good. There are plenty of laws, especially around technology, that deserve a good public mocking.
At least in the US, you have 70+ year old lawmakers proposing (not even writing) laws they do not understand, passed to them by opaque groups with a obscured, albeit clear, interest.
See the latest age verification bills passed by Meta through a convoluted web of influence. Bring back the technocrats.
Regardless of whether this actually works (I have my doubts, but also understand it might be difficult to get range time on a device like this :)), it exposes a fundamental issue with arms control today.
Small firearms are hundreds of years old. Drones have been commercially available for many years and are easily modifiable into something that is 80% as good as what is currently being fielded in Ukraine.
It is not technically feasible to restrict someone from assembling basic, non-firearm-specific components to build a firearm. In the US, there is an increasing effort at the state level to serialize, restrict, and document individual firearm parts. However, an 80% good barrel can be fabricated at home, a 100% as good receiver can be printed on any recent 3D printer, and the rest of the parts (bolt, trigger assembly, etc) can be designed around easy home fabrication (see FGC-9). There is no practical way to trace, regulate, or stop behavior.
It isn't possible to restrict someone from building a capable drone either. The firmware is opensource, the parts can be ordered from almost any marketplace, and an energetic payload can easily be made by any amateur chemist from chemicals in any hardware or camping store. EW is often touted as a solution, but is frequently beaten by tethered drones. Cheap COTS IMUs are getting good enough to provide surprisingly accurate short-term INS, to say nothing of autonomous systems that need no external input past initial targeting.
I personally think this is a far bigger risk than most countries realize, largely because they are 10-15 years behind the technology. I believe this will force most governments into spending an order of magnitude more to defend their institutions at every level, not just core government security.
At least in the US, these threat vectors will absolutely be used to justify intrusions into civil liberties, but no amount of infringement will be able to even partially mitigate these threats. I think this should start to play out over the next 5-10 years.
These discussions always focus around enforcement and never on alignment. The moat for this stuff historically has never been strict enforcement; it has been that the people who have the know-how on how to do it have nothing to gain by doing it, since they are well-educated and benefit from the current socioeconomic order (they have no motive to change it; rather, they want to climb it).
This is shifting. First, economic stratification is getting worse, and as economic mobility declines people start looking for alternatives. (See all of Gen Z cheering for Luigi Mangione). Second, AI will enable people who are less educated to build these kinds of weapons.
For example, you can use a Kalman filter to greatly improve the data you get from an IMU and GPS via sensor fusion. Before, this required a specialist skillset; now you can get a "good enough" implementation by prompting Claude.
I really wish the debate around this stuff wasn't framed in terms of preventative enforcement because it naturally leads towards more enforcement (when your only tool is a hammer...). The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching. That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
> The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching.
People did fly two planes into the World Trade Center. That was a thing that happened. Along with all the regular mass shootings, all the way up to Vegas.
> That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
Well, only because people are actively chiselling away at it because they think they will be able to loot the ruins.
your argument here rests on whether someone with the know how to do these types of things will not be able to find a job in the near future. I’d call this unlikely
There are no few smart, knowledgeable people in the world (perhaps self-educated, perhaps not) who for a huge variety of reasons may be either unwilling or unable to hold a typical job.
I’ll bet most of us here know at least a few people along these lines.
I am certainly pro T2A but your argument doesn't hold - laws to regulate arms are not effective only in a binary way - if they reduce the number of arms they are doing what they say on the tin.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
I am not arguing laws need to be binary-effective. You are right, most of the current laws are designed to slowly erode public support for the 2nd amendment by making the barrier to entry so absurdly high that the average person cannot feasibly own firearms.
I am arguing that the new laws being proposed (e.g serializing other firearms components, ammo serialization, assault weapons bans, higher gun-owner standards) have absolutely no bearing on an entirely new source of firearms. Many Dem-controlled states have passed "ghost gun" regulation, but there is no real enforcement mechanism and it's mostly an additional charge to tack on after an actual crime has been committed.
You can see states like CA trying to go after 3D printers, but I suspect this will fail. There is no software out there that can realistically determine whether a part is a firearm component, other than dumb hashes of known parts. 3DP is a general tool, it is like trying to ban milling machines, files, or basic handtools.
I see it the other way round: there's no way to achieve public safety without drastically reduced gun ideology and availability, but there's no way to do that while the second amendment is in place, so you get both illiberal, ineffective and irrelevant laws and regular mass shootings.
Let's assume you get rid of the second amendment and totally ban civilian gun ownership in the US. No legal firearms other than for the police/military, full confiscation of guns, etc. Let's also assume the public is broadly supportive of this effort, and that there are not large black-market caches for sale.
I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events, political assassinations using a firearm, etc, and that the only way to effectively prevent them is to roll back most of the bill of rights.
The gun is a very old piece of technology and you do not need a sophisticated one to kill people effectively. Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun that could be described as primitive at best. Mangione used a 3dp firearm to kill the United Health CEO. Rebels in Myanmar are fighting the military junta with 3d printed small arms.
I am fundamentally arguing that the capacity of any one person has dramatically (100,000x) increased since the bill of rights was written, for better and for worse.
To be clear, I fully support the bill of rights and want to see it expanded. However, I reject the idea that simply eliminating the 2nd amendment and removing guns from civilian ownership can fix the underlying issues. I think you will see "casual" shootings and hopefully even mass shootings go down, but they will not go away and I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world.
> I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events
These are extremely rare in other countries? It's very hard to achieve true zero, yes, but the UK has about 30 gun deaths per year, almost all of which are crime-related rather than mass casualty events. Those tend to be rare, and tend to be bombs. The Shinzo Abe assassination was also such a "black swan".
> I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world
Why do you think that would be, given (important!) your premise "the public is broadly supportive of this effort"?
We're skipping a lot of discussion to focus on the UK, which has arms measures that exceed (in some, but not all, cases) even the far-fetched hypothetical I threw out above. Shinzo Abe is not a black swan in the context of Japanese political history nor the history of political assassinations generally, but I digress.
To answer the point, there is no technical limitation keeping people in the UK from building, creating and shooting homemade or otherwise improvised guns that I am aware of.
What the UK does have is universal healthcare, a 3-4x lower incarceration rate and dramatically improved social safety services.
I think you can group the majority of shooters into three buckets -- ideologically driven (think white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, etc), the mentally ill, and the criminally motivated (gang shootings mostly). The US has only amplifying factors for all three groups.
For idealgoues, there is no wider span of acceptable discourse than in the US. Commonly espoused views in the US legislative and executive branches are criminal offenses in a number of peer countries, e.g hate speech is still constitutionally protected speech in the US. The rhetoric is insane, accusations of nazism, faciscm from the left and similar accusations from the right, and generally a very high degree of polarization.
For the mentally ill, the support system in the US is abysmal, with cracks big enough to drive a truck through. There are multiple books written about the failures of America's mental health system, I will not belabor the point.
For the criminally motivated, gun crime is concentrated in young, mostly black men in decaying post-industrial cities in the midwest and (south)east. They have almost zero political capital, low social mobility and very little pubic support. Other countries certainly have their ghettos, but take a trip to Gary, IN or Jackson, MS. You would be hard pressed think you are in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
Fundamentally, the point still stands. There is not a feasible technical path to keep firearm technology out of a massive number of hands. The skills needed to produce a functional firearm have never been lower, and they will keep declining until almost zero. The only technical (preventative) measures run squarely into the bill of rights -- think a lowered bar for a warrant or infringements on the 1st amendment limiting the sharing of technical knowledge. Changing the culture -- around mental health, around poverty, and around power is very difficult, so we will see an attempted erosion of civil liberties, just like 9/11 was used to erode civil liberties with the introduction of the Patriot Act and similar legislation.
Again, I am arguing devils advocate because I would be quite unhappy with increased forearm regulation - I live in a very rural area where firearms are a tool and a cultural artifact, and I like them.
With that said - almost nobody goes through the trouble of manufacturing anything. Making it difficult to access firearms means that most people who might think about getting a gun will just get something else. Your opponents not having a gun also makes you less likely to feel like you need one.
I won't argue that it's possible to deter a sufficiently motivated person, but most people are not that motivated. Making undesirable things 'uphill' is pretty effective.
Obama and Biden were the best gun salesman the USA has had in awhile. It's not clear they reduce the number of arms, depending on the culture. In USA culture we've seen the number of arms in civilian hands expand even as regulations increase.
The rest of the FAANG has invested very heavily in cloud while Apple seems to be a laggard. GCP, AWS and Azure are all publicly available products, and cloud at Netflix, Meta seems very mature for a private offering.
This is not a huge disadvantage in my opinion. Let the rest of big tech fight each other to death over cloud, while controlling a very profitable differentiated offering (devices+services). Apple keeps the M series HW out of data centers, even though it presents some very attractive performance/w and per-core numbers.
I think you're correct on it not being a disadvantage. Apple's competitors are the Android OEMs, Microsoft, and Dell. Apple Intelligence is a failure only in the sense that we hold Apple to a higher standard. Can anyone argue that Apple's AI implementation is more flawed than Microsoft? I don't think so.
Market for DDR4 is crazy, but not as crazy as DDR5.
Also a symptom of how inelastic hardware demands are. You would expect the purest k8s people to just shove workers on older machines and completely dodge this crisis, but we don't see that at all. Despite being an almost-commodity, many of the hw vendors still have a decent hand.
As they say, the rules are written in blood. I don't think we should be disqualifying projects because they are not Mponeng-scale or complexity.
I am not a civil engineer, but I did spend a bunch of time looking into building an underground range. Way more relaxed life safety reqs, smaller bore, etc. However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
I think Grady does a reasonable job highlighting the dangers and risks.
The only time theoretical modelling happens in most civil engineers careers is at university. Especially so with geotech/soil mechanics - it is the most inexact and variable/unpredictable area especially when water gets involved.
Structural steel would be the most predictable. Concrete and timber are in the middle somewhere.
Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing. The code is as much about a) homogenizing the industry so big business can statistically reason about it at scale b) turning the subjective into the quantitive so that things can be done, checked, sight off on, etc, etc, without anyone using "judgement" as it is about protecting life and limb. Just about every professional has a laundry list of complaints about their area of code that boil down to it being theoretically useful but at great "not worth it" expense or a similar "not worth it" expense being incurred in lieu of very basic judgement. Arc fault breakers, and engineering requirements for small retaining walls come to mind as oft cited examples. And of course there's the myriad of wrangling that goes on wherein things get looser/stiffer requirements depending on whether their use is deemed worth incentivizing (this stuff usually lives in local addendums to the code).
I'm not saying there isn't value in there, but this habit people have of acting like it's all relevant to safety and screeching about "written in blood" is exactly what creates room for unrelated stuff to exist in the code.
>However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
Which is a point very much in favor of the amateur.
I know you're probably intending to only remark on leaky water pipes, but:
The New London School explosion was caused by a leaky pipe. It killed 295 students and teachers, and led to the inclusion of smelly thiol in natural gas, as well as the Texas Engineering Practice Act.
A drip or stream from a leaky pipe isn't gonna do it. You need to get the bacteria into the respiratory tract to get legionaires disease. And even then a specific temperature water is necessary for it to grow.
A dehumidifier (or an HVAC system, which is where the name of the disease came from) is more likely to give you legionnaires disease than even the most substandard plumbing.
> Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing
Famously, moist wet areas only grow molds that are safe for humans to live amongst, and absolutely never rotted away wooden structural components of a building.
Sounds like a tacit admission that those bits are written in rotten wood rather than blood.
The part I take issue with isn't the building code in principal or that non lethal things can be regulated. It's that the people being to lie though their teeth and pretend it's all written in blood when a whole bunch of it isn't are essentially stealing credibility from those parts that are. A few bad apples (handouts to industry) spoils the bunch (very clearly important stuff, like floor and roof loading).
A lot of regulations are also for consumer or user protection - not just for the first owner, but later owners too. Substandard waterproofing may not be dangerous, but it does bankrupt people and ruin lives.
> I'm not saying there isn't value in there, but this habit people have of acting like it's all relevant to safety and screeching about "written in blood" is exactly what creates room for unrelated stuff to exist in the code.
meh, I understand the point, but it is about your risk tolerance being different than whoever writes the code. I have a long list of complaints about the NEC, (including AFCI requirements), but IMO, these kinds of requirements do save some amount of lives -- the issues comes down to how much do you value your own life, and/or the lives of others. The tradeoff, as always, is cost -- inspections, permits, impact studies etc push up the cost of new and remodel jobs substantially.
Where I really take issue with different code is when we hammer down on a specific issue of small significance while neglecting a more significant problem. For example, I have never in my life seen an inspector check the torque of a main lugs, polaris connectors, etc. Might just be my inspectors, but I have seen way more failures due to loose or over tightened connections than anything else.
I am all for gradually raising the bar for safety, but it has to rise faster than the increased cost, along with a level raising of the bar across all facets.
This is hackernews, do the math for the love of god.
There are good business and technical reasons to choose a public cloud.
There are good business and technical reasons to choose a private cloud.
There are good business and technical reasons to do something in-between or hybrid.
The endless "public cloud is a ripoff" or "private clouds are impossible" is just a circular discussion past each other. Saying to only use one or another is textbook cargo-culting.
At least in the US, you have 70+ year old lawmakers proposing (not even writing) laws they do not understand, passed to them by opaque groups with a obscured, albeit clear, interest.
See the latest age verification bills passed by Meta through a convoluted web of influence. Bring back the technocrats.
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