Why do you choose to call it the "DoW"? Its official name is the Department of Defense, it was titled that way by Congress and only Congress can change it. What is your motivation in using a term that the current administration has started to use? Do you also use the Gulf of America when referrring to the body of water that defines the southern edge of the USA?
Don't you think it is more to-the-point to call it what it is and what the people running it with, i'll bet everything i have, absolute immunity, are doing and intend to do with it?
It is "honest" in the historical sense, certainly.
But the executive-order driven name change just another bit of illegal/extra-legal/paralegal behavior by the administration that, every time we just nod along, eats away at the constitutional structure of our government. So don't go along with it.
It's the term used by Sam Altman in the announcement. Maybe aim your anger there, to someone knowingly helping them in their attempt to turn the department into one of aggression.
Exactly this! Just like the Gulf of Mexico is still called the Gulf of Mexico, if we just ignore his ramblings and continue calling the department of defense, we undermine his whole point. If we fall for all their crap and just accept it, then we loose in the end. Any resistance to a Fascist government is good resistance. Anything that makes their life's a little shittier is good. Better that they go around having tantrums about how they renamed it but no one is paying attention.
No, the Department of War is the former name of the Department of the Army and nothing else. DoD is a new creation that includes the Army, historic Department of the Navy, and the other, post-WW2, new services.
The president has no authority to do this. Federal departments and agencies are named by Congress, and even the Republicans in Congress have shown no interest in formalizing this.
One of the things that a lot of LLM scrapers are fetching are git repositories. They could just use git clone to fetch everything at once. But instead, they fetch them commit by commit. That's about as static as you can get, and it is absolutely NOT a non-issue.
No... Basically all git servers have to generate the file contents, diffs etc. on-demand because they don't store static pages for every single possible combination of view parameters. Git repositories also typically don't store full copies of all versions of a file that have ever existed either; they're incremental. You could pre-render everything statically, but that could take up gigabytes or more for any repo of non-trivial size.
If that is the bet they are placing, it is a bet they will lose. The power and capabilities of US corporations does not rest solely on those corporations, and as the wealth, influence and power of the USA undergoes "a massive contraction", they will find themselves similarly degraded. They might be the big fish in the big pond, but only because everyone knows there's a bigger fish (the US government). Once other countries, and other corporations, no longer care much what the US government thinks, US corporations will find themselves in a very, very different situation.
Of course! I think at some level the people at the top know that this American capitalism is not competitive. The last 5 years or so have been basically the whole country realizing that our system is not competitive. And, the last 1-2 years have been collectively, the world re-calibrating on this fact.
The monopolists don't care though. The power is too intoxicating.
I mean, listen to discussions here. "What's your moat?" -- that's how American capitalists think. Not "What value does your company provide to the customer", but what extra force, beyond simple-minded fair market competition, are you leveraging, to ensnare the customer. The game is to ensure that customers cannot choose another business over yours on its merits. That works in the short term but it's extractive. Eventually, the parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive.
> parasite must stop sucking blood for the host to survive
Biology doesn't work like that. Biological units are too selfish. It is an iterated game so evolution could affect how a parasite's children act. However defection is usually a winning strategy (because there's rarely enough coordination nor enough signals for cooperation to win).
Biology has amazing metaphors, but unfortunately most writers and readers don't understand biology well enough to use those metaphors as part of an argument.
There is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.
I agree that, given the actual history of the US military and foreign policy, it is a harmful and misleading euphimism.
It is also, however, the official name of the department, as determined by the US Congress who are empowered to determine such names.
In no case I am happy to humor this administration's decisions, especially when they are illegal/extra-legal/paralegal. If they wanted to actually rename the department, there's a clear process for that, and then perhaps we could "humor" that effort. As it stands, there's nothing here to humor, since there is no decision, only illegal aspiration.
The signalling in that post is about as clear as it can be.
They’re aggressively signalling that they are cooperative, and that they are not being belligerent. They are using the preferred language and much of the framing that the US government would use, to make it as clear as possible what the key points of their disagreement are, by leaning into alignment on everything else
This is textbook. People are reading this as some kind of confusing, inexplicable framing when it’s how any sensible person would write in their context. When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
Quibbling about the name of the department would be among the stupidest things I could possibly imagine. As it stands, I’m seeing lots of folks online who generally support the administration saying that Anthropic is correct here. If you gave them a bunch of stupid talking points about how anthropic is being disrespectful, you would lose those people. It doesn’t make sense, they’re obviously terrible people without a soul, but that’s reality.
> When you’re up against an authoritarian regime, that’s willing to abuse all the levers of power against you, you very carefully pick your fights and don’t give them any reason to complain about anything that isn’t essential.
While I am not claiming that you're wrong in this particular instance, or in general, I think it is important to note that there are people who absolutely disagree with you about this, some of whom who have lived in extremely authoritarian regimes. I'm not saying they're right, either, but just highlighting that there is no clearly obvious right/wrong on this point.
This is such a silly point to argue over. From 1789-1947 we had a "Department of War", which then merged into "Department of Army" under the newly formed (in 1947) National Military Establishment (NME) which was changed in 1949 to "Department of Defense" because N-M-E sound like "enemy".
It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.
Under US Code, it is the US Congress that names departments. It is not up to an individual officer in the US military, or the administration, to rename them.
I'm expending a fraction of a fraction of 1% on this, and I am in no way defending the euphimism. I am defending the actual written down, legal way in the US government is supposed to operate, which despite its many failings, seems worth defending to me.
If the title doesn't make a difference, then there's no point to insist on it. People say "the Pentagon" as shorthand for "military leadership in Washington." Not using the shorter term wouldn't do much beyond making news articles longer.
This administration says "Department of War" because they want to project an aggressive image. I support anyone who uses the legal name "Department of Defense" in an effort to reinforce an aspirational goal for the department and to remind others that the Executive Branch shouldn't be allowed to remake the entire government at will.
I've been working on the same libre project for more than 25 years, and making a living from it for about 15, so I have my own perspective on this.
The biggest issue that I see is that even for things that are in some respects "finished", grants on the order of $5k do not change the maintainance picture very much at all. If there's a sudden crisis with critical infrastructure, people will step. But that's precisely what we want to move away from, and to do that the funding needs to be living-wage level, not single-issue grants.
It is awesome when those grants happen, and specific new features or compatibility are worked on. But the sustainability question is really not about that kind of work, for the most part. Somebody needs to actually be the guy in Nebraska and they need to consider that their role. Possibly it is just one role among a few, but it needs to be bigger than a one-and-done $5k-sized role.
The question is really how to redirect the streams of revenue that currently flow toward capital so that the people who work on OSS can do this as a living, not a part time calling. I don't see grants as a significant part of that.
Now the Open Source Endowment is a very small organization that starts with ~$5k microgrants. It is not enough for a living but still should help maintainers not only financially but also by allocating attention.
As it grows bigger, the grant size will also grow. One can help with this by donating and bringing in new donors!
I think my point is that grants may not be the way to get what is desired. Most people need predictable, long term income. You can get stuff done with grants, no doubt. But that's not the question - the question is can you build long term sustainable maintainance mechanisms for OSS. I hope you're right and I'm wrong.
Software has its own lifecycle, and the funding should not stick indefinitely to a specific project. Meanwhile, our grant format might evolve into some type of limited tenured positions for maintainers, which support the most critical yet risky projects. But this target scope should be dynamic and adapt to the market—global consumption of OSS; otherwise, we may end up maintaining COBOL in 2100...
$5000 is enough to make a living in several countries.
On a global scale, likely less than 10% of the world's population has ever been able to save $5,000 at any point in their life, with the vast majority concentrated in high-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries, this is a rare achievement limited to a small, affluent minority.
A grant can be for a lot more than $5,000. It can be for as much as the grant-making org has and wants to spend. Grants can be given on an ongoing basis as well.
> Why not build something super minimal that requires less management and operating costs? That doesn't have the market risk at the center of it all? That doesn't have more points for fraud and abuse?
The best long-term protection from fraud and abuse are aligned incentives through skin in the game. That’s why we legally require all people in governance to be Members ($1000+/year donation). This is an important topic, and here you can find more context on this: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment/
I think this is really missing the point of the question. I know that it is common for endowments to be invested "in the market" - people believe that's the most responsible thing to do. But the question was about why do things the normal way? Why link up market performance of a set of investments with funding mechanisms for OSS? If you're going to be bold and try to fund something that is, in market and economic terms, quite off-norm, why do that using entirely normal systems that are at the core of a capitalist economy?
There are areas where we experiment and take risks: raising the first-ever endowment for open source, making it very lean and digital-first, relying on bottom-up funding and governance instead of large corporate donors, etc.
But all other areas should be as low-risk as possible — like accounting, legal, and investment management of a community endowment fund. We are exploring a few ideas on how to grow the fund faster than the market without increasing its risk profile, but they are complementary to a very conservative core strategy.
Besides OSE, I am a full-time VC — that's the area where investors are bold and invest in off-norm opportunities, but it lies on the totally opposite side of the investment risk spectrum. And directly mixing them does not seem like a good idea.
“super minimal that requires less management and operating costs” - that’s exactly our current setup, and always will be the target!
Now OSE has no paid employees - the team is 100% volunteers. Its Board Directors and the Executive Director are required to personally donate $1000+/year. Operating costs are close to zero.
As organization evolves there might be higher operating costs, but our commitment to keep them as low as possible.
Corporations don't have a backyard, based on their historical behavior. The resource extraction and manufacturing sectors simply move on after they screw up or deplete one area.
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.
If the average panel lifetime is 25 years, and it takes > 25 years to reach "full capacity" (whatever that might mean or whatever level that is at), then by definition there will be a continuous cycle of panel replacement taking place.
It's not as if we get all the PV installed in 12 months and then it lasts for 25 years ...
The 25 year thing comes from the 25 year warranties - they’re generally warrantied to be at 80% power capability at 25 years. I don’t know the real lifetime, but presumably it’s a lot longer than 25 years. And by that point, maybe we’ll have the deuteriumdollar…
Being mounted on a moving vehicle subjects them to a much more dynamic and hostile environment than having arguably better quality, fixed panels sitting in a dry desert for 25 years. I’m actually impressed that yours lasted 10 years.
Open for debate. They are mounted horizontally on the van, which makes them subject to almost no face-on wind forces at all. The aluminum frames are bolted to the van, but the van structure is metal and likely doesn't move much in terms of distances between bolts other than due to thermal expansion, which is also true of my ground-mount array (in the dry desert :)
There's more vibration on the van, but how the impacts their life compared to the months of daily 30mph+ winds hit the faces/rear of the ground mount array seems hard to tell without a lot of research (which someone may have done).
We have that in the UK, but its at the discretion of judges, and the loser can ask the court to look at the other sides costs and only award a reasonable amount rather than full costs (to deter people from running up costs to intimidate the other side).
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