I wrote an article a few months ago about how I expect open-source development to shift toward people no longer contributing code, but just contributing money, for the maintainers to purchase tokens to have AI ship a given feature request.
I worry that this ends up, like other EU consumer-protection regulation, as an own goal.
- The cheapest phones available in the EU (and purchasable online) all have glued-in batteries, not swappable ones. Forcing consumers to use phones with swappable batteries may just mean that the bottom of the market disappears, and consumers will be left paying more for their phones. And would they rather pay less or have swappable batteries?
- This will cause some cascade of engineering changes, which will make phones thicker or less waterproof. Again, it's not clear to me that the tradeoff is being fairly reflected here.
They then end up paying more by buying five awful low-range phones that each last a year instead of one mid-range that will last more. No, I would rather everyone paid more for a phone. I find it hard to believe that the difference in price will make it impossible for them to buy it, if so, that's a separate problem. This + mandated software support may finally make it viable to just buy a used phone, too.
- efficient vaccuums
- efficient bulbs
- no roaming costs if somebody leaves a message on your voicemail
- insurance companies and banks can't charge you as they see fit
- toxic free food
- toxic free meat
- farming without killing the rest of the living things
- Best of all: China and USA can't dictate the rules everytime
Like the experience of opening any website for the last decade and being greeted with a cookie popup is more the direction the parent comment was intending I'm assuming.
Some regulations are good, some are bad, all have second and third order effects that need to be weighed against benefits.
and you comfortably ignore all the adds that get in your face when opening any news or commerce site. you would not need these popups with agree and list of third party data aggregators if you were not selling all that visitor information to anyone. alas eu requires you to notify visitors about it. its not like eu says "you must show annoying popups" its page authors choose to do so to be able to sell the data. even knowing that this will annoy the visitors. and then blame EU
Unified charging cable: what if the standard had been set much earlier? For example, in 2008? We'd all be on Micro-USB, far inferior to USB-C. Right now USB-C feels great, but do you really think this is the end-all, be-all? I think the cost of this mandatory standardization will become apparent a few years from now.
It's because we went from the Desktop environment, where rules were well-documented and standardized, to the Web/Mobile environment, where rules had to be reinvented and, for the most part, were not.
Over the past year I've started thinking a lot more about design and UI work, and I think it's basically impossible to design things, or create design systems, that appeal broadly to different types of users in a cross-platform way.
I personally love dense UIs and have no expectation of doing certain kinds of work on a phone or low-powered device like a chromebook, phone, or bottom-barrel laptop. But if you're a company trying to sell products to a broad user base, you want to try to design in a way that works for those kinds of users because they still might be end-users of your product. And there's a good chance that those platforms may be where someone first evaluates your product (eg from a link shared and accessed on a mobile device) even for the users who do plan on using more powerful desktop devices to do their work.
So instead we get these information poor, incoherent (because it turns out proper cross-platform, cross-user design is much more difficult than just getting something that works cross-platform for all users on its surface) interfaces. I guess I'm writing this just to add, web/mobile have complicated things partially because more than just requiring their own distinct patterns, they each represent a distinct medium that products try to target with the same kind of design. But because they're different mediums, it's like trying to square a circle.
It is absurd that there is no standardized UI toolkit, or rather that the web browser _is_ the standard with is characteristic _lack_ of user interaction idioms.
The fact that there are multiple platforms for UIs* is a huge failure of the industry as a whole. Apple, Microsoft and Google could have had a sit down together at any point in the last 20+ years to push some kind of standard, but they decided not to in order to protect their gardens.
*: a standardized UI platform doesn't necessarily mean a standardized platform. Just standardization of UI-related APIs and drawing.
My guess 10 or so years ago was that Google would be the first to bake Material UI into browser with web components, and then any browser would essentially reuse that to extend out whatever style they wanted. It really seemed like the way the web (and Google was heading). Instead we got bad Material UI knock-offs in about 45 different UI frameworks.
I'm not convinced that it's possible to create a UI toolkit that works on both desktop and mobile without one compromising the other. It's a bit like trying to design a vehicle that can serve both as a 2-ton pickup truck and as a golf cart; the needs of the two are just too different.
Another reason is that in 2000 if you wanted pointless UI wank you had to implement it yourself from scratch. Today with bloated frameworks where the developers ran out of ideas 15-20 years ago and have filled the intervening time adding wank that no-one asked for and no-one needs, everything you build with it gets to include every brain fart someone had at 4am back in 2017 that they thought looked cool at the time.
I previously tried buying Apple for Business and it was an endless runaround with terrible signup nterfaces and having to call dumb flunkies. The whole process sucked and was disrespectful to their business customers, who do not have the time to deal with such nonsense.
This stuff strikes me as misguided. Britain's Ofcom is sending censorship/deanonymization requests around the world, Germany prosecutes thousands of its citizens every year for "offensive" things said online... and you think Europe is a bastion of free speech or privacy? You might find that you have greater rights on US soil.
Interestingly, this suggests that the Lean Startup methodology is basically a suboptimal strategy that produces acceptable outcomes only in the most fruitful circumstances. You can start a Lean Startup that makes a little bit of money, but if you'd really bet big and put your back into it, you would've done 1000x better.
Fooled by Randomness talks a good bit about this, and argues it’s true - except you don’t know what to bet on. Hence the outlier successes will be from extreme risk takers, and for each such person there will be 1,000s of other gamblers that bet on the wrong thing.
Taleb does the math as well IIRC, assuming there are x hundred thousand extreme risk takers, and outlier “correct bets” are y% chance, then you will have a surprisingly high number of people with a long series of “correct” bets behind them looking like business geniuses, from pure chance & basic statistics.
In other words, lean startups a concept were itself a lean startup, where the strategy was good enough when the circumstances were fruitful but now is supplanted by other strategies that do it better. The turtles all the way down were leaning so far that they fell over.
Instead of people buying the tokens themselves, they should just donate the money to the core contributors and let those people decide how to spend on tokens.
I agree with the broarder thesis, although some people aren't buying more tokens for this and could just be using their existing plan's limits.
So people may be less likely to donate an extra amount beyond their "ai budget" to an OSS project for tokens. Large OSS projects are also likely to get free tokens from major providers anyway.
But I like the idea of crowdfunding specific features.
This is both (1) not necessarily true -- there's no first-principles reason why being powerful implies being unethical -- and (2) deeply pessimistic and defeatist. You can apply whataboutism and say that everyone's equally bad, but I assure you that there's a pretty big difference, even down to your quality life, between the types of systems you choose to participate in.
It's not pessimistic or defeatist; you first have to recognize the limitations and failure modes of your system before you can think about changing it.
Is it possible to live in a world where powerful entities have gotten there through ethical means? Sure. We don't live in that world, though.
And yes, if I said "name me one powerful person/entity that got there through ethical means", I'm sure you could give me a name. But that name would surely be an outlier.
It wasn't popular but I think it will hold: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t...
reply