>There's still no AI that can fold laundry

We're actually really close to general robot agents that operate in your home. Check out googleAI's saycan & RT-1 systems

https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/12/rt-1-robotics-transformer-....

That's gonna be great until someone hacks it and has it stab me to death in my sleep.

Much like my fears about bluetooth connected cars being hacked to crash on the highway, it turns out that - by and large - nobody wants to kill me (or at least, not badly enough to do anything about it).

Ah yes the nobody wants to do it to me excuse. Until you piss off the wrong person and you suddenly crash into the railing and die in an 'accident'.

In a more Orwellian world. It can be used to assassinate dissidents or individuals who speak out against authoritarian regimes. It's just a tool in a box, but it's one that's simple, easy to use, and leaves no evidence.

> leaves no evidence

For a “car crash” I agree.

But if my laundry folding robot stabs me to death in my sleep, I hope that at the very least it raises some eyebrows :^)

But that’s true with or without the AI. Anyone could decide they want to kill you. Most of the time we rely on “not everyone wanting to kill everyone else” to get by.

Oh, Ada Palmer’s ‘Too Like The Lightning’ has this as an element.

I always felt like the HL7 interface is a huge vector for this. Change someone's medicine allergies, blood type, etc.

Truly the most evil hacker is the one that leaves you to live out your life until old age and decrepitude catch up with you.

The thing about black swan events is they never seem likely to happen until they do.

They can't get bluetooth to connect.

just unplug the robot before you go to sleep, an easy solution

More worried about government backdoors.

cars are great until someone deliberately runs into me

Also: https://kottke.org/10/04/the-robot-who-considers-towels

No way would I bring some company's robot into my house, especially not one that has anything to do with Google. Maybe it does your laundry and dishes for you, but you can bet that it'll be recording everything that it sees and hears and sending all that data back to the people it actually works for so that they can use that data against you or sell it to someone else who will.

Unless I can find a model I can verify has zero networking ability and isn't gathering and storing data for somebody else, no thanks!

it's not about what language you're using

it's about what you accomplish.

that's in isolation of pretty much everything, even computers in general.

The silver lining of is that now I can show this article to anyone who accuses me of being overly paranoid.

I just wish the companies making these devices had the same level of care with other people’s privacy as I would if I was making these devices. It’s not right.

At the very least, companies should have sign an oath to protect their customers and employees - not to abuse them… similar to how health professionals have an oath to do no harm. Is that too much to ask in this world.

It saves me from the implementation details, this way I don't need to wear another engineer/sysadmin hat. I think the website content is more important than the SSL implementation!

Indeed! It's how security should work, and should be the default dual-goal of any piece of security software: provide as much security as possible to as many people as possible.

Having people do things without understanding what exactly they are doing is a good way to create a website with a very good ssl certificate and their private key available on the website itself… or similar issues.

What's a downside of that?

Downside existed before Let's Encrypt, it just got amplified with it.

General public does not differentiate between the SSL certificate validation level.

Let's Encrypt provides domain validation certificates, which only validates that one owns the domain in question.

There is another level - Organization Validation SSL certificates, which involves manual checking that this is the legal entity it claims to be. I would expect the financial institutions to use this kind of certificates to avoid phishing, but sadly I've seen some of them use Let's Encrypt.

Browsers don't differentiate between the SSL certificate validation level. Because it has been shown that the higher validation levels aren't actually significantly more secure, so the distinction is pointless.

OV certs are pointless and that's why nobody uses them. Anyone can pay $30 to register a business with the same name in a different state.

I don't think this is an issue with LE or the implementation. Maybe we need different policies for such organizations, but this is for sure not a LE issue

As someone that supports Let's Encrypt's efforts and playing devil's advocate, I imagine a downside is that the bar is lowered and nefarious websites can easily get SSL-equipped channels compared to the high paywall of prior.

Commercial CAs verify exactly two things: Administrative control over a domain name and a working credit card number.

Let’s Encrypt only gets rid of the latter, and given that fraudsters able to spoof the former can probably spare the $10 for the latter, I‘d argue that this is a good thing.

Before Let's Encrypt there were all kinds of bullshit CAs that would distribute secure sites "seals", and lie all over the internet on how those meant anything.

All of that noise is gone now. That makes the internet much safer.

What is the downside of this?

My guess is a misunderstanding of how easy it is to get a credit card to make a payment. This hasn't gotten any easier, so there truly is no downside at this point, unless people automatically think a SSL means a site is trustworthy. I think that's just education, and is likely to come into public consciousness the longer secure sites are pushed as the default.

It meant a paper trail via CC payments (though fraudsters were likely to use stolen CCs, and they probably needed a CC to buy the domain name in the first place). But yeah it's basically not fundamentally different.

Don't most domains cost $5 or less? I think it's pretty outrageous to have to spend 2x (or more) of the domain name cost to secure connections to it.

Not sure where you found that figure but most domains definitely don’t cost 5 or less. Most domains are 10+ in my experience.

Sorry, we're giving an ML engineer grief for not knowing much about SSL? Should we tease dentists for not knowing how to grow oranges, too?

Not for not knowing but for being proud that they don't have to.

That's the entire point of LetsEncrypt; assist people who know they need an SSL cert, but don't know much about SSL.

It's perfectly reasonable for someone to be into programming and not want to have to care about the details of setting up a networking stack.

Ok I get not wanting to pick on the guy, but is that really reasonable? Engineering is about solving problems by designing/implementing systems. The more you know about the system(s) you're working with, the better the solutions you can build. Even if you're "just" working at a high level and maximally specialized to a single niche, not knowing how the underlying parts work will really limit you.

Pick the brain of any accomplished engineer, and you'll quickly see that the technical knowledge they use to write code on a day to day basis is only the tip of the iceberg.

It's not reasonable to expect everyone to know everything all the time, but I don't agree people should be aspiring to just know the bare minimum either. Mediocrity is like gravity: if you don't (at least occasionally) aim higher, your trajectory will be lower than you want.

Or maybe we should just avoid judging people based on what they do and don't think is worth their time learning, especially when all we know about them is a previous job title and a short message on an internet message board?

I mean, c'mon, it takes quite a bit of arrogance to condemn someone for some little facet of their life when you know next to nothing about them.

Right obviously very few people will be deep experts on the nitty gritty details of any particular thing, but it's weird to work with computers and not have a broad high-level understanding of something as crucial as TLS and PKI.

Not understanding something is to be expected but being proud you don't have to goes against the core of what a programmer is.. curious.

"I don't care to" != "I'm proud I haven't"

You don't know why they haven't taken the time to learn. At least they know enough to know they need an SSL cert. Should I not buckle up in a car if I don't understand the mechanics of how the buckle snaps together?

I don't understand why you're harping on this person for this.

The full quote was:

"frankly I don't care to know the details"

I take issue with that statement not the person. The statement was honest and matter of fact.

Few know how SSLs work, few have time or opportunity or even desire to learn it. Not 'wanting' to understand the details goes against what I would expect. A programmer tries to/needs to understand how the world works. Not wanting to understand the entire stack is a new concept to me.

> Not wanting to understand the entire stack is a new concept to me.

Then I'd suggest that your experience about the world, and about people in general, is severely lacking.

There aren't enough hours in a day or years in a life to learn everything, so we have to be selective.

Do you know how CPUs work, down to the various functional units and pipeline stages and how they work together? Can you explain to me how transistors work on an electrochemical level? Can you explain how silicon wafers are fabricated? Hell, I took those classes in college as a part of my EE degree, and I can't really remember it well enough to explain without cheating and looking at Wikipedia. (And even then...)

And guess what? That's just fine. I have no need or desire to dive that deeply back into that stuff.

Why should the minutiae around TLS certs be any different? I do know how TLS cert provisioning works, and to be honest, it's boring and tedious. And I do it so infrequently that I have to look up a tutorial every time I do it. It's just not worth keeping in my head. If I could use LE for everything, and never try to remember the right `openssl req` command ever again, that would be great.

> A programmer tries to/needs to understand how the world works.

No, a programmer is someone who solves problems with code. How they do it, and what types of knowledge they pursue, runs the entire gamut of possibilities.

Bottom line: knowing technical minutiae doesn't make you cool or special or better than other people. It just makes you someone who's interested in that stuff, or someone who needs to understand it as a part of work they do. Let's not elevate it to something it's not.

Are programmers losing that childhood curiosity for how things work? Do programmers even value that anymore? Should that be the filter employers use to select candidates vs leetcode?

People may think they are Cool or special for millions of reasons (like not knowing what ssl is for example).

Who says they've lost the curiosity? What if all of their programming effort and energy is put into whatever the website is for? Why should they shift their focus over to learning all about SSL when that's not the point of whatever the project is and it will suck up too much time?

I could absolutely be wrong about that reasoning, though, but that's my point - we don't know why, so why assume a negative and then lean into that?

I agree somewhat, but this is about programming in the web stack. SSL should be familiar, we aren't speaking about general programming here.

I think there are a lot of perfectly good programmers who work at the level of the web stack, but couldn't set up a web server with TLS to save their life. There's nothing wrong with that, and suggesting that there is, is just a form of technology elitism and gatekeeping.

This isn't about being able to. I've love to setup machine learning but lack the understanding. It's about taking pride in not having to learn.. taking pride in not having to understand how things work.

Technology shouldn't be a blackbox and shouldn't be celebrated as such.

Not laid off, but company was recently affected by one. I got recruiter interest, but that died down pretty quickly (My theory is that I got marked as "not laid off"). It was reminiscent of recruiter spam during start of covid. Looks like startups without talent now have the ability to get some engineers.

What's the actual "idea" here?

I mean, the answer is obviously yes, depending on what you consider integrators.

A layer that makes it more palatable to switch between payment processors

This is why industry > academia, imo.

At the end of the day, all of the noise of negativity and bad press is being drowned out by incredible demos. I don't know what to chalk this up to if not jealousy. Most people in the ML-o-sphere are ignoring it.

At the end of the day, all that matters is: are users using what you built?

I mean.... That matters to someone in the industry, yes. But not necessarily someone in academia.

You chose industry over academia, and that's fine. It lines up with your values. But realize that not everyone shares those values and beliefs. To some, the act of discovering a new thing is much more important than the users using said discovery. And that lines up with academia more so than the industry.

Both are different. Both are valid.

It's fine that you like industry better than academia, so do I, but you'd better count your lucky stars that scientists exist.

> At the end of the day, all that matters is: are users using what you built?

How would you measure Isaac Newton's advances in calculus and mechanics or Einstein's general theory of relativity, against say, a web app with a billion users?

The two examples you picked are of incredibly and unusually useful advances in science. I have a friend in grad school who told me he deliberately didn't want to work on anything useful!

If you want to steelman the GP's argument, you should compare the web app with e.g. some niche in pure math. There the trade off between novelty/interest and usefulness to people today is more clear.

I think the two are incomparable and both useful, but it's disingenuous to strawman the GP as saying web apps are more useful than relativity.

As a former student of CS I could pick hundreds of examples of algorithms and data structures, which are now baked into the standard libraries of all programming languages, and therefore in web apps, which were invented in universities. Same with AI - industry is now collecting the fruits, but the groundwork research was absolutely indispensable and very few in industry were doing it until FB or Google set up their research institutes (and we could have another debate on whether those are academic, industrial or somewhere in-between).

Yes, I picked those two examples for the effect or as a reduction to the absurd (not a strawman), because going only by the immediate or tangible value of what one "builds" (science isn't even built, but rather discovered) is not a good way to dismiss academia.

People balked at "imaginary" numbers for like a hundred years as a "niche math toy" until it became super useful in physics.

One of the most intense and fun user bases I had was in HPC at an academic healthcare research institute. I've also worked in high energy research.

When most folks think of academia they think faculty, but staff vastly outnumber then. Contrary to popular belief there are legions of cold, level headed, engineers that get shit done.

A lot of the research isn't some random study of something that may or may not be useful in half a century or more, it's often immediately applicable and winds up in products or shaping government policy on a global scale. Especially the well funded ones.

But we don't hear about that stuff. We hear what the media and tech companies are currently trying to cram down our throats.

> At the end of the day, all that matters is: are users using what you built?

Ah yes, the Kardashian model of success

Absolutely. That's why PredPol was such a great success.

I have no insight into the natural sciences, but I've spent a couple of years in computer science academia. With that in mind:

> None of it would be possible without academia though. Industry just applies academic research.

Meh, that vastly oversells academic research. Very little of academic research in computer science is actually used in the industry. It's not that the industry is ignorant, but rather that the majority of academic work is useless: They create artificial problems [1] and solve them in shoddy ways, with hand-picked benchmark results, and frequently without even publishing the source code.

It's probably not surprising, given that the typical incentive is to get a PhD. So you need a "problem" that can reliably be solved in 3-5 years and which allows you to produce 5-10 conference papers with your name on it.

[1] I'm not talking about theoretical fields – my comment is purely about supposedly practical research.

Sadly you are so correct.

I was once watching a VC interview a snooty machine vision scientist at Johns Hopkins who was talking up how well his research was at recognizing three d things. So the VC pulled out his cellphone and took a photo of a box on the table. He asked the professor to have the software highlight the rectangular solid. Whoop. He never heard back. The software in the lab that was supposedly so great couldn't do a very basic task that wasn't from its preapproved set of tasks.

I do think that academia can be the source of some great ideas, but they often end up believing their own BS.

I woudl say that the Ads model at Google represents a truly non-academic set of discoveries. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... and https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... are two of the most significant papers published in ML (and truly underappreciated, IMHO) and represent decades of people time developing new ideas in industry.

I worked at Google and there's just tons of stuff that never actually existed in academia and was created, launched, and then replaced by something better entirely within the company without any publications!

Are you counting research departments in industry as academia?

It's almost as if NYT is extremely biased