Bilt is a rent payment platform required by some leasing companies. In order to use the platform (often a requirement by landlords), one must consent to a series of broad clickwrap. The most egregious of which is that by paying with a card or bank account, one authorizes Bilt to receive all of one's transactions and details thereof including those which have nothing to do with one's lease.
That genie's out of the bottle, couple cheap cameras with cheap AI recognition and tracking, and every network getting pwned by somebody the result is, public spaces become obscenely public. The worst is private spaces, like when a technician or tradesman comes to one's house to do work wearing smart glasses. If they're Rx, what do you do? Refuse service? live with the broken pipe/modem?
No opinion on the decision from OP's post, just noting that, privacy is getting 86'd six ways to Sunday. All that's left are truly owned homes and natural spaces, and Orwell laid the pattern for both.
> That genie's out of the bottle [...] public spaces become obscenely public
A bit "meta" here, but this was never about surrendering to advancing capability, humans have been capable of eavesdropping ever since eaves were invented, people could bring hidden microphones and cameras in "private" spaces for decades, etc.
The "reasonable expectation" doesn't come from our fears of the worst, or else it would be meaninglessly permissive. Rather, it's an attempt to judge individual situations based on some kind of collective agreement about normality. Just because we can't preemptively block something doesn't mean it cannot be a crime.
In other words, we (should) have a lot more power to decide what they become than that. Supposing--and I'm not endorsing this--anyone caught recording in public typically gets their stuff smashed by an angry mob, then the "reasonable expectation" is that you're not being recorded.
Thanks for the nuance. I guess my issue is that pervasive recording has already been normalized, db hacks are effectively normalized (if illegal) so the public spaces are super public, as of yesterday not tomorrow.
This is brilliant. I wish this were available for all legislations. There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.
> There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.
There really, really are.
The legal industry is well aware of that fact - and how many billable hours they stand to lose by making their work more efficient and understandable.
You know how tax prep companies spent over $90m 'lobbying' Congress to ensure that filing your taxes remains difficult and complicated [0]?
Well, lawyers know just as well or better how to butter their bread; and they will pull out every dirty trick they have to scupper attempts to make practising law more transparent or efficient in any way.
It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of course some of it was to reward lobbyists or do other unpopular things, but she used to read bills from back to front because the back was where they put all the graft. An example I remember was $50K in taxpayer money going to a congressman's birthday party.
For a while I thought about trying to write software that would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're online. And LLMs might make the project easier.
Presumably, there must be some point in time where the bill is made public in some form before going to a vote. If you could get the right tool in the hands of a journalist to turn whatever obscure format it’s in into something legible by an ordinary person there’s probably value there.
and then we have people touting Jevon's paradox as outcome of AI disruption leading to more work. Before we create new work we need to figure out how to reduce incentive of people to unnecessarily complicate stuff and to be honest the answer is never clean or easy
unfortunately, laws are not everything. you need to know how to get around them. our country for example has the habit of creating a lex fugitiva that means that some regulations could be changed in other not related laws. good luck finding the correct regulation without a law degree
Our nonprofit, Open Law Library, is working on this exact problem. It is definitely not trivial, but it is very doable. We partner directly with governments to help them implement so the git repos become the canonical record (rather than just an unofficial mirror).
Maryland just launched their regs on our platform:
Everyone in government knows what Track Changes is. The standard format of a piece of legislation in British-influenced systems is a diff. The tech field does not have secret knowledge that the rest of humanity lacks.
> Everyone in government knows
That's part of the point good rafram, I'm not in government but I've looked up laws for at least three jurisdictions and have never encountered version control. A tool at the bottom of a drawer or in only one person's belt is not a tool to anyone else.
To be clear, I wasn't exclusively referring to government. I was actually only thinking of the use of git-like version control across a number of different technical domains, law, design, book writing, architecture, etc
For example, there are thousands of divisions of government out there provisioning largely the same systems in duplicate. E.g. the very local government here has a web portal for the sports venue bookings like pools and tennis courts. They have a waste collection portal. Local tax portal.
Only recently has this been slightly standardized but even those efforts are purely regional. You might get 5 local councils in the city using one SaaS platform, another 5 using another SaaS platform, and another 5 rolling their own. For each function of local government.
Nevermind the fact that a local government in France like this probably has very similar needs to one in Belgium or even the US.
And the worst part is they are terrible at procurement so even when they do consolidate, they're basically getting scammed.
I often think about starting a cost-plus-priced open core project to deal with these issues. Like we build common government functions, and sell it for cost plus 20% markup, with a licence that lets the gov run it themselves if we ever go bust. But then I think procurement is largely a grift game and it might not do well for that reason.
Wouldn’t consolidation lead to monopoly? If 50 local governments use the same SaaS/vendor, the 51st local government would likely go for the same vendor just because 50 others used that vendor before them, no? What prevents the vendor from jacking up prices or general enshittification at the stage?
> What prevents the vendor from jacking up prices or general enshittification at the stage?
Well what I'm proposing building would be source-available and licensed such that the gov can run it themselves if it ever gets too expensive. The sub-gov entities should really band together for the negotiation though, then they can ask for whatever they want: non-profit vendors, liberal licensing, price agreements. A collective of government buyers form basically a monopsony larger than any individual vendor could ever be.
And, in the example of the stereotypical venture capital seeking techbro junk that has somehow infected the entire world, this project doesn't actually understand or solve any real world problems.
No shade on the author, they made a fun thing. I'm directing my cannons more towards the parent post idea that the world needs software developers for their rare genius to use their beautiful brains to solve problems in ways no actual participant in the system could have ever thought of.
The additude that because you can prompt a LLM to write some python you are also uniquely situated to solve the world's problems is how we built an entire generation of automated solutions worse than what we had before.
This story cones uo time and time again, people rail about the data buyer, but practically speaking any one or thing can buy that data and use it against you and yours. The very collection/assembly of life data is dangerous.
Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity
That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug.
Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.
So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.
I take your point, but if the re-implementation looks the same, I would say it’s a form of copying. (Which I don’t think is a problem, I don’t think you should be able to own sequences of numbers.)
Somehow I doubt the precedent will apply to common folk. There will be some obscene carevout like “piracy fair use for corporations training frontier models” and we’ll be even worse off than we were before.
Idk, it might've been used on stuff in the past. My point was that it wasn't a thing that normal people (even normal people in the military) would say. The person I'm responding to described it as "common use" for the last couple decades and that just doesn't match up with my experience at all.
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