Great argument overall. What strikes me is that I have also thought long and hard about fundamental natural rights, and my proposition is that Free Will is paramount and Privacy is the close second.
I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.
Thanks for the reply and for giving me further food for thought. I'll have to think more about it but I can see how Privacy fits this framework. My first inclination is to see Privacy as a consequence of Freedom, meaning you are free not to disclose something if you choose so. I'm still seeing Life as the foremost right because without it, you can't exercise any other rights, and because one's right to be free cannot infringe another one's right to live, generally speaking. But regardless, you've given me lots of great food for thought, so thank you again for that reply and I look forward to seeing your paper posted here one day
True. You should look into Project Xanadu, which was created with seventeen original rules, one of which is the following:
>Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.
Historically, people trusted something reported as fact and were naturally skeptical of opinion. It seems that many people are realigning to an environment where the "facts" were presented to create a limited, specific perspective of the world (which is closer to opinion) and the majority of "opinion" producers were challenged to be, and in some cases became, more evidence-based (which is closer to fact). In effect, the system is self-correcting to reflect the natural state of the world: truth exists, and the task is on you to discover it.
The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos. DDS focuses on the nature of the work itself, not on the keywords or spam in the content. Librarians understand how to class all kinds of works, and it should be relatively simple to build a DDS/MDS index (Melville Decimal System since it's open, see https://librarything.com/mds) for YouTube videos. Just like with books, disagreement on classification is inevitable and perfectly natural; there's no perfect classification scheme, though DDS/MDS does a generally good job.
There is already auto captioning done by YouTube. It would be trivial to plug an ai that generates tags and classify each videos based on the whole content.
I am sure they already do that.
No, ephemeral usernames are not differential privacy. Differential privacy is repeatedly sampling a database through a differentially-private interface which returns data samples which are either real or fake. The mean and variance of the sampled data match the true mean and variance of the dataset according to a system-defined epsilon value. The end user isn't able to know if any given piece of data is real or fake.
Other folks have highlighted the basics, so here's an analogous situation to think about: imagine that the US civil war saw the CSA taking over the territory of the USA, with the US federal government moving to a large hypothetical island off the East Coast. The CSA never completely eliminated all constituent US elements, so the USA still technically exists.
Fast forward to sixty years after the fighting just stopped one day. How would you view those two political entities? Are they equal? Does the existence of the CSA mean the USA doesn't exist as a country? What if the CSA implements trade policies which dissuade you from recognizing the USA as an independent nation? Does the USA still exist in your eyes? Is the USA or the CSA the "true" country?
The answer at this point in time is quite simple: the Republic of China (aka Taiwan) is clearly an independent country. However, the People's Republic of China (aka China) holds such economic power, they bully the rest of the world (though trade policies, etc.) into not recognizing Taiwan as an independent country. Also, the combination of geography and maritime law means that if Taiwan is an independent country, China has very little direct access to the open seas. They want freedom of navigation, so there's a geopolitical angle as well. Look into the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea to advance the Nine Dashed Line policy.
You also need to remember that Chinese civilization is extremely old. The PRC claims to hold something called the Mandate of Heaven, which is a fairly important concept in Chinese history, as it is divine authority to rule over the Chinese people. Frankly, based on how the PRC acts, the RC clearly holds the Mandate of Heaven these days.
China would have open access to the oceans even without controlling Taiwan. The same rules that deny China territorial rights to the South China Sea also grant it access to the oceans. The Nine Dash line is about territory. China wants the South China Sea to be considered its territorial waters where it can make stronger demands about who passes through and what they could do there. It's not the only country trying to do something like that, but international law generally only recognizes the sea up to 12 miles out to be territorial waters.
The Mandate of Heaven is rather more like a justification of de-facto rule and claiming to have lost it is an argument against a failing dynasty. The dynasty managing to unite China would declare it, and as it eventually collapses, rebels would declare it to be forfeit. There would be messy civil war, one of the warring groups would dominate all the others, and the cycle starts anew.
The Taiwan Strait is extremely efficient for shipping routes. The sea and wind to the East of Taiwan are treacherous. Going the long way round would be very difficult and greatly increase shipping costs for a substantial portion of the world's goods.
This is not an issue at all because the current rules permit peaceful passage through territorial waters. That broadly means no lingering, no spying, and going straight to the intended destination. Access can be denied for security reasons of course.
This is totally fine for commercial traffic. Since China has a huge export market, it is also not interested in raising shipping costs.
Taiwan is not clearly independent. The issue was treated in Treaty of San Francisco, yet the treaty never unambiguously declared whether Taiwan is independent. It's an extremely complex legal issue. You can state your case but understand that the opposing case has just as much legal ground.
It likely depends on what constitutes a valid contract in this jurisdiction. For example, some states recognize a "handshake agreement" as a legally-binding contract, and you can be taken to court for violating that agreement. I'm certain people have been found guilty in a legal context because they replied to a email one way but acted in the opposite manner.
The Articles of Incorporation are going to be the key legal document. Still, the Founding Agreement is important to demonstrate the original intentions and motivations of the parties. That builds the foundation for the case that something definitively caused Altman to steer the company in a different direction. I don't believe it's unfair to say Altman is steering; it seems like the Altman firing was a strategy to draw out the anti-Microsoft board members, who, once identified, were easily removed once Altman was reinstated. If Altman wasn't steering, then there's no reason he would have been rehired after he was fired.
> For example, some states recognize a "handshake agreement" as a legally-binding contract
Subject to limits on specific kinds of contracts that must be reduced to writing, all US jurisdictions (not just some states) recognize oral contracts provided that the basic requirements of a contract (offer, acceptance, consideration, etc.) are present.
The trouble with oral agreements then become determining what is in the oral agreement, after the fact. Whether one party remembers it differently to the other, either due to poor memory or deliberately.
> The trouble with oral agreements then become determining what is in the oral agreement, after the fact.
Yes, except for the narrow situations where writing is legally required for a contract, the point of a written contract document is not that it is necessary to create a contract but that it is valuable in the event of a dispute as evidence of what the parties actually agreed to.
Determining that an oral agreement existed and what the terms were is an evidence problem.
For reference, I've designed ~10 PCBs of varying complexity (simple to highly complex) and done plenty of programming. I've used Eagle, KiCad, and Altium. My comments will try to push you to think about some specific points.
Looking at your demo video, it seems that atopile is less a "tool to build electronic circuit boards with code" and more a tool to perform schematic capture in code. Do you agree with that characterization?
I ask that question because you're clearly relying on the KiCad toolchain for PCB layout, which is a crucial part of the overall PCB design process but is not "PCB design" itself. Right now, KiCad is a tool for PCB design, and you are providing an alternative method of schematic capture. I think you should make sure that the description of your creation accurately reflects its capabilities.
Is anything preventing you from taking output from the existing KiCad schematic representation system and transpiling it into ato? What about transpiling from ato into the KiCad schematic representation system?
Does ato provide any focus on routing? It could be nice to state in software that I want a component or trace constrained to a specific layer on the PCB (or in the PCB, if there's internal layers). I'm assuming no, since ato appears to be purely focused on schematic capture, but I'm curious of your thoughts on this.
It could also be nice to include placement constraints in software. For example, say I have a handful of resistors which I want placed in the same relative area of a board and in an orderly row. Do you provide functionality to allow this? The general aesthetics of PCB layout might be programmatically defined with ato.
Just like Arduino took the nitty-gritty away from microcontroller programming, think about how you can take the nitty-gritty away from schematic capture. One way this could work is with a hierarchical schematic templating system. You'd need to build significant documentation to teach people how to use it, but it could vastly simplify the schematic capture process to a few lines of code by importing a template schematic class and instantiating multiple schematic objects into a project and wiring them together.
It makes sense to me that an "interface" as you define it can be imported for a given project. For example, "Bob's Interface" is the set of a +12V barrel-type power input, a USB-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 10-pin GPIO header. Any project using "Bob's Interface" has a known set of input and output capabilities. The term "input/output complex" also gets at this idea. Is that how you think of an interface?
We have indeed started with the schematic/requirements half of the problem. My experience in industry is there can be much more direct reuse/configuration in schematic as many boards might have similar features. Layout is typically quite bespoke as it will have mechanical constraints.
That said, we are absolutely looking to take on the layout section in the near future. We are starting with some augmentations of kicad, for example we just released a layout reuse feature, where component layouts can be captured and shared along with the ato code.
I think with few exceptions defining explicit layout choices in our language will be painful and not the right path (perhaps connector positions would be an exception). We have not put a huge amount of energy into this yet, but from some initial playing around, we believe capturing all the information that a person would use to judge a quality layout will be crucial. For example, current tools do not have concepts of current/voltage and definitely not transient behavior.
To get to actually good auto-layout that doesnt suck is going to be a slog for sure.
Might have to do with demand in those neighborhoods. An financially-constrained person living in a major city in 2024 will have two main choices for an Internet-connected device: laptop or smartphone. These days, the smartphone is the obvious choice. Paying for cell service lets you use the phone around town and at home, whereas paying for home internet is quite restricted.
An ISP usually has a neighborhood hub where local lines connect and feed into the broader infrastructure. I'm betting that ISPs have a pricing model using a "neighborhood utilization ratio" factor, calculated as houses-served-in-neighborhood over total-number-of-houses-in-neighborhood. To cover known network infrastructure expenses (equipment replacement, technician labor costs, etc.), the pricing needs to work out, but low service demand in a given service area for the same infrastructure requires those fixed costs be borne by the few people using the service.
Many infrastructure services typically are more expensive in a rural area, presumably due to this effect but spread over a larger geographic area because population density is lower.
I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.