Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflections on Palantir

nabeelqu.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 658 posts

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#531

Post by BlueTemplar »

lrewh wrote: post #515
mind-blight wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really take into account the advent of COVID vaccines, the evolution of the disease (it appears that less lethal variants), and how human immunology works (people create antibodies if they survive the first round of a disease). 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 goo…

You would be right, except that the policy change was sudden. We went from hardliner measures like vaccine mandates (EUR 15,000 proposed fines in Austria), lockdowns, layoffs for the unvaccinated, gag orders for medical personnel up to December 2021 to almost complete freedom in March 2022. You could watch consent manufacturing in real time as former hardliner outlets like the NYT and the Atlantic started to insert t…

That seems fitting for something that became a seasonal disease.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#532

Post by TriangleEdge »

I worked as an FDE for govt deployments. I am writing this as a warning to others. I got drugged without consent, _twice_, while working for Palantir. Palantir sells software to demons, so take my warning as you will. The first time was minor, but the second time was major, and I'm still hurt from it.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#533

Post by insane_dreamer »

gnmlaxr wrote: post #405
bborud wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Comparable to the USSR? That tells me you have no idea of what life was like in the USSR. There is no way they are remotely comparable. I lived in the US during COVID and I also lived in the USSR and later Russia so I know of what I speak.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#534

Post by tsimionescu »

sebastos wrote: post #463
tsimionescu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, now imagine the kidnappers escape with the hostages, and hole up in their family homes. The family members will answer the phone and they insist they are totally 100% innocent: they haven’t seen their scumbag kidnapper uncle in years! The family sure doesn’t seem to be very cooperative in helping authorities apprehend their uncle though…

Are you suggesting that this then makes it ok to bomb the family home, killing women, children, unknowing neighbours, and the hostage together? And that it's entirely the kidnapper's fault when this happens?

If so, I certainly wouldn't want to meet the gods that approve of such a thing, if any existed.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#535

Post by philwelch »

gen220 wrote: post #499
km144 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Marshall McLuhan was the most famous and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, and the one whose ideas are probably the most obviously relevant to Facebook. He’s not some sort of obscure figure at all. I’m sorry if he wasn’t your cup of tea and it’s totally possible that Facebook execs weren’t understanding and applying his ideas correctly but frankly I would be a lot more worried about the company if the top leadership wasn’t reading McLuhan.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#536

Post by gopher_space »

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

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

It's not a nuanced political situation people need to spend time teasing apart, it's just bloodthirst being perpetuated generationally. There's no subtext to this conflict that won't sound absolutely insane to an outsider.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#537

Post by BlueTemplar »

bborud wrote: post #381
ktagh wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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…

It's interesting to look at the pandemic before Covid (in the West), which was the Hong-Kong flu of 1968-1970, with 1-4M deaths worldwide and 0.1 M in the USA.

It was mostly ignored, worse, its impact was minimized by upper class journals, all the while hospitals were running out of space.

(So comparisons with Covid are hard to make, since the response was so different.)

The medical sector paid attention after the fact though, and supposedly the reaction to it basically created the (postmodern?) discipline of epidemiology !

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#538

Post by scott_w »

crimsoneer wrote: post #521
scott_w wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific to the NHS, Palantir not being a UK company was a big talking point, so yes, that's a tangible difference between Palantir and, say, Capita. Your (and the sibling) responses also beg the question: must governments contract to big foreign consultancies? It's not illegal to do things in-house if they so choose, you know.

God, if we're only now going to accept "Built British" IT, we're not going to be going very far.

Take the effort you’re putting into trying to look edgy on the internet and instead channel it into reading and understanding what I actually wrote.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#539

Post by subjectsigma »

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…

I work for a government contractor that does quite a number of things for a diverse set of agencies. You would be amazed at the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves you are some sort of child-eating monster. 80% of the time they have absolutely no idea what my company does nor what working for the military is actually like.

“Where do you work?”

“Oh at $COMPANY.”

“I hear they work in missile defense technology, you should be ashamed. Gaza Israel blah blah blah”

“Oh, well sorry you feel that way.”

“So how many innocent children you bombed this week?”

“Actually zero, I spent the week writing Ansible and bash scripts. Then I went to a presentation about a team trying to stop $COUNTRY from hacking into the electric grid and shutting down power to hospitals. Then I read a report about improving 911 tech backends and other emergency services. Then I had lunch with my friend, who works in forensics catching sex traffickers, and he told me some crazy stories.”

“Wow I didn’t know you guys did all that stuff at $COMPANY…”

“Sounds about right…”

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#540

Post by skipants »

danw1979 wrote: post #406

> These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun. This, it turned out, was an inheritance from the Paypal mafia. Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.

Eh, maybe. I wouldn't completely judge a workplace by these people. I've kind of come around to enjoy working with "weirdos" like this because their personal quirks have no actual affect on how they work. It can make them more interesting if anything.

I think the actual awful part of people like that are when they get in a position of power and preach their weirdness as The One True Way(tm). Which, unfortunately, a lot of them do. I think this stems from them having success in life without realizing it's selection bias. The result is that their own decisions are biased towards their quirks and they become pretty insufferable about it.

But, to your point and to completely contradict mine, I would bet those "One True Way" people probably are the norm at Palantir, judging by the onboarding book choices.

Post reply on HN