The_Nybbler
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1d ago
My read is that they literally just need to fill in that table that I mentioned on page 32. That's not a lot of reams.
I don't think the "detail" required is going to fit in that table. So it's going to be a reference to some much longer document which explains each item, in language understandable to regulators. And then all this will have to be reviewed by a lawyer specializing in UK regulations. And every time a change is made to the device, the document will have to be audited to ensure there's still compliance.
Of course just this one document isn't going to do much, aside from make new IoT devices less available in the UK and other countries adopting it as mandatory. The more regulation in more countries, the more the works get gummed up.
The_Nybbler
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1d ago
If it's really so easy there won't be any problems. But I'm pretty sure, given the absolute glee expressed in your original post, you know it isn't.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1d ago
Your original post expresses considerable contempt for "tech folks" and demonstrates absolute joy for us having regulation "dropped" on us "in a much stronger way that you really won't like." This really doesn't fit with an idea that you think the regulations will be anything like easy or simple to follow -- rather, you actually think they will be difficult and painful to follow and are joyfully anticipating the pain it will cause.
Yeah, regulation sucks. It's terrible that in the "real" engineering professions, you need a minimum 10 years of experience before you're allowed to do anything more than turn the crank on well-tested models to determine if some very slight variation of an existing thing meets all the requirements, and then fill in all the boxes on the paperwork to maintain traceability. Doing that has high costs; applying those costs to the software industry as a whole will cause it to stagnate.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1d ago
It can be easy and simple to follow, but incredibly grating to the personality of "artists". They don't like coloring inside the lines, even if it's easy and simple to follow.
If it's that grating, it's not easy even if it is simple. The word for such a thing is common: "tedious".
The_Nybbler
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23hr ago
The difference is that it's easy to people who don't have a particular psychology or culture.
So you say. But those people can't do it, because they aren't the people building the devices. The people being required to do it are the people you (gleefully) admit it is painful for.
But hey, I think we're making progress. The reason why IoT devices have been an absolute security shitshow for years is just because a small culture of powerful technokings think that it's too boring for them to fix the obvious problems that everyone knows are obvious problems and which are objectively easy and simple to fix. We may have reached agreement!
I do not agree. The reason IoT devices have been an absolute security shitshow for years is no one except you and some European regulators actually gives a shit. There are no technokings building them, and nobody's going to pay a red cent more for an internet-connected light bulb that's more secure than some other internet-connected light bulb.
The_Nybbler
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7hr ago
That you can scoff at the idea that regulation can kill innovation doesn't mean it cannot.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
23hr ago
The game of insisting on some very tangible prediction for a perturbation to a complex system, and then if no such prediction is forthcoming insisting the person making less tangible claims is wrong is annoying and only works on Yudkowskiites. I'll make a less tangible claim, though: If regulation gets a foothold and continues to increase, in 20 years we'll be talking about the promise of automation of household tasks the way we talk about flying cars today.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4d ago
Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades.
And a staple of SF for longer than that... but in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
20hr ago
What do you think is "the way we talk about flying cars today"?
The idea that we'll ever have them is an utter joke, and has been since before Avery Brooks made a meme of it. And that's true, it is an utter joke. But at one time people thought we would have flying cars. The ever-increasing regulation on anything airspace-related has made it so we don't have flying cars, we won't have flying cars, fewer people have their own aircraft, and even flying toy airplanes is mostly illegal.
There are of course substantial technical barriers to flying cars, but almost no one is even interested in trying to overcome them because the regulatory barriers to marketing them and getting the general public to be allowed to fly them are obviously insurmountable. No one goes into the aircraft industry unless they want to live, sleep, and breathe FAA regulations; nobody's designing better airplanes, the whole object of the business is to make more cost-effective (cheaper or more fuel-efficient) airplanes while still satisfying the myriad FAA regs. Which mostly means finding some way of claiming the new airplane is a variant of an old one, otherwise the regulatory cost of certifying the new airframe AND getting pilots certified on it is too high.
If the regulators get their way, we'll have the same thing in household automation. We'll still be doing the dishes the same way (only with less and less effective dishwashers, since it's an obsession of the US government to do dishes without water), laundry (same thing about effectiveness) and cooking too. Nothing that could be automated will be (except toys like the Roomba)
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6hr ago
You have zero reason for anyone to believe that the core reason why we don't have flying cars is regulatory and not technological/cultural/practical, especially when I can see with my own two eyes that every proposal that comes up is obscenely whack from a technological/cultural/practical standpoint.
Of course they're "obscenely whack". The only people foolish enough to propose them are those who know nothing about the industry and thus the fact that the regulatory barriers are insurmountable.
If you want to fly you have to learn a bevy of arcane radio procedures, log every trip you take, follow various checklists every time you fly, get your aircraft maintained only by FAA-certified mechanics, have regular medical examinations, and more. And you still only can fly in good weather, which makes every trip a risk of being stranded. There's no market for a flying car, even if technical barriers were overcome, given those requirements.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5hr ago
If the blue tribe needs red tribe warm bodies to fight blue tribe battles, most likely Red will just respond to calls to patriotism. But if they don't, there's always force (the draft).
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6hr ago
If the FAA hadn't foreclosed it all at the start by freezing the technology in place with regulations we might indeed live in a different world already. If the NHTSA existed back when the model T was current, we might need checklists for driving cars and have regulations based on needing to turn a crank to start.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5hr ago
If you're going to just ignore everything I wrote
I'm not ignoring it, I'm rejecting it. I'm saying requirements to fly an aircraft have frozen in place because FAA regs froze them in place.
I'm not going to argue about the specific regulations because that's implicitly accepting that the regulatory framework is a good thing, and I think it's a bad thing.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5hr ago
No motte-and-bailey; slippery slope. I'm not going to argue about the specifics about any particular spot on the slippery slope because the main problem is that it is on the slippery slope.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2d ago
Things can't correlate with the same thing both positively and negatively.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2d ago
The Modern Orthodox skew strongly Democratic, though not as much as other non-Haredi Jews.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6hr ago
It's not true at all.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3d ago
I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices.
You can't, though. And when the bills to ban real meat come around, they will be based on this false assumption, which will be trumpeted through all the normal propaganda outlets (media, schools and universities, political pressure groups with sciency names, etc).
(And further, there's better meat than the average store-bought easily available for a modest premium, often in the same stores)
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4d ago
Personally I would have annexed Gaza (and the West bank too for good measure) and made everyone there a citizen.
Now the next time you have an election the Palestinian party wins and all the Jews get expelled or killed. Game over. Thank you for playing Middle East Peace, please come back soon.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4d ago
For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.
Except that it steals a march on those who would ban the real animal stuff in favor of it.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5d ago
That's why I'd choose "bear". If I'm out in the woods I don't want to hear someone yapping away, or worse playing music through speakers or overly-loud headphones.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
Gay marriage was on a slippery slope down to all the trans stuff we have today. I don't know if the slope ends before dog marriage. Not sure what that has to do with a regulatory framework being a slippery slope towards the death of innovation.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
The draft doesn't require social cohesion (as we had in WWII), just government force (as we had during Vietnam)
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6hr ago
There's no point in talking about the specific merits of the specific regulations, since doing so is like the old joke about the prostitute -- "we've established that, now we're just arguing over the price".
Once you've accepted that the government should be regulating this sort of thing your road to hell is paved and greased. The end state might look like aircraft where nothing actually new can be built because the regulatory barriers are too high, it might look like buildings which all have to be basically the same because the rules constrain the solutions overmuch, it might look like dishwashers and laundry where new things are forced to be less and less effective due to regulators' efficiency obsessions. It won't look like innovation. It's not that any epsilon amount of regulation instantly kills innovation to zero; it's that having the regulatory framework in the first place makes satisfying the regulations Job One, and that job tends to expand until it fills the space. Over time, not instantly. And it tends to drive out the kind of people who would do the innovation, because they hate all the box-checking, on top of hating all the constraints themselves.
The cost of compliance -- which is to say, the reams of paperwork and signoffs necessary -- will make this impractical for startups. The large companies making this stuff will do it -- eventually, with the UK getting delayed releases. The Chinese knockoffs will continue to be sold unlawfully, and a lot of new stuff just won't appear in the UK at all.
Sneer all you want (I guess you're a Real Engineer), but I think a big reason bits have continued to grow while everything else has stagnated is the regulators haven't caught up with the bits yet.
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