I've put considerable time into this, including speaking with Ofcom directly. The guidance Ofcom issued for small site operators last year was that they did intend to target "one-man bands", and that there would be no guidance on specific numbers that constituted the "significant number" of UK visitors which triggers Part 3 and 5 provider restrictions.
I would! I grew up in a low-density suburb near Portland, then lived in small-town Minnesota, Madison, SF, Chicago, and Cincinnati. I didn't own a car until my 30s, and I currently drive about once a month---camping, Costco, lumber, that sort of thing. Pretty much all my day-to-day travel is and has been by bicycle (now an e-bike), foot, train, or bus.
Situations vary, obviously! I'm no stranger to rural life, I wound up in a car-dependent suburb with terrible bus service for a bit, and my partner is in the trades. Private vehicles are sensible and essential answers to lots of problems.
But as the Netherlands illustrates, it's not all-or-nothing: reductions in car utilization and car infrastructure have real benefits. Broadly speaking I think we can and should disincentivize private car use, increase public transit frequency, and build networks of protected infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car means of getting around.
I talked about this in the colophon of the piece, but perhaps you'd like an example? This is Pandoc Markdown--basically Markdown, a little bit of YAML front matter, a smattering of inline LaTeX, and some very small shell scripts. Here's the the build scripts and a little bit of fronttmatter if you'd like to do the same:
This series is seriously the best thing I have read about AI. Thank you thank you thank you for doing so much hard thinking and taking the time to write it all up. It's a monumental work and extremely valuable.
The next time someone asks me where I think AI is going, I'll just point them at this series.
I have read every post in the series and really appreciated it.
I've had a tremendous amount of respect for you since I first encountered the Jepsen analyses, but your breakdown of the likely impacts of LLMs and ML may impress me more.
You've articulated very well several concerns of mine that I haven't seen anyone else mention, and highlighted other issues I had not previously recognized.
Thank you for publishing this now, when it could still have some influence, rather than polishing and researching and refining until it was thoroughly rigorous and too late to be relevant.
> I think you can combine 'Incanters' and 'Process Engineers' into one - 'Users'
I wanted to talk about this more but couldn't quite figure out how to phrase it, so I cut a fair bit: with "incanters" I'm trying to point at a sort of ... intuitive, more informal practitioner knowledge / metis, and contrast it with a more statistically rigorous approach in "statistical/process engineers". I expect a lot of people will fuse the two, but I'm trying to stake out some tentpoles here. Users integrate a continuum of approaches, including individual intuition, folklore, formal and informal texts, scientific papers, and rigorously designed harnesses & in-house experiments. Like farming--there's deep, intuitive knowledge of local climate and landraces, but also big industrial practice, and also research plots, and those different approaches inform (and override) each other in complex ways.
I put... I'd guess around 60 hours into editing this piece, and had review from a dozen-odd friends, and I am still finding and fixing errors. I imagine that asking an LLM for a copyediting pass probably would have been helpful, but goshdarnit, I want to show that we can still write somewhat-passable prose by hand.
Thank you for this! I really wanted to go deeper on human factors, and I think there's a lot to be said about CRM and sociotechnical systems design, especially when ML gets used for decision support. Ultimately wound up truncating that section (along with more of the economic critique) because the piece was already far too long.
You're welcome! I imagine you already know this one as well but just in case.
Learning to Learn by the late Dr Richard Hamming. See especially Chapter 2.
A point Hamming makes is that when transitions from hand to machine production occurred, usually what is built ends up changing as the old techniques don't transfer 1:1 from the old world.
So for instance, we went from nuts and bolts to rivets and welding (Dr Hamming's literal example). This required builders to produce an equivalent product to the old, built with different techniques - and crucially! - under tighter control limits.
The reason things are going all over the place with AI at the moment is that it's speed, speed, speed. They had an all hands at my company recently where the top brass talked about AI. The only thing mentioned was speed - go faster, do more, etc. Not a single soul talked about quality.
But if you know your software engineering wisdom you know that you can only pick two when it comes to speed, scope, or quality. It's going to get real dumb for a while until people realize/remember quality is how you achieve speed.
There’s a paper out there, on designing IT systems from god knows when. It is incredibly dry, except for a line in it that stood out: All IT systems are political systems, because they decide how information and decisions flow.
I can only guess as to how much content you would have to explore on that axis.
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