If I produce and sell widgets in my widget shop, then nobody but me gets to decide how I make those widgets.
The government can come into my shop and order sixty thousand widgets built exactly the way they say they want them built, and it may be something that doesn't run afoul of any laws at all.
But that doesn't mean that I am required or compelled to build widgets their way -- or at all.
I'm free to tell them to fuck off.
The government can then find go someone else to build widgets to their specifications (or not; that's very distinctly not my problem).
Actually, that is not what is happening here. What is happening here is that the govt is saying "Okay, we will not buy your widgets. Also, anyone who _does_ buy your widgets, regardless of what they are doing with them, we the government will not do any business with them." Which is waayyyy beyond just not buying widgets. That is outright retaliation and using your power to attempt to destroy a company.
The government signed a contract with Anthropic, then changed their minds and decided they don't like the terms of the agreement that they had already voluntarily signed, and then they designated Anthropic a supply chain risk.
It's like ordering a pizza to the Pentagon, and then saying "actually we made a mistake with our order; we want that pizza delivered to Venezuela, please do that". And then when Dominos politely says that's outside of their service area, you call them a threat to national security, say they're trying to dictate terms, and ban them from ever doing business with any of your vendors ever again.
The presentation is nice, but some of the conversions are questionable.
For instance: The cost section, wherein 1kWh in the US is figured as having a cost of 9.7 cents.
In reality, it's not that way at all. Unless we're fortunate enough to live in an area where we can walk over to the neighborhood generating station and carry home buckets of freshly-baked electricity to use at home, then we must also pay for delivery.
On average, in 2025, electricity was 17.3 cents per kiloWatt-hour -- delivered -- for residential customers in the US.
I looked at the electric car example for the United States. It has 3 kilowatt hours priced at $0.51, 17 cents per kilowatt hour, which seems about right. The "petrol car" example at the top of the chart isn't powered by electricity so its cost number is not directly comparable to the things that consume electricity.
The electric shower also seemed pretty optimistic. I live in an area with about 50°F/10°C ground temperature and my 14.4 kW water heater can just keep a relatively efficient shower head flowing at a comfortable temperature.
This one is resistive (tiny and cheap to purchase) but will be just an emergency-backup shower once my home renovations are done.
The house is getting a split-system air-to-water heat pump with an indirect tank for domestic hot water, so it should cut that down substantially (the unit maxes out at around 3kW input but likely will run longer to recover/preheat).
So they're useless for crimes not involving a reported license plate? Sounds like a pretty worthless marginal gain. The Chinese have done it better since their mass surveillance apparatus isn't contingent on reported license plates, or even the involvement of a vehicle. Start a fight on the street and they'll find you. Is America really this incompetent that they can't match a 10+ year old system?
So what you're saying is that I can report your[1] car as being associated with a crime, and the police will show up wherever you and/or your car is and treat you like a criminal?
> Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs [that we -- regular people -- know about] on your phone [while still being observed by the ones we don't know about].
Can the context of the pre-revision, Instant response be simply be discarded -- or forked or branched or [insert appropriate nomenclature here] -- instead of being included as potential poison?
(It seems absurd that to consider that there may be no undo button that the machine can push.)
It occurs to me that the screw counter's main difficulty is in orientating the screws.
The machine does solve that (as a product of all the shaking and jostling and doubtless unjamming), but judging by the length of the feeder tube it's not a very fun step. And the end goal isn't to have screws that are each oriented in exactly the same way, but instead to have a specific quantity of screws placed in each of a series of containers.
All of that effort to orient them so precisely does make them easy to count using the nut dispenser mechanism, but that effort is otherwise ultimately discarded.
I'm lead to wonder if the process of dispensing 6 screws could be accomplished more simply (ie, with less fiddling and shaking) by reducing the amount of orientation necessary.
Perhaps by using a sorter that puts the screws in a line, axially, without a preference for heads-first or threads-first orientation?
> Perhaps by using a sorter that puts the screws in a line, axially, without a preference for heads-first or threads-first orientation?
Here's a vibratory bowl feeder doing exactly that.[1] This is the industry standard way to solve this problem. Look what happens once the screws are lined up without a preference for heads-first or threads-first. A very simple slotted rack gets them all from horizontal to heads-up. As is usual with such feeders, if something doesn't land where it's supposed to, it falls back into the bowl for another try. That's the anti-jam mechanism.
3D printing vibratory bowl feeders works.[2] Useful for when you need to handle thousands, but not millions.
This is more scale than the clockmaker needs, though. Unless his business scales up.
He needs 6 screws at a time, and the goal is to save time compared to counting manually. I'd guess that 7 would probably be fine occasionally -- maybe even 8 from time to time if the process is fast enough. I'd further guess that 9 screws is a non-starter (screws are inexpensive, but 9 represents 50% waste, which is quite a lot).
The lower limit is hard-set at 6 because the kits that he's producing and selling require exactly 6 of these screws for end-user assembly.
A small cup that would reliably scoop out at least 6 screws and no more than 7 or 8 screws sounds like a simple and elegant concept.
What does this cup look like? Is it faster to use this cup than counting by hand is? (Is it faster than the reproducible screw counter that he's already built?)
I'm in the States so I can only relate from from my own perspective, but...
I've got a NOAA weather radio near my bed. It's a Midland WR120 that I picked up several years ago for $20. I've programmed in what areas I want to pay attention to, and what alerts I'm interested in for those areas.
Accordingly, it spends the vast majority of its time just sitting there in silence. Months will go by without a single peep from it.
When a selected alert happens, it comes to life automatically (courtesy of SAME messages) and announces information about it... and then silences itself again. Current alerts are also denoted by a red or yellow LED that stays alight for the duration, for a good visual indicator, and briefly summarized information also shows on the very basic character display on the front.
And, well, that's pretty good for me. We get things like tornadoes here that can flatten a neighborhood in an instant, and I'd rather survive that unscathed than to wind up dead (or, worse: permanently maimed). Proactive, broadcast weather alerts help improve my odds of success.
And unlike my community's outdoor warning sirens that are hard to hear indoors even when I'm listening for them during scheduled tests, this is loud AF inside of my house and will wake the dead.
Other than plugging into the wall for power, it will also run for a long time (days, IIRC) on the 3 AA batteries that it uses for backup power.
Now, don't get me wrong: I've also got other means, but they're all complete shit.
I've had severe weather alerts show up on my phone before (from Google and/or Verizon), but they're amazingly inconsistent with whether they'll appear or not and seemingly impossible to control. I've set up push notifications for apps that are dedicated to the purpose, but my Samsung phone loves to put apps to sleep in ways that make reliable push notifications mostly a non-starter.
In terms of computers and Internet access: Yeah, sure -- I've got computers and Internet access. But I'm not trying to hit refresh on a weather page all night just to see if a tornado is happening nearby when the weather is iffy, or to set up a computer to alert me to a weather hazard. And when the power dips here because the weather is awful, the DOCSIS network immediately goes with it. The cell phone towers, which are slow here on their very best days, also get overloaded and become unusable for data.
Running my network on batteries and/or integrating a generator and/or getting a Starlink dish for backup sounds like a fools' errand when a trio of cheap alkaline cells and a normally-silent radio will do what I need.
So anyway, weather radio is a lot more than just a thing that a person can tune into if they elect to choose to hear the weather forecast.
Great comment - I missed this as I was typing mine. You and I have basically the same usage, but you filled in some details I didn't include in my reply.
We seem to have a world where neither Linux, nor MacOS, nor Windows "just work". None of them have meaningful support channels for individuals. All of them have issues. They're very similar in these ways.
The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually (not always!) get there.
The other two systems are inactionable: When it doesn't work, there is no fixing it. There is no pathway, nor any journey. One can only accept that it is broken, that they are powerless to change it, and that this is the end of the road for that problem.
---
There are probably healthier ways to learn acceptance than this.
> The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually
It's also important to mention that it is more likely a person would get help along the way.
And - it should also be said that there are non-Linux free operating systems, like the BSD's, for which it can also "generally be made to work". And there's the more niche HaikuOS (where I don't know if what doesn't work can be made to work, but people do use it).
The category of things that don't "just work" on a Mac for me compared to Linux and even Windows is just a class apart. You can't compare shared buffers between phones being flaky or using face time on PC to answer calls from iphone being glitchy to my browser crashing when I try to screenshare, repeatedly, on linux.
1. and 2. are never even an options on linux - there's probably some way but the effort/payoff is basically a nogo. On apple I get those by default just by using the same apple id on the devices. It's not a principled comparison but a practical one between using these systems.
Again if you're coming from MacOS and expect Linux to be better at "just works" you're in for a bad surprise.
> On apple I get those by default just by using the same apple id on the devices. It's not a principled comparison but a practical one between using these systems.
Right. That's why you're complaining about how they don't work.
Anyway, I never suggested that Linux is better at "just works."
Instead, I suggested that -all- of them have issues and further posited that, on Linux, those issues are actionable.
I am disinclined to defend a position that I do not hold.
I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)
The government can come into my shop and order sixty thousand widgets built exactly the way they say they want them built, and it may be something that doesn't run afoul of any laws at all.
But that doesn't mean that I am required or compelled to build widgets their way -- or at all.
I'm free to tell them to fuck off.
The government can then find go someone else to build widgets to their specifications (or not; that's very distinctly not my problem).
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