Those aren't contradictory at all. If I need a particular type of bolt for my fighter jet but I can only get it from a dodgy Chinese company, then that bolt is a supply chain risk (because they could introduce deliberate defects or simply stop producing it) and also clearly important to national security. In fact, it's a supply chain risk because is important to national security.
No, in your example, if the dodgy Chinese company is a supply chain risk due to sabotage, why would they invoke an act to force production of the bolts from the same company for use for national defense preparedness, which would be clearly a national security risk?
The OP specifically mentions this in the context of "systems" (a vague, poorly-defined term) and "classified networks" in which Anthropic products are already present. Without more details on what "systems" these are or the terms of the contracts under which these were produced it's difficult to make a definitive judgement, but broadly speaking it's not a good thing if the government is relying on a product which Anthropic has designed to arbitrarily refuse orders by its own judgement.
I really don't see how anybody could think a private defense contractor should be entitled to countermand the military by leveraging the control it has over products it has already sold. Maybe the terms of their contract entitled them to some discretion over what orders the product will carry out, but there's no such claim in the OP.
>I really don't see how anybody could think a private defense contractor should be entitled to countermand the military by leveraging the control it has over products it has already sold. Maybe the terms of their contract entitled them to some discretion over what orders the product will carry out, but there's no such claim in the OP.
I don't think that is what is happening. What most likely is happening is that they want Anthropic to produce new systems due to the success of the previous ones, but they are refusing to do so because the new systems are against their mission. What seems like the DoD is attempting to do, on one hand, is call them a supply chain risk to limit Anthropic's business opportunities with other companies, and then, on the other hand, simultaneously invoke DPA so that they can compel them to make the new system. But why would the government want to compel a company to make a system for them due to a need for national prepareness that they designated as such a supply chain risk that they forbid other companies that provide government services from doing business with due to the national security risk of having a sabotaged supply chain? It doesn't really make sense, other than from a pure coercion perspective.
>limit Anthropic's business opportunities with other companies
Does it necessarily prevent other companies from doing business with them or does it prevent other companies from subcontracting them on government projects? The term "supply chain" leads me to think it's the latter.
The question is, after witnessing Hegseth crash out against one of their fellow contractors over practically nothing, will contractors want to walk the tightrope of doing business with Anthropic but promising it never ends up feeding into a government contract?
> Try introducing DPA invocation into your analogy and let's see where it goes!
When I introduce that, I see Anthropic's management getting Tiktok'ed.
It can be true that Anthropic's products are essential for national defense and also true that the management of the company are a supply chain risk.
Is any of that true? Well, so much of what has been done in the name of "national defense" & etc over the past many decades has clearly not been done for reasons that are true, so -when it comes to "national defense"- I don't think that the truth actually matters much at all.
"Supply chain risk" is a specific designation that forbids companies that work with the DOD from working with that company. It would not be applied in your scenario.
The analogy doesn't work here ... In your scenario they are ok with using the bolt as long as the Chinese company promises to remove deliberate defects - which is of course absurd ... AND contradictory.
Interesting, it seems like this might be a UK vs US thing. All the non-dodgy UK results for "income" I found agree with what I thought e.g. "Income less Costs = Profit" [1]
The one exception is HMRC (UK equivalent of IRS) which, for the purposes of corporation tax only, defines income like profit [2] (with some technical differences, but the same spirit). But for other purposes (e.g. personal income tax) even they use it to just literally mean cash received without subtracting off outgoings.
Using it in this net sense seems very odd to me, but maybe that's because I'm British. "Income" and "outgoings" look to me like symmetrical terms, and no one would consider outgoings to be after subtracting off money coming in (would they?!)
That page says that "net income" message the sense you meant it and "gross income" means the sense I understood it.
It does say that unqualified "income" means the net version but it's a push to say that makes it unambiguous. (And, at I said on a sibling comment, this seems to be a US convention.)
This is incorrect as anyone who has looked at a financial statement or taken a first level accounting class will know - Revenue is the top line, the gross income and lastly net income, the two reflecting the removal of various costs/expenses as per GAAP.
> The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome.
The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall government is small. They complained that this agency represents a small fraction of their government.
Model A: some visionary gets a great idea and everyone across the board stops whatever they’re doing all at once to prioritize this one initiative, budgets and contracts and laws be damned.
Model B: the modernization department sets standards, those standards are mandatory in the governments procurement process. All suppliers know to update, everything swaps out as-planned over time, no one goes to jail.
It’s usually German towns or cities trying to drive hard bargains or fighting some internal political battle.
This is a different - the agency has more scope and with the ridiculous confrontation between the US and Denmark there’s no doubt active espionage targeting Denmark from the US.
Quite a lot of small bits on Denmark are moving towards this, but its still not every much in a country that is one of the most strongly motivated to not depend on the US (because of Greenland).
The branch of the public sector I'm responsible for is moving towards Cloud Native and Open Source where it makes sense. It's an interesting journey but far from cheap.
Your final sentence seems a bit odd in that context though: Churchill's point is that Latin and Greek actually isn't useful at all, so it would follow that it isn't better to do both (i.e. study the classics as well as English), especially as time to learn them would have a huge opportunity cost, e.g. you could use that time to study more English composition instead.
(If you think they're worth learning just for their own sake then that's another matter, but the quote seems to imply that Churchill wouldn't agree.)
I think Churchill's main point is that they neglected teaching English well. However, if you read him and politicians of the era, you will find plenty of classical references. If we dig into classical history it is quite amazing how many of the same things we see. I was reading something about how certain cities in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) were spending more and more money on civic vanity projects and having to be bailed out by central government in Rome. Very similar to patterns today.
I found the "perp dot product" an interesting one. It's a pity the description is in a massive pdf (though it looks like a great book). The top Google result is the MathWorld page [1] but it's very brief.
Here how that pdf describes it. It first defines the perpendicular operator on a 2D vector x as
x⟂ := (-x_2, x_1)
which is x rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise. Then the perp dot product of two 2D vectors is defined as
x⟂ . y
This has a few interesting properties, most notably that
x⟂ . y = |x| |y| sin θ
For example, the sign of the perp dot product tells you whether you need to rotate clockwise or anticlockwise to get from x to y. If it's zero then they're parallel – could be pointing in same or opposite directions (or over or both are zero).
In this Reddit post [2] about it, again not much is said, but a redditor makes the astute observation:
> The perp dot product is the same as the cross product of vectors in a plane, except that you take the magnitude of the z component and ignore the x/y components (which are 0).
This is one of the most ridiculous comments I've ever read on Hacker News. You really think git became popular because someone wrote up a branching convention for it?
Git became popular because it was one of the first two open source distributed version control systems. Compared to the least-bad open source (non distributed) version control system before, SVN, the native branches and the ability to have a local copy of the whole tree were self evidently a revolution.
(The other one was Mercurial by the way, released at almost exactly the same time as git. Partly git won that race because of the cachet of being written by Torvalds and being used for the kernel, but I suspect mainly it was due to the existence of GitHub.)
Aside from the above, it's also just clearly not true that git flow was particularly common. It's no good claiming anyone that disagrees is in a bubble. We all have access to GitHub! Look for yourself at some random repos (and make sure you sample a few different languages). It will verify my experience of looking at dozens, probably hundreds, of repos over many years: the number of people using git-flow is, to a first order approximation, roughly zero.
Your previous comment was ludicrously arrogant and overconfident ("You're having it explained to you.") especially given that you're wrong.
Rather than lower myself to your level, I carefully explained the reality of the situation, complete with a mention of how I actually did check what you said (despite having overwhelmingly enough experience of version control to already be certain it's nonsense).
Clearly you didn't do the reasonable thing of rethinking your understanding or checking for yourself because you took your arrogance up a notch by telling me to do a Google.
The point of the mythical man month is not that more people are necessarily worse for a project, it's just that adding them at the last minute doesn't work, because they take a while to get up to speed and existing project members are distracted while trying to help them.
It's true that a larger team, formed well in advance, is also less efficient per person, but they still can achieve more overall than small teams (sometimes).
Interesting point. And from the agents point of view, it’s always joining at the last minute, and doesn’t stick around longer than its context window. There’s a lesson in there maybe…
The context window is the onboarding period. Every invocation is a new hire reading the codebase for the first time.
This is why architecture legibility keeps getting more important. Clean interfaces, small modules, good naming. Not because the human needs it (they already know the codebase) but because the agent has to reconstruct understanding from scratch every single time.
Brooks was right that the conceptual structure is the hard part. We just never had to make it this explicit before.
I think "can't you hang out with ... " meant "would it really be a problem if you did hang out with ... " referring to the objections in your previous comment. Not why don't you know any in practice!
https://xkcd.com/1200/
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