Reflections on Palantir • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#551

Post by next_xibalba » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:13 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #413

next_xibalba wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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If you think ethics is “bureaucracy” and “useless classes”, you’re pretty loudly shouting that you needed that instruction. The problem with leaving it to parents is that parents are not uniformly qualified or interested in doing so, and it’s in society’s best interests not to leave important things to chance.

Bureaucracy and useless classes are major drivers of the insane increase in higher ed costs. "The average cost of college tuition & fees at public 4-year institutions* has risen 141% over the last 20 years." Student debt was $300 billion in 2000 and it is now closer to $2 trillion. Starting in 2009, the median graduate had more student loan debt 10 years post graduation than at the time they graduated. It beggars belief to claim that administrative bloat and mission drift are not major variables of the current student loan crisis. And your proposal is to do more of it?

In terms of parents not being qualified, who are you, or anyone else for that matter, to say who is and is not qualified to instruct their own in morality? It is an entirely subjective topic and certainly should not be given over to corrupted institutions. Moreover, do you really believe folks like Elizabeth Holmes, Jeff Skilling, SBF (whose mother is a legal ethicist!!), and all the nameless, white-shoed McKinsey criminals haven't received "ethical" instruction in their coursework? And how has that panned out? SBF is a particularly great example as his mother, who you would no doubt have deemed "qualified", reared one of the worst criminals of this generation.

Let the universities focus on the efficient discovery and dissemination of truth, and discard the wasteful, useless mis-education. Fire 90% of the admins, and tie student lending to financial outcomes of students. All of the grievance studies degrees that purport to provide ethical and moral training would vaporize overnight!

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#552

Post by next_xibalba » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:15 PM UTC

moolcool wrote: post #475

deltarholamda wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post I was replying to explicitly said we couldn't leave the teaching of things like ethics and morality up to parents. That's a priestly caste. It's all well and good to say that your chosen priest caste won't exert hierarchical control, pinky swear, but history and human nature disagrees with you. It's also odd to suggest that we can teach a system of deriving ethics or morality. Philosophers have been hard at…

Have you taken a university level ethics course before? They teach the different ethical frameworks, where they come from, and then get you to apply them to different situations. The classes don't tell you what's right and what's wrong, but rather, the different frameworks people can use to determine that.

SBF's mom is a legal ethicist at Stanford. Beyond her son, how many others has she mis-educated? Or, perhaps, a semester or two of ethics is insufficient and thus a waste of time and money?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#553

Post by kettleballroll » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:15 PM UTC

skipants wrote: post #540

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 l…

Are the book choices bad? I looked them up after first hearing about them through this article, and at least the Interviewing Users one sounded useful, and Principles seems to have a ton of good reviews. For the uninformed like me, could you give some color to those books?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#554

Post by donkeybeer » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:17 PM UTC

yks wrote: post #428

saturn8601 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think anyone sane thinks that Russians or Chinese masses have it better in economic terms. In fact, the message of Russian propaganda including its American extension is that everything sucks everywhere. Uh did I say anything of the sort? When the Cold War was going on the communist system was initially out producing and out maneuvering the US but eventually the fallacy of a communist (and subsequently fasci…

I am partial to that argument, at least in the interwar period the US masses and intelligentsia were enamored with the USSR for it was new and the atrocities were not widely known, so we got the New Deal. I don't think that applies to the post-WW2 period and the fact that the US was the only industrial nation left unscathed was the real prosperity driver. But it is all moot in the world of today where the US competit…

I think his argument is more that threat of communism forced America to take many compromises for the common man. Once the great threat of USSR fell, that pressure practically no longer exists.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#555

Post by sofixa » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:22 PM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #520

ryandrake wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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This reeks of "just following orders", combined with a healthy those dehumanising others.

Do you care if your code is used to kill literal children? Kidnap suspected terrorists (suspected based on detailed information such as their first name, their watch type, or them driving a car at the wrong time in the wrong place) and torture them to death? Where is your moral line?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#556

Post by sofixa » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:25 PM UTC

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #527

talldayo wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I think the ICJ is better placed to decide what is or what isn't a genocide than random people on HN, and the fact that they're still deliberating means that you can't say it's "nonsensical, ignorant, offensive". If it were that, the case would have been thrown out a long time ago.

https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#557

Post by red-iron-pine » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:28 PM UTC

jumping_frog wrote: post #546

itronitron wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

why would they take illegal migrants when you could just put the factories in Mexico? which is what all of the "nearshoring" is about, e.g. chip manufactories in Tijuana

low cost, low overhead, no risks due to INS rounding up your people, and no tariffs due to NAFTA.

the reason they want the in the US is to work in services to keep costs down, because overall wages have not gone up and the costs of everything domestically needs to trend down -- and that means cheap labor.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#558

Post by sofixa » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:33 PM UTC

mind-blight wrote: post #465

gnmlaxr wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

Yeah, and those people have the habit of ignoring how bad things got at the start in a few countries (Italy and France come to mind, but there were others) where bodies were piling, there were military hospitals deployed in parking lots, hospitalised patients were being transported to other countries, people were dying, and there was a general lack of clarity and understanding of how to treat sick people, and importantly, lack of medical care capacity to treat them or any others (a friend had their uncle die because the ambulance took a few hours to arrive due to medical services being completely overwhelmed). Any country that looked into those countries and decided "nah, this doesn't concern us because we're better humans" was led by utterly incompetent idiots.

Did some countries overreact with their measures? Maybe, but based on the limited information available in 2020, overreaction was a better idea than doing nothing.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#559

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:33 PM UTC

mind-blight wrote: post #465

gnmlaxr wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#560

Post by red-iron-pine » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:33 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #364

sroerick wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my experience this is the actual hard work of producing something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS resellers will never be able to deliver on.

It’s also something you’ll never do in-house because there’s too many politics involved in getting everyone to give up their data. Then when the CEO hires Palantir suddenly everyone has to.

Never seen people internally guard their data that much.

But who is going to do the heavy lift? who is going to get billed for that? who is paying for the cloud space, or licenses? absolute holy war.

no problems getting people into the data lakes, but if you want us to do anything useful with it you gotta pay / get people / get resources. but like, you want me to approve the read access or pull request? no problem, have at it.