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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24830 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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By all means, bite.

I meant something more abstract (but still not necessarily complete). As a kind of meta-moderate between you and Nybbler, I'm interested in the general question between some and no regulation. By heart, I am exactly the kind of "move fast an break things" type you criticized, but some amount of breaking things, and seeing things broken by others, has taught me that there are places where "think before you do" is a better approach, and once good approaches are discovered, it might even be a good idea to codify them. On the other hand, I think there does need to be room for good old-fashioned anarchy in a society, for reasons ranging from (as other pointed out) innovation, through having a lower bound on the quality of goods and services delivered by major producers, and all the way just to plain having a life worth living. My personal way of squaring that circle is that I'm open to regulation on mass-produced end-user consumer goods, and a more freedom on anything that requires some deliberate action.

But they do actually mean that, in that moment, instantaneously, the game is over, the logic is iron-clad, the implications flow immediately, and the only conclusion is absolute death.

Look, I think that whole conversation got off on the wrong foot, and if you guys want it to go anywhere, you need a reset. I understand your frustration with lazy "regulation bad" arguments, and I understand his frustration with underhanded slippery-slope denialism. What I'm guessing is that neither of you is as bad as the other thinks.

My personal way of squaring that circle is that I'm open to regulation on mass-produced end-user consumer goods, and a more freedom on anything that requires some deliberate action.

I think this is very reasonable, and these regulations pretty much go after just that. Consumer IoT devices, that are being mass-produced and just thrown onto the internet by the billions. What's worse is that they're making the same handful of mistakes over and over and over and over and over again, even though everyone and their dog knows that they can fix these things (at least the worst problems; not every problem) using even just a small number of best practices. A small number of things that every expert technologist has been screaming, "OH MY GOD PEOPLE JUST DO THIS SHIT WHY WON'T YOU DO THIS SHIT IT'S SO EASY AND WOULD PREVENT SO MANY PROBLEMS!" Things that they don't do because they don't have to. There's no law making them. They're Chinese, but their devices are being sold in the US, so fuck the US anyway. And even if they did do them, it would cost them epsilon amount of money, and they'd never be able to market it as anything to make them more money, besides, all their competitors are just churning them out as cheaply as possible without bothering, and they're not suffering for it.

There are many edge cases, and gattsuru brought up a lot of good cases that may be difficult. Things that might legitimately contribute to a regulation-innovation tradeoff. Most of them still seem kind of minor, so while they might produce some small tradeoffs, I think it's unlikely that they're going to wholesale preclude innovation. There's still going to be plenty of innovation, though there may be some edges that are unfortunately trimmed. Is that worth saving the nightmare of having billions of adversarial objects, likely quickly and easily controlled by the Chinese or Russians, literally everywhere on all our networks? Maybe not. But maybe so?

Is that worth saving the nightmare of having billions of adversarial objects, likely quickly and easily controlled by the Chinese or Russians, literally everywhere on all our networks? Maybe not. But maybe so?

I'm in the curious position of not particularly caring about the Russians running botnets on your vacuum cleaner, but hating IoT with a passion, and being prepared to murder anyone that tries to sell me a toaster that connects to the Internet. What do?

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