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Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine

Given the current administration’s recent market behavior I would not be shocked if people got away with exactly what OP described.


It's often prohibited by contract, not just law, so what the administration thinks is only part of the story.


Of course whether or not a contract is or is not enforceable as such is also a matter of law. As I understand, this IPO was unique for a variety of reasons. The fact unique terms are promulgated in a contract does not mean (at least in saner times) that they are automatically immune to regulatory scrutiny.


Its inevitable because of capital incentives.

Someone makes money identifying you and selling that data to advertisers.

If your pseudonym is famous/infamous someone makes money / cultivates attention if they identify you.

There is a basic instinct to uncover the unknown.

Unless the above systems are disabled then the drive to unify identity will be ceaseless.


Parasitic advertisement is not a basic instinct.


It’s not contrived and starts to touch at the root of the issue: taxes on transactions.

I’m not against taxes to be very clear. Tax something else.


One way of thinking about that is higher order even powers just reduce down to two.

For the purpose of inverting a negative vector, you can think of squaring as rotating the vector around the unit circle, 180 degrees, to make it positive. Higher order powers just keep rotating that vector back and forth- from this perspective the other even powers are the same transformation. Obviously with the magnitude being different.


I mean this kindly, but this is so “engineer brained”

Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard.

Attention and mind share are more valuable than ever. If you can’t answer “Why should I care about X?” then you are fighting an uphill battle.


> Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard.

I agree with your premise, but you're still viewing this technology through the lens of "a successful product" versus "a successful piece of technology".

Plenty of open source projects stay open source and are popular without ever making any sales whatsoever. I'm not trying to project my own motivations on the Iroh team; they may want to build a product out of it. For me, though, the project has a lot of appeal already, because it exactly and excellently fulfills a technological need, not because they brought me in with a "it's x but for y" narrative.


It's still about getting users even if you're not charging money for it. If you want to make an open source thing and don't care about getting users then that's great for you I guess? And there's a good chance it'll stay that way unless you put at least some effort into getting them (eg even putting effort into a readme counts).


replace "successful product" with "useful artifact" and you'll get more of the common ground with less of the pedantics.


I see this line of thinking a lot but lets look at it a different way.

Changing peoples behaviors >cost money<. Using your number here, taxis had a 25% value prop. That was just the cost of getting people to change.

I don’t care for Uber, but many many many businesses give people initial discounts and then full price later

The whole argument is moot though given self driving cars are going to wipe out the industry.


Copilot is the name for the harness / wrapper of MSFT products

The CLI can swap to whatever model (/models) based on your subscriptions.

The copilots on desktop or Office Apps are likely just GPT5 nano or other tiny models with cheap inference


I don't think its innate though - most people I've met can think of higher order consequences or at least understand them.

The real issue is actually measuring results. I think we have to design society to factor higher order effects in. That means a fundamentally new approach to things like voting and tracking accountability.

Is it even possible? Who knows. Sometimes I think our problems have outstripped individual life spans which makes them intractable.


People only see them when they're being objective. My impression is that most people spend most of their time worrying about social status and engaging in tribalism meaning society on the whole is either blind to them or more likely will make up an answer that suits them.


What are the fatalities for e-bikes vs SUVs in the US per year?

Your comment is irrelevant otherwise because last time I checked cars are the real problem, and concerns over e bikes / delivery bots is just another lame extension of “safetyism” and ignorance around public transport failures that just misses the mark.

“Riding in traffic” is half the issue here. Like trying to explain water to fish.


I'd like to think I'm about as car-skeptical as your average person with no driver license who just got back from taking three forms of transit home from an all-day recreational road cycling event. But I'm a bit nervous about the speeds of some e-bikes.

A friend of mine spent a week in the hospital recently after crashing his new e-bike almost immediately after buying it. One interpretation of his accident is that he didn't have some of the right instincts for riding a bicycle at that speed.

I don't actually have a clear sense of the breakdown of risk attributable to the different factors of lack of appropriate cycling infrastructure, lack of appropriate rider training or experience, lack of appropriate rider expectations, or inherent safety or stability problems of some designs. My friend whom I mentioned above said his doctors told him that they had been seeing a lot of patients who'd crashed e-bikes (as well as electric mopeds and electric skateboards) at speeds that produced fairly serious injuries.


That is a regulatory issue and a name issue. Those are actually motorcycles. In Europe e-bikes are capped at 25 km/h (the electric assistance stops at that speed).

So your problem is (electric) motorcycles that are (legally?) accessible without a motorcycle license and motorcycle equipement. For safety what matters is the speed and the weight of the vehicle, the faster and heavier, the more dangerous.

I am also noting that unlike with SUV accidents, your friend put a lot less people in danger if not only himself.


I'm sorry to hear about your friend, and hope they recover well.

Something I think a lot about when it comes to e-bikes, is the level of protective gear people feel they ought to wear on "a bike". Not all cyclists even wear helmets (obviously bad), but in addition to a helmet, on an e-bike you really ought to be wearing elbow and knee protection, purely because of the speed involved.

However, my sense is that people (a) don't think about that at all because they think of it as just like a bicycle, or (b) don't want travel with all of that extra gear. They want to treat an e-bike like a bicycle, when it is something much more.

I say all of this as a cyclist (non-e-bike) and rollerblader. On my bicycle I will just wear a helmet, but because of the particulars of rollerblading, I always wear elbow-pads and knee-pads. Differing circumstances require different adaptations.


> they ought to wear on "a bike"

Indeed, if it's going above 50 km/h, it's not a bike it's a motorbike. Protective gear should match the speed and weight of your vehicle. To drive a motorbike, you should have motorbike license and equipment. It feels like a regulatory issue frankly.


They can both be a problem. I saw a kid hitting a dike like a ramp with one of these electric dirt bikes. I've seen kids too small for these cruising around way too fast with no helmet.

Big trucks and SUVs are a much bigger problem. But that doesn't mean kids riding around on motorcycles isn't a problem either.


The point of contentions is calling them e-bikes instead mopeds or e-motos or motorcyles, which you did, but the article didn't. And they are a journalist so I hold them to higher standard.


By your logic, heart disease and cancer are the real concern. Why you so worried about cars? Your comment is irrelevant otherwise.


I think we can tackle different issues at the same time

For heart issues, it is a bit hard to fix. You need a healthy lifestyle is general is something you need the correct environment for and a good education about. Still, it's not impossible and any sane country has food labeling requirements and education around it as well as promotion of physical exercise. It's being done.

Similarly car-centric city design is not easy at first but it can be done and has been done:

Relax zoning and parking requirements, provide good fast collective transport alternatives,that is with dedicated lanes and safety staff. The general idea is that you shouldn't be forced to have a car if you don't want one. Even people who do want to keep their cars will be happier because there will be less people on the road overall: Imagine that traffic jam you're stuck into if half the people vanish because they are using a bike or a subway, woosh, no more traffic jam.


In case anyone has trouble visualizing that, try picturing this many cars moving so quickly and efficiently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEpjPRs4Iio

Also, the woman with the roller bag.


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