People surprised by this don’t know that the expertise that incubated silicon chips at Stanford and around the valley was based on electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology, among other things.
Stanford and SV have always had deep defense ties. Palmer Luckey and Palantir etc are just the latest iteration of this.
That's about as culturally relevant to Stanford as talking of people who lived through the great depression.
The DoD doesn't get to neglect relationships with a community for decades and then talk of how much in common they have with each other. It's nonsense and transparently manipulative.
Yes, Hack for Defense is a decade old now. But the DoD famously had not done much business with area startups for many decades outside of very specific success stories like the CIA's In-Q-Tel.
Turns out that start-ups can't wait several years for a contract award. They tend to die in that time if they have no funding.
Additionally - talk of electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology has been a oft-repeated tagline by members of military leadership as well as Palantir representatives when talking amongst themselves about Silicon Valley or in their appeals to SV itself.
"We have so much in common! Here, why don't you open your history book and I'll show you!" - that's what the appeal comes off like.
I maintain that primarily relying on those examples is a poor choice in trying to establish cultural similarities.
> Turns out that start-ups can't wait several years for a contract award.
This isn’t true. They literally do this all the time. They just need funding. This is also true for biotech.
> They tend to die in that time if they have no funding.
Right. So they raise funding.
Your argument boils down to “the DoD won’t work with startups that don’t have funding,” which is both true and, frankly, as it should be, in my opinion.
> This isn’t true. They literally do this all the time. They just need funding. This is also true for biotech.
Thus the sentence I immediately followed the one this was made in response to where I said "They tend to die in that time if they have no funding."
> Right. So they raise funding.
In many, many cases when it comes to the DoD, their wants aren't seen as dual-purpose and start-ups struggle to find funding that isn't from some DoD-aligned and defense-focused investment firm - which haven't historically invested in large numbers of startups. At least not when I last checked several years ago.
And just to get ahead of this - a DoD want not being seen as dual purpose and the tech later being used for a dual purpose are two very different things.
> Your argument boils down to “the DoD won’t work with startups that don’t have funding,” which is both true and, frankly, as it should be, in my opinion.
My argument is that DoD contract law is poorly suited for funding meaningful sums of money to start-ups that do not have significant non-DoD sources of funding. I'm to understand relatively small sums of money can be awarded on a short time scale, but those sums of money are tiny compared to what's needed to execute on most contracts.
I would agree that it used to be more of a challenge than it is today. For what it’s worth, I worked at a defense contractor and have advised / invested in defense startups.
The government is much more open to it today than ever before. Is it still hard? Yes. Does it require funding? Yes.
I'm aware of a relative lessening of cultural aversion in the bay area of having anything to do with the DoD, but what of substance has changed on the gov side, really?
I'm aware of DIU and of greater outreach efforts to the bay area. I'm aware of a greater rhetorical focus within DoD leadership on taking advantage of Silicon Valley's tech expertise.
But I'm not aware of any substantive change to DoD acquisition law to address the fundamental incompatibility in funding models between DoD's traditional contractor base and bay area startups. The significant lag time to award contracts. The risk-aversion for the DoD where civil servants face political and, in some cases, legal liability for granting funding for projects that don't pan out.
Has the DoD's risk tolerance for investments changed recently? As in - accepting the possibility that some investments may not pan out if it means there's a good chance that other investments bear fruit.
Last I checked a few years ago, outreach to the bay area startups has been primarily using the DoD's equivalent of change found in the couch. A rounding error of DoD's overall available funding.
It’s the other side that’s changed. Venture investors have both a much greater appetite for large amounts of funding for defense and IC startups, and a lot more experience navigating the defense/IC procurement process, at least in part due to success with Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, and others.
I agree the overtures to attract the Bay Area are small potatoes, even if DIUx does help.
Have many defense investments in startups proven profitable enough for VCs and other investors to continue pouring money into the sector? Or is the sector primarily banking on moonshots?
I don't have a good frame of reference to know when VCs consider the industry worth pouring more money into or if it's a black hole for investment.
Surely there's gotta be some point where the industry has to prove itself worth additional investment $ rather than banking on finding another company where over 80% its valuation is based on memes and dreams (see: SpaceX) or has cartoonishly inflated expectation of future profitability (see: Palantir).
The unfortunate thing is that, while their academic position sounds plausible on paper, just like with most crypto things it's just a money grab.
How many crypto people (with legitimate backgrounds just like the founders of Polymarket and Kalshi) stood up and said big things about freedom and the unbanked etc., turns out they were literally just scamming people- there are so many examples besides FTX.
Letting people bet on any random thing is not at all related to this "price everything" theory. If that was their real goal they wouldn't behave so much like a normal sports betting company. I have yet to actually hear anyone defend their actual actions in a plausible way.
Did you ever consider that the crypto scammers might not be the same people as the crypto freedom folks? It wasn't one grand trick by a collective of genius con artists... Much like the cashier at the store isn't to blame for that guy calling your grandma and trying to trick her into sending money from her bank account.
Crypto is a speculative investment vehicle, its basically a lottery machine - why would people who are so invested in a lottery machine that you can avoid taxes or buy drugs with be surprised they are considered part of the con artists doing the pump and dumps?
> And why exactly are we "hoping for a global currency revolution"
So that Visa and MasterCard can't censor things they don't like. So that PayPal can't block creators from withdrawing money because they made a Japanese style game
When institutional investors and yolo 'get rich' people sell their coins it will drop to (in case of Bitcoin) 2,000 USD again, it would be closer to a currency then. However people would go crazy, because it's only very, very rarely used as a currency. Most just use it as a speculative asset.
Don't forget about regimes like Iran and North Korea using crypto to receive bribes, ransomware payments, and launder money. Crypto is a cesspool. Just wait for the bank runs when everyone tries to bail out. There's a reason we have banking regulations.
I think it's clear that crypto has real market-based utility as an exchange of value. It's just that much of that utility is illegal, for a spectrum of meanings of that word. Paying crypto to murder people is not the same as wanting to get out from under your shitty government's currency into another more stable one.
The whole Epstein thing (the money, I mean) just shows that money has always wanted to be moved around, and a certain class of people don't care how it gets done- I mean the arms dealers, but also the billionaires hiding money in their charities. A libertarian would say that crypto democratizes that for everyone. I don't think it can last forever though.
In the age of AI and npm supply chain attacks I feel like there are more reasons than ever to roll your own.
One other possible title of this article could just be, don’t break UI conventions. Which is not the same thing.
Instead of trying to download and configure a date time thing (for something app specific like domain specific date ranges) rather than having to rely on the configuration of a larger library, then having to manage all future major version upgrades (and some of these npm libraries have major versions every year!) why not just create your own smaller surface area component? It’ll be literally zero maintenance compared to managing an npm dependency in your app.
Counterpoint: all of these things are built right into the user's browser, and browser vendors independently work to avoid attacks across the userbase without any intervention from web designers. In fact, if the browser itself is compromised, we probably have bigger problems anyway. By just letting the browser handle these tools, we do not need to spend any resources at all.
Harvey was never very good, or useful. It mostly exists so large law firms can say they do AI. AFAICT. I hope it dies and something useful takes over, but i doubt it :)
Keep in mind harvey starts at like 50-100k, and is well out of the cost range of the vast majority of law firms.
This will help random people dealing with small claims, people cosplaying lawyers to avoid costs, etc.
It will have no effect on the legal startups that are actually good (Eve, et al), because what this stuff does is nowhere close to what most lawyers outside of commercial contract legal counsel spend their time on. I considered doing some AI legal consulting/startups myself, and so have spent tons of time literally sitting down with lawyers in various areas outside of my own and seeing where they spend their time for real.
Let's take one area: personal injury attorneys who aren't in the volume game (which is owned by a fairly small number of large national firms) spend lots of time on case valuation, getting data, and exhibit prep.
None of this is going to help deal with getting missing medical records from places that require that you literally fax random stuff to them, and then call to followup 18 times. I wish i was kidding. Even getting electronic medical records is still a serious pain in the ass, human wise.
Or analyze the past 1000 cases you have (100-1000 documents per case), including what county, what opposing lawyer, counsel, plus the 1000 documents in this case, and give you a sense of how valuable this case is or not.
Or if you are a family lawyer, actually mediating a divorce.
Things like this are what actually useful specialized AI legal products do or at least help with.
Claude is very far away from being able to handle most of these things. It is a jack of all trades tool. Will it be able to do this someday? Maybe.
Additionally, keep in mind most legal startups i've run into are based on caricatures of what lawyers do (IE startups who think that most personal injury lawyers are running around after auto cases and trying to be high volume, etc).
Any lawyer who has deal with legal startups could very quickly tell you which will make it or not, because it's pretty consistent which solve real problems that will be hard to commoditize through things like claude for legal.
While i agree for the most part, they can only cut the middle man so many times before they get themselves in antitrust trouble.
I suspect that will happen faster than they'd like, because regulators (at least outside the US) are not interested in a repeat of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc.
Not sure why this was downvoted, I came to read more about it. I have a friend that runs a firm and uses Legora and can’t stand it. We have conversations all of the time about pain points. I sent him the Claude Law docs, and while he’s not technical he was intrigued because he envisions his workflows to eventually be similar to mine as a developer.
Of course they know, their same governments have signed some kind of five eyes intelligence treaties before. Palantir will probably have new customers now that Europe is re-arming.
In any case these same governments are probably also approving the purchase of Huawei cell tower equipment.
It's extremely hard for me to separate where we are now from the way that Moore's law dictates a pretty insane level of planned obsolescence for chips and therefore everything with a chip in it.
If we make batteries replaceable or whatever other thing, how much do we change this fundamental dynamic? I feel like it's not very much.
People are kidding themselves if they think somehow recycling ewaste or reusing your last-model iPhone is some kind of sea-change that will fix the environmental impacts of tech.
It also doesn't seem defensible to say we should just slow progress down- isn't that a world where we never get iPhones and AI? How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
I dislike a lot of these wasteful dynamics but I also don't know what the alternative is. Consumer tech and computing is still the poster child for the proponents of global free market economics for good reason. It's one of the least extractive, least wasteful, highest profit margin sectors of the economy.
It's just saying a lot about how wasteful the other sectors are that tech is so wasteful.
> How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
Moore's Law has been breaking down for years already (to the point that people shift the goalposts as to what the actual quantity is that improves exponentially), so it's strange to ask. There are known physical limits that will prevent it from continuing indefinitely; and we aren't even that far away, to my understanding.
Moore's law is ending but the power laws of increased capacity and capability of computing in general continues at a similar rate- so this isn't a question of the specific technology of how many transistors you can fit in a given area.
Moore's law is just a stand-in for the planned obsolescence of all computing related things almost since computers were invented, and the fundamental tech question is always, when thing x gets 10x cheaper/faster, what new use case gets unlocked? Right now it's AI model capability. Maybe also battery tech.
The idea of the slow growth of computing smells to me like the Bill Gates quote about 640k of RAM being enough for anyone.
We can argue about the magnitude and the details, but the basic fact remains.
There are ways of dealing with negative externalities. Some work better than others. The details do matter a lot. And we definitely need better ways of tackling problems like this, especially when the cost is less immediate. The more diffuse, temporally removed, downstream, hidden, or controversial it is, the harder it is to get people to take the problem seriously. Let alone actually do anything about it.
We can take on these challenges. Or we can largely ignore them / throw our hands in the air, and watch the consequences unfold.
As much as we are able to, I’d like to try the former. Computing can still move forward and innovate at a rapid rate.
We should definitely be doing better, and it's also clear that these negative externalities are not being priced in at all.
I do and would want to buy tech that I'm not coerced into to throwing away after a year. It's insane to be how many objects today have batteries that are sealed inside and are meant to be thrown away after- that should be regulated.
But that seems to me to be an implementation detail rather than aspect that's worthy of an entire manifesto.
I do think the political aspects of things like Ring and Flock cameras and Palantir are super important (the reenforcing of existing power structures part).
But I don't get the folding in of this idea that not consuming computing devices is part of the solution- Like I said, it feels like the planned obsolescence of all computing devices and software is fundamental to the field.
PINE64 were trying with the PineNote[0], sort of. It's quite a large device (10.3"), in the same size class as reMarkable/Boox devices. It's cost-competitive with those products, but it's way too big and too expensive to compare to traditional ~7" e-readers.
Seed studio sells some. reTerminal is the more polished one, it has a metal case, nice buttons, and a 2Ah battery. The Xiao screen is more diy, but also has more potential options
I used a reTerminal as a bedside weather station UI recently, works rather nice
Not exactly reading devices, yes, but they are open hardware
supernote's tablets are designed to have replaceable motherboards/batteries although it's still to be seen whether they will actually be able to support that long-term.
Stanford and SV have always had deep defense ties. Palmer Luckey and Palantir etc are just the latest iteration of this.
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