August 2025 — A Tax on the Good Guys

My first love was electronics. Well possibly it was my mother, but you get my point. Along the way, I have lost touch with my roots, but I feel that soon a homecoming is in order. There is probably nothing else which excites me as much as AI-augmented robotic assistants for everyone. 

Two projects grabbed my attention this month. The first case from K-Scale Labs. Their YC launch announcement was inspiring: to create a cheap, open source robot for everyone. But in addition, they aimed to organise and inspire the coming generation of open source robotics enthusiasts. Their recent launch brings that to reality - an affordable robot for the masses.

The second came from Hugging Face. They came to prominence as the “GitHub” for AI models - hosting most of the world’s open weight models, along with rankings and leaderboards for performance. In a move not entirely dissimilar to AWS’s sadly killed DeepRacer, they have released a robot that can be controlled from Hugging Face hosted intelligence. Only $299? A bargain at twice the price.

Separately, watching Grok crash out and become MechaHitler led to lots of internet debate on safety rails and the freewheeling approach xAI takes. My pet conspiracy theory is the timing was a little too convenient: Grok 4 was literally released the next day. Rather than an unfortunate mistake, I think it’s much more likely that xAI was drawing attention to itself ahead of the release, or they were looking for an excuse to turn Grok off for a couple of days to preserve compute.

Take off the safety rails, and unhinged AI is eye opening. I don’t condone the approach, but Gab AI was asked how it would reduce violent crime in the US by 99% and the results are fascinating. Pure, unadulterated MechaHitler.

Reflections On The Mission

“You wouldn’t steal a car”.

If you were forced to sit through that unskippable anti-piracy warning, it means you bought a legitimate DVD. People watching the pirated version? It was removed. So the good guys who bought the movie paid the control tax, while the bad guys didn’t.

Before adding any control, ask: “Does this punish the honest whilst barely slowing down the dishonest?” If yes, rethink it.

During COVID, we were asked to fill out forms to self-declare that we’re not feeling unwell.  This is a tax that everyone paid, but anyone who was actually feeling unwell (but wanted to pass the form) simply lied.

When we weigh up the cost of the tax that we put on everyone, take into consideration the effort needed for a bad actor to fake or remove it.

Many services require a “proof of address” during signup. I have to login to a telco, dig out a recent invoice and download it. Five minutes of wasted time.

Do the authorities realise how easy it is to edit a pdf, faking any address you like?! To the uninitiated, a pdf may seem more “secure” than a simple Word doc. It’s not. Thankfully, the use of services like SingPass are slowly displacing this useless check. May they continue unabated.

The examples are all around us. AWS login CAPTCHAs have become impossible for a human to decipher… So I use GPT to solve them! Literally the opposite intention of the control. Liquids on airplanes punish the frequent flyer, when a terrorist would simply split the liquid out into multiple smaller bottles. Region‑locked content blocks paying customers but not anyone with a VPN.

And before anyone says “well yes, but faking your address (or your COVID status, or downloading a movie) is criminal activity”, yes that’s my point - the controls are to either prevent criminal activity (in which case existing laws already make that activity illegal) or manage legitimate operational risks (in which case we should weigh the cost to everyone against the actual reduction in risk).

Much of tech risk & compliance is a well-meaning set of controls that taxes the good guys, but is trivial for a bad actor to lie or work around. A good control should meaningfully raise the cost of abuse. Choose wisely.

Interesting Articles

• The eleven commandments of AI UX - intelligent UX is a whole new paradigm. Some guidelines for what that actually means.

• More productivity in the car with improved Meetings app - Mercedes has put Teams in a car. Will the horrors ever end? Nothing says ‘safety’ like your boss popping up mid‑overtake…

• Yes, you can store data on a bird - the newest data medium… Storing data on a bird. We’ve had data transfer via pigeon for years, it was only a matter of time before we moved into storage as well.

This Is The Way

Feature A Fractional

We’re On A Mission

Until next month. Together, We Build {+}

Ned & the MISSION+ team

P.S. If you would like to bring the MISSION+ team into your organisation to help, please reach out to [email protected]!