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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#491

Post by butlike »

psunavy03 wrote: post #77
stackskipton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to…

> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the…

I think based on your last sentence:

> Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?

It's important to say which country you're residing in now.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#492

Post by notaword »

Is HackerNews losing it's cynical touch?

To me, the purpose of a 'flat hierarchy' and this internal 'status game' are obvious - clandestine operation.

* Lots of projects, most of them 'clean'

* Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg?

* It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you're doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks. Work at Palantir and you're soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there's plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn't you know it all the data you could ever want.

* All this talk about:

> Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games.

Why is 'social context' so unusually important? Your customers can't actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#493

Post by butlike »

mistermann wrote: post #199
scottyah wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All deliberate actions to achieve certain outcomes are "force", it is a scale not a binary option.

I am skeptical, let's run an experiment and see what the response is: Is feeding the homeless so they are not hungry "force"? Is lending a compassionate ear to someone suffering so they may feel a bit better "force"? Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie because I find it pleasant "force"?

What's the opportunity cost on watching a movie with a sandwich over 'continuing research to help cure cancer?'

You're forcing people to endure cancer while enjoying a sandwich and a movie.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#494

Post by 0goel0 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #476
talldayo wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

This is an extremely myopic take. I don't think I have seen many -- let alone "most" as you prescribe -- comments in any forums that resort to "war bad". Even on HN what I've seen is people with a strong sense of justice and ethics actively speaking out against atrocities being committed using US taxpayer dollars.

As for your line about people not knowing the history -- partially fair enough. Though that's also a propaganda line spread by Israel to keep people out of the metaphoric town hall. If you really believe that to join a movement you must first learn the entire history of all concerned parties first, shouldn't the same apply to any comments about Israel, or the US? I don't see pro-genocide commenters being told to shut up because they don't know the completely history of the Ottoman Empire.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#495

Post by butlike »

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.

Sounded fine to me.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#496

Post by ToucanLoucan »

ryandrake wrote: post #482
ocular-rockular wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it's a site run by a startup incubator with opaque moderation and a strong American bias, I would imagine that most things that make "line go up" are ok.

I don't even think it's always about "line go up". I've talked to real life engineers who evidently have no ethical bar whatsoever--if the technology is cool and complex and an interesting technical problem, they'll work on it, regardless of the real-world application. "Whether my code is used ethically is someone else's problem. I just love technical challenges!" You absolutely see this mentality on HN as well.

The nihilism you see in a lot of nerdy spaces in this vein is so upsetting. Tech workers are so unbelievably critical to the functioning of the modern world that if we collectivized and made demands, we could utterly bring the global system to a halt until those demands were met. But so many are so well sold on this "rockstar programmer" horseshit. Like by all means, get your bag, we all need to, but personally I sleep better knowing no software I've made is helping target guided rockets.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#497

Post by int_19h »

orochimaaru wrote: post #46
tdeck wrote: post #15

> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.

So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would…

> You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs.

To be fair, most countries don't routinely bomb some random folk halfway across the world. So if you work on defense tech there, there is a less immediate connection between what you do and people dying.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#498

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

I agree that's very bad, but shouldn't in this context "horrific violence" be kept for countries under actual war ?

(And specifically the towns where most buildings have been destroyed and most people died or fled.)

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#499

Post by gen220 »

km144 wrote: post #430
gen220 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you onboard at meta (circa 2020) the execs like to make vague references to this rare out of print book on media studies that they say presaged everything and explains a lot about how they think about their role in the media ecosystem. They liked to lift quotes from it to justify certain decisions or whatever. They encouraged you to buy the book “if you could find a copy”. I like reading old books and philosophy…

That's fascinating, and yeah it's just the kind of thing I was thinking of—the concrete example is nice. There is indeed something quite perverse about the fusion of philosophy and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism in the information age. I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doi…

I agree, that it can be a coping mechanism. You find something that's esoteric enough that you can project your goodwill onto it and use it to justify your weird behaviors.

I also agree that if you're doing good, your work speaks for itself, and does not need to be justified. I think Rockefeller, for example, struggled with this a lot later in life when he tried to pay for the cruelty his career with a later devotion to philanthropy. But I don't think it worked. Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos will need to wrestle with this, too, regardless of how much they "donate" to "charity". I don't envy them their positions in life.

The book was "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man" by McLuhan, Marshall. You can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#500

Post by pphysch »

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.

Evidence-free allegations of "human shields" is not an excuse to repeatedly commit mass murder.

Israel has already executed a proportional response to Oct 7, at least 100 times over. The additional 99+ times represent indefensible war crimes.

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