This sort of stuff will continue happening until the regulatory framework acknowledges a fundamental consumer right to privacy.
If a data broker collects data without the consent of the consumer, then their only real risk is a class action lawsuit which drags on for six years, gets settled for a few days profit, and the consumer gets $13.50 after the legal fees. This massive skew in the risk reward calculus of data brokers is why we have the problem. Because there's little to no real downside, the trend is automatically collect as much data on as many people as possible.
Fixing this means big, mandatory, cash penalties in the law code - say $5k per consumer data leak, directly to the affected consumer, with added penalties if the company lies about the leak or delays payment. The fine must be big, mandatory, and paid directly to the consumer. Only that changes the risk reward ratio.
In that new world, companies would have to re assess their risks. They'd either build invulnerable systems and hire a lot more people reading HN to protect their golden goose, or better still they'd decide to exit the business entirely. That sounds bad, but the only reason the industry exists is because regulators failed to foresee massive leaks like this happening every three months.
We need a consumer data privacy law, with massive fines, to force companies to change their behavior. What we're doing now clearly does not work.
They should tax companies so that operating data centers become more expensive. Increase price of electricity or property tax. That will inherently force companies to collect and store less data, hence less damage from breaches.
Bitcoin would make an awful legal tender, because by its design supply decreases while demand for it increases. An ideal, 0% inflation currency (assuming that is ideal) would expand and contract automatically with economic conditions. Satoshi considered this problem but decided it was too complicated to implement, which is why he went with the fixed supply route.
Still, it's worth remembering that a fixed supply currency will inevitably fail just as the metallic standards (which were semi fixed supply) did, and for the same reasons: politics. Metal backed currencies fell because the political will required to coordinate the system fell apart. Newly-enfranchised workers didn't find the message "suck it up, the gold standard requires it" very appealing politically, so they voted for other things that entailed fiscal and monetary policy. Central Banks, seeing the writing on the wall, abandoned gold en masse, with the US retaining it only for other central banks.
Bitcoin would have the same problem. It would be inevitably deflationary - halvenings, for example, are tied to computational power. Presumably, more demand for Bitcoin means more computational power, so its supply decreases just as demand increases.
Deflation is even worse than inflation for working people. Investment dries up, because why would somebody take a gamble on a business if they can keep their cash in their closet and make money, risk free? Employment therefore drops, while people decrease spending - why spend $100 on something today, if you can buy it for $85 in a year? Additionally, loans get more expensive in real terms, wages decline, and a whole host of other bad things happen.
That's why central banks target +2% inflation, in part. Inflation is preferable because it encourages investment, discourages nominal (and only nominal) wage decreases, decreases the real value of loans to the benefit of the debtor class, and other benefits. Central Banks also have a pretty successful record dealing with runaway inflation - hike rates, cause a recession, wait - whereas they lack tools to deal with deflation. At its simplest, the solution to deflation is for everyone to get a check from the government, but this whole field is considered weirdo experimental land and has only barely been tested.
All that is to say: Bitcoin is fundamentally ignorant of history and is incapable of becoming anything other than digital gold. It has a floor value which it cannot sink beneath: online gambling, illegal things, and privacy advocates (in that order) guarantee it will never truly hit $0.00. But it would be an absolute catastrophe for any country to adopt as its actual currency.
Now that I think of it, Bitcoin is perhaps one of the earliest examples of technophiles assuming society should work according to computer code, thereby "cleaning" these imperfect human systems by replacing them with the inevitable future: A philosophically-driven (rather than pragmatically or empirically, for example) system, with clear and inviolable rules, limited to no exceptions, and a happy ignorance of why existing systems came to be. After all, why study the past when we're creating the inevitable future?
> people decrease spending - why spend $100 on something today, if you can buy it for $85 in a year?
Imagine if everything suddenly was infected with the Osborn Effect.
Otoh, certain products like TVs do seem to get better and cheaper as time goes on, yet people don’t seem to delay purchases. It’ll be interesting to see if conventional wisdom about deflation holds, should it come to pass.
>Otoh, certain products like TVs do seem to get better and cheaper as time goes on, yet people don’t seem to delay purchases. It’ll be interesting to see if conventional wisdom about deflation holds, should it come to pass.
The problem isn't just the osborne effect, it's that deflation rewards a non-productive investment (money hoarding) that crowds out productive investments, which makes the economy less efficient.
Buying a TV comes out of spending money rather than savings/investment, and is harder to evaluate because if TVs are getting better and cheaper in the future, they're getting better and cheaper now and so people have more reason to upgrade in the first place - which offsets the incentive to delay the upgrade for future benefits.
It's definitely a bubble. Sam Altman wants to build $7tn worth of data centers; if that's not an indication of how ridiculous this has gotten, I don't know what is.
LLM has been vastly oversold to the general public as "AI" when the technology is nowhere near that. We haven't invented turing complete robots that independently identify problems, learn the solutions, and respond. LLM as a technology might not ever be able to do that, by the nature of how it works. We have only created chatbots that reply to prompts, with a higher than acceptable inaccuracy rate. And yet this justifies $7tn.
But silicon valley figured out that saying "AIAI" on repeat works for funding, then other companies started pretending they were the same for the instant stock gain. Rising interest rates and this wave led everyone to pull out of other companies and dump into anything vaguely related to AI. They rode the price up, and now that interest rates are falling (making other companies more attractive) they are rotating out.
This probably didn't become a full on bubble like crypto did because interest rates were high. It's still a bubble, but seems to be pricking of its own accord as opposed to becoming a gigantic, systemic problem.
That said, when rates fall again, we might see a second boom there. Or maybe another fad will strike silicon valley, to continue the trend.
Part of the problem in AI is the lack of useful benchmarks that show progress is being made in skill areas where AI will truly be useful and transformational. I mean, who cares if a LLM can pass a bar exam or real estate license test?
> Part of the problem in AI is the lack of useful benchmarks that show progress is being made in skill areas where AI will truly be useful and transformational.
There also needs to be discussion if the transformations AI can make possible are actually for the common good. They'll certainly be good for a small minority (e.g. certain billionaires), but its hype-men seem to be lazily gesturing to utopian sci-fi and lazy and oversimple economic thinking to justify it [1].
But it's probably hopeless, since SV is a technopoly and has too much influence.
[1] Like assuming there will always be work for all people in the face of automation, that people will be better off if goods get cheaper as their economic prospects dim, etc.
It's an unanswerable question, but the only option we have is to try and make them work. At least until the next best system comes about. Regressing backwards because old things lasted awhile is hardly the place we should aspire towards.
I'm generally sympathetic to what you're saying, but I also detest a16z and Horowitz personally for being the epitome of "software guy decides he's expert at everything now" and his role in the crypto bubble.
Should the hacker have tried more? Sure, maybe. Do I really care? Definitely not
If you want to get really scared about methane leaks, sinkholes are forming across the tundra as global warming melts the permafrost, creating gigantic methane bubbles as the previously frozen organic material now rots. Those bubbles explode once big enough, creating massive pockmarks which fill in with water.
The amount of methane they leak is estimated to be gigantic, but without full coverage we'll never know.
Idiotic decision by that employer. Who cares where the employee is, if they're a top performer?
I'm convinced the back to office mandates come from people who thrive in office environments. Those people succeed, get promoted, become leadership, and then assume everyone else works just like they do. It's absolutely not the case.
That's without going into the many, many studies of office environments which provide empirics disproving common myths about office work, such as the oft-repeated lie that open offices encourage collaboration. Those facts just don't compute for people who love working in those spaces, so they ignore them and repeat happy lies instead.
I understand this take, but let me present the flip side:
There are two ways of working, remote or in person. Hybrid is a swan song of bullshit where you get the worst of both worlds and few of the advantages. So organizations need to make sweeping changes one way or another: either restructure towards remote-first or return to pre-covid paradigms by not only getting people back to the office, but also teams back in the same office. Both require some pretty sweeping changes to get there, and it's understandable (if maybe not defensible) that a majority of established organizations don't want to reinvent themselves.
At the end of the day, if in-person is the final vision, yes you should be fired if you don't comply with it. Almost everyone is replaceable, including even the top levels of management. Keeping employees who are actively hostile to (remember, not just disagreeing, but actively disregarding) a core organizational standard doesn't help anything --- regardless of their performance.
All that being said, I find it amazing that companies were presented the opportunity to use a new remote paradigm on a silver platter and decided to scoff at it rather than embracing all of its advantages, but maybe that's why I'm not making those decisions.
Foucault is the primary intellectual force behind the contemporary social science trend of seeing everything through a power relationships lens. His influence cannot be overstated, at least in the American academy. It's bizarre.
I’ve read Foucault. I’m familiar with western and continental philosophy. I studied psychology, sociology, and political science too. Foucault‘s influence, as well as French existentialism and post-structuralism in general, are to blame for the current state of social science. Boiling everything down to a cultural power struggle is a pyramid scheme, a cult that infiltrated American academia. It’s certainly not a moral philosophy and Foucault’s life reflects that.
It's bizarre to see you argue on the one hand that he negatively impacted the quality of social science research, then on the other hand declare by fiat that his personal life counts as data point against the quality of the same work!
Foucault's writing is problematic because the conclusions he makes are too broad and are backed up by too much conjecture. So were a lot of other writers of the time, many of whom Sokal covered in his book "Fashionable Nonsense."
I'm saying he used for moral relativism as a way to rationalize his immorality. Foucault's "Fashionable Nonsense" was problematic because it rationalized things like pedophilia which he also strongly advocated for in public along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
With the problems of modernism apparent in the philosophical academy, continental and especially leftist philosophy had a huge void of ideas. Post-structuralism took root precisely because it shrugged the idea of having An Answer but also explained many of the problems with modernism and salvaged the ideas of the Left as best as it could without having to exhume Hegel viz Marx. Rational critiques of post-structuralism remain as lurid as ever but I still see a huge void in modern western philosophy that post-structuralism dances in the ashes of.
If anyone is aware of other non-rationalist western philosophies, I'd be curious as I'm only aware of the Lacanian schools and then more standard post-structuralist stuff like Foucault and Deleuze.
I'd also be careful of trying to read a philosopher's life inside their ideas. Deleuze led a very bog-standard life for a white man in the postwar era in Europe despite advocating for fairly radical philosophies. It's the ideas that take root and shape the academy and then society. If you wish to push back on post-structuralism, criticize the idea, not the people. Foucault himself may have been depraved, but others certainly weren't.
You can analyze the philosopher and their work. Socrates' system of thought can be understood without knowing he fought in the Peloponnesian War, that he was beloved, and that his wife was a shrew. But his philosophy makes even more sense when you know those personal details because context matters. For instance David Hume was an empiricist but accounts of his life make little to no sense. Besides motivations, personal details usually illustrate the limitations to a philosophy. That being said I don't think of Foucault as a philosopher, I think of him as a rhetorician and charlatan.
The very fact that Max Stirner, and anything from anyone with some notion of "Anarchism" in their ideological descriptions is explicitly not something you're aware of is very telling of how the main stream academy has unjustly left Egoism and related ideas to languish in obscurity.
Stirner was prophectic in calling out Hegel's and Marx's bullshit, and the way that his work triggered Marx so hard that Marx felt the need to write an entire book calling him a doo-doo head (The German Ideology) shows that he was subversive in the best way possible - he got under the skin of a thinker whose legacy is hundreds of millions of people dead. I suggest giving him a read, as he has a truly non-rationalist philosophy which is very different from any that you've read before.
Re: Deleuze being "bog standard". You think that doing tons of LSD with his homie Guattari while they wrote Anti-oedipus was "normal"? One of them even killed themselves by throwing themself out of a window (supposedly due to "chronic pain" but who the heck knows with their literal schizoanalytical ideas)
If a data broker collects data without the consent of the consumer, then their only real risk is a class action lawsuit which drags on for six years, gets settled for a few days profit, and the consumer gets $13.50 after the legal fees. This massive skew in the risk reward calculus of data brokers is why we have the problem. Because there's little to no real downside, the trend is automatically collect as much data on as many people as possible.
Fixing this means big, mandatory, cash penalties in the law code - say $5k per consumer data leak, directly to the affected consumer, with added penalties if the company lies about the leak or delays payment. The fine must be big, mandatory, and paid directly to the consumer. Only that changes the risk reward ratio.
In that new world, companies would have to re assess their risks. They'd either build invulnerable systems and hire a lot more people reading HN to protect their golden goose, or better still they'd decide to exit the business entirely. That sounds bad, but the only reason the industry exists is because regulators failed to foresee massive leaks like this happening every three months.
We need a consumer data privacy law, with massive fines, to force companies to change their behavior. What we're doing now clearly does not work.