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The vast majority of running instances of operating systems are Linux or BSD. I don't think proprietary software has dominated for 15-20 years.

The two places it has won out thus far is in retail and SaaS. The environment of 1980 when most important software was locked behind proprietary licenses is quite far behind us.


Since Linux is GPL this seems to support my point.

Ender's Game the novel, but I would say that it's not actually super relevant. First, the original short story was 1977, and then Card expanded it into a novel which was published mid-1980s. The point in the story is that kids are sensitive, and supergenius kids more so, and that they don't want to interrupt performance with concerns about guilt. But Real Genius wasn't about that! It was about an anti-war stance born of the Vietnam War and creative-class hatred for Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Gotcha, I haven't actually seen the movie I just meant the concept of tricking and silo'ing genius kids to make them think they are playing a game when they're actually doing war/genocide is similar to the Ender's Game book. I don't know if this was just an idea floating around in the air or if it was inspired by Ender's Game, just interesting

I have seen tables (SQL and parquet, too) that have at least high hundreds of optional columns, but this was always understood to be a terrible hack, in those cases.

> Are you under the impression that the military is submitting Anthropic API calls?

Yes? I assume that it's not in a government owned and operated datacenter, but likely in AWS (govcloud or whatever) and maintained/serviced by Anthropic SREs like I suppose regular Claude is.


I think there are a number of reasons for this, but a couple come to mind. First, pg seems distant from YC now (to those not at office hours, I guess), and rarely publishes new essays, so he's rarely discussed or present in the minds of commenters here. Also, pg has the fortune or misfortune to write in a way that feels like some LLM writing, when he's writing well. I haven't gone back to earlier essays to check this notion, but I think he's going out of his way to break up thoughts into less likely sentence fragments, now, which give his recent writing a choppier, less well-written feel, with standalone sentences like

> But you could recognize one from across the room.

and

> Or maybe not so lucky.

and starting a paragraph with

> For men, at least.


> pg has the fortune or misfortune to write in a way that feels like some LLM writing, when he's writing well.

It pains me to think how simplistic some peoples' LLM writing detection heuristics are (or at least appear to be). Prose such as in TFA is really obviously human-written to me. It's using those choppy sentences properly. It doesn't strike me as "less well-written" at all; the resulting contrast is clearly very intentional.

Although, of course, what you describe is still a couple levels above "Behold, what doth mine Ctrl-F espy but U+2014 EM DASH! Hie thee hence, O wretched automaton!"


The whole point of pg's essay is that signaling transitioned into being the entire point of wearing them primarily in the 1980s.

It was several paragraphs before that, where pg said "[...] what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine."

> No concern over [...] government employees themselves

Three paragraphs later someone else is paraphrased as including immigration enforcement agents among the problematic users, and in the current political environment, federal law enforcement being made more effective might be the real problem for state and local government.


State and Local LE are also worrying. It’s common enough that they use these systems to stalk exes and such.

There's been a fair amount of speculation that pushing back after discovering that that had happened was what instigated this week's fun.

That would certainly make me feel more positively disposed if that credibly came to light, though I would still wonder how dumb were they to think the military wouldn’t do stuff like that

EDIT: that may be the case actually

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/13/anthropic-claude-maduro-rai...


> on border with one's mortal enemy

I have no special stake or knowledge of this, but Israel hasn't treated Gaza or Palestinians as their "mortal enemy"... more of a problematic-but-largely-contained source of rockets and hateful rhetoric, at least until 2023.


They have treated Palestinians as a pest to be exterminated since before Israel existed. Israels entire existence is based on the erasure of the Palestinian people.

There are five times as many Palestinians in Palestine-the-region as there were in 1960.

U have it exactly backwards

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