The word "lawful" always seems to get dragged out when people in power are doing some especially heinous rulemaking, like throwing a hissy fit over a single company trying to voluntarily draw a line at domestic surveillance and fully automated killchains.
A private corporation can choose not to sell to the government. A lot of them do exactly this. A lot of hoops to jump through.
However, if they do sell to the government, they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products. We're a country of laws, and for better or for worse, these laws are made by elected officials and those appointed by elected officials.
Why an American company wouldn't want American defense to have the most capable tools at their disposal is a different matter all together, but here we are.
The system also wasn't designed for presidential immunity. Combining that with unlimited federal pardons, we're the wild west permanently, or at least until that decision is overturned.
I suspect cynically that as soon as someone not a republican takes power the presidential immunity will magically evaporate in a burst of bad faith jurisprudence.
This administration has made it very clear that they will do what they can to change laws whenever convenient, without congressional oversight, whether or not they are "allowed" to.
Trump implemented tariffs he wasn't allowed to immediately, he started a war he probably wasn't allowed to in order to (allegedly) distract from associating with a pedophile, he wrote an executive order trying to undo the fourteenth amendment, he has actively been abducting and imprisoning lawful residents (and even citizens!) and actively pushed for racial profiling to do so.
If a company feels like the government will simply rewrite the laws in order to advance any kind of political whim (including to be weaponized against that very company!), it's not wrong or even weird for them to want to add safeguards to their product.
To be clear, this isn't weird or uncommon. Lots the stuff you sign in the EULA isn't preventing you from doing things that are "illegal".
> they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products.
why not, many companies have all sorts of rules you agree to when using their products, including many legal ("lawful") things. Are you saying that the government as a client should be unbound by contractual obligations that apply to other clients?
That's fine as long as the company can choose they don't like those terms and refuse to do business. But in this case the government threatened, and carried out the threat, of classifying Anthropic as a "supply chain threat" if they didn't agree to the government's terms.
I want to be clear, I agree. I have no objection to unique government contracts. I'm specifically curious about GPs position that a government contractor should be (ethically?) bound from putting contractual obligations on government use of their service.
Like the various ai providers limit lawful use like creating AI pornography. I think it would be reasonable to keep a contractual restriction against that even when working with the government.
Anthropic wanted the ability to verify compliance whereas OAI and Google are fine with "trust us". Which is how it always is, and always has been.
For better or worse, the government is the one who audits, and has it's own internal systems for self audits. So no one except them tells them what they can or cannot do. The government would never put itself in a position where civilians died because Amodei didn't like the vibe of the case being worked.
In a way it's wild that people are upset that the government didn't put a billionaire megacorp CEO in the drivers seat of intelligence.
The only reason this blew up at all was because of the insane overreach by the DoW after anthropic voiced their concern.
It was well within anthropic right to do so, as it was part of their contract.
And it would've been very understandable that the DoW balked at that, though the real issue would be the incompetence how the contract was able to get through with that in it. But with that contact in place, the only sensible action would've been to terminate the contract and move on. Frankly, nobody would've cared.
But the DoW felt it just had to go further... And their chosen action was just an insane overreach - hence the controversy.
Nope. CPI is an excellent differential indicator -- "how much did a typical person's cost of living rise this year" -- but it's a terrible integral indicator if you compound it because it's blind to the difference between forced and voluntary substitution. If essentials inflate faster than wages, money_in=money_out drives a reduction in nonessentials -- forced substitution -- and the CPI basket adjustments launder the forced substitution into voluntary substitution.
Well, "launder" is a strong word that the hardworking bureaucrats at BLS do not deserve, but the people who use CPI as a deflater so that they can wave around graphs "proving" that things have never been better absolutely deserve it, so I'll keep it in.
Bonus meme: the American Dream was not to Owner Imputed Rent a house.
Yes, it also takes into account rising quality. For an example, in 2010 I rented a rat hole apartment for $x from a fisherman who had inherited the building. He never did maintenance (he was out to sea most of the year) and he never raised rent.
A large company bought the building after I moved out. Ten years later, the same apartment with a fresh coat of paint and new countertops was back on the market for a rent of about three times $x.
The CPI can say that apartment, since it was refurbished, increased in quality and so it wasn't really a price increase of the same good from $x to $3x. This offers a "degree of freedom" to adjust the CPI itself (since quality is inherently subjective), and may be a big part of why CPI does not reflect the lived experience.
I didn't care one bit about paint or countertops when I rented that apartment and I assume broke young adults today don't either. At the time I wanted the cheapest place to live in the area and this was it. It still is one of the cheapest places, but you need three times as much money to rent it.
I don't know if Trump could walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, but he sure seems able to screw Ukraine and bomb Iran at the same time. He just finished sending Vance to Hungary to stump for Orban, too. The love affair between far-right authoritarian leaders is not a 2 person relationship.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
Why are people so focused on India when it comes to outsourcing?
US dev salaries are so much higher than the rest of the world that basically you could hire anywhere in Europe and still save most of the cost per person.
You could go to LATAM if you want the same timezone.
On the corollary, salaries of capable Indian developers have certainly caught up to most Western countries, so that you wont be saving much per person.
Maybe on doctornews, but this is hackernews. To us, Baumol's disease means your job, which has increased productivity, disappears, while your costs, which don't have increased productivity, go up.
Huh, I wonder if there's a flag on the first million users (or some proxy for "Zuck's cohort") from the worst of the slop shoveling. It would sure save him some pointed remarks.
No, the same pattern showed up during the 2016 election when direct monetization wasn't the goal. The Russians were throwing bipartisan spaghetti at the wall, their biggest hit in MAGA land was "Pope Endorses Donald Trump," which went mega-viral, while their biggest hit with the Dems was "Elizabeth Warren Endorses Bernie Sanders," which was a comparative flop.
People underestimate how radical JD Vance is. He wrote an endorsement for the skull book, and not a "my buddy wrote a book that I totally read and you should too" endorsement, but one that restated the core argument: Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you and we should invoke the Iron Law of Reciprocity to preemptively ... them.
During the election I thought this was mostly rhetoric, but now that the administration has turned ICE fully paramilitary and tried to get its base excited about murdering their political opposition, I'm not so sure.
> Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you
Isn't this just how politics looks now? The Republicans say that, the Democrats say the Republicans are secretly nazis who want to nazi genocide you, both parties contain millions of people so both can point to some extremists on the other side saying something shocking and then they both go back to trying to get 51% of the votes so they can be the ones picking your pocket this year.
edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
When things are this lopsided, both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
Want to prove me wrong? Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric (which is the left-coded equivalent). Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are. Show me dead protestors and stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable. Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
> both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
That implies there is a good one. The lesser of two evils is still evil, and even how to measure lesser is extremely subjective.
> Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric
Harris campaigned on saying as little as possible. Several Democrats have called for Trump's assassination. Some (like Stacey Plaskett) quite directly, others (including Harris) have implied or joked about it. Someone worked the nutters into a sufficient frenzy to attempt it with Trump and to murder Charlie Kirk.
> Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are.
Around 3 million people die in the US per year, on the order of 6000 of those are in prisons, ICE was on the order of 30.
The media focuses on that because Trump campaigns on immigration, not because it's a significant proportion of the people the government kills. Significantly more people die when Democrats get paid off by the AMA to limit the number of medical residency slots, or impede housing construction even in states their party fully controls resulting in homelessness and poverty-inducing high rents.
> Show me dead protestors
Are you referring to the unarmed woman killed by the capitol police in 2021?
> stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable
Biden pardoned a lot of people in his own party.
The government failing to hold itself accountable is the default. Most of the time they don't even initiate proceedings against themselves when they're committing a crime, and hide behind qualified immunity etc. if someone wants to sue them.
> Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
The Inflation Reduction Act was a trillion dollars. The federal budget is multiple trillions every year and a double digit percentage of it is corruption every year, regardless of which party is in office.
In general it seems like you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage of the overall problem and ignore the systemic bipartisan corruption and government unaccountability that has been the status quo for generations.
Oh, so you can't find equivalents from Harris and Walz! That's what I thought. You aren't an enlightened centrist, you're a partisan hack posing as one.
> residency slots, NIMBY
Who put forward the last bill addressing the residency slot issue? Which party has the bigger YIMBY faction?
> Ashli Babbitt
She was storming the capitol! The officer who shot her was investigated and cleared because the courts agree: cops are allowed to shoot if you are trying to breach the inner defensive perimeter of the US capitol. Where are the investigations for Rene Good and Alex Pretti?
> state investigators were denied access to the shooting scene by the federal government
Oh. This isn't even "we've investigated ourselves," it's just "we kill you, you die." That's new in US politics.
> IRA was a trillion dollars
Spending that you do not like is not fraud. That's not what the word means. I'd love to call the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan and (soon) Iran fraud, but I can't, because that's not what the word means.
> you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage
The reason why you can't come up with equivalents for the Trump fraud is because they don't exist, so you have to pretend that congressional appropriations that you don't like are somehow equivalent. But they aren't. They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm, but Trump can just pocket billions and Republicans say "both sides." No, it's not both sides, it's not normal outside of shithole countries, and despite Trump's best efforts to turn the US into a shithole country we can still decide to enforce our laws and turn back the clock on that.
I can't help but feel you're leaving out some key details here...
was she perhaps trespassing after walking through broken barriers, past security guards that told people to leave, and through broken windows? was she also warned to stop multiple times while climbing through a broken window to circumvent a barricaded door at the time of being shot?
If those things happened to be true, it would seem that you're attempting to deceive us as readers to make a point in poor faith. Probably no need to do that, right?
The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.
I'm not trying to be combative, just honest. Here is Harris saying Iran is our greatest adversary (sorry for the Zionist source). Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also been very vocal about wanting to attack Iran. Clinton actually recently praised Trump!
Oh, Harris called Iran an adversary! Wow! I'm glad we didn't elect her or the party that negotiated the last deal with Iran! The party that tore up the Iran deal and kept joking about bombing them into the stone age and started 2 out of 2 of the last middle eastern forever wars is the much better bet.
What? They bombed Iran and started forever war 3 of 3? Who could have seen this coming?!
No, Harris failing to push back hard enough on Gaza is not in the same galaxy of culpability or catastrophe as Trump starting a war with Iran on Israel's behalf. And endorsing their actions in Gaza, lest we forget.
And let's not forget who is actually in office and started the war, and how it's currently going. We can wring our hands about what democrats might have done but we have active proof of what republicans are currently doing and it isn't pretty. There's a vast gulf between "hawkish" and "actively bombing." I'd be willing to give pretty much anyone else a shot at it right now.
I simply do not vote for Zionists of either party. They can keep swapping seats and lose every time. If you support Israel, you cannot have my vote. I'll just sit out the election if I have to (and did last time).
Oh, that's why you can't acknowledge the simple fact that Kamala was better on Gaza, because if you do you acknowledge your own culpability in making the genocide worse.
More people in Gaza were murdered under Biden/Harris than Trump. I’ll never understand neo-liberal extreme parasocial behavior. These people are not your friends, they are the scum of the earth. Treat them as such.
What Biden did in Gaza (and Trump continued) is way worse than what has happened in Iran. It's a vile crime against humanity to attack Iran and kill civilians but Gaza is a straight up US fueled genocide.
All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
Exactly: the tear-down-the-system left barely exists outside twitch and college campuses, while the far right has the presidency and majority control of the Republican party. These are not the same.
> edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
I don't think we should pat ourselves on the back too hard for milquetoast takes devoid of any specifics.
(also I think you misread the responses to your post)
> All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
"There are five actual Marxist-Leninists you need to be paying attention to in the US but we can't even name one relevant actual fascist, so the symmetry isn't there."
That was my initial reading, and it's because I've encountered numerous people who sincerely believe that. Using sarcasm in posts subject to Poe's Law is a good way to be ambiguous.
Lets start: you. Followed by Stephen Miller. Trump, per the assessment of his own former chief of staff. Josh Hawley. Leonard Leo. All the "Dark Enlightenment." Your initial reading is tendentious and of little value. Are you seriously going to challenge the notion that American politics has a spectrum from center right to fascists-would-blush ideological crackpots like the dark enlightenment?
reply