If it's a loyalty test then you'd think the DoD would be willing to let them "fail" and simply drop the contract, but instead they're threatening to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.
If we're going by Occam's razor: it's Friday so Pete probably started drinking ~10:30-11am.
This administration has repeatedly shown it will try to bully or take an outrageous negotiating position just to gain featly. Whether they get anything or whether the dispute is actually what the label says should always be treated with skepticism, especially these days with social media information wars. That’s the benefit of realpolitik when you’re a superpower, you often don’t actually need anything, you can just make an example of people to keep the flock in check.
It seems like they'd have a stronger negotiating position if they had an alternative contractor waiting in the wings before they accused Anthropic of being woke traitors, as opposed to a threat to migrate away over the next 6 months.
But again, the sophistication of their strategery might also have a negative correlation with Hegseth's BAC.
No one accused them of being competent negotiators. Remember, the secret behind the "Art of the Deal" is to be obstinate and abusive until everyone settles just to stop dealing with you.
They're not threatening to do that. They just did. Read the tweet linked in the article.
> In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20
This has never happened before. It just goes to show how overextended the USG is these days. America is broke. Anthropic is about to IPO. Most stock market money comes from foreign countries like Japan these days. All those people are going to trust Anthropic more if they believe the company is neutral among nations and acting as a check and balance to power.
U.S. authorities labeled them a supply chain risk. The military went on Twitter and basically labeled Anthropic an enemy of the state. The most popular company on Earth. They did that. If USG was able to issue some kind of secret court order compelling them to act and keep it covert then they would have done it.
> If it's a loyalty test then you'd think the DoD would be willing to let them "fail" and simply drop the contract, but instead they're threatening to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.
It is not just a test, it is PR of sorts. They want to bully everyone into loyalty.
> If we're going by Occam's razor: it's Friday so Pete probably started drinking ~10:30-11am.
If we're going by Occam's razor, then we should cut away the drinks. USSR started its terror not because someone was drunk, it was a deliberate action to make everyone afraid to do anything. They targeted people at random and executed them accusing them of counterrevolution or espionage. The goal was to instill fear.
Now Putin regime does the same, they are instilling fear in people. It is a basic authoritarian reflex to make people afraid of being marked as disloyal. They prefer to do it in unpredictable ways to create an uncertainty of where the red lines are so people don't try even to toeing them.
Trump is not very skilled in the mechanics of terror. He is predictable which is unfortunate for a would-be dictator. It is an incompetence, and if a hypothesis resort to it, it is a bad sign for a hypothesis. But AFAIK no hypotheses explaining Trump can avoid introducing his incompetence into the picture. In this light the reliance of a hypothesis on incompetence loses its discriminatory power.
Everyone in the administration is completely drunk on power, they truly believe the government should be allowed to do whatever they please, despite being vehemently against previous governments telling their constituents what to do. Such nonsense, they hold no values, they only want complete power.
I don't know how the business leadership community could watch this whole affair and still be in support of them AT ALL. This is well past getting a crappy twitter rant from Trump on the weekend that maybe one could ignore until the next rant.
Yeah I'm guessing the TLD was the main signal, based on other comments linking to a thread about "Pinggy", who was also using a .online. The fact that Namecheap is giving them out for free means they probably are more scammy on average.
I've also never added domains to Google Search Console and haven't had blacklisting issue other than with a free .ml (another "cursed" TLD) site that was by default assumed to be spam by Facebook Messenger.
It's unfortunate that this category exists, but I don't share the OP's .com purism; I've used a mix of TLDs and even the cheap ones like .fyi and .cc haven't come under extra scrutiny as far as I can tell.
I think they could get pretty far with a PWA, but there are legitimate arguments to go native. For use cases like podcasts, where users can download them ahead of time, it seems like Safari limits storage to 1GB [0]. Plus playing background audio might not be as good an experience.
Wikidata is a separate project, specifically for structured data in the form of semantic triples [0]. It's essentially the open-source version of Google's KnowledgeGraph; both sourced a lot of their initial data from Metaweb's Freebase [1], which Google acquired in 2010.
Does that logic apply only when the claimed cut is over 100%?
If I advertise that my store "cut prices by 50%" but the prices are actually only 33% lower (which is the same as undoing a 50% price hike), would it be pedantic to call me out on my bullshit?
> Does that logic apply only when the claimed cut is over 100%?
Yes, I’d say.
It’s the same as the informal usage of “X times smaller” to describe scaling by 1/X. The idiom generally isn’t used unless X > 1. (The exception might be when several values of X are reported together. Then one might say “0.74 times smaller” to maintain parallel form with nearby “4 times smaller” and similar claims.)
No, it does not conform. As I wrote earlier, I have not seen that usage for less than 100%. So 600% conforms; 50% does not.
That is, expressions like "twice as slow/thin/short/..." or "2x as slow/thin/short/..." or "200% as slow/thin/short/..." have a well-established usage that is understood to mean "half as fast/thick/tall/..."
But "50% as slow/thin/short/..." or "half as slow/thin/short/..." have no such established usage.
For some evidence to support my claim, please see this 2008 discussion on Language Log:
Since HN has a tendency to trim URLs and might prevent this link from taking you to the relevant portion of a rather lengthy article, I'll quote the salent bits:
"A further complexity: in addition to the N times more/larger than usage, there is also a N times less/lower than [to mean] '1/Nth as much as' usage"
"[About this usage, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage reports that] times has now been used in such constructions for about 300 years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever been misunderstood."
I believe that the history of English language usage is replete with examples such as "X times less than" when X > 1, but similar constructions for X <= 1 do not appear with appreciable frequency.
In any case, I think that continuing our conversation is unlikely to be productive, so this will be my last reply.
I will just say in closing that our conversation is a good example of why the MAGA folks have probably chosen phrasing such as this.
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