Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.
It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.
I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.
France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.
Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.
France is largest net exporter in EU and made about 5.4bn revenue last year from this export. It plans to build datacenters to increase profits further
German companies, especially old school industrial ones like VW, have a very hard time understanding open platforms. The view everything through the lense of liability and compliance first. Their thinking is that if someone runs their app on a custom ROM and uses that to manipulate the app in any way, and that causes some extremely hypothetical damage, that they might be held liable for not having prevented this situation.
Obviously, the chances of that are virtually zero. But they'd rather make their product worse than assume with any kind of risk, even if it is virtually zero. That is simply the way in which German enterprises operate.
It looks like the software development at Volkswagen is done by mixed bag of different deparments with different quality.
On one hand you have: Linux at Volkswagen
"Software development without Linux is no longer possible within automotive environment. Therefore Volkswagen Group IT created and maintains a Linux distribution for our developers. This short talk will highlight our starting goal to integrate into the existing environment, highlight our integration problems and solutions with contributing to upstream. Furthermore we will show where Linux desktop need to improve in future iteration to be a good fitting replacement for other systems."
On the other hand you have insecure implementation of telemetry: Wir wissen wo dein Auto steht
"Bewegungsdaten von 800.000 E-Autos sowie Kontaktinformationen zu den Besitzern standen ungeschützt im Netz. Sichtbar war, wer wann zu Hause parkt, beim BND oder vor dem Bordell.
Welche Folgen hat es, wenn VW massenhaft Fahrzeug-, Bewegungs- und Diagnosedaten sammelt und den Schlüssel unter die Fußmatte legt?"
I’ve spent time doing software at VW and a few of its subsidiaries, and this matches my experience.
Compliance is everything, and SAFe (Scaled Agile) is deployed as a blunt instrument.
Management treats software exactly like hardware production lines—everything is just an "engineering process" that can be optimized on a spreadsheet.
The underlying assumption is that individual engineering talent is just an interchangeable commodity. Once you view developers as replaceable cogs, outsourcing the entire infrastructure to the lowest bidder in India becomes the logical conclusion.
It’s a textbook case of process-over-people driving institutional tech debt.
> Management treats software exactly like hardware production lines
That's exactly my observation as well. Classic hardware-producing companies have an immense respect on the step of entering mass-production, as whatever issue that slipped through will be multiplied and physically spread across the world.
So they come from the mindset that the dominant mindset is to minimize the SURFACE-area of potential risk. This makes it really hard for them to compete in software-space, because in software the dominant mindset is to just estimate risk.
Neither is wrong, but applied vice-versa is.
- If you treat software like hardware, you end up cutting out everything that could make your product fit more than your decided main use-case.
- If you treat hardware like software, you're placing a bet on behalf of your customer that the product "will be fine", and a (very expensive) bet that this product won't create an aftermath which may destroy your entire company.
Companies which can't manage the distinction here end up putting hardware in the hands of customers they should have built differently and then spend all their resources on software updates just to somehow keep the core function working.
Why shouldn’t software be treated with the same rigor at Volkswagen scale?
Pretty much all software products typically talked about on HN are laughable at that scale, they have crashes or weird bugs way more often than the six sigma norm of 99.9999% reliability.
For example, I don’t think it’s even possible nowadays to buy a new iPad and use it with default apps and settings for any significant duration continuously. It’s well under 1 million minutes of uptime before failure and a hard restart is needed.
So anything more complex than the simplest possible use case of an iPad is even more of a joke under hardware norms.
> Why shouldn’t software be treated with the same rigor at Volkswagen scale?
No one said that it shouldn't.
What I wrote is, that the approach of minimizing any SURFACE of risk in software creates the (subjectively good and solid) software of previous car-generations (in Volkswagen terms: MIB2 ~ a bit downhill already in MIB3): A solid, predictable and closed product fulfilling its core use-case.
But it DOESN'T create a user experience with those "fun" niche features, competitive remote-access Smartphone features, exposed API's, sudden new features during lifecycle, funny "ludicrous modes" etc.
And today's customers are demanding those features, it's now a hygiene factor for a premium experience on Smartphones as well as on cars.
A Tesla is not considered a "Premium" car because of its premium hardware or manufacturing quality. They disrupted the car-industry by being the first to apply a software-dev mindset to it, and the consumer perceives this as premium.
Apparently I need to clarify, as it's not obvious from my previous comments: _I_ don't consider Tesla premium at all, it is NOT a premium hardware company.
It's bad quality hardware hiding behind an cleaner engine and some software features.
It is EXACTLY the product of a hardware company which keeps treating hardware-production like it's software, as described above.
If they have concerns about the security of their app on some platform, they have the choice to either put "security" into the app, or to trust the platform vendor to provide the security. The correct solution is the first way. Deferring trust to the platform provider is the lazy way.
If their APIs are done correctly, they shouldn't be afraid to expose them.
Google has a pretty good legal team. Their developer ToS that absolves them of any sort of liability for anything. So this means VW is just being lazy and not seeking legal protection.
It will look better for the project lead if there's an issue though. You can say that you enabled everything recommended by Google or w/e, following best practices, and still got pwned instead of arguing that your own security model had a tiny little flaw that no one recognized. And it frees up project hours which can either be the difference between doing the project or not doing it and/or allow you to have other project work billed to this project.
That's definitely a thing in the corporate world. It doesn't even have to be the project lead, sometimes it comes via stakeholders, some times its even well meaning devs. It is a difficult balance to strike if you want to "only be reasonably safe" whereas cargo culting all security features might take a bit of time but you now can say "hey we did everything"
[]: everything may very well not be a thing but people like to pretend it is
They don't care about legal recourse. If there's something wrong, they'll just change the laws. That's why they don't care about GrapheneOS users, or any EU regulation which could harm them.
How else would you build "security" into the app (in the sense of not allowing third-party modifications of it that would open them up to liability), except relying on hardware attestation that the app has not been modified? That attestation necessarily requires the platform provider to be involved.
You don't, the app runs on a user-supplied device. They should secure the part that runs on the car and consider the interface between the app and the api to be a user interface.
I don't disagree with this, but you're completely contradicting the user I'm replying to. I'm pointing out that the user who says "you should put security into the app" is completely misguided or at the very least perfectly explaining why VW is doing this.
Volkswagon has no jurisdiction over how I manage my fob, which is the client for the vehicle's unlock and start API. Once you hand a bearer token to me that governs full access to the vehicle, including the accelerator and steering wheel, it's not your job to babysit whether I chose to use it while drunk or hand it over to someone else.
So you don't have a VW employee coming by your house in the evening to check if the key fob is still in you possession? Sometimes he even does a testdrive to make sure it still works with the car.
Except it is their job, that is why certain signals on the car are protected from manipulation. Any attempt to circumvent this and succeeding would require direct action from VW. If they cannot prove that they did everything possible to prevent that, then they are legally liable to the authorities.
Same way that banking apps don’t care if you could screw up your account anyway, they will ban rooted phones just to avoid the risk. Because when something happens, what do you think is more likely? That the customer accepts full responsibility for using a rooted device and says that’s on me? Or that they blame the bank for losing all their savings?
> If they cannot prove that they did everything possible to prevent that, then they are legally liable to the authorities.
Laws mostly don't work like that. The seller of gasoline doesn't have to prove they did everything possible to design the product to prevent anyone from using it for arson, nor should they because that's preposterous.
> Because when something happens, what do you think is more likely? That the customer accepts full responsibility for using a rooted device and says that’s on me? Or that they blame the bank for losing all their savings?
You're making the assumption that rooted phones are more likely to be compromised, but it's entirely the opposite. The stock software on phones regularly goes out of support and has known unpatched vulnerabilities (but will still pass Play Protect) and the only way to get a patched system on that device is to install a newer third party ROM. On top of that, GrapheneOS has better security than stock Android even for the same version.
Moreover, that has nothing to do with liability. When the user with the vendor-supplied firmware still gets pwned and has their account drained, they're still going to go to the bank looking to get their money back. All the bank does by going out of their way to block third party firmware is to make that marginally more likely.
Easy: separate the systems into the safety-critical ones required for driving, and the nice-to-have ones used for things like entertainment. You can now give the car's owner full access to the latter via all sorts of weird 3rd-party apps, as there's no way for that access to cause serious issues.
They should be doing this anyways, or else you end up with your Jeep being crashed via wifi [0], and having the blast radius of a corrupt album image [1] restricted to infotainment is probably a really good idea too.
I am pretty sure that was not the engineers, but someone higher up the food chain ordering people to do that. I might be wrong, but maybe I missed the obvious "/s" or "/i" here.
Clearly the engineering team didn't know ahead of time that Electrify America would be the end result of dieselgate. Had they known, perhaps they would have been more eager to do the engineering work though! haha
It was just a fun inside joke, since nobody could have assumed the fines would create Electrify America. Personally I'm glad Electrify America exists, though the way it happened was probably not the best path to get here.
EA even has successfully moved on from just being an org forced into existence and are actively trying to take care of customers and produce a good product now that they have some competition.
I mean, the only reason they did it was to be able to comply with the requirements of the test.
But the reality is that every once in a while you have a scandal like this or something like Wirecard, and it happens, because the culture is such that absolutely nobody thinks it possible. That includes officials and regulators whose first instinct will often be to come after the people trying to expose the scandal, as has happened in the case of Wirecard.
>because the culture is such that absolutely nobody thinks it possible
Only naive laymen or newcomers to Germany think it's not possible. German business leaders, lawyers and politicians know exactly how much corruption and scamming is going on in the business sector, and it's not a little.
>first instinct will often be to come after the people trying to expose the scandal, as has happened in the case of Wirecard.
That was purely malicious to try to protect Wirecard, not because the regulators couldn't possibly imagine corruption and law breaking exists, that was the story they used as cover for their corruption.
Like you're a regulator and instead of doing the thing you were hired for and look at the evidence The Economist showed you, you instead "use your instincts" to decide not to do your job and not look into Wirecard because you can't imagine something bad can ever happen? Come on! All those regulators should have been fired and tried for corruption and/or accessory to crime.
Germans have a superiority complex over lesser developed countries like Eastern Europe that they use to justify how their corruption is acceptable, and how having much slower and much more expensive internet than developing countries is also acceptable. They're victims of their own arrogance and lack of self criticism.
They have a hard time to understand software in general, software developers have a very low standing in German engineering and engineering culture has long been replaced by finance people.
And I don't think the liability is the primary problem, they have a problem with freedom and fear that they lose some mechanism for monetisation. This is why you get subscriptions for heating your arse.
If I had to guess it’s liability concerns around the app-based remote unlock and parking + R155 and CRA. A lot of european companies have moved to require attestation in their apps, likely spurred on by the CRA.
But why? I'd understand (though not approve) them tightening down everything about the car firmware to the max. They are responsible for the app, sure (it's a "digital element"), but they aren't responsible for the OS the app runs on. The CRA should not be used as an excuse to enact stupid restrictions.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of these things, you cannot verify an app is unmodified without also verifying the OS running it is also unmodified. So if VW decides that only their unmodified app may access APIs, then they kind of are stuck verifying the OS.
They can, given basic competence in SW engineering, also verify against GrapheneOS' published release keys. The reason they don't is the same reason Google closed my ticket asking them to include Graphene keys in Play Integrity checks: they don't care.
The reason they don't is the same reason Google closed my ticket asking them to include Graphene keys in Play Integrity checks: they don't care.
I think the reasons are very different. VW maybe doesn't care. Google does it because it would undermine their stronghold over the platform. If they would allow GrapheneOS, what would block Samsung or another OEM from also sandboxing Play Services and not preinstalling a bunch of Google apps and requesting the same?
This shows why attestation is in the wrong hands. Whether a particular device is attested should be purely based on the security of the device (which would also exclude a bunch of certified devices that Google will happily attest now), not on maintaining a smartphone duopoly.
Alternatively: don't add inherently-unsafe functionality which requires attestation in order to have a veneer of "safety".
As media piracy and game cheating has shown: no matter how hard you try, there will always be ways around it. You should assume that 3rd-party device you have zero control over is already compromised, so why not use the API as the boundary layer, stop pretending you can secure the app, and open it up to 3rd-party access like it already is in practice?
Yeah, in the case at hand it's quite silly anyway. We have a VW car and the primary things you can do with the app is check the charging state, stop charging, and turn on the heating/airco.
Unless I overlook something, the worst attack vector for a compromised phone is: you could drain the battery by repeatedly turning on the airco.
Though I guess they are rolling out phone-based car keys, which may be the incentive.
The same company that supposedly views everything through the lens of liability and compliance does this:
> When the cars were operating under controlled laboratory conditions - which typically involve putting them on a stationary test rig - the device appears to have put the vehicle into a sort of safety mode in which the engine ran below normal power and performance. Once on the road, the engines switched out of this test mode.
>
> The result? The engines emitted nitrogen oxide pollutants up to 40 times above what is allowed in the US.
I guess this mentality makes sense if your products’ failures may lead to actual people dying. And in VW’s case it’s the correct culture working as it is supposed to? My Toyota sometimes feels like it was designed by a lawyer. But I somewhat understand given their history of being badly sued.
That being said, at this day and age they probably need to evolve to accommodate some UE principles from the consumer electronics industry. Especially given how cars are getting more computer centric. Hitting a good balance between the old compliance/safety mentality and UE mentality will be hard.
They have to, because German society is extremely litigious and based on finding loopholes in rules.
You know how some religious groups will string a rope between two houses, count it as a roof as long as they're within a certain horizontal distance of it, so they can follow the rope on occasions when the religion says they have to stay inside, and they think God enjoys them finding these loopholes?
Germany is like that, but with lawsuits. If anyone with money finds a technicality to sue you on, they will. So you have to be extremely liability averse if you want to be successful in business. Also, liability is almost always unlimited. You can be bankrupted by a single bad lawsuit.
No idea what's your source on this, but I see you're spanning quite some "rope" from
a.) a global company in the car-industry being cautious of exposing ANY risk-surface in a product because every issue making it to the field doesn't just bear the risk of very expensive recalls/fines but may also put people's ACTUAL lives in danger, to
b.) the country Germany and its whole society
> If anyone with money finds a technicality to sue you on, they will.
In the car-industry you don't need anyone with money to sue you. If you ship a car which is found to endanger participants of traffic, your company may not recover from the aftermath for years...
Same. It doesn't sound at all familiar, but Germans are a relatively litigious bunch (so many have legal insurance). Suing your neighbour because their cigarette smoke wafts into your kitchen. That sort of thing.
But "unlimited liabilities" gives entirely the wrong impression. German courts do not award punitive damages, and fees are generally capped below that amount in dispute.
> The view everything through the lense of liability and compliance first.
Wow, so they must really want to avoid the liability of spying after their users and keeping all that data, and to be extra sure to comply with the GDPR, they must keep only the absolute minimum of data, right?
> Their thinking is that if someone runs their app on a custom ROM and uses that to manipulate the app in any way, and that causes some extremely hypothetical damage, that they might be held liable for not having prevented this situation.
Unfortunately, due to the regulations that have blown up in the EU in the last decade, they are right.
Yes? These things directly follow one another: VW are obsessed with letter-of-the-law compliance, so things like end-runs around test routines are obvious solutions.
And VW didn't single-handedly destroy the diesel market; economics and physics did. Almost every other manufacturer was also fudging the tests results in some way. But more importantly, building a passenger car diesel that meets NOx targets doesn't work; by the time a passenger car diesel meets modern NOx targets honestly, the car contains a ludicrous precious metal loading in the catalyst and is only a few percentage points more efficient in terms of consumption and CO2 emissions than a petrol car and the math doesn't add up. Diesel is just not a practical solution for passenger cars; it never was in most ways, but it took the EU a long time to restrict NOx pollution to a sustainable level and expose the physical issues at hand.
This was official EU policy, based on french reports, as the french and italian manufacturers actually came up with common rail diesels first. The EU then changed regulations to tax based on CO2, which diesels are better at. They also made diesel taxes lower, to offset the higher prices for diesel cars (often 2000+ euros more than the petrol versions). This was all done in the framework of reducing foreign oil imports.
What VW did was to save money from ThinkBlue systems. Not every manufacturer failed the tests, especially the ones who used exhaust gas treatment did pass, and were more economical than petrol engines. After that, the EU changed emission standards and made them more strict, so VW switched to using dual exhaust treatment. Which made the cars more expensive.
What finally killed diesels was the removal of the tax reduction on diesel fuel. Since it is now taxed the same as petrol, there is no more any advantage that can offset the higher purchasing costs of the cars.
That itself though speaks for a broken company culture. If one part of the company is completely disaligned with the values of good engineering, why should anyone still trust the company as a whole? It seems they at the very least severely lack a good vision then, to uphold the company values or what should be the company values.
That’s how megacorps are. VW has almost 700K employees. Enforcing a company culture on that scale is a very diffuse and difficult thing. If you are evaluating whether you should trust a company based on their ability to enforce values throughout all their orgs, you really shouldn’t trust any company unless it’s a tiny one where this sort of thing can be a lot easier to hold the line on.
You don't understand, both comes from the same motivation and way of thinking: You see, compliance in Germany is about pretending to be super-compliant and not getting caught. Everyone will do the dance, make all the moves, and if you seem to make all the moves, you are assumed to be compliant. Supervisory authorities will not really check thoroughly except if you are annoying them or making them look bad. Especially if you are partially state-owned like VW.
In Dieselgate VW got caught, made the supervisory authorities and politicians look bad, which is why the authorities also weren't inclined to sweep it under the rug completely. They just shielded VW from the financial consequences in Germany (German VW customers got shafted).
Blocking GrapheneOS is the useless "pretending" part of compliance. They don't really want to do security, because that would cost money, so they pick some actions that seem drastic, harsh and don't cost them anything to implement. Later, when there is a security incident, they will point to their huge heap of pretend compliance, whine a bit about state sponsored actors, high criminal intent and other obvious deflecting bullshit. But they will get away with it, because they did the compliance dance, so they are obviously compliant and did nothing wrong. Nobody in authority will look twice als long as they are neither annoyed or made to look bad.
It sends very weird signals when the EU will fine an American company over some data moving in a direction they don't like while at the same time EU governments will allow home grown companies to de facto force people into using products from those same American companies all while lecturing us about duopolies and privacy only to re-enforce those same problematic patterns. It is absurd.
All countries are more lenient with their own companies. Remember who started grounding the 737 Max? It wasn't the FAA, an otherwise highly respected organization.
Who is paranoid about Chinese routers while spying on everyone? Etc.
No, it's not weird at all. They're each just an outcome of two different regulatory philosophies about how to protect users. We might want both because we're coming from an individualist hacker mindset, and thus see them as similar issues. But this is not how regulatory environments work (unfortunately).
From what I can surmise, the German/EU philosophy is more of a closed world approach - accepting that companies will keep control, then government regulates the companies to stop the companies-with-control from causing harm. If you don't like the harm, your recourse-focus is to petition the government to stop it (eg GDPR). Whereas the US philosophy is more open world - once someone "chooses" to patronize a company, then the company is free to do whatever they want. Your recourse-focus is to stop using that company.
They both have shortcomings and glaring loopholes, of course.
That would imply that the EU has the ability to build its own, competitive AI ecosystem. At the moment, it's mostly just Mistral, and they have been way behind SOTA for a while now.
You can't just legislate this into existence, you also need the money and talent to do it, not to mention the hardware.
Hopefully, EU-based Yann LeCunn's AMI Labs will develop foundational world models at some point. As I see it, the main problem in EU is not lack of talent: it's lack of investments. Mistral itself recently secured 4B, which is 50 times less than what it could have made in the US.
Investing in the EU is like burning cash. Excessive regulation, high costs and taxes (especially of human labor), and investors get punished for creating and growing companies.
Even if you overcome all of this and become successful, you'll get chased by politicians for having too much money (which is not allowed in the EU).
And even if you don't, today, it will be tomorrow.
Easier to just take a long haul flight to your favorite US coast and do it there.
However true that is, it now has only to compete with the US, where any model could be shut down by the Government on a whim with no clear rules at any time.
The rest who are not chased are usually deeply intertwined with politicians, and are running corruption schemes along them.
I'm not one to hate rich people (I'm a capitalist myself), but if any billionaires are to be looked at with skepticism, it's EU billionaires with significant political ties.
You _can_ legislate it _out_ of existence though. The competence is there, no doubt. Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM. Rules for thee but not for me, classic colonialism. The EU is so intertwined with the US that even Trump isn't enough to force a clean break.
>Just not the complete disregard for copyright law that is step 1 of training an LLM.
I guess you forgot that EU's unicorn champion, Spotify, started by distributing pirated music they stole off the torrents before getting the rights to that music.
Except they could have killed spotify legally if they wanted to. Their luck was that Stockholm was the capital of the music recording industry so they had easy lines to negotiate with record label execs face to face to not get buried by the Swedish, EU and US laws they broke and would have sent them to jail.
Same thing will happen with the LLMs. Publishing companies will cut a deal with the LLM companies to get a cut off the books and IP they used for the training data.
So this is a very poor cope/excuse of why the EU doesn't have cutting edge models, because it's illegal to steal IP in Europe vs US.
Anthropic spent months going on about how incredibly powerful and dangerous their models are and how access to them needs to be restricted. Now they are getting what they seemingly wanted.
Clearly they've assessed that the models they released are safe enough to release. Without a clear regulatory framework and Constitutional basis to overrule them, that is Anthropic's decision to make, and not the US government's.
It's disheartening how many people think the use of government power is justified or not based on the WWE smackdown drama they concoct in their own brain instead of, you know, the laws of our nation.
It is very dangerous for the government to be able to shut off services, regardless of whether their owners wrote some blog posts that rubbed you the wrong way.
You fear monger and tell everyone you’re the next Oppenheimer and maybe you eventually catch someone’s ear, whether it’s bullshit or not.
Last I checked I can’t buy a tactical nuke at Walmart. Clearly the government and all states have some power to control private enterprise for the betterment of their citizenry.
For the record I don’t support this ban, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…
Yeah just like if Volvo complained about automobile safety, imploring regulators to require safety belts, then one valid response would be the government just seizing all of Volvo's manufacturing equipment: problem solved!
You: "For the record I don’t support this theft of manufacturing equipment, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…"
Very wise. We're blessed to have you sitting above the fray where you can smugly approve of abuse of government power, which is much better and more superior than the simple-minded folks who merely approve of abuse of government power without the "I don't support this" caveat.
I don’t think the seatbelt analogy holds up when you have people saying they’re working on the next Manhattan Project.
Also no need for ad-hominem remarks referring to me as smug. I’m not smug about it and as I said I don’t agree with it.
However to my original point can you provide an analogy that showcases a private entity in this country that has previously told the public they’re essentially working on something akin to a doomsday device, whereby the government simply took a laissez faire attitude to it?
To me this just feels like Silicon Valley wants to use awful optics to their advantage and it’s backfired in a very predictable way. We don’t live in a perfect libertarian society that many in the valley wish we did, we never have. Not to mention many of the valley’s most prominent libertarians have backed the current administration, which is not one that believes in the philosophy, just like their counterparts don’t either.
I used to work with lobbyists. Watching as these guys go from telling the public what they’re making is dangerous, needs guardrails, will displace huge amounts of service workers, etc. is woefully shortsighted and only forces the hands of politicians to do something as they represent a populace that has started to poll negatively about it and no longer trust it. They only have themselves to blame. If you want that perfect libertarian society, then a good start would be realizing that they need to win over the public that controls the giant entity that can ruin them, and then maybe their representatives won’t do such things.
Here’s to hoping this is a nothing burger and access is restored soon.
I don't recall Anthropic saying "Fable 5 is a doomsday device, here you go public!"
I actually explicitly recall them saying "Fable 5 is a model we've deemed safe enough for public use."
Has the government come to some alternative assessment? How? Using what assessment framework?
It's almost as if there actually isn't the regulatory framework that Anthropic has been asking for. What we have is completely arbitrary and opaque enforcement by an administration with an already-demonstrated appetite for capricious and selective enforcement against dozens of companies and individuals, and against this company in particular.
I don't want "that perfect libertarian society." Libertarianism is a farcical ideology and always has been, as proven by the Valley's famous "libertarians" bending themselves into pretzels for an actual autocrat, for personal gain.
I merely want a society of laws where we use our consensus-building tools to establish clear and uniform rules around private enterprise. The government declining to create clear and uniform rules and instead relying on totally opaque, selectively enforced, and often totally unexplained "rules" is actually very bad.
No, it's not. If Debian had a community-maintained repo of additional packages, the same thing could happen there.
The fundamental problem is having something that has very loose oversight and next to no controls. That may have worked in the past, but in the day and age of constant supply chain attacks, it's a major liability.
> The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
That article fails to note that the USA lags behind the UK in global rankings of overall dental health. We are either joint fourth (Sweden) or fifth; the USA is ninth.
NHS dentists are scarce for policy reasons that are inexcusible. But private dental care here is not actually particularly expensive unless you want it to be, and it is good.
(Again, don't imagine that "private healthcare" in the UK is expensive in the way it is in the USA).
We have our problems and they are escalating in some ways, but my main issue with this article is that again US writers tend to assume that words and terminology have their US meaning and broader connotations.
Standard of living comparisons that use US concepts (car ownership, air conditioning ownership, even in the recent past comparing how many people dry their clothes outdoors, which is common American poverty indicator) just cannot capture the nuance in a way that makes sense.
>The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care
This figure is from an article in the Times, and has no connection to official NHS figures. The Times just guessed how much it might be, and reported it as fact. Then, since The Times is a paper of record, other news outlets have run with it.
It is paywalled. I only had access to the first two paragraphs. Regardless, that description changes nothing. "The NHS is overburdened" is a problem, but it is still better than not having the NHS at all.
Compilers are deterministic and they actually possess domain knowledge of what they are trying to do. AI models are non-deterministic, have no real domain knowledge due to lack of an underlying world model, and their way of "writing" software is to spew out something that looks like something that they have been trained on, then iterate on it long enough until it has reached the level of being barely runnable.
People say "determinism" but I don't think that's actually the property we care about. For instance you could imagine a compiler that makes heavy use of superoptimization with random search and it would still have the ineffable quality that LLM codegen lacks. I think what we're actually trying to say is that the compiler preserves the formal semantics of the source language in its output, whereas English text doesn't have any such formal semantics to preserve.
Agreed. There's no place for racist slurs on HN, especially when they're posted from behind anonymous usernames. It's often the kind of thing people wouldn't dare say under their real name if their livelihood depended on it ;)
Has nothing to do with that. If someone is looking for something, they can find it anywhere. If you want to say "prevalent in [place name]... etc" The emphasis is on the tech culture. The factors are multiple. Parallel: Do you know about chauvinism, etc.?
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