He wants Anthropic to produce products that he wants that they're capable of making that they refuse to do on moral AND practical grounds (apparently this started when someone asked if Anthropic could produce a system capable of shooting down an incoming nuclear weapon, but escalated when Anthropic's CEO made it clear he wanted humans in the chain making life and death decisions), not to "respect a ToS". The right thing under the circumstances isn't to have a hissy fit and ban the supplier from everything, but go to a different supplier for the products the DoD wants.

The DoD and Trump administration are being batshit crazy here:

1. It is not illegal or unconstitutional or "against a ToS" for someone to refuse to supply a product they consider immoral.
2. It is profoundly stupid not to have a human decision maker in a decision making chain where a device may do things that cause the deaths of human beings.

(Note: this is not me defending an AI company. This is me being disgusted at the Trump admin's rationale. Anthropic are still ultimately a bunch of frauds creating misery by promoting a technology incapable of doing what it's promoted as doing. A pox on both their houses.)

I get the distinct impression there are semi-secret lines of communications between CEOs - as in BBSes or Microsoft Teams groups or something - where they all encourage each other to do these ludicrous things and shore up support for things, from forced AI to RTO, that are objectively stupid.

I think that's what you're seeing here. Not a single person the real world can possibly have missed the sheer revulsion average people have over LLMs being shoved in their faces all the time, and how their companies get reputations for being untrustworthy as a result. But nonetheless, they do it anyway, chasing a ludicrous claim that somehow employees are more productive with AI despite several years now of evidence showing no evidence for this whatsoever.

They're going to destroy the economy. Tens of millions will lose their jobs unable to buy these company's products while the companies themselves find themselves seeing a rapid deterioration in productivity as the remaining employees are unable to cover the work done by those left.

It's collective mass suicide, and more evidence that the ruling class is the idiot class in this country.

Should a boxer be able to wager the he/she wins a fight? I would think so, they are wagering on their skill, putting it on the line.

You're just asking the boxer to collude with the person they're fighting.

It's just like using a C compiler, transforming the programmer's intent to runnable code, so..." *SMACK!* Wrong. Compilers are deterministic

Well, since you mentioned C, UB would like a word ;-)

> The only trend that's kind of fucking that up is these shitty 4K blu-rays. Seriously I do not need a 4K Blu-ray for a 1980s grindhouse horror movie

You probably don't need it period. Movies are generally mastered in 2K. It's a rare movie that isn't. And the more special effects there are, the more likely it is 2K.

(It's really weird, because the cameras they use are typically 4-6K, but apparently Hollywood's mastering process is way lower res than the cameras are. There are exceptions, Christopher Nolan pretty much insists on scanning film at higher resolutions, but alas watching those in 4K does nothing to cover the terrible dialog, bad sound mixing, and awful story writing...)

FWIW HD DVD could work with both the HD DVD media and old fashioned 9G disks. It was medium neutral in that respect. The problems were:

1. It didn't take off.
2. It was assumed, correctly, that the expense of blue lasers - the only real reason to continue using 9G discs - would eventually come down. HD DVD's 30G discs weren't any more expensive to press than red laser 9G DVD media, it used the same equipment with the exception of the master creation system itself.
3. It was assumed since the start that H.264 couldn't compress 2K/1080P video with the same quality that MPEG2 compresses 480P/576P at DVD bitrates. I think, after a decade of streaming services generally topping out at 4-5Mbps for 2K, that this isn't really true.

But in theory Hollywood could have made cheap disks with high definition movies on them at streaming rates had HD DVD succeeded, but preferred Blu-ray's DRM. Which... well, not come across a BD I couldn't rip, so that was a waste of everyone's time.

That's what they're saying in public. But the reality is Pete Hegseth ordered them to drop it because Anthropic are refusing to allow the military to use to to create autonomous AI-controlled weapons.

This is so fucked up I can barely believe it's happening. Every new bit of news coming out of the GenAI world seems to be worse and likely to cause a world catastrophe than the last, and what the fuck are they trying to achieve here?

Do we take Sam Altman's boast that AI uses less energy than the average human as evidence for what the people in charge of these projects really hope to happen? (Or is he just fucking stupid?)

TBH though they're right that it isn't AI at fault. AI, in its current form, is not, despite the marketing hype including losers here, autonomous, intelligent, and capable of being handled the burden of responsibility. It is ultimately a tool, and someone chose to use that tool, and someone chose to give that tool the powers it had.

Maybe those are two different someones. Maybe it was an inevitable result of an AI mandate from management, or maybe it was a combination of an AI mandate from management and misjudgements by the engineer or engineers who set it up.

But every single person in that chain is human. And ultimately the major issue may be with the idea of an AI mandate in the first place, because, frankly, its been forced on us for 3-4 years now, and you'd have to be wholesale deranged to think requiring the use of AI for every task is a good idea.

Why not call it the AI Corps, or even the Fraud Corps? If you call it the latter maybe you can include cryptocurrencies in their mission?

beauty

"Brand awareness probably plays a role here." Gee, you think?

I'd say maybe, but those same people still own the messaging channels. It's hard to get a read on whether or not it'll turn over generationally. I'd say the youth are drinking the koolaid these days.

I posit you have mental problems.

Lol this stupid administration was like "here's some money to make cheese, that'll make us look good people want cheese" .. and DOGE was like "here's some cheese, trust us it's cheese" and they drop a fucking block of cement on the desk. Just back scratching all the way around.

You have to pay for the cost of upgradaing at some point, but cmon US, this is your tax base you're talking about. Outside of *where* that money goes (it's impressive a country is so full of people who think too much goes to the military but yet so much goes to the military) why would you want to kneecap revenue collection? I'm consistently impressed by how the US raises so many adults who think their country would be better with a government that had no money to do anything. No welfare, no health care, all infrastructure private, etc .. the mentality is bananas, almost *because* of how obvious it is to land there.