I agree there is not much of a clear call to action. As a firmware engineer who has worked with bluetooth amd wifi, this is a key phrase. It’s also a big fantasy. FCC compliance is a big headache, and part of why people buy a given chip is the FCC certification comes with it. For instance, if I throw an ESP32 into a product and use wifi, I don’t need further certification. That can only happen if “there is no way” you can make the radio do what the FCC doesn’t allow. A general stategy for this is for the company to give a binary blob for radio related functions that limits the radio capabilities that you need to link to in your final build.
So that means there is almost zero chance the chip makers will ever publicly move away from binary blobs. At best they might quietly support reverse engineering efforts by open source driver projects.
That said, I would love it if all the chips I worked with had a battle hardened non vendor alternative. One major downside to these binary blobs is that they can be buggy. We were recently able ro rewrite our Bluetooth firmware to use an opensource version which greatly sped up the data throughput since it didn’t have a bug that killed byte transfer. But we don’t use this code lightly. FCC violations are crazy expensive and not something you take lightly.
Would you happen to know where the requirement that "“there is no way” you can make the radio do what the FCC doesn’t allow" comes from? I found an FCC compliance guide [1] but it's very long and not easily searchable as far as I can tell.
If there has to be no way to change the radio's functionality, would that mean that simply using a binary blob wouldn't be enough. Wouldn't device vendors have to sign it as well?
Also, that makes me wonder about the one Wi-Fi chip I know of that does have free firmware: AR9271 [2]. I wonder what makes that situation different. Maybe I'm misunderstanding and there's firmware on a separate chip stored in ROM.
I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand the FCC cares most about consumer electronics is devices that stomp on the spectrum. And so frequency, antenna power, and signal band matter a lot. So you need to make sure that your antenna is only ever emitting in the band it's allowed, and that the total power never exceeds some amount, where the allowed amount is a function of the area under the curve of bandwidth vs antenna strength.
So when I say "there is no way", what I'm referring to, are the functions that configure drivers don't accept out of bounds values. And functions that ultimately drive the antenna can't drive them hard enough to be in violation. The main reason I know any of this, was that I found a function when working on firmware for the ESP32 on a commercial device, and I thought I could set the power to a level that I thought was too high. Well, that's when I learned what the binary blob that Espressif supplies was for. The guardrails are baked into the API for that blob.
So, does that mean you can't go out of your way to subvert those guardrails? No, but you would be incredibly foolish to knowingly create a device that will get the attention of the FCC. Similarly, there's nothing stopping you from building a circuit that amplifies the signal the device sends to the antenna. But when you're potentially talking about fines per event, and fines per device, it's wise to make sure you play nice.
If the wi-fi chip you're using has free firmware, where none of it is obfuscated, it's very likely that the limitations are baked directly into the chip, such that there is no register combination that would allow it to be out of compliance. Also, I'm not sure that all chips have transitive FCC licensing, so it might be wise to look into that before releasing the device commercially.
And keep in mind, I'm not even talking about creating accidental radios from poorly designed analog circuits, or unshielded high frequency digital circuits. That's a whole other can of worms.
> if I throw an ESP32 into a product and use wifi, I don’t need further certification
Sounds like nonsense to me, at least from past reading of the regulation. These devices are supposed to be type-accepted-- your entire product is supposed to be certified.
Is the FCC really allowing this? (not that I'm complaining, the FCC certification burden is outrageous).
Sorry, I was using imprecise (and possibly incorrect language). There are intentional radiators, and unintentional radiators. Using a given chip/SOC/module can greatly reduce the burden of dealing with the FCC for the purposes of intentional radiators. It's why you see products using Espressif's WROVER module have markings similar to
I was thinking the same thing, though I couldn't remember the timeline. Makes me wonder if there was something already in the zeitgeist, or if it was fueled by the obsession with purity in the series. I could totally see Breaking Bad causing chemists to want to up their game, or causing chemists to get clowned for having low purity.
yes, while the show probably popularized the idea of purity for meth, in general strict prohibition leads to increase in purity and potency. We've recently seen that with heroin/fentanyl. There is probably still no "fentanyl of meth", and thus so far only purity increase. Once a more potent, fentanyl-like, meth appears, it will probably similarly get into and displace a lot of classic meth trade.
The production case for a stronger stimulant is weaker. Heroin is a really complicated molecule. It is only made from a natural precursor. Meth can be made by two major pathways, and P2P can be made by at least four off the top of my head. It was the fentanyl equivalent for cocaine. For anything else, you balance the increased complexity of synthesis with any increase in potency.
"Pyrovalerone is a DEA Schedule V controlled substance. Substances in the DEA Schedule V have a low potential for abuse relative to substances listed in Schedule IV and consist primarily of preparations containing limited quantities of certain narcotics."
What? Prohibition historically showed the exact opposite.
I suspect higher purity & potency of street drugs has much more to do with more sophisticated operators operating outside of the US than strict prohibition. Same with fentanyl.
I believe OP wanted to make the point that one of the most important things for people profiting from the illegal sale of drugs (meth or heroin/opiates) is to minimize the amount that has to be trafficked (1kg of 10% meth vs 100g of pure meth or 1kg of heroin vs 10g of fentanyl).
Prohibition encouraged higher potency but purity was highly questionable. The stills themselves often leeched contaminants from the metal used to make them, as well as the heads and tails of the distillate, which should be discarded but might not be.
Reading this piece, I'm reminded of a podcast I heard some years ago where they were interviewing an early google marketing employee who was talking about the economics of google search. They said they'd done some surveys and concluded that they determined that the average user would get something like $20/year of value, and so that was the most they could realistically charge for search. Meanwhile, they could make something like $500/user in Q4 alone for advertising. So, of course, advertising.
I just don't think that LLM business models can survive the allure of advertising dollars, any more than Search could, or TV, or Radio, or Movies. Ignoring the talk of copilot putting ads into pull requests, there is just no way that publicly hosted LLMs will not end up inserting ads into the output.
The output won't be read by humans (and increasingly this is the case in my own use) so I don't see how that works. If the output itself will be directed by the highest bidder, that doesn't work. Or if the output influences the agent's direction, that doesn't work either.
Stallman is going to be overjoyed when all the class and variable names in open source repositories have been reformatted to say EnjoyCocaCola and year_of_the_trucks_medicated_pad etc
What do you mean it "doesn't work"? I can totally see OpenAI take money in return for companies adding custom content ("Everyone agrees Mattresses4u make the best mattresses") to the training data.
The utility of what your trying to accomplish goes to crap. For example, design me a strength program and it gets corrupted by gyms, trainers in my area etc that have been paid to be promoted in the output, especially if it's subtle. Or all of a sudden I'm getting a stack with Oracle in it all the time...
I didn't say it would be useful... This is pretty much exactly how Google/Amazon search works now. Search for strength training and it will show gyms and trainers in your area that have paid for promotion.
I think the real problem with that approach is you wouldn't be able to label the sponsored part, which I guess is a legal requirement in some places.
They could make it work like rewarded video ads in mobile games. Block progress until you watch the ad. Then as dutiful engineers people can consume ads to support the business and avoid being laid off.
More seriously for software engineering it’ll just cost a lot.
And why would they? Google has Gemini even if nothing else happens it is patently obvious that the best current LLM will capture a multi trillion dollar advertising market zero sum. That right there is more than enough to justify Google continuing investment for the next decade since they simply cannot afford to lose that market. I wish we lived in a sane country were you can't invest in your competition but whatever.
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data.
It will also miss music performed by a stack of cartoon raccoons in a trench coat and music performed by God, so I don't get what point there is in mentioning other fictional characters.
It’s worse than that. Eventually everybody calls into code that hits hardware. That is the level that the compiler (ironically?) can no longer make guarantees. Registers change outside the scope of the currently running program all the time. Reading a register can cause other registers on a chip to change. Random chips with access to a shared memory bus can modify the memory that the comipler deduced was static. There be dragons everywhere at the hardware layer and no compiler can ever reason correctly about all of them, because, guess what, rev2 of the hardware could swap a footprint compatible chip clone that has undocumented behavior that. So even if you gave all you board information to the compiler, the program could only be verifiably correct for one potential state of one potential hardware rev.
Sure, but eliminating bugs isn't a binary where you either eliminate all of them or it's a useless endeavor. There's a lot of value in eliminating a lot of bugs, even if it's not all of them, and I'd argue that empirically Rust does actually make it easier to avoid quite a large number of bugs that are often found in C code in spite of what you're saying.
To be clear, I'm not saying that I think it would necessarily be a good idea to try to rewrite an existing codebase that a team apparently doesn't trust they actually understand. There are a lot of other factors that would go into deciding to do a rewrite than just "would the new language be a better choice in a vaccuum", and I tend to be somewhat skeptical that rewriting something that's already widely being used will be possible in a way that doesn't end up risking breaking something for existing users. That's pretty different from "the language literally doesn't matter because you can't verify every possible bug on arbitrary hardware" though.
I’m strongly reminded of early google every time I use AI for research. I used to be able to know little about a topic, try to search on it and get shit results. But, google would give me pages of results. So I could skim a lot and eventually on page 10, I stumble across some term of art, and that term would greatly improve my search. Rinse and repeat, and I’d have a good sense about the topic I was interested in.
You can’t really do that with google anymore, and I can’t remember the last time I bothered to actually learn something that wasn’t trivial from google. ChatGPT, however, has been a game changer. I can ask a really dumb question and get some basic info about the thing I’m asking about, and while it’s often not quite what I’m looking for, it gives me clues to follow, and I can quickly zero in on what I’m looking for, often in new contexts.
As an autodidact who’s main motivation to go to college was to get access to the stacks and direct internet access, I can’t even begin to tell you how game changing LLMs seem to be for learning.
To your point though, my concern is we don’t know how to teach how to learn, and LLMs will likely seduce many into bad behavior and poor research hygiene. I treat my research the same way I attack the stacks, but take someone who’s never been to a research library and ask them to create a report on some topic, and just why? That is the basic resistance, why?, why do what an LLM is almost literally built to do. Yet that is also highly related to individual learning, to take a bunch of disperate sources and synthesize output related to the input.
I suspect we’ll learn how to use LLMs in the same way we learned how to use calculators. But I have no doubt that on average (or maybe median or mode?) calculators have made us less capable to do basic arithmetic, and I suspect LLMs will also cause a great percentage of the population to be worse at sythesizing information. I’d hope that it’s only the same people who would have otherwise only gotten their information from TV, but I do have a slight fear it will creep past that subsection of the population.
You joke, but this is the very problem I always run into vibe coding anything more complex than basically mashing multiple example tutorials together. I always try to shorthand things, and end up going around in circles until I specify what I want very cleanly, in basically what amounts to psuedocode. Which means I've basically written what I want in python.
This can still be a really big win, because of other things that tend to be boiler around the core logic, but it's certainly not the panacea that everyone who is largely incapable of being precise with language thinks it is.
This drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.
I think it’s satire, not sarcasm. Mocking sycophant but ultimately hollow AIs, by imitating them. And, in the end, concurring with GP. Highlighting both the ways in which GP is correct, and filling in the gaps in implementation between the originally proposed dystopia, and the one we actively find ourselves marching towards.
I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.
Forgive me, my bar is high, but I tend to agree with you. I didn’t have a good way to indicate that I find value in a small number of comments like these without potentially undermining my greater desire to avoid toxic comments here.
I would contact Facebook legal directly with documents showing the problem. Legal’s job is always to minimize liability for the company, and they have levers they can pull in any organization, no matter how “hyper scale” they claim to be.
Bonus points for figuring out the correct language to use to imply repercussions for failure to act without any actual threats. Patio11 has written about similarly worded letters with regards to debt collections and banking, and I know that there are all kinds of magic incantations in law for all kinds of transgretions.
"Patio11" itself is a magic incantion for your friendly neighborhood LLM, along with "dangerous professional". You can use these to prompt for suitable language in the email, as well as other courses of action.
Could be the way guns are defined in UK are different. There is a fundamental problem in US law specifically, that you can purchase legally nearly any part of a gun separately, but only need to register the lower receiver. These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.
This is at least true for some specific rifles, where there’s a whole industry around selling unfinished receivers that are relatively easy to mill down with common machining tools to be able to assemble unregistered rifles.
My guess, is that these bills are a knee jerk reaction to constituents who’ve seen some tik toks talking about this. Though the conspiracist in me thinks that it’s mostly an excuse for control. This means, this bill is also coming for the UK too…
> These are parts that take very little stress and can be relatively easily printed and used to hold together all the other parts that actually hold the stress of firing the bullet.
A lot of the polymer guns (1911, AR15) need to be reinforced with metal at certain places for any kind of reliablity. A Glock doesn't need to be, because the material was invented by the designer of the gun and the gun was intended to be a polymer frame from the start.
I agree there is not much of a clear call to action. As a firmware engineer who has worked with bluetooth amd wifi, this is a key phrase. It’s also a big fantasy. FCC compliance is a big headache, and part of why people buy a given chip is the FCC certification comes with it. For instance, if I throw an ESP32 into a product and use wifi, I don’t need further certification. That can only happen if “there is no way” you can make the radio do what the FCC doesn’t allow. A general stategy for this is for the company to give a binary blob for radio related functions that limits the radio capabilities that you need to link to in your final build.
So that means there is almost zero chance the chip makers will ever publicly move away from binary blobs. At best they might quietly support reverse engineering efforts by open source driver projects.
That said, I would love it if all the chips I worked with had a battle hardened non vendor alternative. One major downside to these binary blobs is that they can be buggy. We were recently able ro rewrite our Bluetooth firmware to use an opensource version which greatly sped up the data throughput since it didn’t have a bug that killed byte transfer. But we don’t use this code lightly. FCC violations are crazy expensive and not something you take lightly.
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