461–470 of 658 posts
I'm amazed there's no discussion in the article about Palantir's role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and "Where's Daddy". That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.
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he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
> weak ethical discussion followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony? So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does. Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition bet…
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If someone kidnaps people and holds them hostage in a building, it's totally within the realm of reasonable response for the police to surround and isolate the building. If one of the kidnappers does of dehydration during the standoff, the police did not kill him. His own stubbornness and refusal to surrender is what killed him.
Agreed. But if the police then go and bomb the kidnappers's family homes, it's the police who are responsible for all those dead families, not the kidnappers.
At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things.
I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.
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> The Biden administration had authoritarian, Russian style COVID policies. During the pandemic I read various descriptions of what disease outbreaks were like during various times. Including descriptions of the plague of 1665. What is interesting is that the approach to managing outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases hasn't really changed that much. Because we discovered relatively early on what helps. (Though w…
Either the lockdown policy before March 2022 was correct or the sudden "back to normal" after March 2022 was correct. The virus was still there and does not care about presidential edicts and speeches. Given the the world still exists, I think the pre-2022 policies were a gross overreach and the cancellations of the likes of Malone are an eternal shame for the U.S. that is comparable to what happened in the Soviet Un…
There's a tendency amongst folks who have strong opinions on covid measures to create false dichotomies and ignore how context changed over time. Lockdowns appear to have been a good idea during some of the disease (i.e. before we knew how to treat it, and before vaccines became readily available), and became less important as the context changed.
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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…
> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..." ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim. Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial gove…
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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…
> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..." ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim. Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial gove…
https://theconversation.com/postwar-forced-resettlement-of-g...
Also, Hitler's first planned "initial solution" was, as incredible as it might sound, relocating Jews to Madagascar (which of course would still have caused plenty of misery, since the core issue was that Nazis barely considered them as human beings).
EDIT : Yeah, so after following the rabbit hole for a bit, this seems to be about "Trump's mass deportations". Which I remember him claiming himself (maybe in other words), but one should check how massive exactly they ended to be.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigr...
But one of the main gists of that article is about how Palantir is helping law enforcement with data integration. Which, as this blogpost points out, shouldn't be underestimated.
And thankfully at least some of the lawmakers didn't underestimate it : there's a reason why it's illegal to build some national databases, and combine some other less sensitive national databases.
Liberal democracy requires a balance of power, and giving too much power to the policeS (or the state in general) results in a police state (dystopia). (Including through the loophole of private companies like GAFAMs.)
You can also see it as a reminder that tools aren't neutral and scale matters.
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Maduro is a 100% Russian product and service.
Then kick him out of office. Do a Panama and turn it around.
[1]: https://www.state.gov/assessing-the-results-of-venezuelas-pr...
The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider wo…
Certain situations that are likely to occur in professional settings would be suitable topics for university education. For example, doctors will encounter many challenging decisions where it's crucial to understand what past generations of medical professionals have learned from similar situations. However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. W…
When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.
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 ye…
Going for operation use cases was a huge win. Once novel data existed in the system (rather than just transforms of existing data), it became a lot harder to rip out. That could be as simple as having someone merge records so you know that two companies are actually the same.
Foundry was a really interesting case because it was basically an enterprise ETL platform before those became very popular + a team of people who helped you get data into it. One of the genius things about the business model was that it operated like a consultancy, but built contracts like a product company. That allowed them to charge based on the value provided rather than hours worked, then pull the best lessons from the deployment back into the main product.