Legally Bondi

Emptywheel has a good take, here.

 

UPDATE

 

Donald Trump reportedly said on Thursday that Bondi's congressional committee performance was "fantastic."

 

THE PIVOT

 

 

Addictive. Substantively so. These two, geez...

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ERRATUM: MORE BOOKS ON DECK

 

   

Ten patterns that explain the universe
Brian Clegg, MIT Press, 2021

Introduction
We understand the world around us through patterns. These are not necessarily patterns in the visual sense, but rather occurrences that have some sort of regularity, distributed, according to consistent rules. It would be impossible to cope with the world if we didn’t have patterns. It would mean that every time we encountered an object, we would need to learn how to use it a new period instead, we build up patterns—mental models of reality—that inform us of how to deal with, say, an apple or a light switch, so that we don’t have to start from scratch each and every time. 

I am never gonna get caught up...

 

ERRATUM

OK, this is funny. From The New Yorker

 

Anthropic’s headquarters, in downtown San Francisco, sits in the shadow of the Salesforce tower. There is no exterior signage. The lobby radiates the personality, warmth, and candor of a Swiss bank. A couple of years ago, the company outgrew its old space and took over a turnkey lease from the messaging company Slack. It spruced up the place through the comprehensive removal of anything interesting to look at. Even this blankness is doled out grudgingly: all but two of the ten floors that the company occupies are off limits to outsiders. Access to the dark heart of the models is limited even further. Any unwitting move across the wrong transom, I quickly discovered, is instantly neutralized by sentinels in black. When I first visited, this past May, I was whisked to the tenth floor, where an airy, Scandinavian-style café is technically outside the cordon sanitaire. Even there, I was chaperoned to the bathroom.

Tech employees generally see corporate swag as their birthright. New Anthropic hires, however, quickly learn that the company’s paranoia extends to a near-total ban on branded merch. Such extreme operational security is probably warranted: people sometimes skulk around outside the office with telephoto lenses. A placard at the office’s exit reminds employees to conceal their badges when they leave. It is as if Anthropic’s core mission were to not exist. The business was initially started as a research institute, and its president, Daniela Amodei, has said that none of the founders wanted to start a company. We can take these claims at face value and at the same time observe that they seem a little silly in retrospect. Anthropic was recently valued at three hundred and fifty billion dollars… 

Back when I was stll covering SF/Silicon Valley Health IT, I would see pre-AI sprinkles of this kind of stuff going on.