> they have to couch it in language clarifying that they would love to support war, actually,
Yes they do because they are trying to sell to the Department of War.
No one made Anthropic try to be a military contractor. It’s pretty much the definition of being a military contractor that your product helps to kill people.
That the podcast feed format is XML based is an insignificant detail - and a remnant of the past, nobody cares about.
People upload their podcasts to a platform like Apple Music or Spotify or Substack and co, or to some backend connected to their Wordpress/Ghost/etc) and it spits the RSS behind the scenes, with nobody giving a shit about the XML part.
Might as well declare USSR a huge IT success because people still play Tetris.
So why would we want them setting policy for the DoD? Laws are enacted through a fundamentally democratic process defined over hundreds of years. Why wouldn’t that be the way to govern use of tools?
Why would we want to trade our constitution for, effectively, “rules Sam Altman came up with”?
Part of the problem is that due to a combination of the electoral college, gerrymandering, voter supression, propaganda, and Citizens United; America's government is not meaningfully democratic.
Even setting that aside, I don't think that people are saying that they want corporations to make the rules. Rather, what I think they are saying is that they don't want AI to be used for mass surveilance or autonomous weapons and cutting the DoD off at the corporate level is one way to accomplish that.
Voter suppression is not a large scale problem in American (neither is voter fraud.) I would be curious why you mentioned that?
America is an indirect democracy, which isn’t a flaw it’s a design choice. Things like the electoral college still follow a process where the people choose (same with the Supreme Court) it’s just staggered as a system that prioritizes stability over big swings/rapid change.
There’s a strong push right now to mandate voter ID requirements that could block married women from voting (if their last name doesn’t match their birth certificate).
And more stringent ID requirements are discriminatory against the poor, who often don’t have the time and resources to deal with the bureaucracy necessary to do things like travel to retrieve a new copy of their birth certificate.
> Voter suppression is not a large scale problem in American
So you aren’t a person of color who lives in the south I assume? I could also make a couple educated guesses about where you consume news from as well but I’m refrain.
Needless to say, it absolutely is an issue exacerbated by Supreme Court actions pretending it wouldn’t quickly become one.
The "funniest" thing about this is that in any other context, this administration absolutely insists that everyone should be called only by their legal name, not any other name that they prefer because they think it better suits their identity.
The point is, the name of the DoD is still the Department of Defense. Just like his dumb ass calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America didn't change the fact that it's still the Gulf of Mexico. All it meant is him wasting money on new letterhead to sooth his fragile ego.
He can make the executive branch call it The Dumpty Bowl if he wants. That doesn't mean he has renamed it. He has zero power outside the executive branch. Fortunately the United States isn't yet ruled by decree.
The names are decided by the United States Board on Geographic Names, which is under the Department of the Interior, which is part of the executive branch. So yeah, he can make them rename it for the US. Sure, you can pedantically say that he can only force the entirety of the federal government to respect the name, and the State governments could refuse to abide by that, but what would be the point? AFAIK none have outright refused. And obviously private citizens can call things whatever the heck they want, though if they get too creative they may have trouble expressing themselves in a way that others will understand.
The point is accuracy. He literally can only mandate the federal government. Everyone else knows it's the Gulf of Mexico in every state in the US and every English speaking country in the world.
I haven't heard of any states bothering to reprint maps. They all know his whole clown show charade will be over in the blink of an eye.
You could pretend he has more power than he does, but what would be the point?
Yes our democratically appointed government gets to tell contractors what to do not vice versa. I’d much rather that than have the contractors run things. You think Blackwater, Lockheed, Mark Zuckerberg should dictate how our military works? Who is the fascist here?
I'm fine with the Dept of Defense deciding the terms of the contract are not acceptable to them and therefore not doing business with Anthropic. Where it becomes very much not okay is when they retaliate against (or coerce) Anthropic by assigning them the supply chain risk designation. This is not telling a contractor what to do, this is attempting to put them out of business.
Sure sounds like congress renamed it. Those damn masses, exercising democratic power.
Trump will put a stop to that!
Loyalty to the constitution third, loyalty to the party second, loyalty to the president first. That's the order of things in a fascist society and Trump has made very exceptionally clear that he thinks that should be the way of it in the US...
Even outside of the US, a corporation is widely considered to be a company of people with their own agency and rights.
A person or group of people should be able to set their own boundaries without being subjected to immoral and unjust retaliation, i.e. corporate murder (https://x.com/i/status/2027515599358730315).
Also, ask any frontier model what Pete Hegseth thinks about democracy.
The place to set policies on the use of hammers and police enforcement is not at the counter of the hardware store. “You want a hammer but don’t have a contractors license? Are you in a training program? Oh you just want to hang framed art - can I see your lease, does it allow hammering metal into the walls?”
We govern these things through laws and a democratic process. Police enforce the laws.
I don’t want some overconfident Silicon Valley engineering firm telling me how to use my digital tools, and you shouldn’t either.
Whatever you think of this administration, our military should not have to ask contractors permission for their operations.
To stop mass surveillance and autonomous lethality, pass laws. Asking unelected tech executives to do this is asking for trouble. They have no business doing it.
> I don’t want some overconfident Silicon Valley engineering firm telling me how to use my digital tools, and you shouldn’t either.
Last I heard, a US firm can refuse to do business with the US military as a customer in general commercial contexts, there is no blanket legal duty for private companies to sell goods or services to the US military, government agencies do not have a constitutional right to (nor are they a protected category for) the purchase of goods and services from private businesses, and private contracts are voluntary so if either party doesn't like the terms they can decline.
There's the somewhat conscription-y Defense Production Act, but the US goverment making use of that in this case is fundamentally incompatible with them simultaneously declaring the exact same organisation a "supply chain risk". Even without the near simultaneous references to both in this case, it seems to me like the US admin has said:
WE DEMAND YOU SELL US YOUR STUFF OR WE'LL SHOW YOU BY BANNING OURSELVES FROM BUYING YOUR STUFF!!!!!111
Modulo Trump being more shouty and less coherent, and Hegseth being less shouty.
> To stop mass surveillance and autonomous lethality, pass laws. Asking unelected tech executives to do this is asking for trouble. They have no business doing it.
The US executive appears to consider the US constitution to not bind on them, only on their enemies.
What laws do you think you can pass, when even the constitution is seen that way?
I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people.
In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.
Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)
Jesus christ man, you are pulling out a lot from a single typo, eh?
English is just not my first language (and not the last either). Having an accent or the occasional misspelling on some forum has never impacted me professionally.
Slow down. If you read my comment it’s about an aggregate trend, not you or even your comment, which I don’t mention. Plenty of native speakers are slipping. (Fwiw the quality of your writing is pretty native feeling, so good work)
It has a second definition which means something like "unbelievable in its strangeness/perfection", which can be used to imply that a real thing feels made up.
I agree that it's not a good word choice when describing a thing that could actually be fake, but you could describe a view from a mountain as fantastical even though it was 100% real.
Requiring microphone access is a dealbreaker. I transcribe audio files I’ve recorded on other equipment. You don’t need my mic for that.
I clicked hoping it would leverage whisper’s translation capabilities as well, since MacWhisper does not do that (it leverages Apple’s subpar built in translation). It doesn’t do that either.
(Maybe you’re using this for dictation? That’s a very specific subset of transcription. I’d suggest using a name that leans into that.)
I’m sorry but in the context of a 50 year old technology like email, 2008 was yesterday. Gmail is in the wrong, you don’t get to just update the standard for email like it’s TikTok content or a Roblox update or whatever.
Email was here long before Gmail and will be here long after Google abandons it.
Completely separate decision with a higher legal bar for doing that.
It's one thing to allow police to search a phone. Another to compel someone to unlock the device.
We live in a world of grays and nuance and an "all or nothing" outlook on security discourages people from taking meaningful steps to protect themselves.
Yes they do because they are trying to sell to the Department of War.
No one made Anthropic try to be a military contractor. It’s pretty much the definition of being a military contractor that your product helps to kill people.
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