I don’t think you can bet against America. The country has been remarkably resilient over time. At the same time, I view the sickness that we face as being pretty deep. And I also view the challenges that we have to navigate together as being more profound than any we’ve faced in our history.
~ Dean Ball via The Atlantic
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There is something deeper about the damage done by the government, too. The Anthropic-DoW skirmish is the first major public debate that is truly about where the proper locus of control over frontier AI should be. Our public institutions behaved erratically, maliciously, and without strategic clarity. Our political leaders conveyed little understanding of their own actions, to say nothing of the technology and its stakes. They got off on an extraordinarily bad footing, and it is hard to imagine them ever recovering, because they do not seem to care about improvement.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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We live in a state of perpetual emergency being declared, and that has all sorts of corrosive effects.
~ Dean Ball via The Atlantic
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In short, I can see only downsides to the Trump Administration’s decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, particularly considering the far less costly policy alternatives it could have employed. One gets the sense that the people making these decisions at DoW are not acting with strategic clarity nor any respect for the basic principles of the American republic—not to mention in stark contrast to President Trump’s own stated vision of letting AI thrive in America.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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My mother and I exchanged knowing glances, but we never said the obvious nor asked any questions on both of our minds. We knew there would not be much longer. There was nothing to say or ask that would furnish any useful information; inquiry, at that stage, can only inflict pain.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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America rests on a foundation of ordered liberty. The state sets broad rules that are intended to be timeless and universal, and implements those rules. We have not always done that perfectly, but the idea was that we were always getting better.
~ Dean Ball via The Atlantic
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