Definitely a lot of potentially very serious and important downsides to this.
I’m trying to think of any possible upsides to this.
- harder for unlicensed people, eg kids, to drive a car and hurt themselves or someone else.
- harder to steal a car if you’re not an approved driver, regardless of what you do with a copied key fob.
- potentially easier to resolve insurance disputes
- harder for people to commit premeditated crimes using cars (eg getaway driver to a robbery)
That said, these things only really happen if almost all cars on the road have this “feature”. Which means if all new cars in china must have this, then for at least 20 years after introduction, people wanting to skirt the law/surveillance will just use older cars.
So then in the end everyone loses out except for the people this is purportedly target towards, who just go around it.
I have worked with some people in the defence industry who got just that from Adobe and a few similar vendors. They had to negotiate with adobe and sign NDAs both ways, and they payed through the nose for it. But you can do it.
"Be defence forces of (checks profile) one-of-the-five nation states" is not a standard of negotiation requirement I deem attainable for just about anyone that isn't one of the five or EU the union.
Fair enough, but how life-crucial can an old copy of Adobe be?... I'm assuming a project like the Voyager mission relies on something a bit more bespoke than a copy of Adobe Creative Whatever. I really hope the defence forces core mission doesn't depend on Adobe Creative Cloud.
I guess the main reason here isn't "keeping an old version", but having a version that doesn't require an internet connection to be activated and doesn't send any data to Adobe.
But having an older version can be useful too because some features from previous releases may be missing in current ones, so that's a way to ensure access to the old files. A couple of years ago all the Pantone colours used in Photoshop just became black after an update because Adobe stopped licensing Pantone stuff.
Can't agree. Say, when a new treatment emerges for a disease that was affecting some part of the population, it's better for the cured, and not any worse for all others.
Even simpler, at the very foundation of daily life: when two people willingly exchange something, they are both better off, by their subjective measures, else they would have done that. This applies not only to exchanging goods for money, but even to exchanging friendly smiles.
If all life were a zero-sum game, the world would never progress to its current state.
All changes being worse for some does not imply zero-sum. It only implies that every individual change will always make the status quo worse for at least 1 person, not that the collective good did not outweigh the bad. Plus, this is frequently off-set by some future change being a net-improvement for the previously impacted person.
Life is not a 'zero sum game'. Just because someone benefits from something does not mean someone else is exploited or oppressed.
Many in the anti-capitalist crowd have the mindset that wealth is not created, but just spread around. If someone gets rich, it must mean others got poorer. If that were true then everyone would be getting poorer as the population grows (finite resources spread ever thinner within a growing society).
On human lifetime timescales much of life is very much so a zero sum game.
Only the exceedingly privileged cannot grasp this fact of life. Academic bubble theories don’t help a generation of rust belt manufacturing workers, but it sure as hell made a whole lot of other folks rich at their direct expense.
The same academics are happy to talk about income inequality while ignoring the elephant in the room.
Ignoring this fact is exactly how we’ve gotten to where we are today. Politicians have only just begun to exploit this blind spot so many seem to have.
I have directly benefited from this fact and have done quite well for myself. But it’s so obvious I can’t believe it’s even an argument. Comparative advantage may help their grandchildren, but it doesn’t help the 49 year old machinist with no realistic job opportunities and bills to pay after the executives ship the plant off to Mexico or China. I personally watched it happen.
Agreed. It is a zero sum game once you consider the extreme asymmetry in opportunities.
In the age of social media, it's a myth that you can 'create opportunities for yourself'. It doesn't work like that. You need the right social network; else you will create value but that value will be ignored and not integrated into the system; you will not be paid/rewarded for it.
Either you exist in a social environment where opportunities fall on your lap by the hundreds and you have to pass on 99% of them and only pursue the top 1%... or you exist in an environment where you have to work like crazy for 10 years straight to get a single mediocre opportunity and such opportunities are so rare for you that you recognize it instantly and you know you cannot pass it up.
The economy is a zero sum game at best and a negative-sum game at worst. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have such significant asymmetries in opportunities.
Just look at anyone who is earning a lot of money in our system... They're not adding value. They have shares in companies; they could sit at home all day and they'd get paid the same. How is that not proof that they're being paid for not adding value?
Ignore past stories of what these people supposedly did once-upon-a-time to get to their current positions. What do you call a system where, at any given time, most of the money flows to people who do the least amount of work and consume the most?
Probably 5% of the population could do a better job than most CEOs. Still, these people will never get the opportunity to become a CEO. There's just not enough room at the top... So people make up all sorts of nonsense stories about track records and connections.
Buy up my existing cryptocurrency shitcoin for hundreds of millions of dollars and my track record and business connections will magically appear out of nowhere. I don't need to do anything. Just a Tweet from a celebrity will do.
You're not describing a zero sum interaction because the gain in China has almost certainly outstripped the loss in the US. That's pretty much the story of globalization so far.
This is precisely the academic theory bubble talk I was referring to.
On balance no one cares that some Chinese peasants had a huge increase in quality of life. Their lives, and the lives of their children were significantly degraded so some executives and owners could get obscenely rich. If you zoom out far enough literally nothing is zero sum given the conservation of energy. But that’s a silly argument.
That it may someday be a net win for humanity (and this is entirely uncertain) is very much immaterial to anyone other than folks so disconnected from reality that they are insulated from the impact these theoretical games have on real people in their own country and communities.
> If that were true then everyone would be getting poorer as the population grows (finite resources spread ever thinner within a growing society).
Well then what is inflation?
Not everything is infinite like software. The largest sources of inflation are caused by things that have a human limitation. ie. things that need to have a human in the loop.
And lets not forget the many sources of suppressed inflation. That iPhone is its current price because we rely on low paid Chinese workers and factories destroying their local environment to produce that phone. Once that goes away (some are saying this is China's last decade of free trade) then we will see the real cost of these things.
It does mean something was manipulated though. In most cases attention and or resources. Both finite at some scale. When either is gained it does take from something else.
What’s really needed is some way you can easily tell that a device has been tampered with, but which is also extremely difficult to bypass. And also where even if the OEM was in on the scheme, you could still tell. Like how a hash is used to tell if someone made changes to a piece of software.
For consumer products this is a nonstarter because companies will almost never fully divulge info about all the parts of a device required for this.
For defence product where almost everything is fully specified by the customer, it might be possible. If you know all the components in a device, and you can prove they are all genuine, then you can prove the whole device is genuine.
Engraved hashes on every part comes to mind, but that would be ungainly to validate and fairly easy to bypass by simply copying codes from one device to another.
This doesn’t work because the hashes are controlled by the same party party you don’t trust. If you want this, you need to pay for trusted third-parties to audit the factory and random samples - otherwise it’s basically like all of the blockchain startups trying to reinvent supply chains only to learn that a chain of hashes showing package A was delivered to warehouse B don’t help if you don’t actually know what was in the box, who picked it up, or what happened to it in transit. I guarantee that the Mossad would have had valid hashes on every battery.
This isn’t even very effective for software: people have been working on commit signing, reproducible builds, etc. for ages but it’s just a cascade of trust problems where striking the balance between workable and effective can be extremely challenging. Something like xz or SolarWinds would have had valid signatures on everything, and you still wouldn’t know the real identity of the person responsible for the duplicitous code.
You’re not going to easily detect supply chain tampering of code, but you might be able to detect the covert inclusion of explosives in your devices with imaging (X Ray and CT) and random sampling tear downs.
This isn't the world we've built, it's the world we live in. We didn't create this world, and we aren't yet powerful enough to change the nature of reality, so to blame humanity for the necessity of defense is silly. You'll be a lot less dispirted if you accept that the world we live in isn't a human creation and that we still haven't made it out of the struggle to survive.
There's nothing in the nature of reality that forces us to fight each other, unless you mean human nature. But we have a choice in whether we choose to be self-serving, which inevitably leads to conflict, or we choose to love our enemy. Loving your enemy requires dying to yourself, usually metaphorically, but it is an option. Humanity is entirely complicit.
In fact, each person is a microcosm of that dynamic. Each time we sacrifice a little bit of someone else's well-being for our own, we are engaging in a small bit of that warfare. Cut someone off in traffic because you're in a hurry; cheat a little to get ahead; don't clean up your public mess because laziness/rushed. It's all essentially that same dynamic.
>There's nothing in the nature of reality that forces us to fight each other
The reality that we are each capable of disagreeing with each other and having conflicting priorities, combined with the limited resources we have access to, is the nature of reality that forces us to fight each other.
> But we have a choice in whether we choose to be self-serving, which inevitably leads to conflict, or we choose to love our enemy.
Sounds very poetic, but how exactly does this apply to the case of Ukraine being invaded by Russia? Do you propose that the Ukrainians should love the invaders? If that should happen, then the Poles and the Romanians should also love the Russians when their time to be invaded comes?
If people were not pulling the oars, the galley of war would never leave the harbor. People have to remember there are more of them on the oars than there are those who hold the whips, although this is no easy feat when the incentives to paint this simple truth as some desperate impossibility are so high.
It’s all so simple until a missile strikes a hospital full of childern. Then what? Do you think you’ll be praised for your wisdom of oars and helms if you talk to the parents who just lost a child a week ago?
It just so happens that one of my colleagues just finished a PhD creating materials which pretty much do exactly this; converting a relatively broad spectrum of light into a much narrower band of light. I’ve seen them in the lab where it’s colourless and clear to start with, and then it will convert any incident light in the blue range into a much narrower band of a specific blue colour. He has recipes for just about any colour, even into UV and IR bands.
Not sure what the real world applications are though, maybe something to do with coatings for photovoltaic cells to increase efficiency
There was an article about a flat nano-tech lens, but it only works for a single wavelength of light. Combining the two could result in the ultimate "pancake" black & white camera.
I'm not sure that would work well - if you're only recording a single wavelength, then the resulting black and white image wouldn't resemble a normal one, where all wavelengths are added to obtain a pixel intensity.
I can immediately see applications in IR and UV for hyperspectral imaging using cheap sensors. Your idea of PV cells is also excellent, provided the wavelength compression is efficient.
What’s needed is not to compress colors into one narrower band, it’s to quantize them into multiple combinations of bands (e.g. combinations of three RGB bands).
Human level touch/somatosensory system is one of the key breakthroughs needed to make humanoid robots truly useful.
As this articles details, touch is a lot more complex than simply “is there force on this spot” and the sheer amount of information our bodies process subconsciously throughout our everyday activities is staggering.
Ever wonder why it’s so hard to use a pen to write something if your hands are too cold, or if your arm has “fallen asleep”? Robots are in that state all the time, and we have to use a lot of fancy tricks to get them to manipulate objects without being able to feel them very well.
Whoever can solve this problem, with a product which is relatively cheap, reliable, and high resolution, will be creating a multibillion dollar opportunity for themselves.
As someone who works in robotics, I’d put my money on arrays of MEMS or microfluidic channels embedded inside a gel membrane.
I’m guessing the author is counting himself as CTO as part of that. $60 million for the CTO and his posse of senior managers and VPs, and the other $40m split between 180 non management engineers for $220k ish each. Still stupidly high costing now matter how you slice it.
Having something audited by an accounting firm doesn’t make me trust the numbers much more. It’s well known that many accounting firms will give you whatever result you want as long as you pay enough
I’m trying to think of any possible upsides to this.
- harder for unlicensed people, eg kids, to drive a car and hurt themselves or someone else. - harder to steal a car if you’re not an approved driver, regardless of what you do with a copied key fob. - potentially easier to resolve insurance disputes - harder for people to commit premeditated crimes using cars (eg getaway driver to a robbery)
That said, these things only really happen if almost all cars on the road have this “feature”. Which means if all new cars in china must have this, then for at least 20 years after introduction, people wanting to skirt the law/surveillance will just use older cars.
So then in the end everyone loses out except for the people this is purportedly target towards, who just go around it.