Sort of, but isn't the focus on prompts a bit myopic? The huge difference between earlier GPTs and ChatGPT was RLHF, which not only makes it better at following prompts, but also enforces a lot of hidden dogma. It certainly influences how ChatGPT talks about climate change or AI risks, for example.
This is actually a very lucid way to frame this. People love to complain that "Google is useless now," but it's pretty clearly not the case if you look at how most people use search.
What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links - and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me.
What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us, though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the pre-Google days.
But the AI doesn't refuse to work unless you're polite. If my manager is polite with me, I'll have more morale and work a little harder. I'll also be more inclined to look out for my manager's interests- "You've asked me to do X, but really what you want is Y" vs. "Fine, you told me to do X, I'll do X". I don't think my manager is submitting to me when they're polite and get better results; I'm still the one who does things when I'm told.
I wonder if there is a way to get ChatGPT to act in the way you're hinting at, though ("You've asked me to do X, but really what you want is Y"). This would be potentially risky, but high-value.
It doesn't refuse to work. It behaves differently and yields better results with politeness. Coming from a large language model, the occurence of this phenomena is intriguing for some of us.
This is such a weird topic in the ham community. The reason this restriction exists has nothing to do with the retro-justifications used by the community.
For a long time, the US government genuinely feared that ham radio would be used for espionage. It had listening stations across the nation to monitor all communications. It flat out shut down the entire service (!) during WWII. And it came up with the idea that you have to communicate in the open, and that no form of obfuscation or encryption is permissible.
And then hams came up with this roundabout explanation that actually, it's good that you can't have privacy. No matter that it holds back a hobby that is by all usage metrics dying, and that there are many countries where encryption is allowed and doesn't lead to any terrible outcomes.
Privacy is useful in hobby uses. Maybe you want to talk to your spouse without a nosy neighbor listening. Maybe you want to periodically beacon your GPS location without the whole world knowing. There are so many cool things you can do, and there is spectrum that is... quite frankly, largely dead right now, and if you don't encourage new uses, it will be reclaimed by the government.
You talk about retrojustification, but in many parts of the world this has long been written into law, for example in the UK's Wireless Telegraphy act:
1(1) The Licensee shall ensure that the Radio Equipment is only used:
a) for the purpose of self-training in radio communications, including conducting
technical investigations; and
b) as a leisure activity and not for commercial purposes of any kind
As for it being "good" not to have privacy, it's really not about having privacy or not, but respecting the situation that there are different tools for different needs. If you need to speak to your spouse, there are tools to speak to them privately! Amateur radio isn't the only option, and it isn't the best.
The problem is that encrypted comms tie up spectrum space without giving anything back. Now, I don't ragchew, I think it's incredibly boring and unnecessarily toxic chat given most of the personalities and topics involved, but at least anyone can choose to drop in/out of that as needed.
What I'm more interested in is radio as a sport, where I can climb mountains and operate from them, pushing myself and engaging in that competitive activity with others. It's hard to do that if everyone has decided to start using the 2m band as their private internet link because it goes further than WiFi.
> If you need to speak to your spouse, there are tools to speak to them privately!
Apart from amateur radio, what tool exist, that does not require the assistance of private corporations, ISPs, service fees, patents etc? I go camping way outside of cell phone tower ranges and it would be should be legal to communicate with my group privately.
Radio is the only form of totally citizen controlled real time distance communication we have, if we do not count smoke signals. Snail mail encryption is already allowed. Encryption must be allowed on radio as well.
I think a legitimate fear of radio amateurs is that encrypted, fully autonomous, long distance communication is such a killer application that usage would explode from commercial devices sold to take advantage of the ham space, leading to some kind of WiFi cacophony.
Perhaps some kind of compromise is possible, where all encrypted ham must broadcast their callsign in the clear every few seconds.
> Perhaps some kind of compromise is possible, where all encrypted ham must broadcast their callsign in the clear every few seconds.
My thought is that it would always include that part. Maybe not every few seconds, but the same as the current rule - end of every broadcast or every 10 minutes, which ever is shorter.
With 2.8kHz of bandwidth, the requirements to obtain a license to transmit, and the restrictions on commercial use in the ham bands, I don't think your fears are warranted. I definitely think the ham bands would get more active for data uses, but I doubt they would get flooded with newcomers.
You must already broadcast your call sign at a regular interval when transmitting.
You want to use a piece of limited spectrum, don't want to pay for a private slice of it, and complain that you have to be 'public' in a public slice of it?
Yes. Just as I have a right to be on a public highway with whatever personal items I want in my trunk. I will agree to speed limits. I will not agree to letting any member of the public look in my trunk.
But the idea/premise of a highway is to move stuff (people, drugs in your trunk) from one location to another one.
The idea/premise of a private frequency band is to move data (voice, binary,..) from one point to another (or many).
The idea/premise of ham radio is to learn and experiment, to test your devices, compare with others, see how far your signal reaches, etc. It was never meant to be a means for private 1-on-1 conversations.
How will i test my receiver if your transmission is encrypted? What will I learn from that? How do I know that you're not abusing the bands for commercial use? And what do other ham radio operators gain from you transmitting encrypted data?
Who cares? Really, what is the big deal? Nobody is saying that it will always be encrypted. Other radio operators gain the ability to learn about encryption! And we expand the hobby, which as a new member is dying. The radio waves are dead. Why?
What countries allow general encryption on the ham bands (e.g. not limited exceptions for particular cases)
"The hobby is dying" has been a trope longer than nearly everyone in this thread has been alive - give it a rest.
We've always had allocations because there wasn't a commercial use for it. As soon as there is, we lose it. See the loss of part of 220mhz and all the higher frequencies we're in the process of losing to 5G/other commercial use. I recommend embracing this reality
How would one distinguish legal traffic from illegal? If encrypted communications were to be allowed, what is stopping people using the amateur bands for commercial use? This is the main concern of hams, not that it's good that you can't have privacy.
Sure you can. This still does not ensure that the communications embedded within the encrypted portion of the data does not violate amateur rules.
Encryption of communications effectively removes the ability of hams (and government regulators) to monitor their service for rule breakers. It would invite commercial users to exploit hams' valuable bandwidth.
I would go so far as to say encryption is not needed in the amateur radio domain, outside of limiting access to the control and configuration of remote devices. The established goals of the amateur radio service can be achieved without encrypted communications.
My goal is to be able to privately communicate with other people at a distance without relying on cell phone carriers, ISPs, or other brittle corporate infrastructure.
Privacy is a human right, and that applies over radio.
If I need to register my public keys like a license plate, fine, but the content is only the business of the recipient.
> So by this license only businesses are allowed to have private communications, not individuals?
The first words on that pages are "Individuals or entities desiring to […]".
You, as an individual, can get a license. It's probably just more common for legal persons [1] to go through the effort rather than natural persons [2].
Hypothetically you could get a license just for yourself, but only you'd be able to use it which might get kinda lonely. Using a LLC is much more practical as the entity can own the radios and assign them to authorized users acting on behalf of the company.
Forming a corporate entity and paying the frequency coordination fees are going to be minimal in comparison to the hardware costs to communicate at a distance (encrypted or clear) reliably.
Businesses are the only legal way to “group” people together and hold them accountable. Since you are purchasing a license for some spectrum, they need a way to hold that group accountable. A common business arrangement is to create a “co-op” to work together, usually owned equally by the members. For example, there are a couple of developer co-ops around here to get discounts on IDEs and resources by appearing as a large org. Almost like what you’d expect from a union, but most clearly not a union.
> Privacy is a human right, and that applies over radio.
You do not have a right to use common space (e.g., radio spectrum) without regard to the rest of society. If are given permission to use a common space, you have to use it with the stated conditions.
Which they can only do for unencrypted traffic, encrypted traffic by definition would not be examinable by the FCC for determining whether to assign fines.
They don't have to know what you are sending to know you are sending in a way you shouldn't. It's not even about the content of the encrypted traffic at that point. They just see broadcasts (which...good luck hiding them from the FCC) and if they see the bandwidth being used but aren't receiving a usable audio/data stream from it, it's really easy to tell if the rules are being followed.
Is the band you are transmitting over restricted in any way? If they say no encryption, it doesn't matter what you are encrypting. If you are caught broadcasting in that no encryption band, and they see broadcasts in that band that don't correspond with signals they can pick up, it's a red flag that it's encrypted traffic.
Think of it this way - hypothetically if I'm on an English only band, and it's illegal to speak Spanish because English speakers can't understand Spanish, and I get caught transmitting anything other than English it doesn't matter what the content is.
Encryption doesn't magically make the RF you are using invisible. It makes it unreadable. It's still broadcasting and can be picked up by sniffers that flag it as data it can't interpret. It is NOT a no-risk choice.
My original comment was made with regard to someone being incredulous that illegality would prevent someone from starting a business using encrypted ham bands. I said that the FCC fines are quite steep, implying that the risk of FCC fines for running an illegal encrypted broadcast would explain why someone would not like to be involved with such a business.
Obviously if the FCC opens up ham for encryption, it would be legal and totally fine. Currently it is not (the whole point of our conversation), and starting a business like that would be risky. You implied that the FCC can't fine you if they can't prove that you were sending encrypted traffic, and I argued that they'll still see the broadcasts and be able to tell they are encrypted.
So this is kind of a strange question for you to ask now lol
Your original reply to me saying the FCC gives out big fines:
>Which they can only do for unencrypted traffic, encrypted traffic by definition would not be examinable by the FCC for determining whether to assign fines.
If they can only fine unencrypted traffic, as you say in this comment, you posit that it is because they can't examine the contents of the encrypted transmission to know who to fine.
If you intended a different message, feel free to revise what you began our conversation with.
You positively asserted that they can only fine unencrypted traffic. You positively asserted that by definition, encrypted traffic could not be decoded to assign fines. By the logic of your comment, the FCC must decode the encrypted broadcasts to assign fines, which is false. They don't care what the broadcast contained. It violated RF restrictions. It gets fined if detected.
If you believe your comment implies anything else, you're going to have to explain your argument in more words than "it clearly does not imply that" because if it clearly implied what you claim, we wouldn't be arguing about what it "actually" means.
> You positively asserted that they can only fine unencrypted traffic.
No? The FCC can implement a blanket fine on all encrypted traffic on ham radio bands, if authorized by congress, without doing any 'determining' at all.
It seems as if your reading your own opinions and thoughts into my comments.
> For a long time, the US government genuinely feared that ham radio would be used for espionage. It had listening stations across the nation to monitor all communications.
Well this is all somewhat ahistorical. The people monitoring ham radio for abuses were, and are, ham radio operators.
A task which would, you know, be more difficult if everything was encrypted.
The secret is there's already tons of encrypted communications on the bands because of cheap chinese DMR radios that unlicensed teenagers use for airsoft and the like. It has yet to ruin ham radio and nobody has even noticed enough to attempt enforcement.
Agreed. I just got into the hobby, and the whole not allowing encryption or obfuscation is such a silly rule. It really limits what we can do.
And your point about unused spectrum is spot on. Outsides of a couple repeaters on VHF and UHF, there is near zero radio transmissions in those bands 24/7.
> The reason this restriction exists has nothing to do with the retro-justifications used by the community.
The original reasons not being such a big concern anymore don't mean that we've not spotted that these restrictions have a lot of useful features.
There are some great use cases that encryption would allow... and also, if it became commonplace on ham bands, turn them into an opaque, uninviting mess, too.
It's literally the playbook of every single business. Database vendors and graphics card manufacturers tout studies that show their product performs better. Pharmaceutical companies pay researchers who conduct studies that show their stuff works. If Safeway wants a zoning variance to open a new store, they will pay for an environmental impact study that says it's fine.
I'm not saying this to convince you should trust this study. But I think it's important to recognize it's absolutely happening everywhere, not just in the industries we don't like. Most of the research we read was paid for, and an overwhelming majority of it reaches the conclusion that aligns with the views of the researchers or of whoever is footing the bill.
Yes, it probably applies to the most qualified hires, so probably folks who are already around $1M total comp where they are.
But the most important point is, you don't get that money now, and maybe never. The most likely scenario where you get that kind of a payday is if they go public and if the pre-IPO pie-in-the-sky valuation holds for a good while.
It might. But it's far more of a gamble than your FAANG stock.
I assume an engineering fellow at Amazon or Google is making well over 1M, so that actually makes sense to need to give them 3x or more for drastically less liquid comp.
The work culture isn't putting kids in front of computer screens and discouraging outdoor activities.
It's not even something you can control as a parent. My kid, 16 years old, walks to school on his own - but he's always back right after classes. And it's not that he's an outcast. That's just how they roll in the SF Bay Area. Other kids go home too, or they are shuttled by their parents to some organized after-school activities.
In LA county it seems super common to see teens going out on their own. Not sure whats different up north. I think most students get free metro passes. Its super common to see teenagers riding the trains or busses, if I’d guess on account of the cost of insurance here for young drivers.
I'd go a bit further with this claim. Most of what's being done in this space is about inventing new retro aesthetics, not about faithfully approximating how things worked in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, color TVs of that era didn't really have pronounced scanlines. They also didn't have thick, lightly-colored, reflective bezels.
I get that it looks cool and makes old games more aesthetically pleasing. But the reality is that we liked these visuals back then because we had much lower standards, not because CRTs had some magical properties that made the games look awesome.
I see the problem a bit differently. Perhaps a society could function in a model like that. But we decided it's too burdensome and we ceded this responsibility to the government. In such a world, it is paradoxically more dangerous to come across some under-regulated niche, because our default assumption is that the government took care of the risk. It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric.
This is sort of what happened with welfare too. For a long time, we depended on private charities to take care of the less fortunate. We decided the system sucked, so we established a government-operated safety net. But in this reality, it can be worse if you slip through the cracks of government programs. People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.
Anyway, I wouldn't write it off as extremism. It's just we need to pick an option and stick to it. In a "nanny-state" world, you can't decide that you're not going to regulate food safety anymore and hope that the market will sort it out.
The idea that South Asians consumed poisoned lead because of high average levels of trust in the efficiency of their governments and their regulation of the food supply as opposed to low information on lead poisoning isn't one that survives contact with reality. So the "but the market would have solved this if only lead poisoning was legal" position is definitely an extreme one.
The world has had millennia of not regulating very much, and the market very rarely sorted it out.
The world has had millennia of not regulating very much
The one exception is weights and measures. There is a long tradition of regulating these strictly, because experience has shown that the market is incapable of driving the cheats out of business and that there must be trust in the markets because else trade will slow down.
Most economists and left-leaning research institutes disagree with this. Transaction costs, both monetary and temporal, are always higher with more regulation and governmental institutional involvement.
You're not describing a position taken by sane libertarians, though. Their argument is different: that if the government didn't regulate so much, customers would depend on the merchant's reputation, possibly backed by independent testing done by private sector institutions. A modern-day parallel would be electrical safety. In the US, this is largely handled by private organizations such as the UL. You can buy a non-UL extension cord or a toaster if you want.
And look, I'm not arguing that this is a better solution. But I think it makes sense to attack the strongest version of that argument, not the weakest one.
I don't necessarily want to add or take away from your point, but I do want to note that I believe this is false:
> People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.
GoFundMe raises about $650 million for medical costs each year[0]. That's just one little thing, I suppose, but there are many, many NGOs, charities, religious institutions and unaffiliated individuals providing personal care inside their communities and outside. There's plenty of care that /cannot be provided/ by these organisations, and was not provided in the past by private charities either. Neither could provide cancer treatment or cure a patient with major injuries from a car accident. That's a job for institutionalized healthcare.
"Protection of the public from fraud in the marketing of food products represents
one of the earliest forms of government regulation of commercial enterprise" -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/26658854 "FOOD DRUG COSMETIC LAW JOURNAL 39, 2-73 (1984)
A History of Government Regulation of Adulteration and
Misbranding of Food"
The introduction covers food regulation from Biblical and Roman times to the present. If you think about how many of the Biblical rules are devoted to food handling in some sense, it starts to become clear how food regulation is civilization and the state, as much as any other kind of ancient law. I will never understand the Libertarian dream of a "prelapsarian" world where everyone is free to sell poison to everyone else with no consequences.
In particular, adding lead to tumeric was illegal before they made a show of enforcing it in 2019. So their previous policy was the worst of both worlds; telling people they were safe while allowing them to be poisoned.
Well, HN isn't a forum with a well-defined "expert" scope. It's a link aggregator for nerdy news. If you get bored with Rust, you talk about ChatGPT. Or CPU design. Or biotech. Almost anything goes.
I think this makes it immune to the patterns described in the article, although there are other ways for such communities to die. The decline of Slashdot is a cautionary tale.
