I've lived in Sweden, Germany, and the United States. Just being honest about my experience here, but the cheap stuff (like potatoes) are cheaper in the EU but the expensive stuff (like beef[0]) are more expensive.
When you take quality into account it’s no contest. You literally can’t buy American beef in the EU because it is so contaminated with hormones and antibiotics.
This is a pretty common claim, but in the US you can buy similarly 'pure' beef and it's still cheaper. I prefer the EU approach for general food production, requiring every stage of the process be clean enough that you don't need to chlorinate chicken, for example. But, Americans do have access to the same quality food at much lower prices (and they earn more besides).
False equivalence. This isn't about "using AI" it's about having an AI pretend to do your job.
What people are pissed about is the fact their tax dollars fund fake research. It's just fraud, pure and simple. And fraud should be punished brutally, especially in these cases, because the long tail of negative effects produces enormous damage.
I was originally thinking you were being way too harsh with your "punish criminally" take, but I must admit, you're winning me over. I think we would need to be careful to ensure we never (or realistically, very rarely) convict an innocent person, but this is in many cases outright theft/fraud when someone is making money or being "compensated" for producing work that is fraudulent.
For people who think this is too harsh, just remember we aren't talking about undergrads who cheat on a course paper here. We're talking about people who were given money (often from taxpayers) that committed fraud. This is textbook white collar crime, not some kid being lazy. At a minimum we should be taking all that money back from them and barring them from ever receiving grant money again. In some cases I think fines exceeding the money they received would be appropriate.
I think the negative reaction people have comes from fear of punishment for human error, but fraud (meaning the real legal term, not colloquially) requires knowledge and intent.
That legal standard means that the risk of ruinous consequences for a 'lazy kid' who took a foolish shortcut is very low. It also requires that a prosecutor look at the circumstances and come to the conclusion that they can meet this standard in a courtroom. The bar is pretty high.
That said, it's very important to note that fraud has a pretty high rearrest (not just did it, but got arrested for it) rate between 35-50%. So when it gets to the point that someone has taken that step, a slap on the wrist simply isn't going to work. Ultimately, when that happens every piece of work they've touched, and every piece of work that depended on their work, gets called into question. The dependency graph affected by a single fraudster can be enormous.
Only when we can arrest people who say dumb stuff on the internet too. Much like how trump and bubba (bill Clinton) should share a jail cell, those who pontificate about what they don’t know about (I.e non academics critiquing academia) can sit in the same jail cell as the supposed criminal academics.
You gotta horse trade if you want to win. Take one for the team or get out of the way.
Non-academics can definitely offer valid critiques of academia.
You don't need to be in academia to understand that scientific progress depends on trust. If you don't trust the results people are publishing, you can't then build upon them. Reproducibility has been a known issue for a long time[0], and is widely agreed upon to be a 'crisis' by academics[1].
The advent of an easier way to publish correct-looking papers, or to plagiarize and synthesize other works without actually validating anything is only going to further diminish trust.
If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate?
To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.
Stealing more than a few thousand dollars is a felony, and felonies are handled in criminal court, not civil.
EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.
It would fall under the domain of contract law, because maybe the contract of the grant doesn't prohibit what the researcher did. The way to determine that would be in court - civil court.
Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.
Fraud implies intent, either intent to deceive or intentionally negligent.
If you're taking public funds (directly or otherwise) with the intent to either:
A) Do little to no real work, and pass of the work of an AI as being your own work, or
B) Knowingly publish falsified data
Then you are, without a single shred of doubt, in criminal fraud territory. Further, the structural damage you inflict when you do the above is orders of magnitude greater than the initial fraud itself. That is a matter for civil courts ("Our company based on development on X fraudulent data, it cost us Y in damages").
Whether or not charges are pressed is going to happen way after all the internal reviews have demonstrated the person being charged has gone beyond the "honest mistake" threshold. It's like Walmart not bothering to call the cops until you're into felony territory, there's no point in doing so.
The claim is that this would qualify as fraud, which is also illegal.
If you do a search for "contractor imprisoned for fraud" you'll find plenty of cases where a private contract dispute resulted in criminal convictions for people who took money and then didn't do the work.
I don't know if taking money and then merely pretending to do the research would rise to the level of criminal fraud, but it doesn't seem completely outlandish.
For a single user I would start pricing at $5/m on an annual subscription or $9 for monthly. Getting customers in the door and retaining them through the early product evolution cycles is the major hurdle in the early stages.
Beyond that, I would create an offering with 1-2 features tuned towards business customers. This kind of tool is a great knowledge management addition, and knowledge sharing is hugely valuable for business customers.
I'd price it the same per seat at the start ($5/m annual vs 9$/m monthly) and sell multiple seats at a time this way. If this works well, you will have found an existence proof of a highly lucrative customer group.
Appreciate the HN response too. $9 seems reasonable for me too.. kinda. Maybe for v1.5 when I have sharable collections. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to lure them in with a $5/m, no annual, and then up to $7 and $9 in two stages, introducing annual?
The price sensitivity thresholds of your median customer is not likely to be a factor in this range.
What is a factor is 'getting a deal' and customer conviction. You want to give them an offer that makes them feel good about signing up immediately (increase conversion) and makes them feel like the product has substantial long-term value (induces post-purchase rationalization).
The annual plan with significant sale price accomplishes both goals, with the benefit of smoothing out your revenues and making it much easier to estimate your ROAS.
The article doesn't seem to address fully how much of the "Humans are to blame" part is Waymo cars driving in a manner that isn't normal.
The cases they highlight, such as a multi-collision hit and run, are obvious bad human situations. But, this article feels like it's being a bit generous in its interpretation.
After all, I've seen Waymo cars cause wild traffic jams, and that sort of unexpected behavior could absolutely cause collisions.
Being rear ended (16 out of 23 serious accidents according to the article) is a pretty clear case of the car not doing anything wrong at all. It's the one case where collision avoidance is going to be useless because the car is waiting for e.g. a red light and is supposed to be stopped and has to blindly trust cars behind us will do the same thing.
Your assumption is that it was stopped at a red light. What if if slams the brakes on in the middle of the road due to a mylar balloon, etc? Does it sense a vehicle approaching quickly and sound the horn to hopefully alert the driver to stop, and pull forward from the stop line into the crosswalk if it's clear to provide extra braking distance?
Hypothetically possible but the article suggests these were situations where Waymo was not at fault. And I actually know people that have been rear ended at traffic lights or junctions. Twice. In the same month. Both times after they came to a full stop in a spot where they were definitely required to stop.
There's nothing you can do when that happens. Some idiot coming in way too fast not paying attention for whatever reason. Stuff like this is quite common. I don't see how you could mitigate that easily.
I've mitigated it in the past. You sound your horn, which can cause them to look up from their phone, etc. You can also pull forward through the crosswalk if it's clear. If anything, Waymo sensors should be better able to identify vehicle speed delta to sound the horn when a vehicle is approaching it too quickly.
Management perceives people to be more replaceable than they are. Years of working in, or being the architect of, the company's core product will make you a true expert in it.
But, from the company perspective, your value is based on the 'market rate' for your generically defined skills and experience.
It only takes a company messing up exactly once, and the damage is catastrophic.
Everyone gets their social security number leaked...identity thieves have a field day.
Everyone gets their medical history leaked...insurance companies suddenly find another edge against the consumers.
Everyone gets their texts leaked...scammers now have blackmail against anyone who ever got spicy with their significant other.
Huge companies have been exploited before, and they will do so again and again. The only long-term winning strategy is to not let them have your data in the first place.
Nearly all SSNs have leaked by this point. The US needs a cryptography based ID system. That way each identification event is distinct, and each company gets a different (irreversible) derived ID for a person.
On that larger point I'd agree that companies should not have PII data they don't need.
This reeks of an answer given by someone who simply hasn't been impacted by an of this yet - I'm sure for those who HAVE been impacted the world didn't simply "go on" it caused real stress, problems, issues for them.
That’s the precious bodily fluids paranoia I’m talking about.
Nobody is coming for anyone. [Again doesn’t apply to spies and dissidents]
Systems can fail and that can mean ruined lives. However, that’s only part of the equation. There were actually anti-automobile societies in the US and Europe who opposed cars for safety reasons.
If there's an edge, people will use it. Car manufacturers share data with insurance companies[1], which can impact drivers' insurance rates or lead to coverage denial.
Do you believe the same thing will never happen in healthcare?
Do you believe that sophisticated criminals won't engage in large-scale fraud attempts? In 2021, about 23.9 million people (9% of U.S. residents age 16 or older) had been victims of identity theft during the prior 12 months.[2]
You haven't been hurt by this sort of thing, which is great for you. But millions of other people aren't so lucky.
On one hand, culturally, we pushed young people into colleges and universities at ever-increasing and frankly unethical price points. Many people have spent "buy a house" money on education. These people are then given a heavy burden which holds them back significantly both socially (raising families) and financially (owning a home, saving for retirement).
On the other hand however is the many people who decided not to go to school because it was simply unaffordable. They went to work instead, and often in the kinds of careers that are unappealing to college graduates who prefer white-collar work. Any student loan forgiveness is coming directly from the pockets of these people, who have on-average lower incomes and shorter career spans than their white-collar counterparts.
It's easy to see both sides on this one. The only meaningful solution I can see is to remove the (again, unethical) protections which prevent students from declaring bankruptcy over student loans. In turn, this would hopefully force wiser lending and more price-competition to bring the cost down.
Bankruptcy for student loans should be allowed, with appropriate restrictions against the obvious abuses.
I think the federal government should cap the student loans amounts they secure also and standardize all fee and interest service that can be applied to them. That cap should be modest too. The ability for students to get larger and larger loans is the primary driver of tuition fee inflation.
Lastly, and this is maybe a bit controversial. But any university that is either non-profit or receives government subsidies must have a limits on the amounts paid to executive staff like presidents and also a limit on the ratio of administrative spending to education spending. The crazy growth of the the former compared to the latter is form on theft from the students, in my humble opinion.
Except you don't have to tax low earners! Progressive taxation is the norm in the US; you just need to tax where the wealth lies, and the ways in which it moves.
2. Cost of living rises, wages follow (but not closely enough)
3. Buying power is decreased, but the tax brackets don't change much
4. The lower income groups proceeds to pay more taxes than they "should" while simultaneously being the group that can afford it the least. At the same time, this group is the most affected by inflation, hurting even more.
The money printer hurts everyone. Spinning it up as the expedited solution to every problem for political expedience is how we ended up with an enormous and ever-growing amount of debt.
Who gets taxed only really matters for a specific federal expense if the spending were being covered directly by an increase in taxes. Any money spent on buying up student debt will come from new federal debt without a tax increase or levee to pay for it.
React or Svelte - Building landing and product pages
These tools are extremely popular and well documented, so anything you get stuck on is bound to be readily searchable online. If you've already got over a decade of front-end work experience I'd say just spin up Sveltekit or NextJS and follow along with a guide like this one:
[0] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/beef_price/