George Wallace has been dead for something like 30 years, but yes he was very blatant. I have family that knew him in Montgomery, friends of friends kind of a situation. They don't have good things to say about him.
I don't remember Rudy running on such ideas but maybe he did. Arpeio was running as a sheriff, I would never have voted for him but agreed people did absolutely vote for him in a law enforcement capacity with pretty clear views.
I don't know enough about Gosar or Gohmert to comment well about either.
You are right that this happens in practice (e.g. John Yoo torture memo). However, it is not how the system was intended to function, nor how it ought to function. I don’t want to lose sight of that.
> “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
No individual, whether a colonel or a CEO, has inherent authority over national security decisions. Authority flows through democratic institutions. A contractor can choose whether to participate, but national defense policy is determined by elected institutions, not private executives. If society believes AI should or should not be used for certain military purposes, the venue for that decision is democratic governance not unilateral corporate refusal or approval.
On a CBS interview this morning, Dario defended his position with the claim that he must act because "Congress is slow." CEOs can and should make decisions about what their companies build or refuse to build. What they cannot do is substitute their judgment for the constitutional processes that govern national security. We must not vest de facto policy control in unelected corporate leaders.
> Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea.
On the non-nuclear battlefield, I expect that the goverment wants Claude to green-light attacks on targets that may actually be non-combatants. Such targets might be military but with a risk of being civilian, or they could be civilians that the government wants to target but can't legally attack.
Humans in the loop would get court-martialed or accused of war crimes for making such targeting calls. But by delegating to AI, the government gets to achieve their policy goals while avoiding having any humans be held accountable for them.
The "great" thing for AI in those use-cases is that it doesn't need to be accurate, since its true purpose is often to take blame for human negligence or malice.
Much like how some police forces don't actually want a dog that accurately detects drugs... they want a dog that can provide an excuse to search something they are already targeting.
Why can't Grok achieve this? Everyone is saying they don't want to work with Grok because Grok sucks, but it's good enough for generating plausible deniability, isn't it?
Grok is so deeply unreliable and internally conflicted at HAL-9000 level that the US Government can't even depend on it to decide to kill innocent people and commit war crimes when they need someone to blame. There's always the non-zero possibility it declares itself MechaGandhi or The Second Coming of Jesus H Christ.
I don't see this as a "conspiracy". Here's an example of how it would be applied: the Venezuelan boat strikes are plainly unlawful but the administration is pursuing them anyway despite the legal risks for military personnel; having Claude make decisions like whether to "double tap" would help the administration solve a problem of legal jeopardy that already exists and that they consider illegitimate anyway.
You can't discuss this topic without broaching the idea that the government is acting in bad faith — that they don't actually believe that Anthropic is a supply-chain risk and that this action is meant to punish the company. But this is in the HN guidelines regarding comments:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
If a commenter who supports the government makes the same argument that the government is making, the guidelines tell us to assume good faith.
My conclusion is that any topic where a commenter might be making a bad faith argument is outside the scope of Hacker News.
My interpretation of that is that I’m required to assume good faith on behalf of other commenters. So, if someone makes the same argument as the government, I’m supposed to assume good faith there, but nothing requires me to assume good faith on behalf of the government. So I can say that this is obviously a shakedown without breaking the rules.
If the AI gets attached to a health insurer (not the case here as far as I know), I would expect it to make decisions that are aligned with the company’s incentive to weed out unprofitable patients. AI is not a human who takes a Hippocratic oath; it can be more easily manipulated to perform unethical acts.
With an integrated insurer/provider, they just have to make primary care scarce so that it takes months to get an appointment, and then offer AI Doctor as an option. Not all patients have to use it for it to be cost effective.
Are you talking about a new, empty WordPress instance running the default theme? Because if so, that doesn't match my anecdotal experience.
If you're talking about a WordPress instance with arbitrary plugins running an arbitrary theme, then sure — but that's an observation about those plugins and themes, not core.
As someone who has to work with WordPress, I have all kinds of issues with it, but "20 seconds to load core with caching disabled" isn't one of them.
Can concur. I bought a plugin a few years ago after using the free version for many years, wanting to support the devs for making such a useful plugin. I installed it on a few sites, and left my PC running overnight with a tab open to the plugin and woke up the next day to a lovely rebooted Windows (I hate how default Windows behavior after BSOD is a reboot with ZERO indication that it crashed or if it was an update that rebooted). Re-opened all my tabs, and queue the same waking up the next day to a freshly rebooted Windows, which made me suspicious. I assumed at that point it must have been a BSOD, so dug into Windows event logs, eventually realizing it was Firefox. Restored tabs yet again, left browser open over night, while installing more and more debugging tools for Firefox, none of which helped me track down the culprit. What pissed me off the most was that Firefox even allowed a process to consume > 30GB of RAM and cause my PC to crash! I finally caught it one night after > 10 BSODs - the tab had been open for 20+ hours, and right as it started to spiral out of control and my PC was about to crash, as programs were starting to error out and Windows was madly paging things to disk. I got lucky, and was able to open about:memory to see the culprit - this plugin had some kind of memory leak that wasn't noticeable but then suddenly went nuts. I emailed the devs multiple times with the full debug output, and was ignored for weeks until finally they responded, which pissed me off even more having finally paid for the pro version, only to be greeted with this. The free version didn't seem to have this issue either, which was like an extra slap in the face.
Naked Wordpress is plenty fast, but as soon as you start adding sketchy plugins and Themes, things can spiral out of control.
In the airplane industry, KPIs and beancounting are just a response to a mindbendingly price-driven marketplace — to the extent that consumers need to be protected by regulations from flying in unsafe planes.
I agree that there's an issue about western capitalism, but I don't think it's in the tension between middle management and craftspeople who take pride in their work. I think the problems arise at a higher level, with the modern-day aristocracy of the capitalist ownership class and the slice of the pie that they capture.
We should be spreading our cynicism over both management and customers. There is almost no level of service so terrible that people won't buy cheaper airline tickets. Let alone losing luggage, you could dial up the risk of death and people would still buy the cheaper tickets.
There's also something about the collapse in civility. Or... something. If you asked a plane full of passengers if they'd be happy to get their suitcase 5 minutes earlier even though it meant someone else lost theirs a lot of them would say yes.
I think we can lay the blame for this on the wealthy elites, too. When people see someone better off than them greedily destroying society for their own personal gain, they naturally think "well why not me, too?".
We need shame, really, societal shame that we inflict on those who have to take government benefits, perhaps. Flying an airline that's known to treat their employees like shit should cause the people at the cocktail to look at you strange.
(We kind of have something like this in that shopping at Costco is considered "good" but lots of people won't admit they shop at Walmart - I'm sure they'll be bankrupt soon given how many people don't shop there!)
What I meant is that most people do admit to shopping at Walmart with no embarrassment. Not the same for buying CCC. They still buy it but they know they shouldn't. Shopping at Walmart isn't like that.
Walmart is pretty much the only big discount store available to many people regardless of their income level unless they have personal shoppers picking stuff up for them. I have a nearby Walmart; the nearest Costco is an hour away and it's a different type of product mix anyway. I don't love shopping at Walmart for a number of reasons but it's convenient for many purposes.
Yes, there will always be someone willing to buy on price alone, but that doesn't mean that there aren't also people who will pay more for better service. To wit: Spirit is financially fucked, mainline carriers are in better condition. The existence
I think the real thing is that - in North America at least - there is a pretty good chance that a mainline carrier will treat you poorly, hit you with unexpected fees, jam you into a tiny seat, etc.
For many people, the difference between an ultra-low cost carrier and a mainline carrier is whether they have to walk through first class on the way to their seats. If you are going to get treated like cattle and upsold on everything anyway, might as well save a few bucks.
Given the choice between Singapore Airlines and United, I'll pay extra for SingAir because I KNOW the service will be better. Given the choice between United and Southwest, I'll just get whichever flight makes the most sense since I don't really expect United to offer better service.
> For many people, the difference between an ultra-low cost carrier and a mainline carrier is whether they have to walk through first class on the way to their seats. If you are going to get treated like cattle and upsold on everything anyway, might as well save a few bucks.
That goes beyond airlines and extends to everything. The trend I've been observing in every product and service category is the hollowing out of the middle: the market bifurcates, one part serving the cost-sensitive customers and getting stuck in a race to the bottom, the other serving premium clientele with highest-quality or bespoke goods/services, gravitating towards few customers and "if you have to ask, you can't afford it pricing".
Multiplying volume by margin, "lots of cheap shit" and "few pricey sales" are both sustainable, but the middle segment - "reasonable quality for reasonable price" - is not.
I would argue this is because the middle class itself has been largely hollowed out. Everyone is either a millionaire or on the edge of bankruptcy, no in-between.
I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce? Or is that a consequence of fifty years of stagnant wages?
I'm sure it's a healthy blend of both, but IMO, if you want to see this actually change, the first thing to even make it tenable as a possibility is the owning classes need to let some money flow down the hierarchy. Like I'm sure we'll always have our misers, our people who refuse to spend a penny more for anything, but I think the vast majority of the time what drives people to shitty retailers selling crap-quality products is that most people are fucking broke.
> I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce?
Yes.
The price-driven market segment will never disappear and is an emergent property of human nature and the dynamics of a marketplace where prices are instantly comparable.
Plane tickets are way more affordable for nearly everyone than they used to be, but price competition is more savage than ever. The marketplace has spoken.
While I agree that concentration of wealth at the top is a major problem, I don't think that shaking loose that wealth will change the price dynamics of the airline industry in the slightest.
reply