Yes, he's informational but a bit conspiratorial. These people are valid points of interest - it's worth entertaining facts and perspectives that are not well highlighted in the media. Even though they are usually kind of wrong.
The truth is nobody is really fully in charge, there are competing interests everywhere, Trump is making the decisions but even he changes his mind very frequently and objectives are not clear.
It's really hard to understand intentions when decisions have to be made in a reactive manner as well.
Rubio indicated 'we had to attack, because Israel was going to go first, and we were going to lose the element of surprise'. While that is an absurd and crazy reason to 'go to war' - it's actually a very rational tactic for 'when to start' as 'first mover advantage' is enormous in conflict. You can see how 'the most powerful entity on earth' is moved by events beyond it's control.
It's almost better to describe these situations in terms of all of the factions capabilities, influence, power, motivations than it is to say 'this is why it's happening'.
Once conflicts start, they have a way of perpetuating themselves in a 'circularly reactive' way, it fuels itself as both sides have difficulty standing down.
I wouldn't be surprised if the parent's complaint about his academic buddy who didn't read the paper's methods yet declared their findings as true, had misunderstood why his friend did so... which could have well been due to their additional knowledge about similar past findings/studies.
Complete hogwash of a comment, based almost entirely on your limited experiences, to denigrate academic scientists.
If you even knew these people, you'd know that most that remain in academia never considered industry in the first place. These people were not rejected by industry. In fact, it is the other way around. *They rejected industry*. They did so, despite knowing they'd make more money, but chose to remain in academia because they wanted to spend their life pursuing research topics that interested them with independence. Sometimes they feel the fool when money is tight and the hours are relentlessly long, but never have I seen it happen because they were rejected by industry.
Yes, it's officially still the Department of Defense.
If this were a news outline writing "Department of War" I would be concerned. But in the case of the Anthropic CEO's blog post, I can understand why they are picking their fights.
It's a silly shibboleth, but I automatically ignore anyone who calls it the Department of War or Gulf of America. Hasn't steered me wrong yet. They're telling me they're the kind of people who only care about defending fascism.
I think it's worth giving people a tiny bit of grace on this. I've surprised people by explaining that the "Department of War" is just fascist fanfic and that the legal name has not changed.
It's a testament to the broken information ecosystem we're in that many people genuinely don't know this. Most will correct themselves when told. I agree with you that those who don't are not worth engaging.
I would not defend all of Google's decisions in the Trump era, but complying immediately with politicized name changes has always been the status quo. Even in healthy democracies, the precise names of geographic features can be extremely controversial, and no sane company wants to get in a debate with the Japanese government about the real names of various islands.
They can, however, rename their Twitter/X accounts and vacate the @SecDef handle, which seems to be up for grabs now, if anyone wants to do the funniest thing...
No, fighting a war requires only engaging in international armed conflict.
Declaring a war requires Congress, and fighting a war other than in response to an invasion may be illegal under US law if Congress has not exercised its power to declare war, but that doesn't prevent wars from happening it just makes it illegal (though the only actual remedy is impeachment) for the President to wage war without authorization. And, in any case, that’s largely moot because Congress has exercised that power in an open ended (in terms of when and against whom) but limited (in authorized duration of any particular action without subsequent authorization) manner via the War Powers Act, giving every President since Nixon a blank check to start wars with full legal authority and then allow Congress an opportunity to vote to pull support from forces already in combat and hope the enemy already engaged is willing to treat the war as over as the only after-the-fact constraint.
Of all the silly things that Trump did, I think this one is the most reasonable. This has always been a department of war. Calling it defense was propaganda.
After it was changed from DoW the first time (in 1947), it was called the National Military Establishment (NME). They renamed it in 1949, potentially because "NME" said aloud sounds like "Enemy"
"The first is the finalization of the Schedule F rule. The Trump administration has moved forward with a personnel policy that could strip civil service protections from thousands of federal workers. The Office of” Personnel Management estimates the rule would affect 50,000 positions across the federal workforce. For the NIH, the concern is specific: program officers and other grant-making officials could be reclassified as Schedule F employees, making them significantly easier to dismiss and far more vulnerable to political pressure over their grant decisions. The rule explicitly states that such workers can be fired for “subverting Presidential directives.”
The second pressure is less dramatic but equally corrosive. NIH staff are now required to connect at least one of their 2026 performance goals to the President’s Management Agenda, a federal website whose stated priorities include “eliminating woke, weaponization, and waste,” “downsizing the federal workforce,” and ensuring that “grants go only to high-performing recipients to advance America First priorities.”
I am sharing this post of a letter from a verified source inside NIH, and vouched for, privately by contacts in NIH known to some of my colleagues. Take it seriously, and share.
This is the standing reason that is always given for why we must all sit in freeway traffic clogs, and I think it's B.S., because it assumes that there are viable alternatives available in near-medium term, but that isn't always the case. The alternative to freeways that are supposed to compensate is a joint combination of denser housing and mass transit, which in California, is not happening at all...zoning laws and the slow pace of building mass transit due to regulation slow-down and the need to service urban sprawl, prevent that solution from relieving traffic pressure. Don't speak of busses, because taking two hours to get to work is not better than one hour. So..the freeways stay the same number of lanes and my commute time continues to grow, and I am tired of hearing it is for the best.
So yes, lower LLM costs would probably lead even more LLM usage and greater energy expenditures, but then again, so does having a moving economy, and all that comes with that.
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