I think tptacek means to emphasize the "public comment process" as opposed to "public comment" in general. Generic public comments/discussion are great (I think tptacek would agree because... they're commenting publicly).
It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.
The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.
No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc… because he believes that negative comments are overrepresented.
Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.
Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.
A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.
>No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc.
I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.
"Making it easier to participate" is precisely what's at issue here. I don't think that's incompatible with what you were replying to. Note, nobody in this thread said that the public shouldn't have input, just that the existing processes of getting public input are broken.
Telling people to ignore it when 100 people show up to your town meeting to say don’t do something because there’s secretly 500 people at home who want you to do that thing but aren’t doing anything to externally to indicate their wishes isn’t what I’m talking about.
I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.
Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.
You're still responding to points that nobody in this thread made. Can you show me a direct quote where someone said that we should ignore people showing up to town hall meetings, or that we should try to guess what people believe without getting their input?
I had a conversation with the OP a while back where he was posting about how people are much more likely to show up to speak against something at a town hall and how he was talking to elected officials about this bias.
I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.
The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.
If only there were some way of communicating remotely. Some sort of inter-network of devices and people could register their values and opinions so they'd have easier opportunities to tell people what they believe.
The person he is responding to has so frequently made comments with strong "the peasants are stupid and wrong" undertones I think the lack of charity is earned.
If your case is that we should strive for a social/economic state where everybody is equally capable of taking a couple hours to go stand in line and have their voice heard at a governmental public comment section, you have my vote.
But I don't think any of the folks here have the ability to "fix" the reasons that today, the people most able to do that skew heavily towards the old and the wealthy.
I don't understand how you feel so comfortable handwaving the idea of "fixing" the fact that broad chunks of the American population are radically less able to turn up for a couple hours to participate in public comment sessions. There's any number of underlying causes, ranging from having to work multiple jobs or bad hours to having families to take care of or lack of reliable transportation.
I think that's the same reason why online reviews tend to skew negative: people that are against something or that have had a negative experience are more likely to speak out. That doesn't make their voice less important. But you should always compared this against the size of the population. If a restaurant gets 5 1 star reviews it could be a very bad restaurant. But if it turns out that those five reviews are all by the same person and that 1000's of people visited the place and none made a positive review then that gives a completely different perspective.
The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).
You don't even have to think hard about why turnout skews "no". You can see immediately why your neighbor might show up to comment against a new apartment building on their block. But what neighbor of yours has even considered showing up to comment in favor of one? Most of your neighbors are probably just fine with development, but almost none of them are nerds about it, which is what it takes to show up to support a commercial developer.
To me that seems like a mistake of whoever organizes these things.
A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).
This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.
Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.
No, it can't work. Elections are decided on turnout. We schedule elections on specific days, with great ceremony, in part so we can maximize turnout. Public comment processes are the opposite. They structurally select for people with high-amplitude opinions, and for what should at this point be obvious reasons the high-amplitude opinions about development are almost uniformly negative. It's the exact same phenomenon that keeps guns deregulated in the United States: most people support regulation, but the people who don't really don't and turn out disproportionately.
If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.
You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.
If we can switch to 'work from home' for a large fraction of the population at the drop of a hat I think with all of these technically savvy people there should be a way to improve on this. If that's not true then what is all this tech good for anyway?
You can't fix it. Avoiding broad representation is the point of public comment processes. It's the same reason local elections in single-party states tend to be held off-cycle: to keep turnout low.
This isn't a hot take or anything. It's well documented in the social science literature. It just happens that you can intuit why it works this way as well.
I have a similar hobby, and for me it's not so much "helping to play" the original game, but playing a _different_ game, a much richer/strategic game.
It's similar to car racing: most people just drive to get places, and there's little point tuning a car & driver to go fast. But if you want to go fast, then you want to go fast. There are negative externalities, for which it's important to keep the scale in mind, but these hobbies also push the envelope of what we as humans can do.
If your measure of a 10x engineer was in (thousands of) cranked-LOCs/day, then for sure, AI has taken their "performance" to the moon.
The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.
I don't think this line of reasoning is very reasonable anymore. LLMs are getting good not only at producing high quality output but even preemptively dealing with architecture and other 'big picture' type designs. And this has been true for quite some time, certainly at least since the Fable gen of LLMs.
And while I do expect progress to eventually slow, there's no reason to yet think we're at the plateau point or necessarily even especially close, so they're probably only going to get better. But at this point, even if they didn't I'd still be saying this. 'Programming' with an LLM is a loathsome and unpleasant task, but that's because it's no longer programming but instead an entirely different design-centric domain where it's handy to have some programming knowledge to nudge it in the right direction sometimes.
I think human programmers are going to go the way of human computers. [1] And I'm obligated to link to that because now most people probably no longer even know such an occupation existed, even though it rather obviously must have if you think about the past for a moment.
It's not entirely clear which comments/criticisms you're responding to when pointing out the lack of margin. Whose excuse is that? And what's it an excuse for?
Security isn't optional just because margins are low. If eg FedEx decided to disregard security because they only made 3% of the value of the packages they ship in profit, they'd lose most of that business fast. But yes, let's not shame folks for failing to preempt theoretical-yet-unseen threats, if that's what you mean.
I think it's that people who've never faced a security threat and never had to think to are among the most vulnerable. And grocery stores are notoriously thin margin businesses who actually strive not to spend unnecessary the most.
Ok, then why were their damned fridges connected to a network then?
"The chain wanted to have Internet enabled control and dashboards about their fridges" or something?
You don't get to say you want the perks of being Internet enabled and then turn around and say that protecting against the downsides would cut into your margins too much. Sheesh
Imagine instead you had 100 fridges and 3 walk-in freezers and 5 industrial compressors. Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?
Now imagine you had 50 such stores.
MPLS? Multi-site Domain? VXLAN? Absolute fantasies, can't be done.
But seriously, networked fridge systems are one of the most straight-forwardly practical use cases for networking tech to improve logistical latency in a supply chain. There are definitely lots of different solutions for securing it depending on scale though.
> Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?
Sure I would. And my very next thought would be "how do we secure that"
While parent may have indeed been provided an ordinary stock Apple device, Apple's "Automated Device Enrollment" program can be used to administer/manage devices even when shipped directly from Apple to employees. I got a laptop replaced at a former company, shipped directly from Apple to me. I expected to have to reach out to IT to get it bootstrapped with their management tools, but the OS install process did this automatically.
Voter preferences can change with time, as voters observe the effects of their previous selections. Most voters don't want and didn't vote for authoritarian rule. They are humans with many diverse challenges & concerns in their lives. Their votes are an attempt to balance/compromise among those.
Only a small part, maybe 1/3 of the US wanted this. Not the whole population. Sadly 1/3 of eligible voters don't vote - they are the ones who didn't want this but don't have enough sense to vote, and that's different than wanting trump.
It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.
The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.
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