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Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Sorry I missed last week's monologue, everyone. I was sick and in truth I'm still kind of sick, but the work is important. I also want to thank all of you have sent very kind words via the email inbox and the Reddit. I really do appreciate you so much. And actually, that's a good place to start. Everything's rough.

As you know, you've seen everything. The horrors are many. Remember to be there for the people

close to you. And as isolated, as the world might make you feel right now, there are millions of people

feeling exactly like you. Our subreddit, our slash better offline is a great place to start, as I assure you

that if you feel that isolation, the castigation, the irritation, by the push to put AI and everything,

you're anything but alone. We are all feeling it. I'll admit I've been kind of reeling myself.

I've had family stuff to take care of all while being sick for the best part of what is now three weeks, I think. It's tough to take a break when you have so much to do, especially when the stuff you have to do involves keeping up with the current events. And motherfucker, we are in an event heavy era. I missed the premium newsletter for the first time in months and the monologue for the first time since we started doing them.

Felt guilty, which is ridiculous.

You'll all tell me off for saying it. But this show is built on sincerity, so I'm going to say it anyway. So give yourself a little bit of a break. Everything is fucking rough. Not me, though. Not taking one of those. Don't get those. Now, as I wrote in this week's newsletter, which I called the

beginning of history, things appear to be reaching a breaking point. Let's catch up. A few weeks

ago, Anthropic and the Department of Defense got in an argument because Anthropic wouldn't

allow them to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or to control autonomous weapons,

the former of which is a stretch of what LLMs can do,, the former of which is a stretch of

what LLMs can do and the latter of which is totally out of their capabilities. As a result of this

flimsy defiance, Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk by the Department of Defense. This

immediately led to a depressing amount of people doing bullshit we stand with Anthropic,

Jesuit Claude, commentary, suggesting that this company was in any way ethically opposed to

blowing things up. Let me be blunt about how wrong you are, if you think this way.

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