I think the big problem is that this is more like a sanction, more than the government saying they don't want to do business with them. They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.
You certainly seem to support the government designating a company a SCR at gunpoint when they refuse to renegotiate a signed, agreed to, and finalized contract.
...You realize the only valid uses of supply chain risk you mentioned were DJI and Huawei. TikTok isn't providing services to the U.S. Gov. Anthropic is an American company with no foreign ownership. A supplier does not have to sell it's product to a government it knows is liable to misuse it. Not as a SaaS provider. Nvidia and ASML are both now covered under ITAR. Your specification of Democrat &Republican admins just demonstrates both are two sides of the same coin. Both need a good and thorough cleaning out.
> They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
Is neither unusual nor extraordinary. The 2022 TikTok ban on government devices—enacted under the Biden administration—carried the same viral-as-in-GPL terms.
The TikTok ban upheld by the courts was a law enacted by Congress, not an executive action, specifically targeting Tiktok. The legal challenges were all about the law's constitutionality.
This dispute challenges the executive's action, not the underlying law (10 USC 3252). Anthropic does make some constitutional claims regarding the 1st and 5th amendments, but they also advance procedural challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act and statutory arguments about whether the law authorized the action.
At least TikTok is owned by China, which is the US’s rival. Nothing Anthropic has done gives me the impression they’re working against anything America.
The story is they started fishing for classified info on how their tooling was used from their prime contractor, Palantir, who rightfully blew the whistle on them and told DOD what they were up to.
The actual letter the govt sent Anthropic narrowed the supply chain risk to DoD usage. Far less than the Epstein administration poffered on social media
It’s not just the supply chain risk designation from the Department of defense. Trump then added that he would order all government agencies to stop doing business with them. Basically, if you do not cave to their ideology, you will be coerced through such unethical means.
I think that sometimes they decide certain businesses have too much fraud, and they just get out of them. It's terrible for them to do that with no notice, though.
Many big eSIM players uses Stripe so it is weird. Also, if a fraudulent users stole some cards and started card testing then why put all responsibility on me? noting that last dispute was 7 months ago. So everything was looking good.
Tech person - there's only one contributor, it's less than 48 hours old, and appears to be primarily vibe coded with the assistance of Claude Code. No mentions of types of stitches even though it's crucial to understanding how a garment is made. I wonder too if this grammar can represent a glove made from a single strand of yarn.
It's nowhere near Marvelous Designer. Marvelous Designer is for making 3D clothing for games, animation, and such. It's a limited version of Clo[1] , which is for making real-world clothing. Clo lets you design clothing, put it on an avatar, and watch it move and drape with clothing physics. It looks real. When you see good clothing in a game, it was probably created with Marvelous Designer.
Then Clo exports a file for fabric cutting compliant with the ASTM D6673-10 standard, Standard Practice for Sewn Pattern Data Interchange, which is used for the production of garment patterns. It's kind of clunky, being based on Autodesk DXF, AutoCAD's export format from the 1980s, but it's what the industry uses. You can bring such files into anything that reads DXF and view them. So a widely used formal descriptive language for fabric cutting already exists. You can send those files to a contract garment manufacturer and get garments back.
Marvelous Designer is just Clo minus the cutting pattern export feature.
Stitches are load-bearing, so specifying a bartack or a flatlock seems pretty important to unambiguously specifying a garment. Along the same lines, I don't see a way to specify hardware that isn't for closures, e.g. the rivets used to reinforce denim pockets.
I know, I make clothes too. Probably unlike the creator of this thing.
But the comment I was responding to seemed to be using "stitch" in the way knitters use it, not the way sewists use it. No pattern drafting system can represent the stitches necessary to create a panel of knit fabric, that's simply not the level of abstraction they work at.
This thing isn't good but not for the reason of being unable to represent a one-strand mitten or whatever, which is what I think they were getting at.
Well, I actually had two interrelated thoughts and because of proximity I think I confused things. I guess what I was thinking was "garments are constructed not of "panels" but of threads of a given material which can be abstractly thought of as being panels when woven or knitted, but ..." and from there I thought of failure modes, like the fact that this doesn't have a way of specifying straight vs zigzag stitches, which doesn't have a way of specifying things that are not joined together via stitching panels together, etc. Like, I don't think this can specify a pair of jeans, because the hem of a jean requires a chain stitch at the bottom, which isn't unambiguously defined. This project feels like it devalues the complexity of something that is one of the defining features of civilization.
It wasn't quite as old, but there was an old MS DOS database system called Cosmos Revelation that was sort of a proto-nosql/graph database used keys and values for records, with the values being stored in long strings that contained field separators, and support for multiple values of the same time in a single field of a record. It used a language called R/BASIC that had library routines to help you work with the data structure.
This software is my retro computing white whale, I've never been able to find it. But I think it's evolved into a product called OpenInsight, by Revelation Software, which still exists.
Author here. You've intrigued me with this product, to say the least. As I get more experience with the productivity classics under my belt, I absolutely intend to branch out into titles like you've mentioned. That's assuming I can find the stuff though!
It would be really ironic if the guy who kept harping on the need to make us an interplanetary species ended up being the one who triggered a Kessler effect.
But I don't think even he believes he's going to launch a million satellites.
He reads like the kind of dumb who sees "Solar panels work a lot better in space" and ignores all other factors (cooling) and thinks "it's the greatest idea ever!".
But heh, spending tons of energy to etch silicon to make GPUs, tons of energy to rocket them to space, and letting them burn in atmosphere when they become obsolete... must be nice to live on a planet where we have the climate budget to waste on all of that!
I'm completely unfamiliar with these, but it seems like you need to press your palm against the device, no? The doctor's office is the last place I'd want to do that.
You don't need to press your palm, you just hover it over the plate for a moment. I think the hardware is just an IR illuminator+camera.
It does seem like a technology that should have a useful niche. Unlike fingerprints you don't leave partial copies of your vein pattern on everything you touch; unlike face recognition it's an explicit act you take so it can be used for attestation-type actions (like paying). It still has all the usual disadvantages and advantages of any other biometric. Perhaps the unique niche isn't big enough to fit a new product into though.
I'm writing my first custom policy for MS's B2C identity provider, and it's a painful process.
Making authentication and SSO more painless will actually make the world a better place -- apps will become more secure, people will be less frustrated when they use them, etc., and people like me will have less stress in their lives.
This matches my experience as an amateur programmer. The initial hill was steep, but I don't think it was because people weren't friendly.
There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's sometimes easier to find correct answers for Clojure.
Clojure itself is very clean and consistent, it's got a lot of polish to it, which makes it comparatively easy to learn. And there isn't that much of it. But for a long time the tooling was hard.
That's far less of a problem than it used to be. deps.edn and shadow-cljs both made things easier, as has Cursive. People say nice things about Calva, but I don't know it.
I'm a big fan. Babashka alone is enough to make learning Clojure worthwhile. Also, for someone like me, it's kind of nice that it feels almost finished. Once you learn it, you know it, and now that the tooling has settled down a bit you don't have to keep running to keep up.
People posting the wrong information is a great opportunity for a community to explain why it’s wrong. We lost that take on community and it’s a major loss for our entire industry. It’s remarkably hard for people to figure out why they’re wrong when they’re wrong.
I don’t think the solution is the Usenet-esque “you are wrong and your breeding is suspect” way. But there’s a very good place in the middle and I’d really like to find that place.
Business wise, I think we’re using the wrong paradigm in some major places. Maybe we can beat that while I’m still alive and that would be a net win for our whole craft.
I was on the Cypherpunks list, mostly as a lurker. The technical discussions were amazing. I was really into it at the time, but now I find some of the political ideas to be embarrassing.
Other people had a lot to do with the spread of strong crypto as well. Many people realized that encryption was necessary if we wanted to do business online. Matt Blaze (who was on the Cypherpunks list, but never said anything crazy), helped blow up the government's compromise solution, mandatory key escrow, by demonstrating flaws in their Clipper chip technology. The MIT Press published PGP's source code in book form, using an OCR font, because books couldn't be blocked as munitions. I think Hal Abelson, who wasn't on the list, was the person behind that.
The basic political idea behind the list was that you could effect change by writing code. Instead of going to the government, with your cap in your hand, and saying, Please, sir, can we have strong encryption?, you write code and give it away, thus making the law impossible to enforce. This sounds really cool when you're young, especially if you write code, but it's an anti-democratic idea.
The political positions of some of the leaders was kind of an extreme, anarchist spin on libertarianism. Bitcoin is a currency designed to solve a specific problem -- it's kind of the ultimate solution to the old goldbug fear that governments will print money and dilute the currency. That's impossible under Bitcoin.
The original crypto currency the Cypherpunks were really into was David Chaum's Digicash, which was designed to solve a completely different problem, the same one Monero is aimed at today. It was supposed to be untraceable. Instead of asking governments to lower taxes, the idea was that programmers could create a way to transfer funds anonymously. In theory, taxes would become impossible to collect, and national borders would collapse.
Eventually this led to things like discussions of anonymous murder contracts. There was a proposed protocol that was supposed to allow you to put out a hit on someone with complete safety. You could pay the killer anonymously with digital currency. I think the payment would go into some sort of escrow, so the killer would know they'd get paid. I don't remember how the system was able to know that the hit had taken place.
Those murder contracts were one of the things that made me pull back from the list. But it really was terrific to read, even though I think it would be a mistake to lionize it too much. Arguably, they were struggling to make the whole world run on 8chan's rules.
I -think- the anti-democratic thing is making it impossible to enforce the laws of a democratic society. If a democracy decides that strong encryption should be banned, going against that is going against the will of the people.
Of course, we all (technical people) agree that it was the right thing, but ask yourself: If there was a vote on the issue, do you think the majority of people would vote for keeping strong encryption, or do you think they'd ban it? Especially back then.
I personally think they'd ban it. I bet the majority would just go "encryption is for terrorists and bad people, we don't need it", and we'd lose the vote.
Now for an alternative thought exercise consider the situation in which a democracy votes to end itself and initiate a dictatorship. Is it democratic or anti-democratic to try to stop it?
Although the end of the Weimar Republic was essentially an electoral choice, significant chunks of the electorate by then had been skewed, divided, disenfranchised, or even displaced it wouldn't be accurate to call the elections fully representative. And yes, similar efforts are underway in the US too.
Through the good advertising it's now usually understood as 'we vote => we are in control => values', except democracy is clearly has nothing with social and humanitarian values.
Democracy is a system where political disagreements are resolved through a set of agreed-upon rules (AKA "rule of law") instead of violence. The alternative to Democracy is mass murder. There is still plenty of violence in a Democracy -- witness the prison system in the USA, but it isn't neighbors just casually murdering each other (as also happened in the USA in an organized way in the Jim Crow era). Interesting to note -- both counter-examples were / are founded on denying parties participation in the democratic process...
The Rwandan and Bosnian civil wars are both examples of "tyranny of the masses" where there's no mechanism for resolving disputes between groups, besides killing your neighbor.
It's what John Gilmore said and claimed to believe (emphatically, unambiguously, repeatedly) to me in person that I object to, and the intellectually dishonest and factually incorrect way he argued in support of it, but not anything he's written publically, nor who he listens to.
He's been claiming to me and other people that I got mad that he listened to somebody I disagree with, but he's gaslighting about the point I clearly explained to him: I listened to what Scott Adams said too, so I know what he said, and what he's said in the past, and I don't agree with him, and I explained clearly why he was lying and wrong. But John made it extremely clear that he does believe Scott Adams' lies, and other White Supremacist propaganda, and he also spouts ridiculous climate change conspiracy theories.
It's not just because John Gilmore strongly AGREES with Scott Adams, but also that he intellectually dishonestly and emphatically argues in support of White Supremacist propaganda like "Black people are a hate group", and that "White people should stay the hell away from Black people" and "It's OK to be White", and believes he (a successful straight white multimillionaire) suffers from systemic reverse discrimination.
All that in spite of all my arguments and the evidence that I gave him, which he refused to listen to or look at. I'm sure he knows very well what the evidence says, because he's not as ignorant as he's pretending to be, and I certainly tried very hard to explain it to him, he just would not listen to me, and refuses to accept it.
John pretended not to know about Scott Adam's long sordid history, but when he mentioned his girlfriend was coming over, I offered to read some Scott Adams quotes to her so we could hear her opinion, and he got mad and slammed a door in my face and refused to talk with me for the rest of the night. Not the behavior of somebody on the winning side of an argument, or a mature adult arguing in good faith.
“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.” -Scott Adams
So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.
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