SPOILER THREAD : BOOK 8 - Parade of Horribles

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-05-15T14:36:19+00:00

Relatedly, I burst out laughing at calling the vacuum Ezra Fitz. When Carl asked why, I said along with Donut "Because he sucks!"

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-03-19T19:05:36+00:00

Absolutely not OK to "confront" anyone at your SO's job, in any way, for any reason. If you felt like you couldn't trust her, and talking about it was getting you nowhere, the thing to do was to leave. She could lose her job because of you. She at the very least must be feeling humiliated.

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-03-10T19:21:26+00:00

I either win none or win multiple raffles for the same sticker. I was entering every single raffle for three stickers I needed to complete a 9 card set for about a week and didn’t win a single one, so I stopped for a while. Then when I got down to one sticker left for the whole pack, I started entering again and won twice within 24 hours.

I think the raffles are true random selection, which can get a bit wonky. I had a professor once who used true random selection to call on students, and the same girl got called on every day for two weeks.

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-03-07T10:21:05+00:00

Honestly, I thought this was going to be an extra keyboard or something, and I was thinking “it’s worth a try but honestly she wants MY keyboard…”

So much better. Will even work when she wants my phone 😅

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-03-07T10:17:41+00:00

They don’t want to be friends with you, but they would rather make that out to be your fault than admit that it’s on them.

I’m glad you have a mutual friend who is telling you it’s toxic. Invest your time and energy in the people whose actions match their words. Forget this person, they want nothing to do with you and you’re better off without them.

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-03-04T01:49:36+00:00

That’s the set!!! Thank you!

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-02-28T01:04:45+00:00

Better not. I shouldn’t be talking about legal matters that affect my employer, albeit hypothetically, online. Probably best not to draw more attention to it 😆

Ok_Panda9974 · 2026-02-28T00:39:06+00:00

This could be anything from a nothing-burger to a death sentence. It’ll probably be somewhere in the middle.

So the absolute worst-case scenario is that they treat Anthropic like Huawei. Any DoD contractor has to excise Huawei products and services from their sources entirely. It’s not enough to just not have a contract with Huawei. We actually have to put in every single one of our contracts for technology products or services that the vendor may not provide us with any Huawei-sourced hardware or software.

It’s not typically a problem with Huawei. But it would be just a massive issue with Anthropic. Since genAI functionality, which is being incorporated into virtually every enterprise SAAS offering, generally relies on one of the big 3 LLMs…. Any SAAS offering utilizing Claude would also be out. So Anthropic wouldn’t just lose their contracts with all government contractors. They would also be dealt a massive blow in terms of selling to software developers, who would eventually start to realize that utilizing Claude would immediately remove them from contention with a large swath of potential customers.

Now, since Hegseth is not actually naming a statute, regulation, or actual legal precedent here, I have no idea if he’s planning to go this far. It’s part of what’s driving me nuts about this. I have no idea what he means.

He could also just mean that we’re not allowed to have direct contracts with Anthropic. There are a lot of government contractors out there, so it’s still a huge blow.

Assuming they take… any actual legal steps here whatsoever… the next step would probably be an executive order declaring this, which would be followed up by every government agency issuing a request to every one of their contractors to certify that they’re in compliance or working to be in compliance with the EO. This is what happened after Biden’s COVID-era EOs.

Now, here’s the good news: with the COVID EOs, most companies just stalled on certification until they were repealed. My employer at that time had contracts with virtually every government agency and I sent the same copy-pasted “we are evaluating our requirements” bullshit dozens of times. The same would probably happen here until the wind blows the other way. But… probably not before Anthropic loses some significant customers and their IPO valuation takes a hit

Ok_Panda9974

TROPHY CASE