> CPUs now dedicate a ton of silicon to decoding the CISC stream into RISC-y microcode.

In absolute terms, this is true. But in relative terms, you're talking less than 1% of the die area on a modern, heavily cached, heavily speculative, heavily predictive CPU.

Didn't there use to be a joke about Intel being the biggest RAM manufacturer (given the amount of physical space caches take on a CPU)?

I hadn't heard that, but certainly, there must have been many times when Intel held the crown of "biggest working hunk of silicon area devoted to RAM."

It turns out I'll never get those three minutes back.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned zig.

Surely its "bring your own allocator" paradigm also allows this.

> Entire libraries are a weird sort of exception.

Not really. The entire point of the article is that there are a lot of problem domains where data stays on a single machine, or at least a single type of machine.

> owners sued firemen for pulling water hoses through their cars after breaking the windows - the law was not allowing it even if the line through the car was the only option.

I'll bet anything you have no citation for this.

Sovereign immunity and necessity combine to make sure that firefighters and cops can do whatever the fuck is required.

The aftermath is even more brutal. You will receive multiple tickets for this, you will receive a bill for damages to the hose they had to thread through your windows (or to the police car that rammed you out of the way), and your car insurance will point to a clause in their policy that says that you are personally on the hook for all of this.

You may even face civil or even criminal liability for any damages to whatever is on fire, or loss of life, that a good prosecutor or plaintiff's lawyer can convince a jury is directly traceable to your egregious conduct in parking your precious car in front of the damn fire hydrant.

There is no sovereign immunity for firefighters, that is for states. Firefighters are city employees and cities don't have sovereign immunity.

Right, I should have written governmental immunity.

In any case, it's a losing lawsuit.

Your contention that Trump's administration is big tent is risible.

Political witch hunts, women and minorities forced out of the military, and kicking out all the allied countries that used to be in the tent with us?

Bullshit of the finest caliber.

Yes, the Trump administration is big tent of politicians who hold incompatible opinions and are allowed to stay as long as they display personal allegiance to Trump.

The knife manufacturer would be more than happy to continue to sell to you, except for that minor little detail that you're in jail.

Any knife vendor who

1. Found out you used their knives to go murdering

2. Sells knives in a fashion where it's possible for them to prevent you from buying their knives (i.e. direct to consumer sales)

Would almost certainly not "be more than happy to continue to sell to you". Even if we ignore the fact that most people are simply against assisting in murders (which by itself is a sufficient justification in most companies), the bad PR (see the "found out" and "direct to consumer" part) would make you a hugely unprofitable customer.

Meh. Not sure why knife dealers would be assumed to be more moral than firearms dealers. See, e.g. Delana v. CED Sales (Missouri)

> the bad PR (see the "found out" and "direct to consumer" part) would make you a hugely unprofitable customer.

That... Doesn't happen.

Boycotts by people who weren't going to buy your product anyway are immaterial to business. The inevitable lawsuits are costly, but are generally thought of as good publicity, because they keep the business name in the news.

People who buy luxury kitchen knives are exactly the type of people who would choose not to buy a product because it is associated with crime.

People who buy (and make) firearms are... pretty close to the exact opposite.

So now it's "luxury" kitchen knives?

Goalposts moved.

Direct to consumer sales of kitchen knives are entirely luxury products... the goalposts are exactly where they've always been.

Ahhh, direct to consumer.

Where either it's a computer program (website) that knows nothing about you, or cutco.

If you think you wouldn't find a cutco representative to sell to you, you're on some good reality-altering drugs.

sotto voce the knives are a metaphor

Doesn't matter.

There will always be some company willing to sell to even the worst person, in any product category.

The response that companies have to boycotts, and the results of the boycotts themselves, are fractally chaotic at best.

But even most nominally socially-aware companies are reactive, rather than proactive.

Since the knife vendors were metaphors for AI vendors, is the comparison you want to make "AI vendors & weapons manufacturers"? That's the standard we should judge them by?

It's not about the standard we should judge them by, which is equivalent to how we think they should act.

It's about how we think they will act.

Especially when it comes to sales to the US military, I have no expectations about how companies will act.

Hell, just look at how many companies willingly helped China with their Great Firewall.

> Not sure why knife dealers would be assumed to be more moral than firearms dealers

What I mean is that you _did_ judge them by a standard used for weapons manufacturers. How you react to their actions _is_ your judgement.

But perhaps that is the standard we should use. Weapons manufacturing is a well regulated industry after all. Export controls, dual-use technology restrictions, if it has applications for warfare it should be appropriately restricted.

> is that you _did_ judge them by a standard used for weapons manufacturers.

I think any of these companies will attempt to get away with whatever the fuck they can.

That has fuckall to do with your rhetorical question of:

> That's the standard we should judge them by?

He's reading the room.

No, not this room. The one with Hegseth in it.

Look at his other comments. He's not wrong.

> if the directive had never been made public, would that blog post exist?

You're ignoring the sequence of events on the ground.

If there hadn't been any been any internal pushback from Anthropic, would the directive have ever been made public?

That's a fair point about sequencing, but it actually reinforces the argument rather than undermining it. If Anthropic pushed back internally, and that pushback is what led to the directive going public, then Anthropic had every reason to anticipate that this would become a public story. Which means the blog post wasn't a spontaneous act of transparency, it was a prepared response to a foreseeable escalation. That's more strategic rather than less so.

Internal pushback and public damage control aren't mutually exclusive. A company can genuinely disagree with a client's demands behind closed doors and simultaneously craft a public narrative designed to make itself look as good as possible once those disagreements surface. In fact, that's exactly what competent communications teams do, they plan for the scenario where private disputes become public, and they have messaging ready.

The real question isn't who went public first or why. It's whether Anthropic's stated position, "we support these military use cases but not those ones", reflects a durable ethical framework or a line drawn precisely where it needed to be to keep both the contracts and the brand intact. Nothing in the sequencing you've described answers that question. It just tells us Anthropic saw this coming, which, if anything, means the messaging was more carefully engineered, not less.

I already suspected the first comment was by an LLM, but deleted that from my reply as it didn't feel like a productive accusation. However, with "that's a fair point" as an opener, plus the sheer typing speed implied by replies, and the way that individual sentences thread together even as the larger point is incoherent, I'm now confident enough to call it.

I actually use assistive voice transcription as I am unable to type well with a keyboard.

[Edit: update]

I use assistive voice transcription because I'm unable to type well with a keyboard. But I'd point out that "you must be an AI" has become the new way to dismiss an argument without engaging with it. It's the modern equivalent of "you're just copy-pasting talking points", it lets you discard everything someone said without addressing a single word of it.

The fact that my sentences "thread together" is not evidence of anything other than coherent thinking. And speed of response says more about the tools someone uses than whether a human is behind them. Plenty of people use dictation, accessibility tools, or just happen to type fast.

^^^ This took me 30 seconds to speak aloud.

Ok, good to have that explanation. Your larger point, though, remains incoherent. Whether Anthropic saw this coming has nothing to do with the substance of the conflict here and is very much not "the real question".

Thanks. I saw everybody responding as if there might be at least a modicum of gravitas there, and thought I was suffering a stroke, or was pulled into another dimension.