We should be making some effort to quantify the amount and cost of slop produced by both AI and simpler automated systems (spinners etc), it's a huge negative externality.
I strongly disagree. Many technologies aren't neutral, with their virtue dependent on the use given them. Some technologies are close to neutral, but there are many that are either 1) designed for evil or 2) very vulnerable to misuse. For some of the latter, it'd be best if they'd never even been invented. An example of each kind of technology:
1) Rolling coal. It's hard for me to envision a publicly-available form of this technology that is virtuous. It sounds like it's mostly used to harass people and exert unmerited, abusive power over others. Hardly a morally-neutral technology.
2) Fentanyl. It surely has helpful uses, but maybe its misuse is so problematic that humanity might be significantly better off without the existence of this drug.
I think a good metaphor for the situation is that the US is like a tank and regulations are like armour on that tank.
It can both be true that the US has too many regulations (the tank has too much armour) and that it's in the wrong spots (too much armour in the back and not on the front.)
America needs less regulations in some scenarios, and more regulations in others. It may very well end up that the net result of these combined changes is less overall regulation and also more effective regulation.
How about giving less profit to the shareholders? How about making customer support legally mandated so companies don't have the "greedy shareholder" excuse?
There is a range between less profit and no profit. As a shareholder, I'd rather have a functional society for all at the cost of a bit less profit, rather than being the richest in a world of ashes.
You really are on the side of letting companies steamroll customers throughout this thread. There's what's technically true, and there's the society most of us would prefer to inhabit. I want mine to be less extractive of profits by any means necessary.
Australia has very strong consumer protection laws but international companies still sell products here. They are forced to comply with the regulations and the prices are mostly comparable with other countries. Regulations work.
Australia's startup scene is doing ok, but the funding model is lacking. There are a few reputable VCs, and very limited government funding. I don't think it's regulations that are cramping Australian startups, I think it's more lack of investment from both private and public sectors. I know many people who are running successful startups in Australia.
I'd argue that having a system of lobbying government and lax rules on political donations would have a much greater effect on stymying competition. It seems that monopolies in the US are very much protected by a lack of regulation on political donations rather than too much regulation.
> I'd argue that having a system of lobbying government and lax rules on political donations would have a much greater effect on stymying competition.
Interesting. My belief is that regulations are the most harmful since they raise barriers to startup competition and thus protect monopolies (since startups, due to their hunger, are the most important source of competition in a market - incumbents usually end up in monopolies and cartels instead). We're seeing that here in the EU every day.
But let's explore your point: how exactly do you think lobbying and donations are stymying competition? What's the mechanism at work?
The mechanism is as old as the hills. You pay for favourable conditions for your business, and unfavourable conditions for your competitors. Australia has a classic history of political figures being given very comfortable jobs in the private sector after they've greased the wheel for their largest donors. This applies to tech, communications, finance, property development and probably every other money making sector.
When contracts are awarded to companies based on lobbying and donations it stymies competition.
The following quote is from the report linked at [1]. It's worth reading the entirety of that report.
"the growing politicisation of public service, exemplified by political appointments to government bodies (Griffiths et al. 2022), may spill over into the contract market. Links between politics, donations, and contracts may negatively impact competition and firm entry".
What you are describing is how governments prop-up incumbents. But this rarely apply to startups, who seldom stand a chance at getting government contracts and the like. Entrepreneurs will ignore those and build the startup from the bottom up, with small customers first.
Of course a less corrupt government could help here, like the x-prize helped SpaceX and electric car subsidies helped Tesla. But that's too much to ask from politicians of most countries.
To actually prevent startups competing and disrupting the market, I maintain that regulations are much more effective: they will prevent entrepreneurs from even thinking of entering and competing highly regulated domains. See the three canonical examples (health care, education and housing) where high prices and scarcity are the name of the game.
I think we're debating around the actual core of the issue: Regulations are only as good or bad as the content of the regulations, and corrupt governments can (and do) ignore and enact regulations at their pleasure.
Ideally, regulations can promote startups and overall market competition. We do see that ideal in some Australian regulations (and I would guess in most countries) but regulations are decided by the government, and that means that their enforcement (or lack thereof) and intent is often pro-incumbent.
I still maintain that regulations on political lobbying and donations would go a long way to open up the playing field for startups. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence of any political party in any country doing more than pay lip service to actually doing this.
Unlike the author, I think featureless slab phones are an improvement, yet I'd like my phone to have several user-customizable buttons on one side (or maybe both?) in order to be able to call up some of the phone's functionality solely by touch. An on-screen app shouldn't always be the sole interface to a device, in my opinion.
Well, years back I released an unstable sort called pdqsort in C++. Then stjepang ported it to the Rust standard library. So at first... nothing. Someone else did it.
A couple years later I was doing my PhD and I spent a lot of time optimizing a stable sort called glidesort. Around the same time Lukas Bergdoll started work on their own and started providing candidate PRs to improve the standard library sort. I reached out to him and we agreed to collaborate instead of compete, and it ended up working out nicely I'd say.
Ultimately I like tinkering with things and making them fast. I actually really like reinventing the wheel, find out why it has the shape that it does, and see if there's anything left to improve.
But it feels a bit sad to do all that work only for it to disappear into the void. It makes me the happiest if people actually use the things I build, and there's no broader path to getting things in people's hands than if it powers the standard library.
There's no typo there, what I typed is what we were told. There's a genuine belief that research expires after ten years in educational psychology (and possibly other human sciences). It was a sharp contrast to my major in physics, in which the first year was almost exclusively ideas from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Did you not see the TV show? It had a bit of production hell (Jon Chu from Wicked was going to direct, and had 2 different people come in after him) and was very uneven, cancelled after 1 season. They buried it so deep it's not even on Disney+ anymore and it only came out in late 2022.
I think it was objectively terrible, certainly I found it almost entirely unredeemable except for very few CGI scenes (the wizard magic wand training sequence if I remember correctly) and a very golden set piece at the end.
Disney then canned it and I'm pretty sure they removed it from Disney+ for a tax write off.
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