Yeah, it always seems weird to me how we deem most adults responsible enough to own a car and not drive into oncoming traffic or how people are allowed to buy actually dangerous tools from big tool stores without a second glance. And sure, there's safety training available and in the case of driving you gotta first prove you're able to follow the rules. But after that? You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.
With that in mind it ends up being weird to me in a way I can't articulate because after all I can speedrun losing a limb if you left me loose in Harbor Freight or speedrun losing all my money and becoming debt-ridden if you give me a laptop with internet connection.
Anyway, I know there's more nuanced discussion to be had still I sometimes wonder how would the ideal approach actually look like without requiring people to have a digital(ing) license before being allowed to connect to the internet.
To attack your specific example, cars have added all kinds of things that "hand hold" the user and keep them (and others) safe: Seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, automatic emergency braking, back up cameras, lane keep assist, blind spot monitors, etc, etc, etc. (Oh, and guess what, per-mile traffic deaths are WAY down from a few decades ago).
All of which are trivial for a user to override, disable, or ignore completely except the primary airbags, which I believe is the whole point. The user is in control and its all in the owner’s manual to boot.
Many are not, and ma y of the ones in the pipe line, like speed limiters and drunk driver detection are going to be legally mandated to be nondisableable..
> You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.
Well, firstly, newer cars are now equipped with tons of safety features like various kinds of auto-braking, various warning systems which monitor blind spots in the car, and driving aids like lane assist, lane monitoring, what have you. And then they also have advanced telemetry features that don’t keep them safe, but their insurance company hopes will identify them as bad drivers if and when they get into accidents so they can be denied coverage. These could be analogous depending how you look at it.
Additionally while there’s not much out there for tools, I think that’s less to do with it not being an issue and more to do with it being kind of impossible? That said a few tools have things like sensors that detect the presence of fingers near saw blades and will not only stop operating, they’ll usually destroy the tool in the process to ensure the operators safety, because fundamentally, more saws exist, more fingers do not.
Like despite loving track driving, I wouldn’t think that everyone tearing around in V8 monsters with stripped interiors and roll cages is a good idea.
Huh, I always forget about the newer safety features of cars because I generally see older cars around me and I used to drive cars where ABS, ESC and beeping where as far as it went for safety. And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.
Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).
And yeah, I see your last point and generally agree but for fairness sake I would like to present the other extreme end where a person on a bicycle against a pedestrian is also dangerous albeit less so. That said I'm about to accidentally argue in favor of the "guns don't kill people..." rhetoric and I really don't want that so I will concede that for the time being it's better to (thoughtfully) design safe systems instead of relying solely on operator diligence.
Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/
> And sure you could argue that telemetry used this way could be a path to price bad drivers out, if I understood your point correctly, yet while it would be effective when deployed to this goal I still instinctively regard telemetry as an invasion of privacy (in a space I assume by default to be private) but that's veering towards a different discussion.
A discussion on which I think we'd absolutely agree. But yeah, it's a thing, whether we agree with it or not.
> Generally I have to admit that society is trending towards making things safe(er) by default but as always with every trend some attempts at following or complying are executed poorly (intentionally or unintentionally). Here's where I agree that while some safeties are universally good and people that disable them suffer from overconfidence I have seen some examples like experienced people removing the shields from brush cutters because they can get in the way and increase the risk of a tangle when cutting overgrowth (though you have to be mindful and careful to not fling small rocks around afterwards).
Oh 100%. I would argue most safety features, even when implemented well, will encumber those who were already skilled, which is why you rub against the ones in MacOS. It just... I don't think there's a way around that, you know? Think it's just an immovable law of the universe.
> Oh how I dislike that objectively I recognize the need for safety yet subjectively I disdain the fact that my tools try to nanny me and I can't reconcile these two views :/
I struggled with this for a long time too, but for me, it kinda resolves with the following reasoning:
On balance, safer... everything... makes for a better society, because it enables more average people to do more things, to go more places, to use more technology, to make their lives better. And the fact is, for more experienced people, we can get around this.
Like the security constraints in MacOS are a great example: they are fucking ANNOYING when you're configuring a new Mac, completely agreed, because every last thing requires so many steps. However how often do you really find yourself needing those options in daily driver use? I can count on a hand the number of times I needed system access the last couple of weeks (and usually it's just an app update where I have to give the app the go ahead by typing in my password). The last time I had to open security options and do that whole procedure... it would have to be weeks at minimum, perhaps even months.
Except when it becomes a reputational problem for the OEM: Excel sucks at X (i.e., don't use it for that) and Excel sucks can become equivalent in many people's minds.
Sometimes it is actually a problem of people 'holding it wrong' (as the meme/trope goes). And who gets the blame?
*shrug* I bought my mom a specific laptop to prevent "them" problems. I'm sorry that you're mad that every laptop doesn't conform to your use case, but perhaps this is a good time to realize that not every product is for you, and not every product has to conform to your view of the world. Sometimes, you can just not buy things that don't function the way you want.
This is a great point, further to your point on AI. Another perhaps worse offender is our focus on "the economy", at times the focus is always on "what about the economy?!" Forgetting "the economy" is merely a tool intended to improve the human condition. Sometimes I feel people lose sight of this original intention, be it unintentional or otherwise.
When Media Talking Heads say “the economy,” what they are really talking about is just rich people’s investments and old people’s retirement. Basically, for reporters, the economy = only stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
I think you’re being unfairly down-voted. While a lot of people here seek out more news, what I see normal people exposed to on TV is basically that – stocks, and if gas prices are high, that and quarterly jobs reports discussed in relation to stocks. To a first approximation, “did your retirement find gain or lose?” really sums it up for all but my father-in-law and the two of us. This is why it’s such a common trope not to think politicians talk about the real economy because your lived experience really varies based on how much stocks affect your life.
You might consider whether this is a little too reductive. After all the values of the stock, bonds, and mutual funds are directly related to the profits and capital flows through and health of the economy.
The economy is complicated and those high-level indexes are gross simplifications of a mass of complexity, but they're not entirely unrelated to whether people have money to spend and whether our liberalized economy is functioning. In fact, I'd suggest that our economy is increasingly suffering from the population's inability to participate and drive the maximal capital flows and prosperity that are possible. There is an additional distributive and concentration problem which we have been solving even more poorly lately.
> Sometimes I feel people lose sight of this original intention, be it unintentional or otherwise.
It's more than a matter of losing sight. This is endemic to liberal hyperindividualism which places the individual and "consumer utility" at the center of economic activity. This ideological presupposition actively works against human flourishing - and even the viability of an economy at all - as a precondition for successful economies is so-called "normal social reproduction". Our consumerist economic order is actively hostile to stable family formation and fecundity (as evidenced by precipitous demographic decline) and thus to the health of society in general.
The economy is indeed supposed to be in the service of human flourishing. Modern economics instead optimizes for "utility maximization".
People are coerced into losing sight of this via capitalist-backed mass media, think tanks and politicians. In the context of popes in recent years as OP says, Pope Francis was particularly an opponent of trickle down economics and consumerism. Leo doesn't seem to be much different, based on his continuation of Francis' critique of modern capitalism as an economy of exclusion.
At that point their ground truth is completely skewed (already for some folk), everything is relative. Some of them will probably die off in self-induced Darwin award winning ways, but sadly certain skewed world views may persist.
Subscription costs per person going from $20 to $100, may be expensive and potentially unbudgeted expenditure, but it's hardly ruinous.
Many big organisations are already on per token pricing purely due to privacy concerns.
Once workflows are in place it becomes easier to see what level of "intelligence" is adequate. It no longer becomes important to necessarily keep that workflow on the next state of the art model if the new cheaper models does a good enough job given ongoing improvements. Gemma 4 I'd say is equivalent to 2.5 flash in my opinion/workflows.
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