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Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

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Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#641

Post by rob74 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #467
Johnny555 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those idiots "in charge" are what matters, right? Since they set the tone for the department, and lately they sure are acting more like a DoW than a DoD.

Its quite laughable to pretend that DoD was never on the offense between 1948 and 2025.

Even Hitler's army, which attacked large parts of Europe in WW2, was called the Wehrmacht ("defense force" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht). But, as a famous German who was almost 150 years older than Hitler already knew, "Namen sind Schall und Rauch" ("names are but sound and smoke").

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#642

Post by [deleted] »

alterom wrote: post #634
aziaziazi wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman. First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy - which are what the 0.99/p chicken eat [edit: and it's closer in term of nutrients]. Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale. The grains price should be the one paid by the fermer, adjusted for smaller packaging. Your comparais…

>The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman. It's a direct answer to the question asked by the parent. The answer is: no, vegetables are not cheaper than meat in the US. It is perverse. Which is my point: what enables the low, low price of chicken isn't merely the laws of supply and demand. >First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy Those are not vegetables . T…

[deleted]

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#643

Post by varjag »

ajam1507 wrote: post #361
varjag wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a widespread belief that U.S. government has an elaborate system of checks and balances but it was not evidence-based. Kind of Flat Earth period of American political science.

The checks and balance are between the 3 branches of government. If congress wanted to stop the war, they could. If the supreme court wanted to hand the power to start wars back to congress they could. Just because they don't, doesn't mean they aren't able. The real flat earth theory is thinking that unwritten rules and institutions were protected from a president that insists on pulling every lever of power at once,…

If one person in executive position is able to effectively override the nation's rules and institutions it sounds awfully close to saying there are no checks and balances.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#644

Post by badgersnake »

ryandrake wrote: post #288
seattle_spring wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc. The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?" The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never…

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.

When I did mine, it was mandatory to get BCS accreditation for the degree to teach some professional ethics.

I don’t know if that is still the case though, I’m not sure how relevant BCS membership is these days, I don’t know anyone who has it.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#645

Post by aziaziazi »

alterom wrote: post #634
aziaziazi wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman. First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy - which are what the 0.99/p chicken eat [edit: and it's closer in term of nutrients]. Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale. The grains price should be the one paid by the fermer, adjusted for smaller packaging. Your comparais…

>The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman. It's a direct answer to the question asked by the parent. The answer is: no, vegetables are not cheaper than meat in the US. It is perverse. Which is my point: what enables the low, low price of chicken isn't merely the laws of supply and demand. >First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy Those are not vegetables . T…

Ah I might be confused by my low english skills but it seems grains and legumes are vegetable. I was curious and a quick search returned several sources confirming that however I'd be pleased to learn other usages.

> a plant or part of a plant that is eaten as food. Potatoes, beans and onions are all vegetables.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

I'm don't want to argue on definitions though but the chicken/tomatoes comparaison hardly make sense in an answer to satvikpendem: he mentioned vegatable in comparaison to meat in a poor people diet. In that situation one would certainly aim mainly for cheap and nutritious staples AKA grains and legumes instead of tomatoes.

At least we agree on the regulation impact! I wish you a pleasant Californian day :-)

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#646

Post by card_zero »

tdb7893 wrote: post #101
Ritewut wrote: post #69

Everyone in this industry should be required to read Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams about her tenure at Facebook. Not because the book is about how evil Meta/Facebook is as a company but because you get to see the lengths people go to mentally convince themselves they are the good guy. Repeatedly in the book she tries to assure herself she's making the world better and that there's actually an ethical, positiv…

My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the amount of people who have unprompted (people are weird about it so I try to avoid talking about being vegan except for mentioning it quickly while declining food) said something along the lines of "factory farming is awful but I just love bacon" and laugh is l…

I'm disconcerted from the opposite direction, because it seems people feel uncritical compassion for anything with a face, and they want to prevent suffering but instead of caring about the complexities of human anguish they seem to define it as "pain signals in vertebrates", and they call this ethics, but they just base it on vibes, and so maybe all their morality is incoherent intuition.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#647

Post by notlenin »

nickburns wrote: post #312
notlenin wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honestly, I don't know. Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it. It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me. I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog…

So you acknowledge the former but can't get past the latter. Got it. I wonder how the judges will score.

sorry for the stupid question, but what is "the former" and what is "the latter"?

Did you mean I acknowledge the sentience of plants but not animals?

I believe that all life might be conscious, but life that is "very different" from me I have a hard time imagining what that consciousness might be like. For animals, especially mammals, I can easily imagine what they must be feeling and empathize with them. I can understand that a cow feels pain when hurt, because the cow is very similar to me. A plant might also feel pain when hurt (even the grass I step on might not appreciate me walking on it), but I'd have a harder time empathizing with that.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#648

Post by carlosjobim »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #591
antiframe wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree there's not a universally agreed upon definition of terrorism, I want to hear more about why you think bombing with novel munitions expressly delivered to dense urban areas which killed 250k people 90% of whom were civilian, in an attempt to scare them into surrender, is not "terrorism".

Killing people while trying to scare them into surrender is a feature shared by both terrorism and wars. A big bombing campaign done by an army is a war, not a terrorism.

There is no distinct line between war and terrorism. Even before World War II, leaders would proudly and openly call for terrorism against their enemies and civilians. Most notably communist leaders like Lenin, who didn't shy away from using the word "terror" and "terrorism" to describe their own campaigns.

As for allied bombings, there is a chapter here on the term "Terror bombings":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing#The_term_%22...

The war was won by systematic, deliberate terror bombings, these weren't accidents or rare incidents.

From the great general Patton:

"We then went to the town hall and saw the Mayor, the Chief of Police, etc. I told Truscott to do the honors as he had captured Messina. The town is horribly destroyed – the worst I have seen. In one tunnel there were said to have been 5,000 civilians hiding for over a week. I do not believe that this indiscriminate bombing of towns is worth the ammunition, and it is unnecessarily cruel to civilians."

As for the Germans, they were among other things conducting terror attacks on civilan ships with their submarines, and openly calling their population to "total war".

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#649

Post by Zigurd »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #401
Zigurd wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing is a US defense contractor. Yet there are plenty of Boeing employees who can have a high expectation of ethics in their jobs. You may think you are being even handed and neutral in some way. If you are actually, find me that part of Palantir that's doing good.

https://www.palantir.com/interoperability/ looks to be a computing tool used for purposes currently popular and not warcraft

A "multimodal data plane?" Popular? Jargon heavy middleware for linking kill chains?
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