No other administration has used the "supply chain risk" designation against an American company. This is unprecedented.
Readit Newswslack commented on President Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/pkress2
Is it really incredible?
Only if you're naive. I guess most here are.
Governments are paranoid, particularly about losing control and influence over its subjects. This is expected behaviour.
By that logic we should expect all governments to regress to totalitarianism, which hasn’t happened, and isn’t what’s happening here.
The question isn’t if some would attempt these behaviors, but rather if we and our democratic structures empower those people or fail to constrain them.
wslack commented on A few words about FiveThirtyEight natesilver.net/p/a-few-wo... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
I kinda get your point - statistics suck the air out of the room. If regular people are talking about swing state poll margins of error instead of the actual issues, something's gone wrong.
538 democrasized the numbers that were the domain of political whizzes. I don't know if that's a good thing.
I think aggregators are useful to tell us what actually moved voters in a campaign - the swings are visible even if baseline error is not.
> it will eventually put downward price pressure on the commercial tax prep societal leeches like TurboTax and Block
https://cash.app/taxes is already free for both federal and state and handled all of my complicated tax needs the past two years.
It's free as long as Cash.app wants to maintain it. I'd rather there'd be no incentive to complicate the tax code such that many people need to hire accountants to figure it out.
wslack commented on Google Gemini tried to kill me old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/... · Posted by u/MBCook
More accurate, albeit less sensational headline:
"Blindly following instructions from an LLM would have killed me."
Not exactly shocking if you take into consideration that at the core, they're simply number predictors.
We know that. The mainstream discussion, use, and personification of LLMs does not suggest that.
I admit I drink the koolaid and love LLMs and their applications. But damn, the way it’s responds in the demo gave me goosebumps in a bad way. Like an uncanny valley instincts kicks in.
It should do that, because it's still not actually an intelligence. It's a tool that is figuring out what to say in response that sounds intelligent - and will often succeed!
The US justice system and regulatory agencies treat corporations with kid gloves. They often get many strongly worded letters and many chances to correct their bad behavior before regulatory action happens, and then when it does happen, it's slow and the corporation usually continues to operate, and then when penalty comes, it's some ridiculously small fraction of the gains that came from the bad behavior, which the corporation usually appeals and gets reduced or thrown out.
There are almost never company-killing fines. There are almost never consent decrees with stipulations that change the company's behavior. There are almost never instances of piercing the corporate veil and going after executives or shareholders. It's a total joke.
There's an incentive problem here because litigation is so expensive. If the fine is large enough, it becomes more and more worth it for the company to fight it in court - and therefore more expensive to the regulatory agency's legal budget. The only folks who benefit from it going to court are private lawyers.
Whereas, settling meets the company's incentives (eliminating uncertainty), meets the regulator's incentives (bad behavior is stopped locally). The moral hazard created by making fraud seem less risky (because the punishments aren't that bad) is born by the public.
The solution here would be to limit the possible legal shenanigans that companies can use to increase the cost of taking a case to trial.
wslack commented on Lableak truther loses $100k in his own debate protagonistfuture.substac... · Posted by u/ZeroGravitas
> The false myth of a research-related accident being at the root of the COVID-19 pandemic has become endemic in society. Despite a large and detailed body of scientific evidence contradicting or disproving most circulating ideas, many proponents are reluctant to give up even the most unsustainable notions of genetic engineering or gain-of-function research. This gap between scientific knowledge and public belief is dangerous for any democratic society.
I thought this was still up in the air.
The author of this is presenting their view and you have hours of content to watch about this if you want to dig into it. One problem is that "lab leak," as Peter says, means a bunch of amalgamated theories. It's hard to discuss this without going through in depth, which is what this debate tried to do.