waterheater

"Efficency" in what domain? Travel time? Cost? Convenience/comfort?

Comparing programming to other creative arts for which significant automation exists (e.g., baking, ceramics, etc.) is a poor venture for one primary reason: all bits are equal.

With baking, you can choose between cheap or premium ingredients, which affects the quality of the output. With ceramics, your choice of clay essentially determines the upper quality limit on your piece. However, with programming, your ingredients--bits--are always the same.

Additionally, both baking and ceramics require significant investments of time and energy. Humans tend to ascribe greater value to things which take more time to create.

Perhaps there's a lesson in here: artisanal crafts require both locally-optimal base materials and investments of both personal time and energy.

Not quite. The exclave communicates with the OS via what I'll call a World Information Interface (WII). Like an API, the WII define a fixed set of function calls which will return a response.

Say the OS wants to know how many people are in a room. The OS will call the WII.numPeopleInRoom() function. The exclave is free to use whatever sensor data is necessary to return an accurate number; it might use a camera, microphone, a touchscreen, or sensor fusion. Regardless, the OS is given no information about what sensor data was used to arrive at that result. The key piece is that the OS may only acquire information that is provided by the exclave.

Separating the camera and microphone data processing functionality into a Secure Exclave should be seen as a genuinely important step forward to protecting privacy, not just implementing data control schemes which masquerade under the name of "privacy." This approach should be the norm moving forward, as cameras and microphones provide the biggest issues for privacy.

With this established, it becomes possible to envision a Secure Exclave which handles data from _all_ device sensors, not just cameras and microphones. The Secure Exclave will contain all sensor data processing functions, which will feed the information to the OS. With the processing capabilities of sensor data being unalterable by any web-connected actor, and by building a physical interface for processing capability updating, unwelcome perception becomes impossible, thereby solving the privacy problem.

In short, physical infrastructure and talent.

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this point here, but passkeys are likely not protected by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, whereas passwords generally receive much stronger protections.

Dead Internet Theory becomes less prescient each day.

What an absurd take. Comparing decades-old video games to modern social media is completely off-base. Sure, both are experienced with a screen, but that's about where the similarities end. It'd be like a pharmacist who used to smoke cigarettes back in high school writing an article discussing opioid addiction titled "Molecules Aren't Destroying Adult Minds. I Should Know".

Video gaming, particularly MMORPGs, were highly social experiences. WoW guildmasters received valuable organizational management skills, and I'm aware of a CTO who explicitly said his WoW experiences helps him manage people in professional settings.

Browsing social media is an antisocial activity, given that you're passively seeing what others are doing; reactions and comments don't count as a social activity because it's not real-time interaction with a human. Social media is engineered to maximize engagement by putting mostly negative content (that is, content that annoys you) in your feed interspersed with some positive content. It's weaponized behavioral psychology.

Precisely. It's similar to their practice of aluminum dumping to depress US aluminum prices, which causes our aluminum mines and mills to close.

What's your understanding of cross-border data flows and third-party doctrine?

Say data leaves the US and goes back to the PRC. Did you know it's actually easier (from a legal perspective) for the US government and its business interests to collect the data outside the country than inside? It's actually in the intelligence and industrial communities' best interests for data on US persons leave the country. My point is, even with your beliefs, you should very much dislike that PRC automotive data will leave the country.

Remember the OPM hack? Perhaps the data should have simply been given to the PRC, since they're better data stewards and have our best interests in mind (/s). Ultimately, PRC vehicles will be used for facial recognition, home address identification, employer identification, and more. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, consider that the PRC can locate any person inside their borders (at least within an urban area) within ten minutes.

One thing many Westerners get wrong about the PRC is assuming its economically monolithic, though I guarantee you that's the outcome of decades of Chinese messaging to the West. They want to appear unified, that they've done all these amazing things and everyone has benefited.

In reality, there's two separate economies within the PRC. Around 40% live in the modern world we see in images of China (skyscrapers, EVs, high-speed trains, etc.). Awesome stuff, to be sure, and that same environment has been engineered to track every single interaction you make with it. You must use Wechat; no exceptions. Say the wrong thing on the Internet? You might lose the ability to take long-distance train or airplane rides within China, let alone international travel rights.

The other 60% live with dirt floors, hand carts, and engage primarily in subsistence farming. (It's been about five years since I last looked up those stats, but it should be around the same.) The US has eliminated this level of poverty; having even access to an automobile is enough.

The PRC argues they're able to take care of all their people, but they're nowhere near out of the woods when it comes to food insecurity. Due to population and geographic realities, they simply cannot grow enough food to feed their own people, so importation is an absolute necessity. For this reason, "unlicensed" fishing fleets (no Chinese group larger than 20 people operates without de-facto government consent) sail across oceans to fish just outside a country's territorial waters.

The Chinese political economy appears to be rationalist, but few countries have more political dishonesty than the PRC. According to an old friend who extensively knows Chinese politics, there's three main political factions: pro-Xi reformers, anti-Xi old guard Communists, and everyone else. Their ability to disappear a political enemy without what we'd term "due process" is truly unheard of in the West. Local politics is arguably worse; bribery is how anything gets done, and local officials suppress incident fatalities because over a certain threshold (around 30), the higher-ups will shame them. In such a media-controlled environment, that's less difficult than you might think living in the West.

When you talk about exporting wealth with EVs, that comes with the understanding that the PRC has de-facto control of your vehicle. Most people dislike the idea of the PRC not only retaining all data gathered by your car but having remote access to disable or drive it. If that's alright with you, go right ahead.

In some cases, yes, but I've used a digital ticketing system (Ticketmaster) where the barcode changes about every 20 seconds. Short of reproducing that barcode generation algorithm, Claude or Codex wouldn't help.

BP once had a game where you run around refueling cars at a gas station.