Anthropic: "Oh... American access only, you say? I'm sorry, we can't promise that (because VPNs and US-local cloud hosting and all that), so we need to turn it off completely."

...probably.

If so, I wonder what turn the political shenanigans will take next?

Based on the actions of the current administration and the short-sighted tech oligarchs who have been consistently pushing towards neo-fascism/neo-feudalism, probably one that further degrades trust all around and gives China even more of a leg up.

Let's see!

It seems to me like referential transparency and pure functional composition would be a much cleaner way to visually compose functions into larger functions (and eventually programs).

In today's economy power and wealth are not even close to evenly distributed.

Claiming that responsibility should be evenly distributed is therefore a highly disingenuous argument.

Seems to me like we should reward people for achieving sustainability rather than only rewarding growth.

Maybe it's time to start substituting a bit of competition with a bit more collaboration and looking out for the needs of everyone? Just a thought.

Needs are food, housing, and safety. Anything beyond that is not a need, it is a want. We're not giving everyone everything they need, and an increasingly tiny number of people are grabbing anything and everything they want.

We're about to start discovering that in a dynamical system with lots of other intelligent agents, our need for "safety" at a certain point does depend on others need for food and housing.

Let's try to remember that as we are laying them all off to give their jobs to AI.

The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc.

There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain.

From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense).

Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically).

Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.

Basically what we're seeing is the inevitable collapse of 50 years of supply-side economics (or "Reagonomics" or "Trickle Down Economics", as it's often referred to as). The inevitable result of this is wealth stratification and ultimately demand implosion.

The next 10 years should be interesting.