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I don't follow your line of reasoning. Can you speak plainly, please?
Your original post expresses considerable contempt for "tech folks" and demonstrates absolute joy for us having regulation "dropped" on us "in a much stronger way that you really won't like." This really doesn't fit with an idea that you think the regulations will be anything like easy or simple to follow -- rather, you actually think they will be difficult and painful to follow and are joyfully anticipating the pain it will cause.
Yeah, regulation sucks. It's terrible that in the "real" engineering professions, you need a minimum 10 years of experience before you're allowed to do anything more than turn the crank on well-tested models to determine if some very slight variation of an existing thing meets all the requirements, and then fill in all the boxes on the paperwork to maintain traceability. Doing that has high costs; applying those costs to the software industry as a whole will cause it to stagnate.
This does not follow. It's just a non sequitur. It can be easy and simple to follow, but incredibly grating to the personality of "artists". They don't like coloring inside the lines, even if it's easy and simple to follow.
Who are 'artists'? Can you speak plainly and say what you actually mean instead of sneering and generalising like this?
"Artists" aren't real artists. They're just programmers and engineers at tech companies who developed a culture of believing that if they just imagined really hard that they were artists, it would be a good excuse for not being regulated. This culture grew out of the 90s and just happens to be a useful rationalization for them to refuse to do anything that seems "boring" to them. Sure, every other industry has boring parts of the job that need to be done in a proper fashion, but this cultural imagination gives them an excuse to object and only ever chase the "cool" stuff, no matter how much damage it does to the world. How long did they put off doing any sort of vulnerability work (except the "cool" red-teaming stuff) before it became such an incredible thorn in the side of the industry (and the world that uses their tools) that they were existentially forced to figure out some cultural modifications to actually manage a vulnerability disclosure and response cycle, pulling bodies away from the "cool" stuff and assigning them to "boring" patching work?
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If it's that grating, it's not easy even if it is simple. The word for such a thing is common: "tedious".
The difference is that it's easy to people who don't have a particular psychology or culture. You're concluding that it's not easy to certain folks, which is perfectly compatible with it being objectively easy to most people. Maybe it's even tedious, or as the dictionary would recast that word, boring, to you. But hey, I think we're making progress. The reason why IoT devices have been an absolute security shitshow for years is just because a small culture of powerful technokings think that it's too boring for them to fix the obvious problems that everyone knows are obvious problems and which are objectively easy and simple to fix. We may have reached agreement!
So you say. But those people can't do it, because they aren't the people building the devices. The people being required to do it are the people you (gleefully) admit it is painful for.
I do not agree. The reason IoT devices have been an absolute security shitshow for years is no one except you and some European regulators actually gives a shit. There are no technokings building them, and nobody's going to pay a red cent more for an internet-connected light bulb that's more secure than some other internet-connected light bulb.
Maybe their little subculture will change. It is a Culture War, after all.
I mean, plenty of people care, including lots of technology and security experts. E.g.
...wait, so those people aren't building them? Who is building them? People who aren't the artists and don't find following the regulation to be boring? Then we don't actually have any problem at all! I'm not sure what you've been complaining about this whole time.
Well, now, if all the internet-connected light bulbs that are available in the store are more secure and cost one red cent more, will they still fly off the shelf? You've resisted making any tangible prediction here. I think it's because you know that they will still sell just fine for a tiny amount of additional money.
The game of insisting on some very tangible prediction for a perturbation to a complex system, and then if no such prediction is forthcoming insisting the person making less tangible claims is wrong is annoying and only works on Yudkowskiites. I'll make a less tangible claim, though: If regulation gets a foothold and continues to increase, in 20 years we'll be talking about the promise of automation of household tasks the way we talk about flying cars today.
Ok, so not a prediction about consumers' willingness-to-pay slightly more for slightly more secure products. That's fine. It would have been an easy thing to make a prediction on if your step function catastrophic model was correct, but I think we can conclude by this much longer-term, contingent prediction that your step function catastrophic model really really wasn't ever a serious attempt at a model in the first instance.
Does TheMotte have a RemindMe bot that can come back in 20 years?
Flying cars actually are pretty close to my area of expertise, so I'm betting that you probably have some misconceptions of the reality on the topic. What do you think is "the way we talk about flying cars today"? Let's see if it reflects reality.
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You won't change it without breaking it such that it can't produce the new stuff any more.
"Technokings" is not a reasonable description of the people building them. The people building them exist, and are not people with the regulated-industry mindset, where there are a ton of boxes to be checked and rechecked every time something is built or a change is made.
But you know all this; you're unable or unwilling to truly conceal your glee at keeping the people (such as myself) that you hold in such disdain being stomped on by the English jackboot.
This is just hyperbolic catastrophism. Hilarious, really. I mean, honestly. You can't possibly have a real argument for this. Did you really think that this was an actual argument? Or do you have some weird twisted argument that literally any epsilon>0 of regulation instantly grinds innovation to a halt? I hate to break it to you, but no one else believes this, because it's just not true. Not even remotely true. Tons of industries that are infinitely more regulated than tech still have plenty of innovation. There may be a tradeoff on some margins, yes, but your step function model is not remotely serious.
What shall we call them, then? "Bored Pandas", the culture of folks too bored by things like making sure there's no default password on their devices?
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