How are you tracking RAM usage? MacOS will report that it is using as much RAM as it possibly can, but this does not mean a machine with less RAM will struggle. My M1 MacBook Air with 8GB easily runs the full set of MS365 apps, Slack, and dozens of browser windows.

My local school district is 100% Chromebooks, first issued in 4th grade and through high school.

So I guess they must have fully depreciated the gigantic fleet of CNC routers they use to cut the aluminum cases. Making a cheap laptop seems better than throwing them away.

The final version of the “wedge” Air case was an amazing piece of physical design. The lid had a large-radius complex curve that perfectly controlled reflections. The bottom case had a curve that made it look like the machine was hovering above the desktop from almost any angle. Calling that a “hack” is sort of like calling it a “hack” that a Ferrari looks fast even when it’s parked.

The new designs are overtly boringly utilitarian. I would say they intentionally look ugly. I guess this must have been intended as a marketing signal.

And it seems like it’s working since you think the new design delivers better battery life. It doesn’t! The 13-inch M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 MacBook Airs are all specced for 18 hours of battery life.

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.

Why would he need any lines then?

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.

> e.g. the defensive attorney's experience.

Which is another way of saying the defense's wealth.

He was powerful enough to hang someone on a flimsy excuse, but not so powerful that he did not need a flimsy excuse. Right in that sweet spot.

You don’t need Anthropic for this use case, so obviously this use case is not what the current fight is about.

You don't need Anthropic for any use case. They don't ship VLAs either - nothing from Anthropic's entire model lineup can run on a killer drone.

Which raises the question: why did the Pentagon try to pressure Anthropic at all?

On the principle of it? Political reasons? Or was the real concern "domestic warrantless surveillance"?

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.

The bad part is the failure of the political parties to proffer moral and ethical politicians for the people to elect.

Congress needs public pressure to act, and the public needs a spur to apply pressure. That’s really what Amodei is doing with this statement.

> 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.

Right, because DNS entries never expire.

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.

> Of course they do, they have to.

Why do they have to?

(This will also tell you why certs in your OS need to expire.)

Because domains change owners.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074127

More specifically: because they cannot be revoked, they need to expire. Same with root certs.