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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#541

Post by insane_dreamer »

vundercind wrote: post #285
jeltz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is very hard. But does Palantir succeed? Or do they like some other companies just trick customers with big wallets to buy?

The impression I get from their involvement at one company I know of is that it’s very much the latter. I was pretty surprised to see them behaving and performing about the same as any parasitic enterprise software vendor with an integration services arm. One wonders how different they really are, and if maybe they just have very good PR and marketing. Chalk it up as yet another case of some famous one-would-suppose…

I’ve heard you often get the A Team coming up with the plan and making the sale and then the B Team doing the actual implementation which surprise! doesn’t live up to the A Team hype. Not specific to Palantir.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#542

Post by dralley »

pphysch wrote: post #502
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.

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 extra 99+ times represent unprovoked war crimes.

That... is not how wars work. Proportional response is not a requirement.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#543

Post by aguaviva »

subjectsigma wrote: post #539
orochimaaru wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defe…

And yet, if $COMPANY is also providing munitions for "Gaza Israel blah blah", then by continuing to work for $COMPANY, you are also very much a part of that.

It doesn't matter what department you are in, or the neat little Ansible scripts you get to write.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#544

Post by nonameiguess »

oceanplexian wrote: post #472
acdha wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Americans are not opposed to having immigration laws. The disagreements come from whether those laws are fair and the way “illegal immigration” is used as a bogeymonster by racists. For example, when Trump and Vance were doing the “Haitians are eating cats!!!” thing recently, note how often their supporters would throw the “illegal” term around even for people who are here legally. Their concerns were quite tran…

The reason they call asylum seekers illegal is because most asylum seekers are immigrating for improved economic opportunities, not because they are otherwise fleeing persecution from their government. If you want to immigrate somewhere for work you need to get in line for the correct visa. I would expect many legal immigrants here on HN would know this struggle. My parents did when they immigrated to the US. The pro…

I don't get it. Haiti has had an ongoing civil war for at least 6 years. Their last president was assassinated and they've suspended elections and haven't replaced him. Most of the capital city is controlled by criminal gangs. Civilians are regularly raped and murdered for no real reason other than intimidation. The UN has authorized and sent an official security assistance mission. What exactly needs to happen in a country before you consider people fleeing it and seeking asylum to be legitimate and not lying?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#546

Post by jumping_frog »

itronitron wrote: post #372
notadoomer236 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'd argue that legal immigration is changing the US more than illegal immigration because illegal immigration largely originates from other countries in the Americas and therefore more easily fits in with the USA's existing history and culture.

Is the reason why America is filled with illegal migrants (millions allowed till now) because the US power structure wants to decouple from China and will need cheap labour to work in onshore factory?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#547

Post by ab5tract »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #318
carom wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist. The counter narrative would be that preventing it gives power to American workers (of all races) but no one seems to discuss that.

I agree on both counts at a high level, but America always had cheap labor. It is what helps us have so much disposable income compared to other countries.

This is a bizarre take. Corporate towns and company stores and union leader assassinations are all a part of the history of cheap labor in the US.

None of those dynamics contribute to higher incomes for anyone aside from bosses and investors.

But maybe exploitation of cheap labor for personal gains is what you were referring to?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#548

Post by siliconc0w »

IMO it is inevitable that this technology will be turned against Americans if it hasn't already been. I'm sure they do some good but a large part of their value is an socio-political arbitrage where they're allowed to do things that would be absolutely unpalatable for the government to do directly.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#549

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

Who is "we" in this context? This thread is descended from people complaining about American policies and speculating that Biden is trying to make us into the USSR. The US is not Austria and never had fines for being unvaccinated. Vaccine mandates themselves were never federal and can't be. It's up to individual businesses and schools and what not to decide if they care. The government itself only ever mandated vaccines for its own employees. Lockdowns were similarly never federal and mostly on a city by city basis. Some cities hardly anyone was out on the street ever and in-person services businesses were closed for a long time. In other cities, virtually nothing changed at all outside of maybe a few months immediately after March 2020. Where I live, Dallas had a "lockdown" for like three months. This ended way before Ukraine was invaded.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#550

Post by acdha »

deltarholamda wrote: post #460
acdha wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a civics class is a taught by a “priestly caste”? Or the ethics course in a medical or engineering program? Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.

It's naive to think that a civics class or an ethics class is free of foundational prejudices. You suggest empowering a group of people to choose what to teach, and what not to teach, and thereby decide what constitutes "civics" or "ethics". And you advocate that this is outside of a parent's scope. That's a priestly caste. Of if, as you say, there may be a problem in the formulated standards, then the body that form…

By this logic every class other than pure math involves a “priestly caste” because teaching involves decisions about what to cover and how to do so. In reality, what happens is that professionals in the field set standards for what should be covered and those are periodically reviewed and updated, and what keeps that from being the exercise in dogma which you appear to be worried about is having that process and the results public. The problem with priests occurs when they’re given special privileges without accountability, and that’s far less of a concern when, say, the standard is “a panel of experts recognized in the field accepted this standard after public comment” than “$DEITY says you have to do it my way, no questions”.

Put another way, real engineers, doctors, scientists who work with human subjects, lawyers, finance people, etc. do not seem to have a conceptual hazard from professional ethics codes. Why would we expect software development to be so different?

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