My first couple of attempts at antigravity / Gemini were pretty bad - the model kept aborting and it was relatively helpless at tools compared to Claude (although I have a lot more experience tuning Claude to be fair). Seems like there are some good ideas in antigravity but it’s more like an alpha than a product.
They aren’t requiring it though - they are just noting it on your profile. That seems like a very reasonable approach that lets the reader decide how much it matters.
“Roblox CEO sees pedophiles as ‘opportunity’” would be a less biased headline that reports the actual interesting facts of the interview and would be more damaging to them in practice.
> As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone.
The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here.
The other alternative that I can think of is that experimental engines get an exception to be not certified for X miles of operation. Once the candidates are chosen for mass production, mandatory certifications can be introduced. Even if your new design doubles the emissions for some reason, over 100000 miles, that’s barely a drop in the bucket. For reference, double the emissions for 100000 miles is roughly equivalent to having an extra semi on the road for a year, which is nothing.
We need more information. How does this work for internal combustion truck engines?
Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to say.
I imagine that the variation is in the internal combustion engines the system is being paired with. In that scenario, it can be that the regulator is treating the combined units as a new drivetrain and requiring certification of each combination as if it were a new engine.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what larger operators have in their fleets. It could be that a few certifications go a long ways. They are going to be at least somewhat inclined to avoid variation.
> The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here.
Any form of regulation is attacked by those who seek to profit by freely causing the harm that regulation prevents. These attacks aim at completely eliminating any and all regulation, but also aim at eroding it so that complying with the letter of the law is ineffective at actually complying with the spirit of the law.
Trying to make mountains out of molehills is one way to attack regulation.
Look at OP's example. In no way did OP offer any support for the $100k price tag for certification, or even mentioned what this hypothetical amount represents in the total investment in a product such as an engine. We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
The combinatorial explosion is also a far-fetched example of this desire to make mountains out of molehills. You do not need to recertify a whole engine if you do a minor change out of a whim such as changing the color of a knob.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that whoever wants to sell an engine isn't putting out subpar products that underperform and outpollute at clearly unacceptable levels. If proving that your product is not poorly designed and irredeemably broken is too much to ask, is regulation really the problem?
> We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
I think you missed the context here. Revey, the company being asked to do these certifications, doesn't make diesel engines for semi-trucks. The company makes an electric "powered converter dolly" which puts a mini trailer between the semi truck and trailer that uses batteries and electric motors to reduce the amount of diesel burnt per mile.
It's clever solution, there are externalities to consider (increased truck weight and length, changes to turning behavior, etc) but expensive certification per motor to prove that giving a truck an extra electric push doesn't increase the emissions doesn't strike me as making sense.
You cannot separate the idea of regulation from their harm because they are inherent to the concept. A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects. Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
> A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects.
This isn't quite right. There are some regulations that have such obviously enormous benefits that even if our estimates are imperfect, they'd have to be off by a thousand miles to not be the right thing. Examples like banning leaded gasoline or asbestos, or having antitrust laws that kick in if a market gets too consolidated for any reason.
The problem is then people start making a bunch of other rules that on paper would improve things by a couple of percent, but in practice because they're not accounting for overhead or their numbers aren't perfect they're actually making things slightly worse, and then multiply that by thousands of such individual rules and you've got a huge mess.
I agree with this. When Michael Huemer talks about political knowledge he lists several requirements:
1. Simple. For example, “Demand curves slope downward.” The more complicated a theory is, the more ways there are for it to go wrong.
2. Accepted by experts. For example, there is a broad consensus in economics that protectionism is undesirable. If a theory is well-justified, then the great majority of reasonable and intelligent people will usually come to accept the theory, once they understand the arguments for it.
3. Non-ideological. Theories that have an ideological flavor and that call forth strong emotions tend to be pseudo-knowledge–for example, the theory that behavioral differences between men and women are entirely due to socialization. Reality is unlikely to conform to ideology.
4. Weak. For instance, we do not know that free markets are always perfectly efficient. We can say only that free markets are usually approximately efficient.
5. Specific and concrete. We can be much more confident in a concrete claim such as “Ted Bundy’s murders were wrong” than in an abstract theory such as “It is always wrong to initiate violence against another person.”
6. Supported by appropriate evidence. For example, the claim “violent entertainment increases violent crime” cannot be known without empirical evidence. In this case, a study based on a large, random sample would be appropriate, rather than, say, a few anecdotes.
7. Undefeated by counter-evidence. If there is a large quantity of evidence against P, or if one does not know whether there is such counter-evidence, then one does not know that P. For example, if one has read several studies supporting gun control while having read none of the literature on the other side, then one cannot claim to know whether gun control is desirable.
The claim "Leaded gasoline should be banned" reasonably fits most of these requirements, thus it's probably a relatively safe intervention with upside.
>Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
No it isn't. Rent control is made to provide short term relief. Regulations tend to be long term requriements. Of course making a short term temporary solution long term does not work.
>we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes
For policy, I think it is important to be risk averse. Regulations are extremely risk averse. Slowing down reckless actions so that people don't die should be considered a good thing. Of course, that can be anathema to businesses who rush to be first to market.
I don't see regulations being a problem here, but the cost of the regulations. Instead of focusing on de-regulations we look into what that 100k certification is going to? Hopefully not yet another for-profit middleman with incentives to bog the process down.
> Rent control is made to provide short term relief.
Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the market value diverge further with each lease renewal. There are people in NY who have been in their apartments 50 years and pay 10% of the market rate.
I'm talking about the policy, not the tenants. Enacting 50 years of rent control is no different from Japan's economy the last 30 years.
Of course after multiple generations you scare off housing investment. But not after 5. And that should be the goal of rent control. Short term relief while doing the long term plan of building more housing.
Politicians not doing it this way is like blaming your duct tape for falling apart after a few weeks of adhesive duty.That doesn't mean duct tape is bad. It means no one bothered to fix the underlying issue.
> Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the
You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).
They're right. Rent control is useful as a short term measure to keep rents from spiking, but it does long term damage to supplies and you need completely different methods to fix the supplies.
If central planning didn't work, why does every corporation under the sun use it internally? Why don't they just let everyone do what they want, and then sue eachother when it doesn't result in great outcomes?
Central planning does work at small scales. Everyone "centrally plans" their own life. Can you imagine doing it any other way?
The issue is that as the context expands, we lose the ability to make accurate predictions. To some extent we can't even predict our own lives although we try our best. When you expand that to the size of a corporation it's mostly just guessing. Corporations fail all of the time. When we expand that to a society, we are just guessing for everything but the most simple of predictions.
Clarify that, please? Maybe you mean "most corporations are short-lived due to excess central planning", or then again "most corporations are full of crusty old dudes who love the tradition of central planning", or ..?
I may believe both of those things, but no that's not actually what I meant. I simply meant look at the stats for how long corporations actually live. Are we sure that's how we want to structure our government?
Without comparing the management styles of different corporations it's difficult to say if it's related or not. For example, it's possible that long-lived corporations are run in a more laissez-faire style compared to ones that fail.
Interestingly, one marker for longevity is distributed ownership, aka profit share or co-op structures, or family run businesses. Co-ops specifically have much longer longevity than traditional corporations.
And you cannot separate the idea of lack of regulation from the harm inherent to the concept.
This kind of lazy ideological posturing is thought-terminating and incredibly tiring.
Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes. It would be truly baffling if of all conceivable points on the axis it was a global optimum.
I sympathise with your fatigue, I get tired of repeated arguments too, but I suppose the tiredness itself isn't a sign of being right. I wonder whether oh no not this again contains useful information. Perhaps not. Misconceptions are popular, but good ideas are also popular.
The earliest regulations were about the purity of bread and beer, and I tend to think of them as a good thing. But concepts like gypsum doesn't go in bread are simple enough for a king to understand, so perhaps those early regulations were more suitable for central administration. This was before there were brand names or consumer organizations. I suppose a non-central form of regulation would have to be along those lines, adversarial but symbiotic with the specific industry. Restaurant rating stars. IDK. Some stuff isn't consumer-facing though.
When unmonitored, people aren't motivated to behave, and they make a mess. When monitored, the people comply, but the monitors aren't motivated to be wise or understanding, only to enforce. Sometimes you get situations where an entire culture of people are spontaneously careful and good, or where they are regulated by regulators who are wise and perceptive and flexible. This state of affairs comes about, so far as I can tell, at random, or by voodoo.
I think this specific thing is more an effect of human brains trying to stereotype complicated things.
"all regulations are bad" is a much simpler premise than "rule #3.70.66.345 should be adjusted to consider multiple drive trains with the same engine to pass the same tests".
Like, if you found a specific regulation that was badly designed and advocated for it to change, no one would argue against it, but you wouldn't get any internet engagement either.
Here's a simple and elegant theory - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure. If you'd like it to be even simpler, "Measure twice, cut once."
Trying to squeeze blood out of a rock from people who cut corners and hurt others after-the-fact is a fuckin' nightmare and leads to globally bad outcomes.
> Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes.
You're gonna complain about "lazy ideological posturing" and then in the same breath construct a tired, boring straw man? Was this on purpose to prove a point or something?
Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. Regulating lead in petrol is simple, uncontroversial, and very reasonably likely to do more good than harm. It's an example of an intervention on society that is relatively safe and easy to predict the outcome. And it's also an outlier, because most political action is neither uncontroversial, simple, or likely to do more good than harm.
Regulating lead in petrol was very much not uncontroversial when it was regulated. Same with asbestos - the industries involved fought really hard against it.
Central planning is why our cities are no longer choked by smog. It is extremely difficult to predict outcomes in complex human system, but that cuts both ways: it’s hard to know if some intervention is good or bad, and it’s hard to know if leaving things alone is good or bad.
If you leave things alone, you get the light bulb and the airplane, but also leaded gasoline and radioactive tonics. The notion that it’s always better to do nothing rather than something is as fallacious as the opposite.
Most corporations and dictatorships seem to be centrally planned. Communism didn't work out for the Soviets, but they also didn't have smartphones and ChatGPT.
> In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes.
This doesn’t follow from your premise.
> We know central planning doesn't work
Europe conquered the world using central planning. Every society on earth with any measure of security, order, and cleanliness to speak of is dominated by a central bureaucracy. It works.
> under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
Doing nothing is precisely why anarcho-capitalists failed to change anything. Everyone smart associated with that movement studied power dynamics and moved onto other projects.
An inane, intentionally bad-faith reading of my comment that you fell back on because you know you don’t have the requisite background knowledge to refute anything I’m saying.
The magic of the system is that we all did it, comrade. There's multiple people, laws define what those people can do, processes, comment periods. It's all spiderman pointing at spiderman. You can't find any one party so clearly culpable that they can in good conscience suffer real consequence.
And it's not just this, every f-ing regulated industry is like this. I work with someone who specs out where the wires and fixtures for the lights are gonna go in commercial buildings. Ceiling lighting is full of crap like this for christ sake. The whole system is rotten.
Having dealt with regulatory bodies before - they probably did lose their job, maybe multiple times, before becoming an engineer that doesn't have to engineer anything, just come up with rules.
Why's that? Because a guy who's apparently friends with the owner of the company that produces these things told you that it saves emissions? Doesn't it seem reasonable to verify these claims?
No that doesn't seem reasonable at all if it's been proven to work _really well_ in several configurations and there's no particular reason to expect that the results would be drastically different in other very similar configurations.
That's what regulatory exemption procedures exist for, and it would be the logical next step if you had convincing hard data.
Every single regulatory process has them, so the fact that this very ranty article omits any mention of an attempt to use them is highly suspect.
I've worked with plenty of systems where for all sorts of reasons exemptions are granted for the express purpose of promoting innovation or recognizing a special circumstance.
How many types of truck engine do you reasonably need to test with? The number should fit on one hand. And really you should only need to do the full test with one model and limited verifications with others. That'll get it down from $27M to $200k, which would be a far more reasonable requirement.
Yeah why does the certification process cost so much is one question I have. Would this be a conversation if the cost of the test were more reasonable?
Most likely it costs a lot because there isn't enough frequency of demand for it for more than one company to offer the service thus there is no supply. However, as it is a regulatory requirement the severity of demand when it appears is near infinite.
Having done UL certification before, this is exactly how it is.
During the process we forgot/missed that the product serial needed a single letter appended to the end to denote that it was the UL compliant version. We caught this after paying $15k for just recertification with new parts, no testing, only paperwork.
We went back to UL and told them about the mistake. They charged us $5k to open a new case just to append a "-5" to the name of the product on a handful of documents.
> whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations
Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the $27M price tag come from?
Seems somewhat reasonable. I don’t know why the company is supporting all 270 engine families.
This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else you’ll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from the “status quo.”
$27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
I assume that out of 270 entire families that some are more popular than others? Why not pick the 20-30 most popular ones?
The tone of this article is that OP’s company has a savior complex. If they aren’t given expedient special treatment regulatory approval, the status quo is causing a bunch of fake make up dollar values of damage. It’s kind of a gross tone.
>As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks.
Where in this sentence is asbestos mentioned? As for the families, if they know their product works in 270 engine families why would they chose to only sell to 20-30?
I don't know enough about it to know whether it's a waste or not. It's certainly not surprising that the company that has to pay for it thinks it's a waste.
Presumably they have so many families to serve their customers well. If they were to consolidate their engine families in such a way to avoid paying as much money to regulatory processes, that seems like a bit of a perverse incentive and outcome.
In my view though the goal of the regulation isn't bad, but the cost of the process is prohibitive. Why is it so expensive to measure engine emissions?
Complying with regulations is a sometimes-difficult but necessary part of my existence.
Small business owners like myself are the ones who comply while the biggest corporations use their armies of lawyers and bean counters to see how many pennies they can save by skirting those regulations. Just like OP.
If you want to argue that adding an electric engine to existing trucks is going to make them go out of control and kill people in some completely common sense defying manner, then the burden of proof is on you and not on the company to prove a negative.
> one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks and that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item.
Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
> Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough".
This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a specific government official, instead you're paying a huge certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on new and small businesses.
It's gonna be California (but I'm guessing, not sure). Other states just defer to federal regulation.
That they don't put the state on blast sort of points to the big cost not being entirely real (where they either think they can induce regulatory change or the number of tests that is needed to sell the systems is quite a lot less than the number of tests that would be needed to allow 100% of the market to use their system).
Seems like there must be a way to get his ex-wife taken off the mortgage if she’s actually abandoned the property and moved across the world. I can imagine it might be a tricky thing to navigate though.
Occam's razor rarely ever suggests a cover up. I don't think Hanlon's razor quite applies here since it's not obviously stupidity or malice vs. just actual work prioritization with unexpectedly limited capacity.
My prior on “state sponsored actor” is 90% “just some guy”. Some combination of CYA and excitement makes infosec people jump to conclusions like crazy.
