cuuupid

At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record,

- no open weights

- can’t use claude to research AI

- train on everyone else’s IP and sell it back to them

- 8 regulatory capture attempts and counting

- so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US government

This is not effective altruism / rationalism gone wild, it’s just monopolistic anti-competitive business practices masquerading as ethics, and they’ll continue getting away with this until we look past their sensationalism and hit them with antitrust.

Altman gets so much hate but OpenAI has been a far better steward (on 3/5 above at least) than Anthropic!

This might be IT department enforced, we're a FedRAMP High shop with Google IdP and roll Safari

I've worked at some places where they restrict to Chrome because they have a corporate extension

Is the limiting factor for extensions APIs or just porting it to WebKit?

Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?

Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.

I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.

You are absolutely correct, billable hours are perverse incentives and wrap rates border on predatory, but this status quo is Congressionally mandated and buy commercial as a policy is generally bipartisan.

I was not a fan of Direct File (I think it could have been much better!) but it was objectively in the success bucket:

- ~$50M all-in to build which sounds egregious but is small for a government project

- mostly good outcomes

- ~4y to pilot which also sounds egregious for a single moderate-complexity web app but again is practically lightspeed for a government project

People blame it getting shuttered on Trump but this is both a misread and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates. The entire federal government is deliberately paced and primarily driven by a combination of politicals, regulation, budget, Congressional policymaking, and program staffing. The hammer on this was always going to fall,

[1] Congress has maintained a "buy over build" policy since literally the Cold War. Ironically the first policy here (1965) was to buy computers from ADP instead of custom-building them. The most impactful "buy commercial" policy (1996) was also IT focused. This was literally codified in several parts of the FAR, and if we're going to be blaming admins, the Trump admin has actually weakened the FAR with the RFO and would be on the other side of this issue.

[2] This policy is also the foundation upon which IT contractors like Palantir are built, if you've ever wondered "wtf do they do" they are a commercial contractor that builds custom software for government. So agencies get their custom stuff, Congress is happy they bought commercial, and the only loser is the taxpayer who overpaid a factor of 3-5x. To their credit, Palantir is a huge improvement on the status quo, because they charge by use cases and outcomes, whereas traditional SI's operate on a staffing model and a combination of high wrap rates and perverse incentives with billable hours creates horrible outcomes and ballooning costs. Anyways, there are a lot of commercial vendors that this work "could have" gone to and didn't. It would also have been really easy for them to shop this out because this was shaped really well for GSA MAS or STARS III.

[3] When you build things internally with e.g. 18F, one agency is typically the "customer" and pays the other agency (afaik 18F program is nested under the White House). So this really sucks when they walk away; 18F earned a reputation for building things through pilot, blogging about it, puffing their cheeks in the media, sending a bill to the agency, and then running off to the next shiny thing as engineers tend to do. As an agency you save a bit of money initially but now you are left with something nobody knows how to maintain, you have to hire contractors to do it, which by nature has to be a staffing contract, and then the wrap rate alone wrecks you. This happens all the time with commercial vendors, usually when they are outsized or don't get renewed, but obviously upsetting when it happens internally.

[4] The author of this piece was part of the team and so as you'd expect this piece is exceptionally biased. The reality is that the IRS self-assessed the maintenance as low and everybody who reports on this treats this as fact when it was not a GAO estimate, which is what carries any actual weight, it was internal IRS estimates and a single independent that mainly assessed call center volume not the actual system. Not only does their reputation precede them here, but their own spend on buildout (~$30M on contractors to help) contradicts the low maintenance narrative. We may never see a GAO estimate here, but the contract would almost certainly go out to TrussWorks, all government contracting data is public and you can look up for yourself how much TrussWorks typically charges the IRS whether directly or thru ATI's vehicles as subawards.

This sort of thing was only worse in the past and IMO this admin has actually made the largest inroads to resolving this issue which tbh lies primarily in procurement (RFO, FR20x, PA, mandates for automation, shift to COTS, etc). With any luck this will get recompeted

Project 20x looks pretty cool, we're in a similar space and there's probably a ~2y horizon to fix things before the bureaucracy falls to consultocracy. FWIW if you or anyone else building in gov need funding to get stuff off the ground there are plenty of DC-based VCs that are phenomenal, mission oriented and take big swings like this all the time.

Fireworks is an inference provider that specializes in running open source models very fast and makes almost all of their margin on chinese models

So the economic incentive is literally their entire business model lol

This is essentially the point of the visa, it feels wrong especially as YC drops standards and increases cohort sizes, but the same power laws that keep them winning also apply here in maximizing economic value of each O-1 approval

Basically of all visas O-1 is virtually guaranteed to have highly positive economic value

This admin and its policies on immigrant visas have been around for 1 year and Biden was famously pro immigration

This makes even less sense, Trump admin has been here for 1 year, the implication here is a university grad on H1-B in January would become a world class researcher capable of building a frontier model in <18mo

The visa that would correlate to this is the O-1 visa

20k O-1 visas were issued last FY which was mostly under the Trump admin, up from 19.5k the previous FY under the Biden admin