This apocryphal quote was a statement about his overwhelming power (strong enough to hang people who have done no wrong), not on the mutability of the law. It is frequently mis-applied.
The quote is indeed about the law being a nose of wax, to borrow an old English phrase, and how with sympathetic enough courts almost any decision could be upheld. But it's nothing new, precisely the same crime can yield drastically different judgements depending on e.g. the defensive attorney's experience.
Use of the DPA can be litigated, and surely would be. Designation as a supply chain risk surely would be as well.
These court cases would produce bad outcomes either way. If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled. Or if the court finds for the government, an expansive permissive view of the DPA might encourage future administrations to compel tech companies to make AIs break the law in other ways, for example by suppressing certain political points of view in output.
National defense is strongest if the military is extremely powerful but carefully judicious in the application of that power. That gives us the highest “top end” capability of performance. If military leadership insists on acting recklessly, then eventually guardrails are installed, with the result of a diminished ability to respond effectively to low-probability, high risk moments. One of many nuances and paradoxes the current political leadership does not seem to understand.
> If the court finds for Anthropic, future DoD leadership will find itself constrained or at least chilled
Seems like a good outcome? The government should not be able to arbitrarily decide to make private citizens do things they aren't willing to do, whether the government thinks the action is legal or not, and its especially egregious when the government knew about those limits ahead of time, spelled out in a fucking contract.
The problem in this case is in fact the best part of our military. The civilian control. This isn't a general or admiral going insane. This is a politically motivated and appropriately assigned civilian. And that's the good part.
The bad part is the failure of the citizenry to elect moral and ethical politicians.
> what on earth could they be continuously doing for four years?
It’s not continuous. Court time in particular is a scarce resource. Many people are involved in complex litigation, and for almost all of those people it is not their only project / job.
> My guess is that it's like a poorly run software project: mostly empty, where Person X is blocked waiting on the output of Person Y for weeks, and so on.
Correct but the off times aren’t empty; the lawyers and staff simply pick up one of the other hundreds of tasks in front of them while they wait.
Of course they do, they have to. But it's okay for things that are sent to you over the network to expire. It's not okay for things built into your potentially abandoned OS to expire.
Maybe not a winning strategy because a lot of public companies have a comms team that manages the CEO’s LinkedIn. Thereby saving the valuable time of the CEO themselves.
> It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat.
To be clear, they were “handed power” by decisively winning a national election, which sort of undercuts your opening statement about how unpopular they are.
I think it’s funny that while GOP supporters are investing tens of $billions to take over popular broadcast and social media brands to privilege their point of view, Brendan Carr threatens to invoke the equal time rule, which would completely negate their structural advantage.
This is kind of like when conservatives spent years wrapping their advocacy in the banner of free speech, and then Brendan Carr announced that free speech is over, actually, because Jimmy Kimmel was mean. Oops! Nevermind.
> I think it’s funny that while GOP supporters are investing tens of $billions to take over popular broadcast and social media brands to privilege their point of view, Brendan Carr threatens to invoke the equal time rule, which would completely negate their structural advantage.
Why assume the rule would be applied fairly? Carr said they would not enforce it against right wing radio.
It is unlikely Carr will be FCC chair past January 20, 2029. (If he makes it that long.)
However, all those conservative billionaires will still own their media companies. Expanding the coverage of the equal time rule would hand the next Democratic administration a big club to swing at them.
Hey maybe for his next act, Carr will revive the Fairness Doctrine that was repealed under Reagan.
Deming’s idea is that each line worker is responsible 1) for understanding and minimizing variation in their specific area of work, and 2) for speaking up when they have ideas on how to do that better.
It is management’s job to protect their ability to do that, and integrate the information from workers to make decisions about what to change next.
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