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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#291

Post by jedimind »

Barrin92 wrote: post #275
jedimind wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read…

>Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay: https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating... Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be i…

The problem is that Thiel himself clearly didn't understand the message of the novel. Quoting Ender's Game to justify genocide[1] fundamentally misinterprets the novel. Ender is horrified when he realizes he has been tricked into committing genocide and spends his life seeking redemption. Thiel on the other hand is bending over backwards to lie to the audience in order to justify the genocide.

Even before the genocide began, it was clear from how israeli officials repeatedly referenced Dresden that they viewed the bombing as a model for their actions—and that is precisely what they did. Thus, it is even more absurd for Thiel to claim that they "didn't Dresden Gaza." They did, and it is much worse and it still hasn't stopped after more than a year.

[1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go... - Israel 'undoubtedly committing genocide' says Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#292

Post by vundercind »

thimkerbell wrote: post #107
Manuel_D wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agenc…

So if they are dumping data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore, which one is the active database going forward? In 2024.

All of them, plus whatever next vendor they “migrate” to in three years (I’m being generous).

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#293

Post by samrus »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #265
botanical wrote: post #263

[flagged]

There was an interview somewhat recently where someone asked his connection to Israel's military, and he squirmed and rapidly stuttered in sheer terror for about 15 seconds before he finally put together a sentence where he said something like "I'm not allowed to criticize Israel." It was weird seeing one of the richest men on earth suddenly have absolute fear in his eyes and talking like he had a gun to his back. Tw…

Link to the interview https://youtu.be/q1asavnl_o8

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#294

Post by knowaveragejoe »

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…

[flagged]

"Cracking down" isn't what's needed, it's reform of the immigration system in the first place.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#295

Post by knowaveragejoe »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #266
mc32 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It’s the progressives who took over the vanguard of the Dem party that espouse the position of open borders There are no federally elected democrats who espouse the position of open borders. None. Zero. Every single member of the democratic party in office today in federal office supports some degree of border control, and frankly the degree that they want is not worlds apart from what most republicans want. The GO…

The distinction you're drawing is called being intellectually honest about the subject. For people predisposed to the fox news cinematic universe, this is not something they will want to substantively engage with.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#296

Post by ArtixFox »

monkaiju wrote: post #283
samatman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you think the goal of defeating Hamas justifies this amount of civilian killing yiu have no moral basis to argue with.

What is the other solution?

create a separate state for palestine under the control of hamas would only legitimise them, allow them to easily get more weapons and go on another oct 7, which will again lead to the bombings currently happening.

Bombing them to death would lead to deaths of many, many women and children cuz gaza is 75% children.

You cannot have peace with hamas, only ceasefire, and even then they havnt stopped launching homemade missiles.

The most sane solution is defeating hamas, establishing a third party control over it to stabilise the region and then return it to democracy, but israel is too trigger happy to do any progress on this field and hamas wants all of israel.

You cannot have peace on the land without destroying hamas. Not even for moral reasons. Maybe there is another solution in ur mind?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#297

Post by ArtixFox »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #241
dralley wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would start by not sending them money. Unless of course you needed a justification for your political/expansionist goals. https://archive.ph/2023.10.14-033824/https://www.haaretz.com... https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hamas-israels-own-creation/ Anyway, the idea of embedding military targets within civilian populations is also not exclusive to one side: https://www.haaretz.com/2012-06-09/ty-article/.premium/does-…

sooo israel should use time travel? the situation right now is a fucked up war between two bloodthirsty groups. I dont think this is the right time to think of inventing time machines...

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#298

Post by kuhewa »

jiggawatts wrote: post #281
botanical wrote: post #263

[flagged]

It's interesting to watch these "talking points" bouncing around when there's a politically charged topic like the war in Gaza. (For reference: I have no skin in the game and support neither side.) Having said that: 65% killed being women and children is because of the demographics of Gaza , not because of any specific behaviour by Israel other than just "being at war" with their neighbours. It's a talking point used…

You appear to be making the case that the 65% statistic of Gazans killed by Israel shouldn't be alarming since it merely is converging on the demographic makeup of the population.

I'd argue that it is very alarming when military casualties converge on the general populations demographics and not the demographics of actual combatants.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#299

Post by worstspotgain »

MrLeap wrote: post #260
mc32 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A week ago Alejandro Arcos was decapitated right after he took office as mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people. Some approximate stats: Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has about 25k a year. The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the US is 350m. One can't derive the distribution of motivations that bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd cal…

Everything you wrote is correct. However, Mexico is actually an immigration success story. The net migration flow is around zero [1].

The big picture comes down to supply and demand. Today's supply is from specific countries: Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, a few others. Each country has a different rationale, but generally it boils down to violence, poverty, and Putin. Not necessarily in that order, and often it's all three.

"Demand" is due to the congestion backlog in the US immigration courts. A prospective refugee might not see a judge for a year or two. During this period they have to be paroled in and granted work authorization.

Most applicants today aren't genuine refugees. This was not the case in prior decades because there was no backlog. Awareness of this loophole makes the US a much more practical and appealing destination than it used to be.

The backlog, in turn, stems from the congressional paralysis on immigration. For 20 years the nativists blocked bill after bill, despite large bipartisan support for reform. They did so because every compromise also included a guest-worker program and other immigration benefits.

More recently, there was a deal on the table with no GWP and no immigration benefits. In previous years, it would have been a nativist's dream. It was blocked by the Trump campaign in order to "run on the issue." [2]

A large fraction of the 2024 immigration numbers is due to Trump, maybe as much as 50% or 80%.

For the bigger picture, consider the fact that the exodus in Venezuela and Syria was started by Putin. He gives you the flu (waves of fleeing migrants,) blames the aspirin (the "globalist" Western governments who are forced to handle them,) then sells you the Ivermectin (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, AfD, etc.)

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/09/before-co...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans...

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#300

Post by vundercind »

xrd wrote: post #176

As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them. But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But,…

I found TFA to frequently juke in weird directions, and for the text to at times be at-odds with what I believed the subtext of what I had just read—a notable early one is where the author describes the intellectual atmosphere at the company in a series of examples that definitely read to me like performative, LARPing intellectualism… then sums that up by claiming you can’t copy their vibe by LARPing intellectualism, which is what I though I was just reading a description of.

The selection of the list of people and the reason they were being mentioned, in the section you’re referring to, was another point where the piece threw me.

I wouldn’t say it changed my mind about the company, but it, uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.

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