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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#221

Post by ks2048 »

dralley wrote: post #217
pphysch wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what extent is repeated mass-murder of civilians, total destruction of healthcare and education systems, etc. part of the "moral gray area"? That's just not a serious argument. You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist values and so on.

If you have a military enemy that blatantly hides itself within civilian areas and builds its underground infrastructure underneath civilian infrastructure, and that military enemy kills 1200 of your citizens in an attack, that creates a fair bit of moral ambiguity.

Imagine the reaction to Palestinians blowing up a residential Israeli apartment building with hundreds of civilians inside and justifying it by saying they wanted to kill an IDF member inside.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#222

Post by aaron695 »

ak_111 wrote: post #173

Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza. In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance. from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f... """ Not only did it provide information to…

[dead]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#224

Post by lapphi »

swells34 wrote: post #179
Manuel_D wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.

I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the eve…

I appreciate the technical achievements here. However, I wonder how long before it’s standard practice to track all peoples movement, not just those suspected of a crime. I know of at least one YouTube channel that is always recording all traffic camera streams in Washington so there must be some State entities doing the same. Back in 2020 there was a twitch channel that would play a 9x9 grid of all the livestream footage from the George Floyd protests. I’m sure an archive of that exists somewhere on a LE server.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#225

Post by carom »

lmz wrote: post #216
avmich wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s…

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It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist. The counter narrative would be that preventing it gives power to American workers (of all races) but no one seems to discuss that.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#226

Post by rabf »

tolerance wrote: post #105
julianeon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factually untrue. I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough. > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well. About "sin" industries: > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as moral…

Julian, I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument. However— please —there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims. You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.

I find the disdain for LLM's somewhat troubling when they they are easily in the top 1% of commenters on most subjects.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#227

Post by maeil »

wg0 wrote: post #140

TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product. Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.

It's funny to read this. The reality is the opposite - Palantir pushes the custoner all day to go with actual operational usecases (i.e. CRUD, not R) and oftentimes some highlevel exec says no, I just want my reports.

Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the rewards.

It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g. worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the gov side of things.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#228

Post by rabf »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #146
julianeon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factually untrue. I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough. > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well. About "sin" industries: > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as moral…

ChatGPT is not a valid source to substantiate a claim.

What sources do suggest as superior?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#229

Post by jongjong »

ks2048 wrote: post #223

The age old tale of “libertarians” getting filthy rich on taxpayer dollars.

That's the story of the entire big tech sector and they can't deny it.

If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need a monetary system based on unlimited money creation.

It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the globe attract the 'right' candidates.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#230

Post by IgorPartola »

lmz wrote: post #216
avmich wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s…

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Basically because everyone here is an immigrant of some sort just maybe not first generation. Also because the vast majority of people who show up at the Mexican border are fleeing horrific violence and when you are fleeing horrific violence it is difficult to always do things by the book. And also it is a reaction to just how poorly these people that otherwise would be classified as refugees get treated. Under Trump in particular family separation became the norm and courts who oversaw immigration cases had kids as young as 4 brought before a judge without family or legal representation.
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