Amadeus Pagel

@PirateWires > According to Semafor, Anthropic has called this characterization “patently false,” but Michael said “20 people in that room could validate that it happened.” Are you a journalist? Have you asked to meet these 20 people? Have you verified it?

Read it here: piratewires.com/p/inside-penta…

EXCLUSIVE: Department of War AI Chief On How The Anthropic Deal Collapsed When Emil Michael (@USWREMichael) took over the Department of War’s AI portfolio last August, he discovered the Biden admin had been “asleep at the wheel” when it came to top military contracts. “I was like, ‘Holy cow,’” Michael said of Anthropic’s contract, “There’s 25 pages of terms and conditions of things I can’t do.” For example: as written, the contract would not allow Anthropic to plan any kinetic strikes, generally considered a central activity of war. “This is a contract that should be made with GEICO Insurance, not with the Department of War,” he told us. A renegotiation ensued. What followed, in Michael’s words, were “three months of knockdown, drag-out negotiations” which involved Michael imagining every possible future wartime scenario that would require a carveout in Anthropic’s terms of service, and asking them for approval. Anthropic was also quite slow: “It’s not like mano a mano negotiation, me and Dario,” Michael says. “It’s like every time we discuss something, he has to take it back to his politburo of co-founders and their ethics panel.” Then, after an Anthropic exec reached out to Palantir to ask for classified info about how Claude was used to capture Nicolás Maduro — allegedly implying they could pull the plug on a military raid if they disagreed with how AI was used (which Anthropic denies) — Michael and the DOW concluded the company was a supply-chain risk. Many speculated that the Pentagon was punishing Anthropic for ideological differences. But Michael feared that certain ideological differences could, in fact, harm or undermine the performance of DOW products, potentially threatening soldiers’ safety. “I can’t have a gun not work because they decide they don’t like guns,” Michael says. That’s “putting real lives at risk. It’s no joke, right?” Anthropic’s unreliable behavior led Michael to believe they may have never really wanted to reach a deal. Still: he’s open to renegotiating if Anthropic can prove they’re acting in good faith. “I have a responsibility to the Department of War, and if there was a way to ensure that we had the best technology, I have no ego about it.” he said. “I mean, look, I’m a deal guy.” Full story in Pirate Wires 👇

The point of this feature is to make the people discussing this bullshit feel important.

@johnnie The streetlight effect: people discuss business models and business strategies because they don't understand the tech, and then convince themselves that the tech will be commoditized.

This lesson from 2000 is just as relevant today. (From "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, published 2011)

Try bluesky if you prefer the fundamentals: - No link throttling. - No monetized trolling. - No paid bluechecks. Don't worry about whether the average bluesky user likes you.

@DMcgeezak Racism.

What are things that Europeans are more likely to do than people from the US, BUT that within the US, Republicans are more likely to do than Democrats? My guesses include driving a stick shift, working in a factory, smoking cigarettes while never touching weed, etc.

@NunoSempere @DominikWKH Macher.

@DominikWKH Do not ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or a German what their short word for someone who drives things forward is.

To my fellow German speakers: we need a word for agency.

@GavinNewsom Sounds amazing. I wonder why more people don't move there.

$25 minimum wage. Universal access to healthcare. A progressive tax system. The top university system in the country. Fox News hates California because of our success.

On twitter I often see a kind of bitterness from old people, a sense that everything gets worse, usually expressed in uglier language. I never hear that kind of thing from my parents. Is there something about being a parent that immunizes you against that attitude?

@_FlipMan Friendship paradox: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendshi…

How is every big business you call always “experiencing higher than normal call volumes”?

@hntrbrkmedia @jdotarnold

@jdotarnold We dug into the core claims—about tech, partnerships, sales, and profitability—that these startups focused on in their slick investor ads. We found many to be misleading or outright false. Teaser highlights in this thread. Full story can be read here: hntrbrk.com/morning-brew

BREAKING: Newsletters—from Morning Brew, Robinhood, the WSJ—helped struggling startups crowdfund from small investors using sponsored ads. We investigated—and mapped a wild west of shady deals, staggering losses, and shirked accountability.

@wwwjim youtube.com/watch?v=g59m-D…

So basically the most valuable thing to build right now is friendship

The word "genuinely" must sound completely different to people who aren't on twitter.

@s8mb And he's still just Thomas P, so unless women stop climbing mountains with any Thomas P he'll have many more chances.

Gosh, incredibly unlucky for this to happen twice to two different girlfriends.

@Birdyword The sphinx without a secret. abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2014/02/franci…

Isn't it sort of fascinating that the UK has had, in its last five prime ministers, four who have seemed to have political instincts far weaker than would be ordinary for someone in that position?

Follow people who post links. They don't care about appeasing the algorithm.

@TheAlexSylvian or something you already were too neurotic to do.

the key to being a good person is to find something you already were too lazy to do and then create a framework where you're morally correct not to do it

@spectraimsim If you believed that, you'd be posting it on the website of the american microposting corporation, not on X, formerly known as twitter.

I cant stand these millennial tech companies with these 'cute' nonsense names like "granola" or "clay." if I had a company youd see me calling that shit the American Computing Corporation. National Electron. United Tabulation. thats a name with some chest hair

@antirez @dhh Yeah, more people are below 50% of the median income when the median income is that much higher.

The decline in Europe's sovereignty, power, and entrepreneurial prowess maps depressingly well onto the rise of the degrowth narrative, the net-zero economic suicide pact, and dismantling the energy infrastructure. The bit has to flip: Using energy is good!

@hobdaydesign It might be a local maximum though.

Amazon's interface is another infamous example. Their interface is all over the place, and not easy to casually glance through, but it's all driven by testing, so it's hard to argue that it's not working.

Something I find strange about highly optimised e-commerce interfaces is how chaotic they feel. This Instacart shopping cart has 11 distracting elements, not to mention the ones in the background. Hard to believe this is the "best" approach.

@mattyglesias One way to understand the EU's problems with tech is to imagine every consumer tech company was Yelp.