From what I was reading, it appears that their tools were used outside the scope of their contract with DoD via Palantir's work that also used Claude. Anthropic freaked out, DoD freaked out that Anthropic freaked out and threatened to declare them a supply chain risk. That designation would've required any company that contracts with DoD to strip out any Anthropic tooling from their business in order to continue working with DoD. It was effectively designating Anthropic a terrorist organization.
I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
> having men who'd make women comfortable having kids
This is maybe the most underrated comment in this whole lively thread. Completely agree on all fronts. Men are a huge, huge problem in this equation: in the US, anyway, many of them simply refuse to catch up to simple human values about respect, mutuality, and emotional intelligence.
At root it's about entitlement. Scores of women, seeing this very, very clearly since age 5 in the boys and men around them, get to adulthood and, sanely in my view, just say "no thanks". Why shouldn't they?
There's a book about male domestic violence perpetrators which you really ought to read. It's called "Why Does He Do That?". Author is Bancroft. The vast majority of men in the US are not abusers. But he describes a degree of entitlement to women -- their bodies and minds -- that, in my decades of clinical experience with families and couples, applies to most men in our culture. It's a little parable:
> Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.
> In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.
> In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the
problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public
picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the
land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his
amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they
continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area. The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer.
> He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in
driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his
physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area,
he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot
them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.
> One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had
suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family
on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the
documentary record. When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew.
> He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.”
> Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never
be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went
through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly
misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.
I understand the majority of the story, and through some personal experience really feel for women who have a controlling and abusive man. I find the story a bit strange though. It begins describing how boys inherit the idea of some beautiful woman that they are owed instead of it being something that requires constant work and effort. I agree/understand this part. But then it describes him trying to limit public access, how he has no document showing ownership, etc and this is where I get lost. To me that is what marriage is, giving up freedom for a partnership. To turn my husband self into a park, I feel like it is completely understandable my wife wants some space that is "public" and other that is "private". The key is healthy boundaries, ones set by compromise and understanding through honest communication. That's what separates healthy and abusive relationships, not the boundaries in the first place.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story and if I am let me know, I just feel like it describes the ideal situation as one's partner entirety is open to the "public", and where setting boundaries itself is abusive, which I feel like is not really how most people feel nor what they want in a relationship.
I'm not the author, of course, so I can't say for certain that I have the most correct reading of it. But, if I'm reading your interpretation right, here's what I'd say:
The story analogizing women to land -- which has no voice, no agency, no mind -- is the critical part. If one is consensually "limiting public access" with another sentient human being, that's wonderful -- because you'd be doing that in dialogue, in true partnership, on the same footing, etc. "Hey, we're in a marriage now, that means we agree to not sleep with other people. Deal? Deal." I think the author (and certainly I) would heartily endorse that sort of "wanting some space that is public and some that is private".
The key word in your comment, to me, was "healthy" -- as in "healthy boundaries," and honest communication etc. You're right, it's not boundaries as such that describes abuse or even the entitlement on which abuse rests. It's the kind of boundaries.
What Bancroft is saying in the parable is that, if men see women as pieces of land -- private land, at that -- that they have a god-given right to, then anything healthy between men and women is by definition impossible. That's why, in the parable, the boy's compromises and concessions are in fact no such thing: because they're still founded on inhuman premises.
There are aspects of the parable here that the book goes into a lot more detail on -- male jealousy, in particular -- that overlap a lot with what you and me are talking about. I urge you to read it! The boy limiting public access on these entitled premises is what a lot of men will do, on either side of the "abuse" line: losing their shit when their attractive girlfriend, who they chose in part because of her attractiveness, goes out in public looking attractive, and he sees other people (other men) looking at her. Maybe next time he tells her "you're not wearing that outfit", thus "limiting public access" but not in the healthy sense that you mean it, because she's not treated as sentient, she's not part of a conversation. She's just coerced. (This is excused or minimized as "culture" or "values" by many!)
But again, if I'm reading you right, I think the part where you got lost is just that. Ironically, it's probably because you have a pretty healthy view of relationships that just how fucked up the boy in the story is confused you!
Yeah that helps it make more sense. I was reading it as Bancroft comparing woman to land, instead of it being Bancroft showing there are men who treat women as land. I'll definitely give the book a read.
IME, women are overwhelmingly more entitled (in a general sense) than men, sorry.
Sure, women having to deal with a few "entitled" "predators" sucks and we should do something about that but the vast majority of men have no such entitlement - although obviously this is different in the context of a marriage.
There have always been certain rights granted to and duties expected from men and women. Leftism and feminism have weakened the expectations placed on women (and to a lesser extent men) and now the scales are unbalanced.
1. American men feel entitled to women, as from birth they’re told that they are.
2. Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men. Unlike before, women can now survive (and even thrive) outside of a relationship with a man, especially an entitled one.
3. As a result, there are fewer babies.
OP’s point was that men ought to look at themselves in the mirror when they’re clutching their pearls about lower birth rates. I agreed, and proposed that the specific mechanism for men being shitty partners to have a kid with in so many cases is male entitlement: guys don’t believe they need to put in the work to be good partners and instead simply deserve a woman to bear their children. (Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex.)
> American men feel entitled to women, as from birth they’re told that they are.
Outside of lower-class men (who tend to have more machismo/less to lose) and presumably unusually attractive men (who can get away with it), I have literally never heard anyone express this even once. Maybe lay off the smut?
> Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men
You absolutely should not engage with "entitled" men, insofar as they aren't a figment of your imagination.
> Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex
> it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.
The really skeptical take here is that eventually all of Musk's companies merge, or at least the biggest ones, for juicing that market value to get that $1T payout. Looking at Tesla.
You're in half the comment replies with a confrontational tone and, at times, quite aggressively. It does not feel as though you're sincerely engaging, but instead have an ideological world view that makes it difficult to reconcile different perspectives.
I'm working directly with these tools and have several colleagues who do as well. Our collective anecdotal experience keeps coming back to the conclusion that the tech just isn't where the marketing is on its capabilities. There's probably some value in the tech here, which leads others like yourself to be so completely sold on it, but it's just not materializing that much in my day-to-day outside of creating the most basic code/scaffolding where I then have to go back and fix/correct because there are subtle errors. It's actually hard to tell if my productivity is better because I have to spend time fixing the generated output.
Maybe it would help to recognize that your experience is not the norm. And if the tech were there, where are the actual profits from selling it? It's increasingly more common for it to be "under development" for selling to consumers or only deployed as a chatbot in scenarios where it's acceptable to be wrong and warnings to verify output yourself.
I’m replying to the people replying to me, which is hopefully permissible? I will respond aggressively to people who say that my work must not be very important or hard if I feel that AI can do a considerable portion of my day to day because I feel like that is initiating rudeness and find that the HN tendency to talk down to people expressing this opinion is chilling important conversations.
If my other replies come off as aggro, I apologize - I definitely can struggle with moderating tone in comments to reflect how I actually feel.
> Our collective anecdotal experience keeps coming back to the conclusion that the tech just isn't where the marketing is on its capabilities. There's probably some value in the tech here, which leads others like yourself to be so completely sold on it
Let me be clear - I am not so completely sold on the current iteration. But I think there has been a significant improvement even since the midpoint of last year, the number of diffs I am returning mostly unedited is sharply increasing, and many people I am talking to are privately telling me they are no longer authoring any code themselves except for minor edits in diffs. Given that this has only been 3 years since chatgpt, really I am just looking at the curve and saying ‘woah.’
It's unfortunately the case that even understanding what AI can and cannot do has become a matter of, as you say, "ideological world view". Ideally we'd be able to discuss what's factually true of AI at the beginning of 2026, and what's likely to be true within the next few years, independently of whether the trends are good for most humans or what we ought to do about them. In practice that's become pretty difficult, and the article to which we're all responding does not contribute positively.
>independently of whether the trends are good for most humans or what we ought to do about them.
This whole article is about the trends and of they are good for humans. I was pleasantly surprised that this was not yet another argument of "AI is (not) good enough" since people at this point have their fences set on that. I don't think it's too late to talk about how we as humans can manage pandora's box before it opens.
Responses like this dismissing the human element seem to want to isolate themselves from societal effects for some reason. The box will affect you.
Neither in my previous comment nor in my actual views do I dismiss the human element or expect to isolate myself from societal effects.
> I was pleasantly surprised that this was not yet another argument of "AI is (not) good enough"
The article does assert that, and that's important for its argument that ordinary workers just need to convince decisionmakers that things will go poorly if they replace us.
"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem... But AI can’t do your job."
>independently of whether the trends are good for most humans or what we ought to do about them.
Saying "the writer shouldn't talk about this" is about as dismissive of a topic as you can be. You could have simply said "this topic isn't as interesting to delve into", but the framing that "the article to which we're all responding does not contribute positively." suggests that.
>This isn't ambiguous.
It's also talking about the present. The article already made clear it is not going to predict the future of tech in the very beginning. Its looking at the here and now for AI and the human element for any possible futures on whether or not that remains the case or not.
Also note this response. It is again trying to focus on the tech arguments. This isn't the focus of this argument
That two things can or should be discussed independently doesn't mean either is unimportant. And insisting that you know what I meant better than I do is not a good way to have a productive conversation.
As for the Doctorow article, I don't understand exactly what you're trying to say about "focus", but it's incoherent to read the discussion about replacement of your current job as talking purely about the present - since the job is currently yours, the replacement must happen in the future.
> Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.
Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.
It must be part of a larger marketing push; their boss(?) appeared on the Odd Lots podcast a couple days ago to talk about this work: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-... He spent a lot of time promoting this new National Design Studio's attempt to attract tech works for 2-year commitments to drop into existing orgs, which is basically how the 18F PIF program worked before it was dissolved earlier this year. Perhaps abruptly terminating a program to reinvent it from scratch six months later is very efficient.
(A warning about Odd Lots: the hosts never question or push back on people talking their book. This especially bad with politicians and political appointees, who are often very creative during their interviews.)
> With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end.
Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.
It was downplayed at every other opportunity including the conclusion, emphasizing instead the lone team of two heros. A few shout outs here and there, but the theme was clear.
They're still pushing the "underground mine" bullshit too even though the ex-salt mine storage facility has a state of the art audio and video digitisation studio in it.
Unequivocally, yes. There are plenty of "useful" things that can come out of doing unethical things, that doesn't make it okay. And, arguably, ChatGPT isn't nearly as useful as it is at convincing you it is.
This is so strange to me. It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon. No one cares that the morning commute's traffic is just as it was the day before and the day before that, but they do care that an accident shut down the main highway. It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.
At some point, media literacy went out the window in the US. Probably right around the time humanities education did.
The source article elaborates on the reasons that dramatically over-reporting homicide and terrorism is bad for the public. One of those reasons is that it obscures the actual changes in our lives, it hides what’s truly ‘new’. In that sense, they are fully agreeing with you: news is supposed to communicate on what changed, not what stayed the same. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re supposed to report on the uncommon, but rather they should report on the delta, i.e. what’s different from yesterday.
If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.
> It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon.... It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.
News organizations could report on people dying of extremely rare diseases and these are rarely reported on compared to terrorism/homicide.
Rarity is not the best predictor of whether a news organization will cover something. "Likelihood of engagement/rage/shock/fear/anxiety" is the best predictor of story coverage, although this overlaps well with "uncommon happening."
There's absolutely nothing special about news organizations (beyond engaging in 1st amendment activity regularly): they want to make money, they're businesses.
Seems like it, yes.
reply