Maybe it's a better analogy to compare this to food-without-lead costing 10 times as much as food-with-lead in large part because of direct actions undertaken by lead manufacturers.

Hope you like being overworked!

Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take.

There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.

Spam calls frequently don't have a source in the same country as their target victim.

I don't have a good frame of reference to know when VCs consider the industry worth pouring more money into or if it's a black hole for investment.

Surely there's gotta be some point where the industry has to prove itself worth additional investment $ rather than banking on finding another company where over 80% its valuation is based on memes and dreams (see: SpaceX) or has cartoonishly inflated expectation of future profitability (see: Palantir).

I'm aware of DIU and of greater outreach efforts to the bay area. I'm aware of a greater rhetorical focus within DoD leadership on taking advantage of Silicon Valley's tech expertise.

But I'm not aware of any substantive change to DoD acquisition law to address the fundamental incompatibility in funding models between DoD's traditional contractor base and bay area startups. The significant lag time to award contracts. The risk-aversion for the DoD where civil servants face political and, in some cases, legal liability for granting funding for projects that don't pan out.

Has the DoD's risk tolerance for investments changed recently? As in - accepting the possibility that some investments may not pan out if it means there's a good chance that other investments bear fruit.

Last I checked a few years ago, outreach to the bay area startups has been primarily using the DoD's equivalent of change found in the couch. A rounding error of DoD's overall available funding.

Thus the sentence I immediately followed the one this was made in response to where I said "They tend to die in that time if they have no funding."

> Right. So they raise funding.

In many, many cases when it comes to the DoD, their wants aren't seen as dual-purpose and start-ups struggle to find funding that isn't from some DoD-aligned and defense-focused investment firm - which haven't historically invested in large numbers of startups. At least not when I last checked several years ago.

And just to get ahead of this - a DoD want not being seen as dual purpose and the tech later being used for a dual purpose are two very different things.

> Your argument boils down to “the DoD won’t work with startups that don’t have funding,” which is both true and, frankly, as it should be, in my opinion.

My argument is that DoD contract law is poorly suited for funding meaningful sums of money to start-ups that do not have significant non-DoD sources of funding. I'm to understand relatively small sums of money can be awarded on a short time scale, but those sums of money are tiny compared to what's needed to execute on most contracts.

But there's a great deal of department needs that don't revolve around information processing infrastructure where there aren't many success stories to refer to. Especially relating to startups.

Yes, Hack for Defense is a decade old now. But the DoD famously had not done much business with area startups for many decades outside of very specific success stories like the CIA's In-Q-Tel.

Turns out that start-ups can't wait several years for a contract award. They tend to die in that time if they have no funding.

Additionally - talk of electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology has been a oft-repeated tagline by members of military leadership as well as Palantir representatives when talking amongst themselves about Silicon Valley or in their appeals to SV itself.

"We have so much in common! Here, why don't you open your history book and I'll show you!" - that's what the appeal comes off like.

I maintain that primarily relying on those examples is a poor choice in trying to establish cultural similarities.

The DoD doesn't get to neglect relationships with a community for decades and then talk of how much in common they have with each other. It's nonsense and transparently manipulative.

It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.

Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.

Plenty of variants of "people who don't use AI will be left behind" are sprinkled around various threads about AI. It's an attempt to both manipulate via fear as well as sell.