5 ms·

Why is this regulation necessary? You can just choose not to buy products whose future you’re skeptical of. In this case, Humane would likely go bankrupt rathe

by avalys 2y ago

Why is this regulation necessary? You can just choose not to buy products whose future you’re skeptical of. In this case, Humane would likely go bankrupt rather than pay out the refunds your regulation would require, so it would still be ineffective in protecting consumers.

tbrownaw 2y ago
> You can just choose not to buy products whose future you’re skeptical of. I had a meeting last week whose sole purpose was for me to re-describe something a couple times which I had already described in text. And which also could be found in vendor documentation. I also know someone who seems to think that (almost?) anything pushed on the Internet must be true.
mrtksn 2y ago
Understanding how products works and what are the risks requires a study. It’s not realistic that a layman will study and understand the implications of the architecture of the product. This regulation will transfer that requirement from the consumer to the maker so that the maker can choose to create products they issue full refund when they can’t guarantee perpetual software availability or they can choose to make all the software available with the product. It also avoids dictating how the product should be designed when doing all that.
rsynnott 2y ago
In this particular case, this is true, and in any case approximately nobody bought these, but it's not uncommon for large, well-capitalised companies to nuke products when convenient (Google likes doing this, say).
askonomm 2y ago
Why have regulations at all then? Why regulate water purity when you can choose to not drink water you're skeptical of, or why regulate food if you can just not eat food that you're skeptical of? Regulations are there not for you, who perhaps knows better, but there for the people who do not. Most people are not tech-savvy. Most people believe whatever marketing is being shoved down their throat. An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings. I don't understand how libertarians look at the current state of things and conclude that fewer regulations would solve the problem.
  - snackbroken 2y ago
    > Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings. Worse. It requires that doing so is effectively free. Otherwise, a successful strategy is to lower your product quality compared to your competitors by an amount just shy of the cost of discovering the lower quality. This leads to a race to the bottom.
    - avalys 2y ago
      Yes, and? That very “race to the bottom” is what drives progress. Yes, it’s much messier than having a central authority dictate everything. Such is life. Making a product cheaper to produce without affecting what people care about (or, equivalently, improving the performance without increasing the cost) is what drives productivity growth, and the relentless competitive pressure to do so is what produced the modern world. It’s not fun or easy, and yes, sitting on your ass would be easier. Oh well!
      - int_19h 2y ago
        The modern world is the one for which we had to invent a new word "enshittification" to describe the results of that process.
  - avalys 2y ago
    Are you suggesting that the people who could afford $700 for a Humane AI pin last year were not capable of doing research about the company, its history, its prospects? Every one of these people have access to the sum total of all human knowledge in 10 seconds at their fingertips. Come on. This is a completely new product, in a category that never existed and no one was desperately demanding. It was bought with the disposable income of wealthy people who enjoy trying new technology and knew exactly the risk they were taking. Are you seriously going to dispute that? Why is this a space that needs to be regulated?

by avalys 2y ago

tbrownaw 2y ago

> You can just choose not to buy products whose future you’re skeptical of. I had a meeting last week whose sole purpose was for me to re-describe something a couple times which I had already described in text. And which also could be found in vendor documentation. I also know someone who seems to think that (almost?) anything pushed on the Internet must be true.

mrtksn 2y ago

Understanding how products works and what are the risks requires a study. It’s not realistic that a layman will study and understand the implications of the architecture of the product. This regulation will transfer that requirement from the consumer to the maker so that the maker can choose to create products they issue full refund when they can’t guarantee perpetual software availability or they can choose to make all the software available with the product. It also avoids dictating how the product should be designed when doing all that.

rsynnott 2y ago

In this particular case, this is true, and in any case approximately nobody bought these, but it's not uncommon for large, well-capitalised companies to nuke products when convenient (Google likes doing this, say).

askonomm 2y ago

Why have regulations at all then? Why regulate water purity when you can choose to not drink water you're skeptical of, or why regulate food if you can just not eat food that you're skeptical of? Regulations are there not for you, who perhaps knows better, but there for the people who do not. Most people are not tech-savvy. Most people believe whatever marketing is being shoved down their throat. An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.

plagiarist 2y ago
Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings. I don't understand how libertarians look at the current state of things and conclude that fewer regulations would solve the problem.
- snackbroken 2y ago
  > Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings. Worse. It requires that doing so is effectively free. Otherwise, a successful strategy is to lower your product quality compared to your competitors by an amount just shy of the cost of discovering the lower quality. This leads to a race to the bottom.
  - avalys 2y ago
    Yes, and? That very “race to the bottom” is what drives progress. Yes, it’s much messier than having a central authority dictate everything. Such is life. Making a product cheaper to produce without affecting what people care about (or, equivalently, improving the performance without increasing the cost) is what drives productivity growth, and the relentless competitive pressure to do so is what produced the modern world. It’s not fun or easy, and yes, sitting on your ass would be easier. Oh well!
    - int_19h 2y ago
      The modern world is the one for which we had to invent a new word "enshittification" to describe the results of that process.
- avalys 2y ago
  Are you suggesting that the people who could afford $700 for a Humane AI pin last year were not capable of doing research about the company, its history, its prospects? Every one of these people have access to the sum total of all human knowledge in 10 seconds at their fingertips. Come on. This is a completely new product, in a category that never existed and no one was desperately demanding. It was bought with the disposable income of wealthy people who enjoy trying new technology and knew exactly the risk they were taking. Are you seriously going to dispute that? Why is this a space that needs to be regulated?