Anyone starting a software business today should look back at what it was like building apps during the PC era. Lots of companies died because the platforms (Windows, macOS) built their product right into the OS. Same thing happening with the AI providers.
Sci-Fi trope: brilliant scientist / engineer builds a new technology for good. Ruthless military tries to turn it into a weapon.
Reality: Anthropic builds Claude. Reality TV President and TV news pundit Secretary of Defense tries to turn it into a weapon.
TBH, I prefer reading LLM written design docs over human written ones, assuming they've been checked for errors. The writing is just easier to read and understand than what most engineers produce.
I wish I could filter all my news and social media for any mentions of the following people, so I simply never hear about them:
Peter Thiel
Elon Musk
Alex Karp
Marc Andreessen
Donald Trump
Will AGI help Anthropic make a working SSO/SCIM integration?
The Trump really is a lesson in Chesterton's Fence. Now we see why every president in the last 45 years avoided going to war with Iran.
Claude Code remote controll with agent teams is absolutely insane. At the park, checking in on it grinding away and writing real software.
I thought the one positive about Trump was he didn’t want a needless war, and would break the Republican president pattern of always starting one. I was quite wrong.
And they are expanding the market of developer tools. I’m seeing non-engineering teams building useful internal apps, who would have never done that before.
Software stocks are selling off because people fear AI will devalue them. But Jevons paradox is going to kick in. There are so many more problems to solve with software that now become cost effective to solve. Demand goes way up.
in a democratic republic (and really in all times and places) the slavish hunger to be in the thrall of a strongman or a king is the ultimate moral degeneracy.
This is so apt. I see this with a lot of tech people too, just clueless about how politics but getting deeply involved... and now learning the hard way why you don't do that thing.
Those of us who took some Political Science in college, and actually read some books were not so surprsied.
Lots of surveys show roughing 30% of the population supports some form of authoritarianism over democracy.
Apple autocomplete and spell check is embarrassingly bad given the state of the art.
Business leaders backing Trumpism don't get it: when you weaponize dominance to extract concessions, you accelerate the world's race to decouple. They're torching their own markets.
Imagine what we'd be hearing from the right if Biden or Obama were sending masked/armed federal agents out and rounding people up to take them to prison camps. Stopping citizens asking them for their papers. Killing several. Defying court orders. Violating the 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments regularly.
Jerusalem Demsas gets to the heart of it. The rule of law and American democracy is core to our prosperity. We risk throwing it away if we don’t defend them.
open.substack.com/pub/theargum...
A clear description of how ICE collecting facial recognition info plays with the DOJ trying to get voter rolls. It’s about being able to contest votes.
www.reddit.com/r/technology...
They are intentionally trying to make supporting democracy and electing leaders a “woke leftists ideology”.
We need to start making this a moral case. Democracy is the only right and moral choice. It’s not about left and right ideology.
The murder of Alex Pretti is now seen in at least 5 videos. The incident unfolded over less than a minute. One agent instigated. One shot. Pretti held only a camera. He had a gun is his waistband, but never touched. it. The shooter saw him get disarmed, then shot him in the back, point blank. 1/
Bovino says the CPB officers were the victims and Pretti was a suspect. Says without evidence Pretty came to harm the agents, was assaulting and obstructing CPB. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears..."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VBJ...
Support for a free and open democracy with a government accountable to the people is not a political issue. It’s a moral one. Anything else is simply morally wrong.
Let's remember the Mulford Act banned open carry in California in 1967. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. It was a direct response to the Black Panthers armed patrols of Oakland to protect the community from abuse by the police.
The Trump administration loses power, and the mandate to govern the more people resist. If there was a real cost for complicity, more businesses would reconsider.
It should not wade into more normal politics. Very important to stay non-partisan to get support from traditional Conservatives also.
It should be non-partisan, and probably crowd-sourced with moderation. The goal is to highlight actively anti-democratic organizations, so people and businesses can avoid giving them money or doing business with them.
Ratings should be on a spectrum. It could be used to organize boycotts.
I want an authoritarian / anti-democratic complicity rating site for businesses and leaders. You could see things like:
"Jeff Bezos, Anticipatory obedience"
"Disney, Anticipatory obedience, back tracked after public pressure"
"Costco, resisted pressure"
"Koch Industries, actively complicit"
Who could have possibly predicted a second Trump term would be like this?
I came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.
