0x3f

The UK is IMO quite terrible in this regard. Yes, a lot is OGL, but very key items are sequestered away and very costly to obtain. OGL is a total bodge; just get rid of Crown Copyright.

When it comes to the law specifically, there's a whole silly setup with transcription companies as well.

> Out of curiosity, like what specifically?

For example, there are thousands of divisions of government out there provisioning largely the same systems in duplicate. E.g. the very local government here has a web portal for the sports venue bookings like pools and tennis courts. They have a waste collection portal. Local tax portal.

Only recently has this been slightly standardized but even those efforts are purely regional. You might get 5 local councils in the city using one SaaS platform, another 5 using another SaaS platform, and another 5 rolling their own. For each function of local government.

Nevermind the fact that a local government in France like this probably has very similar needs to one in Belgium or even the US.

And the worst part is they are terrible at procurement so even when they do consolidate, they're basically getting scammed.

I often think about starting a cost-plus-priced open core project to deal with these issues. Like we build common government functions, and sell it for cost plus 20% markup, with a licence that lets the gov run it themselves if we ever go bust. But then I think procurement is largely a grift game and it might not do well for that reason.

Nice, now I just need to spend 5 years encoding it all and I can finally start my 'AI' tax evasion consultancy firm.

Well, there's a new batch of autoformalization attempts with LLMs now. Although I've also heard people say autoformalization will always be impossible.

It's interesting to wonder what kind of coverage Cycorp managed to achieve internally, and on what domains. Seemingly no job openings at the moment though!

Neat. I wonder if there are commercial products that are formal specifications of laws, decisions, etc. Such that you can reason on them via solvers etc.

They're in China so there's some inherent latency, but it only takes about a second to load each stream for me (in Europe).

> The only experience I can have is personal.

Right, and the point was that personal observations and impressions are a really poor way to judge the internal thoughts, feelings and motivations of random strangers. I.e. that nobody could possibly come to this determination in any robust way.

Moreover, it's exactly the kind of conclusion that suffers from common biases, and that we should be inherently skeptical of.

They're overly cautious about creating inadvertent structural forms of discrimination. Although perhaps they're not actually paranoid, given some recent court rulings.

That's presumably what the word 'fully' is being employed for.

Surely some of the online fax services are offering retention and certification of what's sent? Seems like free money to add a checkbox at checkout.

Depends, you can get NSL'd to disclose passwords. Good luck running that one up to the supreme court. And biometrics aren't as well-protected. Though, yes, in the UK it's a much more routine affair.

> in my experience bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy.

What possible kind of 'experience' could you have to judge such a thing, save for personal preconceptions and biases?

I think you have to add in the cost of PR toxicity for being so closely associated with Trump, though. Most of these guys are from the prime liberal subculture of America, even if in private they lean another way. Traditionally they've never emitted so much praise or support for one president over another, but with Trump it seems like the price of entry to get in on e.g. AI discussions around regulation or funding. Musk is arguably a player in the space but wasn't involved due to some falling out with Trump.

> Any sort of backroom dealings where they whisper off the record to defense CTOs that they have a problem with anthropics leadership and would prefer that they sub out to OpenAI or Gemini instead for LLM services would be totally illegal and a violation of procurement law. So they definitely can’t do that.

It doesn't seem they'd be subject to any kind of effective enforcement to me

I think that's what the common reporting implies, but I'm not confident that it's true. My understanding is that a supply chain risk must specifically be involved in the supply chain, hence the name. It may be that the admin hypes up their powers for the purposes of instilling fear, but as evidenced by this very post, they can be wrong.

Same as they already pressure these companies. Remove access to the admin thus giving them unfavorable terms on other issues compared to their rivals. Tell them as much in private and what they can do to rectify it. That's this admin's whole modus operandi, is it not? There's a reason all the CEOs clamor to go to the relevant WH events.

I don't think that's true, as I stated elsewhere:

> I'm not sure that's how the supply chain risk thing works. AFAIK, it has to be part of the supply chain for the products delivered to the DoD to count. I don't think just because Amazon is unrelatedly involved with Anthropic, this forces them to sever that relationship. I'm not sure if Hegseth thinks otherwise, but it's entirely possible that he is wrong or that being wrong is expedient to his threats.

I'm not sure that's how the supply chain risk thing works. AFAIK, it has to be part of the supply chain for the products delivered to the DoD to count. I don't think just because Amazon is unrelatedly involved with Anthropic, this forces them to sever that relationship. I'm not sure if Hegseth thinks otherwise, but it's entirely possible that he is wrong or that being wrong is expedient to his threats.

I believe Palantir are the only ones providing gov with Claude access

Yes, but

> I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.

I understand that, but I suspect the admin will now just have an informal, not-written-down policy that does exactly the same thing.

Well, you could also say what's the point of laws when courts can interpret them however they like? There's never a neat answer in such multi-valent systems, is there?

Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality.

If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".

They don't have in-house talent to implement what they want. The same reasons they used to hire Deloitte/EY/KPMG/PwC. Palantir is one rung up from those places when it comes to talent/ability to deliver.

They only have to replicate Palantir marketing and garnish it with a bit of nationalism. Not like the government is good at getting its money's worth in the end.

It's not necessarily airgapped but yes. Air gapping is a bit much for hospital data, which after all does have to be readily accessible to the people working at the hospital or group of hospitals.

> ah? Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics (from the above article contract). The base necessity for doing this work is... data, and the data is somewhere, stored.

It's on prem at the customer.

The idea that the Economist is running ads for Vienna's tourist board is insane enough to convince anyone reading this thread to make up their mind, I think.

> What if random arbitrary QoL indexes don't match real world reality?

That would be up to you to show. By default, I trust the Economist more than I trust a random guy.

> Except that income lets you get better life for you and your family.

We're in a thread about whether the non-monetary QoL aspects make up for less money. This is irrelevant.

> Except that unlike Amsterdam, none of those cities are in the EU therefore not accessible to EU labor, and we were talking about a sum in Euros.

First of all, at these levels you can move almost anywhere. It's not that difficult to get a visa for skilled work. Second, you said Europe. London is in Europe just fine. Talking about Euros hardly matters. Sweden and Switzerland are both part of Shengen, don't use Euros, but you could move there trivially. Zurich probably pays better and has better QoL as well.

> According to who? Tourists?

Just about every QoL index around. [1] [2]

> NL infrastructure and tech jobs market is leagues beyond what Austria offers.

These are not QoL-related beyond pure income.

> Like which?

California, NYC, London even.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Index

[2] https://www.mercer.com/about/newsroom/zurich-offers-highest-...