While that makes sense on paper, in practice do those chips provide better support for networked, autonomous activities? I haven't heard much about their usages just some PR things about them so I'm genuinely curious.
The machine learning people I know have been very unimpressed with it. From the little I understand, it cannot run the style of neural network that have been breaking records.
TrueNorth chips would probably be a competitive disadvantage. I found Yann LeCun's critique[0] compelling. In short, simulating the brain via spiking neurons is less efficient than just doing the floating point math like regular neural nets do.
It's just normal now for huge companies to meet with government "regulators" who have the power to empower or disable their business model and that of their competition.
I really don't know. I assume that you are correct that it has been normal at various times throughout history - the railroads come to mind for sure.
But it seems to me - and I have no special insight on this per se - that technology companies have dramatically increased their reliance on insider contacts in government in the past... I dunno, 5 years? Something like that? Maybe 10?
I sat through pitch week at BluePrint in NYC and I was absolutely floored at how many companies (seriously almost every single one) openly described the advantages they thought they had as a result of odd or even outright unethical health-care 'regulations.'
How else do you propose new technology become legal if not by meeting with government regulators to promote change? You can't just sell self driving cars because you want to, the law must first be addressed.
I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.
The time and manner of invention and evolution do not yield to government nor even recognize its purview. I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.
Think about it this way: Seven generations hence, do you really think that internet will be a triviality to be 'regulated' by cronies?
Most people don't regard "the law" to be merely the collection of statues passed by whatever government claims power at a given moment.
"The law" is subject to incredible debate and scrutiny - this is the reason, for example, for constitutional courts. It is also the basis for revolution.
What if more than one entity claims to be the legitimate government? Then what is 'the law'?
Merely reading the federal register is not sufficient to inform someone about the particulars of the law.
Please - read the essay and see if you are find "the law" to be a matter of fact.
> "The law" is subject to incredible debate and scrutiny
Not debated, but only after the fact when challenged. Laws are passed by popular consent, even when they contradict previous laws and they tend to stand for far longer than they should because taking down bad law takes years. You're discussing an ideal "law", I'm discussing actual law. Take gay marriage, illegal for how long... despite always violating the constitution; it just took that long for the courts to acknowledge the discrimination that was going on.
And no, I'm not going to read a few thousands words because you're unable to make your point yourself.
My point is fact, and stands: law doesn't require reason to exist. Yes, eventually, after many decades, reason may find its way into the law, but that doesn't dispute my claim.
> And no, I'm not going to read a few thousands words because you're unable to make your point yourself.
This is ridiculous. Not every matter of conversation - especially one so enormous as "what is the nature of law?" can be answered in an HN thread.
There's nothing wrong with reading a few thousand words of a crucial essay to educate yourself. That's what you need to do to be able to think clearly about big topics.
Reading the law will only just get you started. It makes sense to read The Federalist Papers, The Communist Manifesto, The Republic, and many other cornerstones of thinking about this instead of demanding that someone distill thousands of years of thought into a HN comment.
> My point is fact, and stands:
It isn't and doesn't. I asked you a simple question in my last comment that you haven't answered that, for your purposes, may well "make my point": What about a situation in which two different entities both claim to be the legitimate government? Or a society in which large numbers of people regard a government as illegitimate? Or who regard particular laws as beyond a purview which they recognize for government?
What then is "the law?" How many different places to you need to look to find this one law?
> That's what you need to do to be able to think clearly about big topics.
This isn't a big topic, I stated a fact, I'm sorry you're unable to cope with that.
> Not every matter of conversation - especially one so enormous as "what is the nature of law?" can be answered in an HN thread.
Fortunate then that we are not discussing the nature of law.
> It isn't and doesn't.
Yes it is and yes it does.
> What about a situation in which two different entities both claim to be the legitimate government? Or a society in which large numbers of people regard a government as illegitimate? Or who regard particular laws as beyond a purview which they recognize for government?
None of those questions are relevant to the point I made and serve only as an attempt to move the goal post because you're unwilling or unable to restrict yourself to the point I'm making; I reject this attempt.
There is no discussion to be had here, I stated facts, not opinions to be debated; it is a fact that laws need not be logical to be passed, you're being a child to deny that; we're done. Whatever your higher point about law is, I don't care.
The question is whether the statement "Legal is the default state for devices that don't use public roads, public airwaves, etc" is a form a No True Scotsman. You are saying that the answer is "no," because this concept of "legal" is something that you attribute directly to the statutory authority of government alone.
The goal posts haven't moved. My hypothetical describes perfectly the state of the internet today: a bunch of governments claiming authority various realms, and worldwide confusion about what 'the law' is or how it is defined and decided.
You won't be taken seriously by saying, "I have decided that a huge open question in political science is just a simple matter of declarative fact that I need not consider." I mean... do you not realize how ridiculous you sound?
If this 'simple fact' that 'the law' is so easily defined and understood as a 'popularity contest' is self-evident enough to warrant this kind of 'case closed' mentality, then why have the greatest minds in the field been wrestling with it since ancient Greece?
If you refuse to consider the question, then of course you get to make up the answer.
So go ahead. The answer can be "yes," "no," or "unknown" depending on your mood, and you'll always be correct.
Your laziness vis a vis reading the seminal works of law has not only the consequence of making you seem stubborn and misinformed for the purposes of this discussion, but also unfit to be an effective citizen generally.
If you can't bring yourself to participate in even elementary academic discussion, why even visit this site? Just to raise your blood pressure?
> There's no reason that roads and airwaves need to be managed by violence.
I said the law doesn't require reason; that's a fact, it does not, unreasonable laws happen all the time. So you don't even have the question right, it's no wonder you can't stop blabbering on about unrelated ideas. This was never about the nature of law, you simply fail to realize that.
> The time and manner of invention and evolution do not yield to government nor even recognize its purview. I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government
Well you must be rather young and have no idea of the history of the Internet that some of us here have lived through (or you're old and are just oblivious).
All changes to the Internet's root zone need approval by the US Department of Commerce. That's because the Internet is an invention of the US government. It is government's purview since it's government's creation.
You can go out to an audience of laymen and probably fool them, but I remember when there were hosts still manually mapping name to IP in /etc/hosts, before switching over to pointing to sri-nic.arpa. As do others here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're just ignorant of what you're talking about, as opposed to being deceptive. Either way, this is the wrong crowd to try to fool with this - many of us were there when it happened.
I might be neither misinformed nor disingenuous. Perhaps instead I have a different assessment than you.
I find your position to be equivalent to saying that, because the government dropped an atomic bomb on people, it invented periodicity and the nuclear forces and retains perpetual say-so over their function and mechanics.
> I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.
But it isn't, so that proposal doesn't mean anything; if you want self driving cars, you must convince government to allow it. Vehicles require state approval, you can't drive an unlicensed vehicle and the state won't license vehicles they don't know are safe and haven't been approved yet.
> I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.
Actually, the constitution is written so that things are legal by default. All rights not explicitly granted to the national government go to the states or to the people. Edit: in the United States.
Is it?! It seems to be increasingly in a state of tension as governments flailingly attempt to censor and surveil.
Content whose distribution is prohibited on "copyright" grounds is very widely available. My understanding is that drugs and illicit pornography are available on ongoing dark net markets, which are now stronger and more numerous than in the silk road days.
Jobs are routinely outsourced as remote work to the other side of the world, in violation of the spirit of labor laws.
The EFF and other organizations are in a constant cycle of litigation to ward off more impotent laws that threaten to criminalize or civilly sanction already widespread behavior on the internet.
In what ways is the internet abiding the government?
Those things are all still quite barely used by the masses, government control is still firmly in place of the majority of people who abide by the law. Pointing out exceptions to the rule doesn't invalidate the rule.
It's pretty ironic to direct an anarchist screed at something (roads and cars) that wouldn't exist without the threat of government violence (either government road construction or exercise of eminent domain in favor of private road builders).
Also, cars are the archetypal example of externalized violence that must be countered with government violence. They impose violence on the public and the environment by spewing pollution into the air, and create externalized risk for everyone in their vicinity.
Name one anarchist civilization that has created sophisticated road networks, even in antiquity?
Road construction is the archetypal government activity. You go back to 3000 BC and look at ancient Egypt's sophisticated infrastructure. How did they do it? Government. And compare that to what contemporary societies without government have left us. Pottery fragments.
I acknowledge that absence of government hasn't worked well during history. However, what I'm saying (perhaps in fact the whole point) is that we are leaving the period called history and entering a very different space, as evidenced by the rapidity of the internet.
In other words, I assert that the time for peace without government is ahead, not behind.
Name one anarchist civilization that has created sophisticated road networks, even in antiquity?
"Wenzhou has become one of the richest cities in China under a regulatory regime that borders on anarchism.... for the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure."[1]
> I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.
This is a pretty ridiculous concept.
It would just encourage dodgy entrepeneuers to rapidly produce disruptive products without any care for safety or public benefit. Some things need to be thoroughly tested before releasing them into the public e.g. milk formulas, vaccines, cars otherwise they could kill masses of people before anyone has a chance to stop it.
And in fact a place already exists with lax regulations: China. And look what's happened there over the last few decades. So bad in fact that the public desperately looks to Western countries for food and health products.
When it comes to economic rules, China went from a centrally-controlled economy to a shockingly unregulated (by Western standards) market economy. If you want to speak up against the government you're out of luck, but if you want to sell baby formula without inspections it's much easier than in the States.
I'm saying: obviously China, which is an environment of dreadful rights of expression of all sorts, is not a good example of the potential of innovation sans government.
Yes... China is about as unregulated w.r.t. to industry as you can get. Have you ever seen the air quality in Beijing? Do you remember the air quality in LA in the 80s before stricter CARB standards? (Or are you too young to?)
I never visted LA in the 80s. I have two friends who live in Shanghai and complain about the air quality.
Regardless, the state is no friend to the environment.
And as I said to the other commenter, I don't think it's reasonable to hold up China, a huge and corrupt state with no meaningful rights to expression, as an example of innovation sans government.
Actually that's pretty much one of the key philosophical tenets of the U.S. Constitution. The idea being that 300 million free individuals can come up with many more good ideas than a few heads of state, and they shouldn't have to wait for some gov regulator to give them the ok to try an idea first.
I have sympathy for your views - those states which by default declare anything illegal until regulated are slow to innovate.
However, roads and traffic is one area where even the most limited government fan will typically agree that regulation provides benefits well outside the cost. Well regulated road networks provide large economic benefits even to people who don't directly use them.
Eh, I think it will be done better once the government is gone.
I see bungling, overpriced and late construction projects. I see utter callousness toward the environment. I see a relentless yielding to more and more and more cars along with cordoning off of pedestrians. I see languishing rails, with road-based competition receiving an effective subsidy (and also no competition at all on the rails, with amtrak, also government-subsidized, having an effective monopoly for passenger traffic).
There is no doubt in my mind that the internet will do roads better than government.
Some things can't work like that, for good reasons. In the case of cars or drones the main reason would be safety. In the case of a lot of IoT things the issue is going to be spectrum.
“My vehicle can drive itself” was the default state until Ford, Panhard, Bugatti and Rolls-Royce came with horse-less carriages. It wasn’t ideal: horse, oxen and asses got mad and rumbled into crowd regularly so it was far from ideal, but dandies needn’t no permission to get drawn by a new animal, be it a camel, and ostrich or tortoise.
Then, with mechanisation drive-through lattes and texting, a little too many kids were crushed to death, with their severed limbs thrown in the air into their parents’ faces — so we had to change that state of affairs. We ask people to prove they realised they were sitting in armoured tanks, and make sure those tanks acted like expected. When the expectation is “you can go back to texting and sipping your latte, your tank will swerve when needed” that bar is, expectedly, incredibly high.
You are more welcome to introduce any self-driving vehicle that is not independently powered with so much energy that it can kill on impact: clubs who make recumbent bikes are a good example of where to look for hackers in that area.
Your brevity and weird use of quotation marks makes your comment somewhat ambiguous, and I can come up with a few interpretations: 1) that the government should not have the power to enable or disable this new business model, or 2) that it's inappropriate for companies to have such access with the "regulators" as they may inappropriately influence the regulators outside of public discussion.
Regarding one, it has to be completely appropriate for entry into an existing field that has proven to be highly dangerous and is therefore highly regulated field.
Secondly, it also appropriate for those who are entering the field with a new technology to be able to explain to regulators about the new technology. In highly regulated fields like pharmaceuticals, those proposing new products for approval have many such meetings, and these meetings have not led to the appearance or accusations of undue influence. Rather in that field the problem has been deceit or misinterpretation of statistics.
California allows autonomous vehicles, but the manufacturer has to take responsibility for any damage or injuries, and report all accidents to DMV. That's reasonable. While some auto companies would like to continue the current "blame the driver" model, that isn't going to work with full autonomy.
Early commercial self-driving cars will probably be leased, with terms that include insurance. That eliminates any arguments over who pays in an accident.
Interesting; I wonder if they'll actually attempt to go to market with this thing or if it's just one of their many experimental projects that never sees the light of day. I'd love to see more competition in this space regardless.
To me it feels Apple and Uber are years behind Google. Today it's not very difficult to build a self driving car. But over the years Google developed a gigantic network of all kinds of data used by the cars.
54 comments
[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread[0] https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152184295832143
But it seems to me - and I have no special insight on this per se - that technology companies have dramatically increased their reliance on insider contacts in government in the past... I dunno, 5 years? Something like that? Maybe 10?
I sat through pitch week at BluePrint in NYC and I was absolutely floored at how many companies (seriously almost every single one) openly described the advantages they thought they had as a result of odd or even outright unethical health-care 'regulations.'
The time and manner of invention and evolution do not yield to government nor even recognize its purview. I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.
Think about it this way: Seven generations hence, do you really think that internet will be a triviality to be 'regulated' by cronies?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44800/44800-h/44800-h.htm
"The law" is subject to incredible debate and scrutiny - this is the reason, for example, for constitutional courts. It is also the basis for revolution.
What if more than one entity claims to be the legitimate government? Then what is 'the law'?
Merely reading the federal register is not sufficient to inform someone about the particulars of the law.
Please - read the essay and see if you are find "the law" to be a matter of fact.
Not debated, but only after the fact when challenged. Laws are passed by popular consent, even when they contradict previous laws and they tend to stand for far longer than they should because taking down bad law takes years. You're discussing an ideal "law", I'm discussing actual law. Take gay marriage, illegal for how long... despite always violating the constitution; it just took that long for the courts to acknowledge the discrimination that was going on.
And no, I'm not going to read a few thousands words because you're unable to make your point yourself.
My point is fact, and stands: law doesn't require reason to exist. Yes, eventually, after many decades, reason may find its way into the law, but that doesn't dispute my claim.
This is ridiculous. Not every matter of conversation - especially one so enormous as "what is the nature of law?" can be answered in an HN thread.
There's nothing wrong with reading a few thousand words of a crucial essay to educate yourself. That's what you need to do to be able to think clearly about big topics.
Reading the law will only just get you started. It makes sense to read The Federalist Papers, The Communist Manifesto, The Republic, and many other cornerstones of thinking about this instead of demanding that someone distill thousands of years of thought into a HN comment.
> My point is fact, and stands:
It isn't and doesn't. I asked you a simple question in my last comment that you haven't answered that, for your purposes, may well "make my point": What about a situation in which two different entities both claim to be the legitimate government? Or a society in which large numbers of people regard a government as illegitimate? Or who regard particular laws as beyond a purview which they recognize for government?
What then is "the law?" How many different places to you need to look to find this one law?
This isn't a big topic, I stated a fact, I'm sorry you're unable to cope with that.
> Not every matter of conversation - especially one so enormous as "what is the nature of law?" can be answered in an HN thread.
Fortunate then that we are not discussing the nature of law.
> It isn't and doesn't.
Yes it is and yes it does.
> What about a situation in which two different entities both claim to be the legitimate government? Or a society in which large numbers of people regard a government as illegitimate? Or who regard particular laws as beyond a purview which they recognize for government?
None of those questions are relevant to the point I made and serve only as an attempt to move the goal post because you're unwilling or unable to restrict yourself to the point I'm making; I reject this attempt.
There is no discussion to be had here, I stated facts, not opinions to be debated; it is a fact that laws need not be logical to be passed, you're being a child to deny that; we're done. Whatever your higher point about law is, I don't care.
The question is whether the statement "Legal is the default state for devices that don't use public roads, public airwaves, etc" is a form a No True Scotsman. You are saying that the answer is "no," because this concept of "legal" is something that you attribute directly to the statutory authority of government alone.
The goal posts haven't moved. My hypothetical describes perfectly the state of the internet today: a bunch of governments claiming authority various realms, and worldwide confusion about what 'the law' is or how it is defined and decided.
You won't be taken seriously by saying, "I have decided that a huge open question in political science is just a simple matter of declarative fact that I need not consider." I mean... do you not realize how ridiculous you sound?
If this 'simple fact' that 'the law' is so easily defined and understood as a 'popularity contest' is self-evident enough to warrant this kind of 'case closed' mentality, then why have the greatest minds in the field been wrestling with it since ancient Greece?
If you refuse to consider the question, then of course you get to make up the answer.
So go ahead. The answer can be "yes," "no," or "unknown" depending on your mood, and you'll always be correct.
Your laziness vis a vis reading the seminal works of law has not only the consequence of making you seem stubborn and misinformed for the purposes of this discussion, but also unfit to be an effective citizen generally.
If you can't bring yourself to participate in even elementary academic discussion, why even visit this site? Just to raise your blood pressure?
> There's no reason that roads and airwaves need to be managed by violence.
I said the law doesn't require reason; that's a fact, it does not, unreasonable laws happen all the time. So you don't even have the question right, it's no wonder you can't stop blabbering on about unrelated ideas. This was never about the nature of law, you simply fail to realize that.
That breaks the HN guidelines, as you know. Please comment civilly and substantively, or not at all, even when someone else is being a jerk.
You can't post uncivil attacks like this here, even when someone else is being a jerk. Please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Well you must be rather young and have no idea of the history of the Internet that some of us here have lived through (or you're old and are just oblivious).
All changes to the Internet's root zone need approval by the US Department of Commerce. That's because the Internet is an invention of the US government. It is government's purview since it's government's creation.
You can go out to an audience of laymen and probably fool them, but I remember when there were hosts still manually mapping name to IP in /etc/hosts, before switching over to pointing to sri-nic.arpa. As do others here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're just ignorant of what you're talking about, as opposed to being deceptive. Either way, this is the wrong crowd to try to fool with this - many of us were there when it happened.
I find your position to be equivalent to saying that, because the government dropped an atomic bomb on people, it invented periodicity and the nuclear forces and retains perpetual say-so over their function and mechanics.
But it isn't, so that proposal doesn't mean anything; if you want self driving cars, you must convince government to allow it. Vehicles require state approval, you can't drive an unlicensed vehicle and the state won't license vehicles they don't know are safe and haven't been approved yet.
> I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.
It's abiding by government just fine.
Is it?! It seems to be increasingly in a state of tension as governments flailingly attempt to censor and surveil.
Content whose distribution is prohibited on "copyright" grounds is very widely available. My understanding is that drugs and illicit pornography are available on ongoing dark net markets, which are now stronger and more numerous than in the silk road days.
Jobs are routinely outsourced as remote work to the other side of the world, in violation of the spirit of labor laws.
The EFF and other organizations are in a constant cycle of litigation to ward off more impotent laws that threaten to criminalize or civilly sanction already widespread behavior on the internet.
In what ways is the internet abiding the government?
Also, cars are the archetypal example of externalized violence that must be countered with government violence. They impose violence on the public and the environment by spewing pollution into the air, and create externalized risk for everyone in their vicinity.
As I'm sure you already suppose, an anarchistic assessment of this results in a different conclusion.
Road construction is the archetypal government activity. You go back to 3000 BC and look at ancient Egypt's sophisticated infrastructure. How did they do it? Government. And compare that to what contemporary societies without government have left us. Pottery fragments.
In other words, I assert that the time for peace without government is ahead, not behind.
"Wenzhou has become one of the richest cities in China under a regulatory regime that borders on anarchism.... for the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure."[1]
[1]https://reason.com/archives/2011/11/15/chinas-black-market-c...
This is a pretty ridiculous concept.
It would just encourage dodgy entrepeneuers to rapidly produce disruptive products without any care for safety or public benefit. Some things need to be thoroughly tested before releasing them into the public e.g. milk formulas, vaccines, cars otherwise they could kill masses of people before anyone has a chance to stop it.
And in fact a place already exists with lax regulations: China. And look what's happened there over the last few decades. So bad in fact that the public desperately looks to Western countries for food and health products.
Regardless, the state is no friend to the environment.
And as I said to the other commenter, I don't think it's reasonable to hold up China, a huge and corrupt state with no meaningful rights to expression, as an example of innovation sans government.
However, roads and traffic is one area where even the most limited government fan will typically agree that regulation provides benefits well outside the cost. Well regulated road networks provide large economic benefits even to people who don't directly use them.
I see bungling, overpriced and late construction projects. I see utter callousness toward the environment. I see a relentless yielding to more and more and more cars along with cordoning off of pedestrians. I see languishing rails, with road-based competition receiving an effective subsidy (and also no competition at all on the rails, with amtrak, also government-subsidized, having an effective monopoly for passenger traffic).
There is no doubt in my mind that the internet will do roads better than government.
Then, with mechanisation drive-through lattes and texting, a little too many kids were crushed to death, with their severed limbs thrown in the air into their parents’ faces — so we had to change that state of affairs. We ask people to prove they realised they were sitting in armoured tanks, and make sure those tanks acted like expected. When the expectation is “you can go back to texting and sipping your latte, your tank will swerve when needed” that bar is, expectedly, incredibly high.
You are more welcome to introduce any self-driving vehicle that is not independently powered with so much energy that it can kill on impact: clubs who make recumbent bikes are a good example of where to look for hackers in that area.
Regarding one, it has to be completely appropriate for entry into an existing field that has proven to be highly dangerous and is therefore highly regulated field.
Secondly, it also appropriate for those who are entering the field with a new technology to be able to explain to regulators about the new technology. In highly regulated fields like pharmaceuticals, those proposing new products for approval have many such meetings, and these meetings have not led to the appearance or accusations of undue influence. Rather in that field the problem has been deceit or misinterpretation of statistics.
Early commercial self-driving cars will probably be leased, with terms that include insurance. That eliminates any arguments over who pays in an accident.