Some years ago I, an American citizen and resident, studied abroad briefly and was asked by the House of Lords to speak to them about what GDPR (a UK law!) was, how it worked, and the impact it could have.
Further than ejecting nobles, they really should just overhaul the entire chamber, which is surely doing more harm than good if they need a foreign national to explain their own laws to them.
Did they _need_ you or were they seeking the perspective of someone they considered well informed or valued for some other reason? What's the context here?
You don’t think it’s a strength that they have the courage to seek views from as wide a range of perspectives as possible, including from outside the UK?
I, a developer, have never heard of Proton. Googling Proton, I only find Protonmail, and googling "Linux Proton," Valve's Proton is not even the first result. If you are not terminally online keeping up with Linux distro discourse, it's also difficult to even recognize any of the newer names and players.
Linux is not even remotely considerable as an option for the average consumer, which is fine and fully intentional with the audience and goals Linux distros serve.
You could even consider this a strong positive, because a Linux distro geared towards average consumers would probably be an analog to Samsung's take on Android. What makes your experience with Linux good is that it isn't catering towards a wider audience.
Personally, I've actually had noticeably better compatibility on Linux with older games, compared to Windows. And every single one I've been interested in for the past several years works flawlessly on it. (I don't enjoy most AAA games, so my sample is definitely skewed, but it's a fairly common result)
All games I've installed on Steam Deck, with our without official compatibility, have worked well. Steam Deck runs a Linux. It all works thanks to Proton. And I'd go as far as saying, it just works.
This is explicitly not what they have done, not how government contractors ever interpret this designation, nor something they could do even if they wanted to do.
It is also common corporate doctrine to use a subsidiary for government contracting to avoid having to evidence that a commercial vendor is utilized for government, so this won't even be 'annoying' for contractors.
ITAR and compliance frameworks (e.g. FedRAMP and CMMC) already mandate this for any non-US company, yet AWS commercial still has offerings in other countries and from non-US vendors, Palantir still has an IG business, etc.
It's entirely fake, sure Palantir uses Claude, but it takes about 10 minutes to pull all their federal contracts and realize the little involvement they have in the kill chain is preliminary
If a majority of the Americans believed America was not generally the "good guys" it would be a sign of a failed democracy.
Similarly normal for the population of any country that has net negative externalities from America to view them as the "bad guys".
The current and growing anti-US sentiment is an expected result of an increasing gap between the US and the rest of the first world on economy and defense. The existence of a superpower is precluded on being viewed negatively by the rest of the world
Imagine democracy playing out in literally any measurable field. Think about society getting to vote on who should be on a basketball team, but without any real knowledge of the candidates' abilities beyond what they said and advertised about themselves. And then we put the winners of the vote on a team. They'd get face-stomped by a D-tier NBA team pretty much always.
Democracy isn't about maximizing outcomes, because maximizing outcomes entails the possibility of minimizing outcomes. Marcus Aurelius was perhaps one of the best rulers in all of history. His son, Commodus - raised by him from birth, was certainly one of the worst rulers in all of history. Minority rule systems oscillate between extremes of the best of times and the worst of times. Democracy is always just kind of meh, never particularly great, never particularly awful.
But it creates a stable system because while it's meh in the present, you can always envision that things will be totally different in 4 years. Of course they won't be, but there's this weird bug in our psychology that we can't help but remain optimistic, even though in reality candidate after candidate it always feels like 'well it can't get any worse than this at least' and then the next guy is like 'hold my beer.'
It's more likely they will continue expansionist policy in Asia which counters several American diplomatic goals:
1. Democracy and freedom worldwide
2. Economic access+prosperity with Asia
3. Pro-American sentiment
(Not in order of importance, which shifts constantly)
I think assuming China would beat the US in conventional war if they reach 'AGI' first is a stretch, even if this actually grants them a force advantage it's not like the US can no longer reach AGI. The risk is really more that if they reach 'AGI' and subsequently a force advantage, that they would no longer be deterred and more decisively move on Taiwan next year. Taiwan is key to [1] and [2] above.
There is nothing unconstitutional about the first paragraph of your criticism. What is unconstitutional is restricting your ability to write this criticism, which is not breached.
You _could_ argue that this is a flaw in the constitution, and that none of the above should be legal, and that people who support those things should be restricted in their speech or ability to hold office. This was the status quo in politics for a while! These things have all existed for a long time but this seems particularly targeted at Trump, who was famously banned from most social media platforms for years.
There are a lot of democracies (most of the EU for example) that take this stance on freedoms and will even overturn elections to prevent those who support those policies. The question is really 'does doing that protect freedom and democracy or infringe it?'
As for the second paragraph, this is just a lie, Congress has not abdicated any type of war powers to the Cabinet. There has not been any type of declaration of war, and if Congress wanted to stop the DoD, they very much could and in fact came very close to doing so. If your Congress representative did not represent your interests (in this case voted nay), you can call email etc. them and their office or vote them out.
> better country that believes in freedom and goodness
I think you're letting your strong feelings here cloud your judgement, you can hold all of these opinions above without needing to fellate China, which is objectively worse on freedoms than the US. It's also important not to conflate "believes in freedom" with "perfectly meets my line of freedom."
You're being disingenuous, but yes, if you believe the US is not inherently better than China you are fellating the most well documented modern authoritarian state, which was borne from the largest genocide in history, and has decades of examples of breaching freedoms and silencing dissidents, and is viewed negatively even by a large portion of communists. If the two are even comparable in your eyes, you are fellating China.
There's a phenomenon when PRC comes up where people actively root for the United States to lose. Some of these people are even Americans (at least on paper). Regardless of the wisdom of the Iran war, there is a sizable amount that wants to see dead Americans result from it because it would allow them to do the same moral preening that is going on in this thread with regard to China. The Americans finally "got what they had coming", or some such silliness. I expect to see the same thing as the race, such as you can call it a race, to return to the moon gets going. I don't have a good explanation for this because, like you say, it's bonkers to look at PRC and think it's at all comparable on any given freedom metric, so I think these people are simply lying.
The one plausible claim they could make is, ironically, one similar to Altman's claim a while back that visiting China was "easier" (I don't recall his precise phrasing) because there is a very clear and public list of things you are not allowed to talk about and actions you are not allowed to take. This list is, of course, subject to change.
While this suit has a weak basis, what you’re saying is not at all how government contracting and procurement works.
> The government has near-absolute discretion over whom it contracts with,
Not at all the case, procurement is dictated by a maze of Congressional acts and the FAR.
> and no company has a constitutional right to be a federal vendor.
Not constitutional but federal law actually dictates they do. Many companies actually have _more_ of a right to contracts than primes.
> Courts treat military technology decisions as core Commander-in-Chief functions subject to minimal judicial review,
Not at all the case there have been many disputes and it’s not uncommon to see a protest filed against procurement decisions in even innocuous cases. Many companies (eg Palantir) have sued the government on procurement and won.
> and the political question doctrine may bar second-guessing what the Secretary deems a security risk.
Sure, lowercase security risk, but uppercase Supply Chain Risk designation is an actual action subject to administrative procedure. There are many laws (eg Administrative Procedure Act) that allow judges to overturn this. The current basis of their suit is largely ideological but if they instead argued the designation was arbitrary the APA could very possibly be used to overturn it.
>The current basis of their suit is largely ideological but if they instead argued the designation was arbitrary the APA could very possibly be used to overturn it.
Their front-line complaint (Count 1 in the brief linked elsewhere in this thread) invokes the APA.
Palantir famously sued the army and won, now accounting for the majority of their USG revenue. So, this is not necessarily a bad strategy.
Key differentiator though is Palantir’s suit was based primarily on Congressional acts and explicit clauses of the FAR. This absolutely does not seem to be the case for Anthropic, who could easily do the same, but chooses another ideological battle. I can’t imagine their legal counsel would recommend this route (actually asking Claude it doesn’t either!) which would imply this is Anthropic leadership’s move.
I’d gamble they’ve already given up on actual business with the government/military and that this is more of a PR move to further distance themselves and maintain a high road image.
Actually Anthropic is just refusing to renegotiate a contract. If the DoW cared so much about these restrictions, they shouldn't have signed the contract. Attempting to mike the company is childish behavior that will be stopped in court.
The US has been remotely striking targets for 20+ years and famously racked up a high casualty count on drone strikes during the Obama admin.
The (incorrect) assumption you’re making here is that the US not only is using AI for later stage targeting, but that there is also no human who signed off on this. Note that the AI targeting system here, Maven, has been around even before GPT-2.
This is just pure AI alarmism. The worst part is absolutely anybody can sign up for Palantir AIP right now for free and see what it actually does with LLMs (spoiler: very boring!)
First of all, the use of AI to determine targets is well documented.
> The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the US military in Iran has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it.”
> According to the Post, Palantir’s Maven Smart System—which contains Anthropic’s Claude AI language model—reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone.
Second of all, I agree. There is certainly a human signing off.
But AI ethics research has shown a clear and consistent a human bias towards trusting automated systems when there is ambiguity.
I am not at all trying to redirect blame but I think it'd be foolish to not acknowledge the risks introduced with involving AI in decision making even if a human ultimately makes the call
Further than ejecting nobles, they really should just overhaul the entire chamber, which is surely doing more harm than good if they need a foreign national to explain their own laws to them.
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