> Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.
I'm surprised they got away with the first two paragraphs! The Onion wasn't really founded in 1756, doesn't control the world's shipping lanes, etc.
Later on in the brief they get all self-referential and point out how this brief itself exemplifies parody. But this isn't a parody of a legal brief. It's a real legal brief with arguments and citations that might really sway the court, with some parodic elements.
> I'm surprised they got away with the first two paragraphs!
I'm not. Even if one is entirely unfamiliar with The Onion, the final paragraph of the first section makes it pretty clear what they're about and why the document they're submitting is written the way that it is:
> The Onion files this brief to protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality. As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.
And, as the titles(?) of Arguments I and III note
> Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real.
> A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody.
> Yes, but I'm saying the brief isn't parody, it's real.
You're correct, yes.
> Unless I'm the gullible, unreasonable person who was tricked and still doesn't fully get it.
You're -I presume- neither more gullible nor more unreasonable than typical for humans, but no, you still don't get it.
A huge part of the practice of law is persuasion. What better way to persuade someone that the laws and regulations that have protected parody for ages are good, prosocial, and should remain intact than to gently use parody as part of one's document of persuasion?
If your position is that parody is strictly prohibited in a legal document, then what's next on the chopping block? Metaphor? Simile? Colloquialisms?
How does that work on the authoring side? Are there staff writers that follow a court document style guide, or are there lawyers on retainer that are a personality match for the org?
I’ve had the privilege to work at a company with a highly aligned legal team. It turns out there are quite a few people who get law degrees and are just sensible, chill, fun people. And if you can hire them onto staff, there’s no limit to the awesome things you can do.
I've never frowned while paying a legal bill. They do good work, provide useful perspective, avoid problems before they start... reminds me of the better engineers I know, but for contracts and compliance.
Gillis (head writer for the onion) drafted the tone, arguments and jokes. He connected to Novak's lawyer through a friend at the firm. Novak's lawyer then connected Gillis to a former colleague who helped format it and provide relevant legal statute.
I was surprised that they didn't contribute to the jokes, it really does read like it was written by a particularly funny lawyer.
I have a copy of "Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source".
Quoting its Wikipedia page: "The book, spun off from The Onion weekly-newspaper format of dryly satirizing current events, features mocked-up newspaper front pages from the entire 20th century, presented as though The Onion had been continuously in print since before 1900." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Dumb_Century
In general it’s the price of working with government, also see AWS Bahrain. I wonder if their insurance actually pays out because those are not officially wars there so hopefully they could recover some what from the insurance.
AWS plays both sides in that conflict since they're also a supplier for Israel. Presumably the aggressive side got them more profit than the defensive side cost them.
I agree, 9 of one hour interviews is exhausting just imagining it. In my company, 3-4 steps of 1h each that spans over days were already stressed. Guess I’m too old for that kind of companies
No it is not at all Neoverse V2, which is obsolete and has much lower performance.
It is a custom Armv9.3-A design (same ISA like the Arm C1 CPUs from the flagship smartphones of 2026), but it has double-width execution units for SVE2 (i.e. 256-bit width, vs. 128-bit for the other Arm CPUs) and it has some ISA extensions for AI/ML, e.g. instructions for inference with FP8 (BF16 is already supported by the standard Arm ISA).
Despite the fact that Armv9.3-A may include SME (scalable matrix extension, like in the Apple CPUs and in the Arm C1 CPUs), Fujitsu did not mention SME, so I assume that they did not implement it and they rely on their enhanced SVE2 (which is not surprising, while the origin of Arm SME is at Apple, the origin of Arm SVE is at Fujitsu).
> what prevents US AI labs from doing the same level of software optimization?
Because they don’t have to. Most of the time money would buy you newest and/or more hardwares so there’s low/minimal interest to optimize the code or approach.
I would be extremely surprised if US labs weren't aggressively trying to optimise their stacks in exactly the same way. Any gain in performance or efficiency directly affects the bottom line as well as research speed.
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