cmdli

I know this post is mainly about money in politics, but lobbying does go a lot farther than campaign contributions. Many lobbying groups are arranged around certain political groups, like environmentalism (Sierra Club), civil liberties (ACLU), or gun rights (NRA).

"Lobbying" is a generic term for influencing a politician, and it existed well before Citizens United. Hell, corporate influence in politics also existed long before Citizens United, too.

"Supply chain risk" specifically refers to risk of malicious attack or sabotage through the supply chain, not all risks associated with supply chains.

A vendor with particularly poor QA might be a risk in your supply chain but isn't a "supply chain risk" according to this designation and neither would Anthropic be.

Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.

That isn't sabotage, that is simply product design. Anthropic is free to create their products that refuse to kill people, and the DoD is free not to buy those products if they don't fit their needs.

However, that's not what a supply chain risk is. It's not an order to "don't buy these products if they don't work the way we want them to", its designating Anthropic as a national security threat because they might intentionally sabotage US military operations.

There are plenty of companies that are opposed to certain operations of the US military and refuse to sell to the US military on those grounds. None of them are considered a supply chain risk because that's not what a supply chain risk is.

A supply chain risk is specifically an entity that is likely to maliciously sabotage the US military's operations, such as Chinese companies that are controlled by the CCP. It is not simply a decision to "not buy from this company", but rather a wide-ranging decision that this particular company is a national security threat.

This also includes revenue sharing with distribution partners, which should probably be in COGS.

Would you care if your accountant liked to sit outside a high school and watch teenage girls with binoculars? What if a local shop owner was known to harass female employees? Everybody has a line somewhere.

I guess it depends on how to measure a single "person"? If you spun up 2000 copies of Terrance Tao, I wouldn't be surprised if you found a few new discoveries at the end of it.

It sounds like they are making a clear argument: models are getting worse for certain domains even while they are getting better at others.

I don't know if I agree with that but it doesn't seem like an irrational claim and does seem credible to me.

This reminds me a lot of the proof by construction for the 4-color theorem. It was only enabled by the advancement of computers and dissatisfied many of the computer scientists and mathematicians since it was a "brute force" approach.

I wonder if AI will end up being similar. Certain theorems get proven by AI but others do not. We haven't reached the limits of this yet and I haven't found a good argument for where those limits will be (I do doubt that there are no limits).

> I’m surprised there isn’t a Costco like medical group that’s nationwide, has a membership, and works solely to provide care efficiently.

What you are describing is an HMO, which hasn't had that much lower costs historically. Theoretically, you pay once and then they take care of you, but in practice costs haven't been that much lower.

Millions would also love to live in Europe. Does that make them better than the US?

Twitter isn’t collapsing, but it’s hardly more profitable. In fact, the last numbers we know about them show >50% drop in revenue.

I think this is disingenuous. Charlie Kirk's content was specifically around "triggering the libs". He deliberately tried to make people angry, not looking to make any kind of common ground for discussion.