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Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

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Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#281

Post by NoGravitas »

rayiner wrote: post #44
ants_everywhere wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palantir is unique in that one of its founders has publicly stated he doesn't believe in democracy, the bedrock of the American system.

Hostility to democracy is literally the bedrock of the 20th century american federal government. We live in the nation Woodrow Wilson created: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad...

I mean, it's also the bedrock of the Constitution as compared to the Articles of Confederation. Most of the "founding fathers" haaaaaaatttteeeedd democracy, equating it with Mob Rule.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#282

Post by gremlinunderway »

surebut wrote: post #216
lolive wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me a fully graphical version controlled UI that hides PySpark behind visual widgets. Show me a entity-relationship model management [with version control] that wraps Spark data frames into a fully ontology-based graph database. Show me a low code/no code UI designer that is fully consuming the ontology layer abstracting your Spark dataFrames. #meWaiting

Yeah ok let me go expropriate other peoples systems. They exist but are used in house not sold as products. There are information theory texts with all these ideas written in them published back in the 1950s we just didn't have powerful enough computers Thiel and Musk's only advantage is age. They were able to implement first due to a single property of physics. Most "geniuses" today, like Tao, just like reading math…

This is like the equivalent of "my girlfriend goes to another school, you wouldn't know her". Okay, so there's in-house systems as good as this. Big whoop if no one can actually see or use them.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#283

Post by rayiner »

FireBeyond wrote: post #238
rayiner wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove. The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise! > But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats reg…

> Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election Yeah, uhh, citation needed. Tell us about the 90% of executive agencies that are headed by democrats today.

It's not just about who is the "head" of the agency. In practice, the career civil service has tremendous power and discretion to run the agency; political appointees can't do much without their cooperation.

And the career civil service overwhelmingly is Democrats. 85% of federal employee donations went to Kamala Harris, 90% of you exclude the DOD: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... The proportion of republicans in AOC's district in the Bronx and Queens is more than twice as high as in the federal government outside the DOD. And given that federal workers tend to be highly educated, and more educated people tend to be more politically ideological, you get a federal government that's a true monoculture.

Certainly, we can debate about the degree to which the career civil service zealously carries out the agenda of the current elected administration. I suspect it depends on the agency. What's disturbing to me is the people who think the career civil service should serve as a "check" on the elected administration. These are the people who cite political appointees overruling career civil servants as itself an example of "dismantling democracy." They are the ones who cheered on civil servants who declared their "resistance" to Trump in 2017 at the start of his term. This view--which I think is fairly widespread--nakedly embraces the idea that "democracy" is where one party always runs the government, and that electing a President from the other party simply means that he gets to cajole and try to persuade civil servants into carrying out some of his agenda.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#284

Post by bovinejoni »

rayiner wrote: post #268
sofixa wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own! Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though. And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.…

> Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism Nobody targeted anyone’s immutable characteristics. If you object to 10,000 Appalachians being resettled in your New England town, that’s not “racism.” It’s an objection based on not wanting them to do to your town what they did to their hometowns in Appalachia. It’s ab…

Being a Haitian immigrant is an immutable characteristic. That aside, these were legal immigrants welcomed by the city and assimilating into the community, used as a scapegoat with a baseless conspiracy to stir anger on a campaign trail. I’m not sure what about this incident is defensible but it has nothing to do with culture. Are you being intentionally provocative or do you really believe this?

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#285

Post by grafmax »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #279
grafmax wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true. Is this or that victim of ICE really a “trespasser”? Without due process you can’t know that. All you have are accusations and punishment. A place of mass detention without due process: that’s the definition of a concentration camp.

>The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true. None of the detainees are claiming citizenship. Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them. One might think that even someone ignorant of the law might start babbling "you can't do this, I'm a citizen" or similar. They know the score. They know they're not. Now if only the left would clue in…

> Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them.

Due process is a human right not a right of citizens.

> What punishment?

The conditions of these concentration camps are inhumane, which itself is punishment. Besides, as stated by public officials, Alligator Alcatraz is intended as a deterrent. How can it deter if it doesn’t punish?

And being deported if you don’t deserve it is punishment. And being deported to foreign concentration camps where you are tortured is punishment as well.

And individuals can indeed claim citizenship and get no hearing for their claim. Claims don’t get hearings. That’s because there is no due process. In fact, many people are kidnapped without any formal accusation whatsoever being levied at them - for example Mahmoud Khalil, who had a green card and was retaliated against for protesting genocide, without ever being formally accused of anything.

> No one intends to incarcerate them

Detention at a concentration camp constitutes incarceration. On average ICE detains people around 50 days domestically (although those are dated numbers). Some are detained indefinitely. At CECOT, prisoners are incarcerated for life. And the US plans to increase the numbers of foreign concentration camps it uses as part of its operations, which don’t even have to be the person’s country of origin.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#286

Post by phendrenad2 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #148
TriangleEdge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex FDE here. Part of Palantir's pitch for Foundry back in the day is connecting disparate databases from agencies that don't collaborate well. They're also really good at getting demos up and running in a few days. The tech was good back when I was employed. They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence. They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curv…

Yes. In practice, Palantir enables obfuscation of the "fruit of the poisonous tree". Enabling a parallel construction in a surveillance state should draw hate, as it weakens the fourth amendment.

The thing is, Palantir doesn't enable that, their software does. And if Palantir didn't exist, the government could simply create it. (Some will say that the government is too incompetent to write software, to which I point to the US Digital Service, and also point out that trusting hyperbole is always a bad idea).

My point isn't that you shouldn't hate on Palantir, but that in doing so often the cause and effect get reversed in people's minds. They think that Palantir is the cause and eroded civil liberties is the result, when the opposite is true.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#287

Post by upboundspiral »

palmfacehn wrote: post #159
rayiner wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd point out that, at the time American went to war against the Nazis, it was in the 3rd decade of an immigration policy so restrictive that the foreign-born population dropped from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. Even though Europe was utterly devastated from war in the post-war period, there was no mass immigration of europeans to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration laws. So yes, there were Nazis in the U…

>Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.”…

Now I haven't read the book "Looking Forward." If I can get my hands on a copy it promises to be an interesting read. But I would like to follow up on the other ideas presented.

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill

Democracy for all its imperfections, is symbolic of the idea that the people give power to the government, and that it is the government's duty to give power back to the people. To me, this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Did the people not give money (taxes) and power (accept rule of law) to the government? Is it so bad for the government to return some of that money and power to the people through the New Deal? Is it so bad for the government to lay the foundations for the economic security of its people? Or at least attempt to? I don't care if a crazy person was supposedly "impressed" at what Roosevelt was doing, because they were attempting to reframe it in terms of their propaganda. From the quotes you can see how they are twisting the ideal of democracy "power to the people" to instead focus solely on power (to the government), and thus authoritarianism. To disregard that the government is a powerful institution is foolish, of course, as is to assume that it somehow will magically work toward the betterment of the people. But to disregard the extreme differences between the social contract in a democratic state and an authoritarian one is insane, and the article you posted, when read in its entirety, agrees.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#288

Post by [deleted] »

strogonoff wrote: post #250
chpatrick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad I don't know what any of those things are.

Ontologies, semantic relationships, data pipelines, data provenance (I suppose a.k.a. lineage), etc. are all things that quickly become familiar to anyone working on knowledge management. All of these things are pretty fascinating, as they concern the meta of the meta; the nature of knowledge itself; how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people. Many software engineers…

[deleted]

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#289

Post by phendrenad2 »

strogonoff wrote: post #250
chpatrick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad I don't know what any of those things are.

Ontologies, semantic relationships, data pipelines, data provenance (I suppose a.k.a. lineage), etc. are all things that quickly become familiar to anyone working on knowledge management. All of these things are pretty fascinating, as they concern the meta of the meta; the nature of knowledge itself; how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people. Many software engineers…

> how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people

So, lots and lots of pie charts?

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#290

Post by phendrenad2 »

belter wrote: post #225
lolive wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to know an alternative to that superbly integrated stack . [be aware that none of those tools require coding knowledge, nor any DB administration, nor scalability consideration. But for me the most important part is that the data workflow is not dataFrame driven, but semantic entity/relationship driven. Think of that as if you had an ORM magically wrapping your Spark cluster, and make it look like a grap…

> be aware that none of those tools require coding knowledge, nor any DB administration, nor scalability consideration. These are slogans with marketing grade truth, not engineering truth. The moment you leave the happy path wizards you run straight into Python, SQL, JVM knobs, and cluster limits. The visual Pipeline Builder drops you into a Code node the second you need anything beyond basic joins/filters. Here is a…

Yeah as a general rule, when something requires "no coding" I question if they're too zoomed-in. In reality, you can just hire a programmer instead of a box-clicker.

...Except in this case, there might be a lot of value in letting James Bond or Boris Badenov whip up a quick spy pipeline without putting up a job ad for a Python coder.

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