Too bad somehow the face that ends up out there as the face of surveillance isn’t the CEO of Flock, not their coders, not the YC people who gave them money to do exactly what they’re doing. It’s the lowest of the low in the chain, the guy sitting in the sun to install the cameras on a post.
The advantage of the gym is that machines usually (but not always) force or at least guide the correct form. Free weights and free exercise leave so much room for a wrong form and building up to injuries.
Or they know they'll be told it was wrong. Children start knowing nothing then they slowly absorb what they're told again and again, and what they see around them until they feel it. They go from knowing nothing, to knowing what the adults told them, to internalizing that and feeling it rather than just knowing it (maybe these 2 concepts fully overlap in other people's minds).
But until they do get all of that, they'll spend a lot of time plucking wings off of insects, burning ants with a magnifying glass, pulling the cat by the tail, or throwing rocks at dogs and frogs.
I can't say whether it was or wasn't true for you. But I can say your certainty is misplaced.
Most of your memories and everything you think of now about early childhood were formed long after it. They were created from bits and pieces of real memories, stories, backsplanations for things that happened later, retrospective, etc. Even if you had now an accurate debug dump of your child brain, you'd still not be able to process that the way you processed it back then.
Your kid brain was a black box, a CPU with a different architecture running code that you've never before or since. You later tried to recreate that code for the CPU you have now, based on input from others who've also never seen that original code or have access to that type of CPU. And you are certain you recreated it accurately?
How could it be possible for anyone to accurately reflect on the mechanisms shaping their emotional reaction to a specific situation when they were 4 years old? It should be transparently obvious that this is unknowable. First, by the time we begin to form memories, these influences have already been shaping us for months to years. Second, even if at 4 years old you remembered every moment from birth to now, you still wouldn't have the ability to actually reflect on all that data. Most adults aren't even capable of reflecting accurately on the influences affecting their current decisions!
I have other memories when I was 4, and talked about them with my parents years later. Another significant one is I wandered away and got lost in London, and some cops noticed me and picked me up and took me to the station.
My parents filled in some details, some of which I did not remember.
I don't doubt that you have memories from when you were 4, I have memories from that time too. And I'm sure you felt the shame you described. But I know that it's impossible for a 4-year-old to accurately decipher why they feel shame when they do!
You disagreed with sevenzero when they claimed that concepts like violence and right and wrong are actively taught by parents instead of being innate to children. Assuming you read all three lines of sevenzero's comment before disagreeing: the perspective of your 4-year-old self is not a reliable source, because 4-year-old children cannot accurately differentiate between innate or taught feelings.
I would certainly agree that one gets taught more refined and nuanced notions of right and wrong, but those are innate feelings. At least for me.
I recall seeing a TV show where they studied very young people by putting them in right and wrong situations, and they definitely knew what was right and wrong.
> I would certainly agree that one gets taught more refined and nuanced notions of right and wrong, but those are innate feelings. At least for me.
How could a person who was taught social concepts of right and wrong since birth ever hope to reliably determine which parts of said concepts in their own mind are innate, and which aren't? Human minds are infamous for being terrible at introspecting their own mechanisms at the best of times.
> I recall seeing a TV show where they studied very young people by putting them in right and wrong situations, and they definitely knew what was right and wrong.
Unless said very young people were raised by wolves, chances are that they've been taught these concepts since birth as well. You can't determine the innateness by only looking at people who share this bias.
Because we have proof that humans who aren't taught a subset of social behaviors never show any of them. It doesn't matter what we've bred foxes to do - "sense of right and wrong" is not the same as "social behavior", and innate traits in one species can be non-innate in another. You cannot analyze a cantaloupe to determine the taste of bananas, no matter how hard you try.
It is important to understand our own human limits. We cannot reason our way through our own minds, we can only accept our biases and try to work around them. But the first step is being humble enough to accept that human intuition is no substitute for actual research.
> Waymo FSD is obviously more advanced than Tesla, but they will lose out to both Tesla and Rivian when it comes to manufacturing
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean but the car itself (chassis, bodywork, drivetrain) is a commodity today. If you can turn any car into an autonomous car then the car isn't worth that much in the self-driving game. Tesla's stock is propped by the promise of becoming the first to achieve autonomy not by its ability to build cars, or else VW and Toyota would be worth multiples of Tesla. They aren't because cars are a commodity. Autonomous car brains are the hot deal.
If manufacturing ever became Google's Achilles heel, they can take a majority stake in something like VinFast and manufacture a Google car.
It's like saying Linux will lose out to Microsoft when it comes to manufacturing. Yes, they do lose out by not manufacturing anything and yet their product is slowly taking over the market. Local loss (no profit from manufacturing), global win (core product is increasing market share).
> If manufacturing ever became Google's Achilles heel, they can take a majority stake in something like VinFast and manufacture a Google car.
They won't even have to (partially) buy any manufacturer - they can utilize contract manufacturers like Magna Steyr (which made the Jaguar I-Pace) or Foxconn, or lean on/expand partnerships like the one they have with Toyota.
I said that on the assumption that they want control and guarantees that Google's needs get serviced. Otherwise they can partner with any manufacturer to incorporate the tech, like they do on the software side. But they could be dropped at any time.
> I'm just pointing out that "it's in the [my own] requirements" in this case does not really make something "not over engineered".
You point that out without providing any context or criteria. So you're just pointing out your personal opinion, nothing resembling fact. In this case everything is over engineered. The doorbell is overengineered before even discussing mp3.
> Excel is famously complex because, despite most users only using 20% of the features, no one uses the same 20%
I think you're comparing 2 very different scenarios here.
Excel is solution engineered to meet every requirement under the sun, for every possible user.
"The doorbell" is something designed and built by 1 person to meet exactly their own requirements.
whstl (the other commenter) insists that he is better suited than the benefiter and builder of that doorbell to decide what is a good requirement and he's willing to make tasteless jokes comparing anyone who doesn't agree with his assessments to Nazis on trial at Nurnberg [1]. You'll notice that whstl didn't even ask why the requirement exists in the first place, just concluded it's wrong (it's something they teach you on day 1 of engineering school, build whatever you want, better if you don't ask questions where the answer might inconvenience you).
When you have a requirement would you take the word of someone on the internet just saying it's not a valid one?
> "The doorbell" is something designed and built by 1 person to meet exactly their own requirements.
Nothing wrong with that.
Also nothing wrong with people going to great lengths to build an Excel replacement that fits their exact requirements like glove, by ignoring 99.9% of what makes Excel … excel.
The issue is calling Excel over engineered for catering to everyone else:
> You would be surprised that 99% of the solutions out there are complete over engineered stacks that depend on wifi devices, Internet access, connecting to various cloud services...
Even if all some people wanted was a custom sound on their doorbells, I bet many of those people will want to transfer the sound using a smartphone rather than an SD card they can't modify with a computer many don't own. And, given that capability, even more people will want to be notified of a ring on their phones, and then why not when they're outside (maybe on the backyard) away from the LAN, and then why not while they're at work, and so on and so forth.
The “over engineered” solutions are actually engineered to cater to everyone else, that is all.
And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet and cloud to support a doorbell that's genuinely more useful (rings remotely) than SD cards and custom hardware to justify something as … frivolous as changing the bell's sound.
PS: I just spent $70 modding a $20 Casio watch. I loved every second of it.
About Excel, that’s not what I meant, in my head at least. For any 1 excel user the software looks over engineered. So many complex features not being used... by them. But from the product perspective it probably does exactly what all the users need as a group.
Is a coffee machine with 1000 parts over engineered? For home use yes. For use on the ISS probably not. Context is important, take something out of context and you’ll confidently give the wrong answer.
Anything can be considered over engineered if we just ignore the requirements of the user/builder. Copy from phone? Over engineered with wireless. Copy over SD? Over engineered with a controller. Have a door bell at all? Over engineered with wires.
Start with the goal of the device. Do you want a doorbell with a ring you can choose? SD is probably a lower complexity choice and can’t really go much lower. Do you want a doorbell with internet? Add basic internet connectivity. Unless you do it in a convoluted fashion, with more parts and complexity than needed to achieve that, it's not over engineering.
> And to make whstl's point: I find it much easier to justify internet
I read the opposite. whstl made 2 points for as long as I could be bothered to read his comments: that engineers who implement all the requirements are like Nazi soldiers committing genocide, and that additional features on a doorbell amount to over engineering which is exactly the opposite of what you say.
If you don't need internet, why add it just on a "might as well" basis? The feature creep can go on forever like that. Add a 2-way intercom, video camera with IR and floodlight, some AI recognition stuff, local and cloud backed storage, etc. Now you also created a headache to maintain the software or guarantee it will be in a botnet soon.
Always start with what you need, what’s the goal of the device, and how can you implement that in the most reasonably straight forward fashion as possible. Just so you don’t end up with a doorbell that runs Vmware because "why not".
The original poster claiming "over engineering!" is the one that wants to "just change the ringtone," apparently failing to realize that the products they're comparing too were never meant to "just change the ringtone." (i.e. they need to cater to a wider audience to be successful)
I can't be sure about whstl, but that's my only point.
And, really, nothing against going to great expense/effort to build exactly what one wants. In fact, I love doing just that.
> "it was in the requirements" is not a "get out of jail card"
How do you define objectively as an engineer if "play MP3" is too much? A doorbell is a sound outputting device only, being able to select the sound seems like a reasonable extension. Is a digital doorbell overengineered when analog electric ones worked just fine for almost 2 centuries? Or were these overengineered when mechanical doorbells worked for many more centuries before? What if I attach a light to the doorbell, is that over engineering?
Or are you just fighting to save face after missing the point completely and making that tasteless Nurnberg trial parallel?
Precisely. Courts will find that the situation where Linux users are exempt from the law, whereas Windows users have to submit their ID and any other personal data, can not be maintained, so Linux users will also be forced to give up their ID before being able to access the internet. This will also first come via commercial distributions (perhaps it can not be enforced by independent linux users, but the law need not necessarily work for 100%, could be 95%, and the rest are declared as breaking the law).
This is pure speculation. You can't possibly predict what courts are going to decide in the future. And the Digital Age Assurance Act doesn't "force a user to give up ID to access the Internet", it requires age information to be collected during creation of a user account on a system.
Totally agree. After the next big cyber attack, ganna have to kyc to access internet. It will be “for our safety”. Luckily now with ai the world doesn’t need me as a programmer so I’m just ganna stop using computers if they go full facist
As for the bill itself, it's one of those that gets passed because it is non invasive to the typical person, it's voluntary, and it should help some. There is no downside at all.
But 2 years from now a baseline has been established where the need to know your age when using a computer is taken for granted, and it's revealed that self-reporting isn't working and gasp there was this one kid in the news about something bad happening.
This is how it goes. This is one of the reasons the anti-gun crowd is so adamantly opposed to virtually everything. I'm not advocating anything with respect to guns here, but "sensible" measures were broadly supported and then turned against the owners who acquiesced.
An "exception" is two faced in this case. It implies Linux needs an exception to begin with and that the bill itself isn't absolute garbage and a direct attack on general purpose computing. Again, they establish a baseline with something that people are ok with.
The baseline is already being established. In the majority of US states now you have to send your photo ID to a 3rd party to access "adult content". The conspiracy theories around the California and Illinois laws are senseless given the speed run the rest of the country is doing to ending privacy online. We get threads with hundreds of comments about California "fighting against privacy" and basically silence on the dozens of other states implementing far more privacy invasive legislation.
I agree, it's just a different vector to entry based on content. California is stepping it up to computing as a whole. Combine the two. Then the next step is actual ID, not an ID clearinghouse. But we're all paranoid for suggesting such things, just as people were paranoid that we'd get this far.
Companies have never been “democracies”. Most companies are more like dictatorships internally (for employees) and past a certain size also externally (for customers). Everything is dictated by a small group of leaders and shareholders not chosen by either employees or customers.
If you really want to imagine them like democracies, you are voting with your wallet. Maybe you’re just in the minority.
Nobody said companies _are_ democracies ... you're reading something that is not there.
The point is that Apple thinks it can somehow bend the rules of the EU that were established democratically. As if users are better off with Apple's rules.
> bend the rules of the EU that were established democratically
EU might occasionally get some things right but saying it's rules are "established democratically" is a slight stretch. It's a sort of a third degree democracy (that parliament is mostly imitative, has no real power and is easily manipulated) with all implementation details and most decision making being done by unelected bureaucrats.
Yes it is not perfect, but a company telling us where democracy is functioning or not is not a solution and if a company suggests it, that is arrogant and dumb.
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