Tech CEOs are breaking the law

Tech CEOs are breaking the law(kiesow.net)

25 points by speckx 3 hours ago | 16 comments

bignavy 1 hour ago |

I clicked on the headline, read the whole article, and then came back here to realize the “law” that CEOs are breaking is the conservation of complexity.

3/10 article, 10/10 headline

dlcarrier 13 minutes ago | |

Authors often have little input on the headline or title of an article or book. When a publisher focuses on one-off readership instead of longtime readers, they tend to use whatever headline grabs the most attention.

tyleo 1 hour ago | |

Yeah, this felt like clickbait to me. It's pretty poor quality writing. It introduces a pretty abstract idea which is fine, but it doesn't seem to land it's points.

bee_rider 1 hour ago | |

The headline is so appealing, haha. This conversation is going to have two non-overlapping topics based on whether or not people read the article.

hyperpape 1 hour ago |

This article is inane.

The law seems...truthy, though I find it a little too underspecified to assess.

The conclusion is true, and I'll even overlook it being a slight strawman. Your "long genius"[0] CEO cannot talk to AI and get a full business overnight. That's true.

But how does that follow from the "law"? The article admits that you can shift complexity to a complex algorithm or information processing system that the consumer doesn't touch.

You know what's a incredibly complex information processing system? GenAI.

So we have a reasonable conclusion, an ok "law", and no real connection between them. It was an inane non-sequitur.

[0] Not actually a genius.

bee_rider 1 hour ago | |

Laws are, of course, some of the least well supported scientific objects generally (just sort of ad-hoc observations that never got upgraded to a hypothesis or theory). It is a shame that “law” sounds so authoritative.

But these businesses laws seem to be even worse. We need a new name, Tesler’s Quip maybe.

simonw 1 hour ago |

Confusing headline. This is "Tech CEOs are breaking Tesler’s Law", which states that you can't eliminate irreducible complexity from your product. The argument is that Tech CEOs think they can replace their workforce with generative AI, which violates that law because it takes humans to design for human problems.

smallmancontrov 2 hours ago |

> Tesler’s Law (the “conservation of complexity”) -Larry Tesler

> "I love Tesler" -Donald Trump

Tesler II: when Elon does it, it is not illegal.

throwaw12 1 hour ago |

The problem with late-stage US capitalism is that, as long as you have money, you are above everything.

* Want to change laws? create lobby group

* Want to get special treatment? buy politicians

* Want to get even bigger? No problems, can do anything for your money, lets pick any candidate for POTUS and we can make it a reality

* Some people are creating problems? (Thomas Massie) - no problems, lets promote another candidate and spend +$30M on his campaign

Citizens? Oh come on, who cares about them, call riot police and they will start behaving properly

throwaw12 1 hour ago | |

And then everyone is saying, the law which Uber broke was actually non-sense and was working for the benefit of Taxi companies.

Of course it does, because system is built in a way to create non-sense regulations to protect lobbyist of that time, not the average people

exabrial 2 hours ago |

"At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought."

I mean yes, the headline... Uber broke the Taxi Medallion law, and gets around hiring employees and other tax law for example. These are stupid regulations though and everyone knows it, so nobody cares.

Terr_ 1 hour ago | |

It could be clearer and shorter, but I don't think its Billy-Madison-quote-level bad. I read it as:

1. Tries a title where "the law" could refer to both legal-statue and also metaphysical limits. (But, disappointingly, does not really deliver on both.)

2. Assert that there's a lower-bound (a "law") on how much work can be removed from a product or process.

3. Observe that some major tech products do not eliminate work so much as move it and take advantage of efficiencies of scale.

4. Claim that some CEOs seem to think they can use "AI" to repeat the same overall process against their own companies in a vaguely recursive way.

5. Dismiss that as foolish because the work is going somewhere, even if it's just to the company selling the inference, and ultimately paying a different development-org.

minraws 1 hour ago | |

When breaking the law is the norm, small or big seems to trivially get blurred, if you don't care when X law you didn't care about was being violated then why should the company think you will care if they broke Y law instead.

thomasingalls 1 hour ago | |

Yeah, labor law is bad. You tell em

whattheheckheck 1 hour ago | |

Who coined the term legal arbitrage?

consumer451 1 hour ago | | |

I believe it's called "regulatory arbitrage." This has to be my favorite SV euphemism.