He’s just as nice and fun in person as he seems online. He’s put time into using these tools but isn’t selling anything, so you can just enjoy the pelicans without thinking he’s thirsty for mass layoffs.
Because he's prolific writer on the subject with a history of thoughtful content and contributions, including datasette and the useful Python llm CLI package.
he's incredibly nice and a passionate geek like the rest of us. he's just excited about what generative models could mean for people who like to build stuff. if you want a better understanding of what someone who co-created django is doing posting about this stuff, take a look at his blog post introducing django -- https://simonwillison.net/2005/Jul/17/django/
People with zero domain expertise can still provide value by acting as link aggregators - although, to be fair, people with domain expertise are usually much better at it. But some value is better than none.
For every new model he’s either added it to the llm tool, or he’s tested it on a pelican svg, so you see his comments a lot. He also pushes datasette all the time and I still don’t know what that thing is for.
I think moving OTA updates for embedded devices to project-specific key management rather than relying on web roots of trust should become the norm.
Since your firmware images should themselves be signed and relying on some physical fusing of the key hashes + have some ratchet system, this leaves a web root-of-trust as a liability.
With the setup described above, you could deliver the OTAs signed by some key material that could more easily and/or effectively be made public.
Thought pointedly not a podcast, the YouTube channel Historia Civilis was my go to thing to fall asleep to for a while. The simple animation style and depth I found very soothing.
First: I appreciate the overall tone of your comment. It's a polarizing subject, and I feel this is very much in good faith.
I think there's two important points you made that I'd like to address:
1. Failures to apply meaningful penalties / punishment to transnational corporations
2. Individual culpability for oil consumption
To start, I think it's worth looking at how punishments for corporate wrongdoings might look in a brighter world. Not having faith in the system is _completely_ understandable, and I think it can be easy to forget what it is we _do_ want after being shown what we _don't_ want over and over.
Off-the-cuff, I envision something like the forced closure and seizure of all Exxon assets by the federal government. These assets could be sold off to pay for the settlements of the multiple class-action lawsuits against Exxon focused on public health and environmental wrongdoing[1][2]. I'd love to see criminal charges for those at the top
There are past examples of companies doing wrong and being forced to close "with prejudice", or not being allowed to restructure into another entity with a different name. A famous example is the forced closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)[3]. Another is Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which was restructured into a public beneficiary trust that would administer payouts to "opioid creditors" or people who suffered from the opioid epidemic[4]. And hearteningly, there are also examples of executives facing jail time. Enron[5] is the most famous example, and though there are critiques that it wasn't far enough, Skilling was a fall guy, etc., it serves as a good reminder that even within our system today, there is already precedent. Theranos is another example of criminal proceedings against executives[6].
All this is to emphasize that though pessimism is understandable, optimism can help us push the system in the right direction, and doesn't have to mean having all the answers.
Now we can look at individual culpability.
I wanted to look at this point second because I think it becomes more approachable once we've seen what widespread change can look like. I don't have citations, or evidence to bring here. Just my own experience. I find it much easier to start taking personal responsibility when I know that there is some effort being made to offer me a mode of life where I don't induce second order demand for oil (i.e. I need to buy groceries, those groceries may come packaged in plastic). I find it much easier to take a freezing half-mile walk to the store when I see the companies inducing oil demand many orders of magnitude beyond what I'll ever use or need begin to face consequences.
That Intel board article was great. It named names, responsibilities, some degree of culpability.
There are org charts and paper trails for these corporations. Corporations aren't mechanical automatons. They are made of people that make decisions. Unfortunately, they are rich and influential people.
Between statute of limitations, limited liability corporations, fall guys, unlimited resourced lawyers, and a fundamentally corrupt judiciary when it comes to corporations, there's no justice for the legal immortal invincible personhoods that are corporations.
It is nuts that physical reality is subordinate to the law and even worse, the selective enforcement thereof, but that is the nature of this peculiar filter. What will probably kill humanity? Bureaucracy.
Is there a robust library for good quality cables somewhere? I remember a few blog posts that did larger tear downs, but I’d love to just be able to go to a site that has validated cables and know with some confidence “this is a real TB5 cable”
Or they live in fancy houses because they're doing a great job at ensuring their union members get better wages and working conditions?
Harold Daggett has been the main labor leader getting criticized recently for a large salary. He's the leader of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), and makes somewhere in the ballpark of ~$1M a year. The ILA is striking right now in the hopes of getting a ~70% wage increase over the next 6 years, better healthcare benefits, and better retirement contribution.
If I were a longshoremen making $130k, and I stood to get a ~70% wage increase + benefits, I'd absolutely be okay with the person who could make that happen making a low 7 figure salary.
Generally, I think the discussion around labor leader salaries to be very insidious. The truth is that they're fighting for chump change against an industry that's pulling in hundreds of billions in profit. And the same goes for the Teamsters. I'll let the respective unions determine leadership profits, but I'll 1000% support whatever they agree upon, so long as the union leaders are making sure that workers get treated well.
Harold Daggett has also been credibly accused of having ties to the Mafia, which is especially consistent with the idea that the union is involved in drug trafficking.
> The ILA is striking right now in the hopes of getting a ~70% wage increase over the next 6 years, better healthcare benefits, and better retirement contribution.
And a permanent ban on automation, you forgot to mention that part. Also, the strike is on pause until January 15th.
> The truth is that they're fighting for chump change against an industry that's pulling in hundreds of billions in profit.
Ports aren’t private industry. They’re public infrastructure, owned by the public, and the ones that do turn a profit are a source of funding for public services.
And he just secured a massive salary increase for his constituents, in short time. As a member of the labor class of society, I can’t help but cheer him and the union on.
On some level I think everyone admires a mobster, but he and his union are parasites enriching themselves at literal public expense. This “labor class” nonsense is just an identity racket that helps them get away with it. You might as well have said “I’m a mark and I’m proud of it!”
Not that anyone is disagreeing, but it bears repeating: This is a lack of any real pressure from regulators, not a technical challenge. Or rather, there may be technical challenges but they absolutely can be overcome, and aren’t being tackled right now very simply because the business doesn’t care. As is so often the case, the business must be made to care.
> This is a lack of any real pressure from regulators, not a technical challenge.
Also, I think it's easy to misstep if we start thinking of it as a problem of "better regulators", since some of the blame lies on deeper legal-aspects around (data-)ownership, contracts, and what what happens in bankruptcies.
Even a company with great intentions may have difficulty ensuring the promises they made are kept long-term, especially if a bankruptcy court voids those promises in the name of repaying creditors.
My impression from all that I've heard is that you should have a backup retention policy, but otherwise there's no set upper bound on how long that may be. Not that the text of the GDPR breathes a word of it, though, everything's just a rat's nest of exemptions suggested by various authorities and other parties that haven't been tested in court.
In general I don't particularly care what other people say on this topic and rely on the legal guidance I received during my work from UK ICO and Slovenian office, but even some of your links don't collaborate you. The second one linking to Verasafe's page on which it clearly says that yes, you should delete it.
There's a lot of complainig around how difficult that can be and the fact that EU legislation in general often does not like to precisely prescribe its requirements like what reasonable means, which can indeed be annoying.
You still need to remove it either directly or your retention policy for backups needs to be short enough that keeping it in backups for a while is judged as reasonable.
> In general I don't particularly care what other people say on this topic
Nor do I see why I should particularly listen to what you say on this topic, given that others have similarly claimed authority from their lawyers or from their local jurisdictions.
> The second one linking to Verasafe's page on which it clearly says that yes, you should delete it.
Right before the "But don’t panic! Enforcement authorities know how difficult it is to fulfil this obligation in practice." section, where it elaborates on your ability to claim that stripping data from backups is technically infeasible, in which case you must promise to delete the data on restoration. Just like I've heard from everyone else.
It's always seemed paradoxical to me that the GDPR is branded as this unyielding hammer against companies improperly storing your data, only for it to be riddled with amorphous holes on every axis. "Data is data, period, unless it's not on a live production system, in which case the written vague rules it abides by are swapped out for a new set of totally undefined rules!"
> You still need to remove it either directly or your retention policy for backups needs to be short enough that keeping it in backups for a while is judged as reasonable.
And how might I know a priori what's the longest 'reasonable' retention term that a business might be permitted by its jurisdiction? The whole nature of backups is that they're useless right up until they aren't, so the marginal value of each additional week is difficult to measure in the first place. And when most concrete talk of 'reasonableness' is seemingly done behind closed doors if at all, I have no idea just how far other jurisdictions' ideas of a reasonable term might differ from mine.
From the picture it looked to me like it was more aligned with the DAC, although I double checked and I don't think that any DACs of that size would be in the order of 20-30 grams. Could a discharge be angled like that within the confines of the can?
