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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#571

Post by acdha »

next_xibalba wrote: post #551
acdha wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bel…

“grievance studies degrees”? That escalated quickly from “maybe software engineers should have ethics classes like real engineers”.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#572

Post by ArtixFox »

int_19h wrote: post #501
ArtixFox wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sooo prolong the problem so that when you are dead, your descendants have to deal with it and you will be free of the responsibility? Do we forgive oct 7? what precedent would it set for other groups? that you can just go kill and rape people and there will be no response?

Self-defense is supposed to be proportional. If you're killing 30x as many people in "response", and most of them weren't in any way involved in the original attack, that's not justifiable.

Self defense is not seen based on how many skulls you collected. Hamas needs to go and that's how Israel will do it's self defense.

Proportionality has nothing to do with self defense.

Hamas the org was involved, and the other ones too, they are the target.

But I do agree that Israel's policies regarding air strikes are fucked up

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#573

Post by scott_w »

llamaimperative wrote: post #566
scott_w wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you actually said is ridiculous: "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." No, they don't must do this. No, it's obviously not illegal to do things in-house. They choose not to because it's obscenely hard to build what Palantir has already built and to battle test its securi…

> They choose not to because it's obscenely hard to build what Palantir has already built and to battle test its security anything close to what Palantir has done.

While true, it also doesn’t answer legitimate concerns that the British public had that their medical data was being shared with a foreign entity that had actively participated in foreign government programmes of questionable morality.

The response to that was “all fundamental contractors have done dodgy things.”

To which you have my quoted reply. Which I’m not sure you understood at all, judging by your response.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#574

Post by BlueTemplar »

itsoktocry wrote: post #133
ngcazz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should stop defending an imperialist establishment which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-based order. More like America rules. The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral high ground was shattered at the very latest with the Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of…

> You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. All complaints, no solutions. Typical. So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe? It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.

While Pax Americana does have some benefits (but not for everyone), taking examples from history is worse than useless when nuclear weapons have completely changed war.

China might be eyeing Siberia for all its space and resources, but unlike in the modern era, the chance that they will declare war on Russia is basically nil.

It even predates nukes when you look how WW1 and WW2 had only losers (nothwithstanding those that didn't let war touch their territory, like USA). But I guess that we were too "dumb" to figure that out before nukes.

And still are, Russia is getting an example of it in Ukraine right now... speaking of, what "rules" ? Russia just went and completely ignored the Budapest memorandum (while Ukraine is regretting deeply they didn't keep at least some nukes).

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#575

Post by mind-blight »

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…

I mean, the quick shift makes sense with vaccine deployments and the medical community figuring out how to deal with it all happening within a few months. We went from not being equipped to deal with the disease to being equipped in a pretty short window.

If governments were using covid as an excuse to control their population, then I would have expected them to hang on to the rules for as long as possible. Instead, we saw rules change as the context changed. That's generally not what totalitarian takeovers look like

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#576

Post by rudnevr »

jiggawatts wrote: post #281
botanical wrote: post #263

[flagged]

It's interesting to watch these "talking points" bouncing around when there's a politically charged topic like the war in Gaza. (For reference: I have no skin in the game and support neither side.) Having said that: 65% killed being women and children is because of the demographics of Gaza , not because of any specific behaviour by Israel other than just "being at war" with their neighbours. It's a talking point used…

[flagged]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#577

Post by razakel »

staticvoidstar wrote: post #426
razakel wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why do about 60% of people who consider themselves left or far left oppose immigration? Cooper also claims that the Holocaust happened by mistake, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to him.

I imagine for the same reasons people on the right, but it's forbidden to speak out loud I heard no such claims, but also he hasn't finished his WWII series yet, so a little premature to dismiss him Edit: When I said conservatives, I meant conservative values

Plenty of people of all political stripes were, are, and have been complaining about immigration. It was a key factor in Brexit.

Cooper's deliberate misreading of the Wannsee Conference is Nazi apologeticism.

"Well, they didn't really mean to commit genocide, they just whipped up public hatred, confiscated all their assets, and banned them from working! So of course they had to commit mass murder!"

Who are his sources, David fucking Irving?

And let's not get started on the pipelining of extremist views to people who would normally consider themselves moderate or centre-right and are now spouting insanity...

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#578

Post by deltarholamda »

acdha wrote: post #550
deltarholamda wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Why would we expect software development to be so different?

It isn't. Recall the big push on DEI initiatives, quite similar to the push to remove blacklist/whitelist or master/slave in the software world. Or the guardrails put onto LLMs so they don't become antisemitic or whatever. Why was it a good thing to do? Because the priestly caste said it was, and tolerated no questions about it. You seem to be unaware of the concept of institutional capture.

And, yes, all teaching involves some sort of bias. We haven't yet created the human that is free from bias.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#579

Post by deltarholamda »

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.

Is it required that you attend a university-level ethics course to learn how to apply ethical frameworks? Very ecclesiastical. But it would explain why we can't leave this sort of thing to the laity of parents.

In any event, the poster I replied to also included "morality" alongside "ethics", which is why I suggest it's not as cut and dried as you imply.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#580

Post by pazimzadeh »

ArtixFox wrote: post #297
pazimzadeh wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would start by not sending them money. Unless of course you needed a justification for your political/expansionist goals. https://archive.ph/2023.10.14-033824/https://www.haaretz.com... https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hamas-israels-own-creation/ Anyway, the idea of embedding military targets within civilian populations is also not exclusive to one side: https://www.haaretz.com/2012-06-09/ty-article/.premium/does-…

sooo israel should use time travel? the situation right now is a fucked up war between two bloodthirsty groups. I dont think this is the right time to think of inventing time machines...

You can start by removing from power the government officials who funded Hamas. After that, yes time travel could help: https://xkcd.com/209/
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