There were a lot of protests over the Iraq war when Congress was voting on it, but Congress hasn’t had a role this time. Who would the protesters be trying to influence?
The lead up to the Iraq was took a long time, with (to me and a while load of other people) clearly misleading and wrong evidence about WMDs as the justification.
There was no attempt to sway public opinion as to the right or wrong on this one. They just piled in with no warning.
As a person who organized and participated in the ultimately useless protests against the Iraq war, I think that you're correct- we had a couple of months to watch the BushII folks lie their way into getting wide support for the war.
As far as I can tell, these current assholes don't really care what the folks in the US think about their actions, so they don't spend time making cases- they just go do whatever dumb shit they want to do. Hell, I suspect that even they don't have a firm idea of what they are doing.
I don't think the protests were useless even if they didn't stop the war. It allowed the anti war opinion to solidify, particularly when there were no WMDs found (surprise).
Tony Blair is now widely reviled in the UK, and you can hardly find anyone who will admit to have supported the war.
Fair enough. It was certainly a learning point for me, personally. And it was probably an on-ramp into understanding imperial and neo-liberal politics that set a lot of folks of my generation into Occupy.
At the same time, I wish that protesting felt effective; the stated goals weren't achieved, and that is a fact. I've never been satisfied with being "right" about these horrors, even if I've been "right" a lot in my life.
And protesting is way more fun and less risky than the direct actions that seem to be for more effective in having measurable effects on efforts around ICE.
Roman Sheremeta on X: "Before the strikes on Iran, Republican voters were overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. involvement in a conflict between Israel and Iran. A survey by YouGov and The Economist found that only 23% of Republicans supported U.S. military involvement, while 53% opposed it.
However, attitudes shifted almost immediately after Trump ordered U.S. airstrikes on Iran. A survey conducted after Trump’s bombing campaign showed support climbing to 85% among Republicans."
I think the big problem is that this is more like a sanction, more than the government saying they don't want to do business with them. They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.
You certainly seem to support the government designating a company a SCR at gunpoint when they refuse to renegotiate a signed, agreed to, and finalized contract.
...You realize the only valid uses of supply chain risk you mentioned were DJI and Huawei. TikTok isn't providing services to the U.S. Gov. Anthropic is an American company with no foreign ownership. A supplier does not have to sell it's product to a government it knows is liable to misuse it. Not as a SaaS provider. Nvidia and ASML are both now covered under ITAR. Your specification of Democrat &Republican admins just demonstrates both are two sides of the same coin. Both need a good and thorough cleaning out.
> They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.
Is neither unusual nor extraordinary. The 2022 TikTok ban on government devices—enacted under the Biden administration—carried the same viral-as-in-GPL terms.
The TikTok ban upheld by the courts was a law enacted by Congress, not an executive action, specifically targeting Tiktok. The legal challenges were all about the law's constitutionality.
This dispute challenges the executive's action, not the underlying law (10 USC 3252). Anthropic does make some constitutional claims regarding the 1st and 5th amendments, but they also advance procedural challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act and statutory arguments about whether the law authorized the action.
At least TikTok is owned by China, which is the US’s rival. Nothing Anthropic has done gives me the impression they’re working against anything America.
The story is they started fishing for classified info on how their tooling was used from their prime contractor, Palantir, who rightfully blew the whistle on them and told DOD what they were up to.
The actual letter the govt sent Anthropic narrowed the supply chain risk to DoD usage. Far less than the Epstein administration poffered on social media
It’s not just the supply chain risk designation from the Department of defense. Trump then added that he would order all government agencies to stop doing business with them. Basically, if you do not cave to their ideology, you will be coerced through such unethical means.
I think that sometimes they decide certain businesses have too much fraud, and they just get out of them. It's terrible for them to do that with no notice, though.
Many big eSIM players uses Stripe so it is weird. Also, if a fraudulent users stole some cards and started card testing then why put all responsibility on me? noting that last dispute was 7 months ago. So everything was looking good.
Tech person - there's only one contributor, it's less than 48 hours old, and appears to be primarily vibe coded with the assistance of Claude Code. No mentions of types of stitches even though it's crucial to understanding how a garment is made. I wonder too if this grammar can represent a glove made from a single strand of yarn.
It's nowhere near Marvelous Designer. Marvelous Designer is for making 3D clothing for games, animation, and such. It's a limited version of Clo[1] , which is for making real-world clothing. Clo lets you design clothing, put it on an avatar, and watch it move and drape with clothing physics. It looks real. When you see good clothing in a game, it was probably created with Marvelous Designer.
Then Clo exports a file for fabric cutting compliant with the ASTM D6673-10 standard, Standard Practice for Sewn Pattern Data Interchange, which is used for the production of garment patterns. It's kind of clunky, being based on Autodesk DXF, AutoCAD's export format from the 1980s, but it's what the industry uses. You can bring such files into anything that reads DXF and view them. So a widely used formal descriptive language for fabric cutting already exists. You can send those files to a contract garment manufacturer and get garments back.
Marvelous Designer is just Clo minus the cutting pattern export feature.
Stitches are load-bearing, so specifying a bartack or a flatlock seems pretty important to unambiguously specifying a garment. Along the same lines, I don't see a way to specify hardware that isn't for closures, e.g. the rivets used to reinforce denim pockets.
I know, I make clothes too. Probably unlike the creator of this thing.
But the comment I was responding to seemed to be using "stitch" in the way knitters use it, not the way sewists use it. No pattern drafting system can represent the stitches necessary to create a panel of knit fabric, that's simply not the level of abstraction they work at.
This thing isn't good but not for the reason of being unable to represent a one-strand mitten or whatever, which is what I think they were getting at.
Well, I actually had two interrelated thoughts and because of proximity I think I confused things. I guess what I was thinking was "garments are constructed not of "panels" but of threads of a given material which can be abstractly thought of as being panels when woven or knitted, but ..." and from there I thought of failure modes, like the fact that this doesn't have a way of specifying straight vs zigzag stitches, which doesn't have a way of specifying things that are not joined together via stitching panels together, etc. Like, I don't think this can specify a pair of jeans, because the hem of a jean requires a chain stitch at the bottom, which isn't unambiguously defined. This project feels like it devalues the complexity of something that is one of the defining features of civilization.
It wasn't quite as old, but there was an old MS DOS database system called Cosmos Revelation that was sort of a proto-nosql/graph database used keys and values for records, with the values being stored in long strings that contained field separators, and support for multiple values of the same time in a single field of a record. It used a language called R/BASIC that had library routines to help you work with the data structure.
This software is my retro computing white whale, I've never been able to find it. But I think it's evolved into a product called OpenInsight, by Revelation Software, which still exists.
Author here. You've intrigued me with this product, to say the least. As I get more experience with the productivity classics under my belt, I absolutely intend to branch out into titles like you've mentioned. That's assuming I can find the stuff though!
It would be really ironic if the guy who kept harping on the need to make us an interplanetary species ended up being the one who triggered a Kessler effect.
But I don't think even he believes he's going to launch a million satellites.
He reads like the kind of dumb who sees "Solar panels work a lot better in space" and ignores all other factors (cooling) and thinks "it's the greatest idea ever!".
But heh, spending tons of energy to etch silicon to make GPUs, tons of energy to rocket them to space, and letting them burn in atmosphere when they become obsolete... must be nice to live on a planet where we have the climate budget to waste on all of that!
I'm completely unfamiliar with these, but it seems like you need to press your palm against the device, no? The doctor's office is the last place I'd want to do that.
You don't need to press your palm, you just hover it over the plate for a moment. I think the hardware is just an IR illuminator+camera.
It does seem like a technology that should have a useful niche. Unlike fingerprints you don't leave partial copies of your vein pattern on everything you touch; unlike face recognition it's an explicit act you take so it can be used for attestation-type actions (like paying). It still has all the usual disadvantages and advantages of any other biometric. Perhaps the unique niche isn't big enough to fit a new product into though.
I'm writing my first custom policy for MS's B2C identity provider, and it's a painful process.
Making authentication and SSO more painless will actually make the world a better place -- apps will become more secure, people will be less frustrated when they use them, etc., and people like me will have less stress in their lives.
