Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Anthropic is suing the Pentagon
This whole saga is a resounding “everyone sucks here”. but I’m gonna have to side with Anthropic on this one because at least they have some incredibly basic standards, which is far more than I can say for the current government and OpenAI, though the real best outcome is if the government and the AI industry destroy each other
(this has now been deemed high-quality enough for its own post)
The specific article's framing pisses me off...
As to who picked a fight with who, the DoD wanted to change the terms of their contract, to which Anthropic apparently compromised on every term except for mass surveillance of Americans (fuck the rest of the world I guess) and fully autonomous weapons (cause a human clicking "yes to confirm" makes slop-bot powered drones so much better). This wasn't good enough for this authoritarian strongman administration, so Pete Hegseth took the fight public with tweets first. So the article framing it as Anthropic "picking a fight" is a bullshit framing. I mean, they did kind of bring it on themselves hyping up their slop machine like it was a sci-fi AGI, but they didn't start the fight.
So they find a quote about contracts, but a Supply Chain Risk isn't just the DoD deciding on contracts, it is a specific power that has specific mechanisms set by legislation. If (and it is a big if with the current Supreme Court's composition) the court actually considers the terms set out in the legislation (including, most problematically for the DoD, a risk assessment and consideration of less intrusive alternatives), I think the DoD loses. Of course, the SC has all too often been willing to simply defer to the executive branch's judgement, even if the process for the judgement was "Trump or one of his underlings made a choice on a spiteful or idiotic whim, announced it on twitter, and the departments underneath them rushed to retroactively invent a saner rationalization". If the DoD decided to just end the contract (without all the public threats of SCR or invoking the Defense Production Act) Anthropic wouldn't be in a position to sue and this drama wouldn't have been as publicized in the first place.
Yeah because one set of a language is a CEO trying to grovel and backtrack on one of the rare few ethical commitments he has ever made, and the other is making a court case about the actual law.
whoever loses, we win
If the DoD accidentally pop the AI bubble by triggering a cascade when Anthropic runs into issues; then later the DoD loses the court case in a humiliating enough way; then DoD loses a civil case with the money going to pay the debts owed in Anthropic's bankruptcy proceedings, and the American public blames all of (without letting one shift the blame to the other) the Trump administration, the Republican party, the parts of the Democrat that acted as pathetic enablers, and the tech ceos for the following economic depression... I would count that as a relative win?