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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

#741

Post by mdnahas »

tptacek wrote: post #497
eucyclos wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.

We all get that Oracle has literally the same naming provenance, right? Actually more so: they took the name from the Central Intelligence Agency project they started the company with. Every time this comes up, I find myself asking, "what do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?" Maybe it's just that I'm older than the median here, but when I was a kid, the mere concept of a relational database w…

One throughline of history is database-ization. Some of our older writings are records of ownership and tax liabilities. We keep moving information from the real world into a database. We have done it so much that the database is sometimes more important than the real world. Someone marked “dead” in a database can have a hard time living!

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

#742

Post by projektfu »

asdfman123 wrote: post #259

I'm sure this is especially true of Palantir employees, but I feel like everyone in big tech is increasingly wrestling with this. (Don't ask me how I know.)

I can understand why. In the 50s-60s, tech was highly military, or corporate. The NASA people came from building ICBMs to the space program and joined a similarly staid, regimented culture. The IBM guys were notoriously square. Silicon valley was also started and funded by these types (e.g. Shockley from Bell Labs), but then at the same time there was the LSD-influenced counter-culture developing around Stanford and Berkeley. Eventually these people, with desires of consciousness-expanding, world-changing, even revolutionary outcomes, started to populate the labs and develop new companies. Apple wasn't alone among companies that thought they were doing something with counter-cultural and utopian ideas. "Digital Research" of CP/M fame was originally called "Intergalactic Digital Research". Many of these types were highly influenced by science fiction and probably had a little adjacent experience with the hippies.

Many people envisioned a future where there wasn't a phone company intermediating a long-distance call, where you could participate in a virtual economy without government interference, and where many more products were not much affected by capital and scarcity. After all, once you have the computer, the software possibilities are unlimited, even if the hardware might not be ready yet. People could extrapolate from dial-up modems to neural linkages and participation in a virtual or holographic universe which was free from physical constraints.

What we have in the 2010s and beyond is people coming to terms with the reality that what they developed is actually a more effective straight-jacket than the previous constraints of physicality, and at the same time it is hollowing out traditional human relationships and social constructs. The fact that things like MAGA, Qanon, Ziz, and 764 are transnational and transcultural now is bizarre. These are all disappointing developments from the dystopian side of 70s-80s science fiction, not what people thought they were building when they were creating the first addictive smartphone apps.

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

#745

Post by stasomatic »

ericmay wrote: post #685
stasomatic wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. What's in it for them ("They are the authority")? Weathering the weather until the next election? I'm prone to assuming that people higher on the totem pole are smarter, more experienced, more nuanced, better educated, that's on me.

I don't follow the question. What do you mean what's in it for them? They simply disagree with you and they get to make that decision.

Apologies. My premise is this:

The POTUS is funny /s. Read his remarks about Tim Apple, pure comedy if was intended as such. He needs to take an ESL course. "3 or 4 "BIG HELPS". "I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’”

He's surrounded by the creme de la creme of our society, at least in terms of influence. Many of these folks come from old money, West Point, Ivy League, whatever. No matter how egomaniac one has to be to raise through the ranks of our the political system, they are still highly intelligent and connected tribe and should be able to read the future we are leaping into. Am I giving them too much credit? Why isn't their horizon decades long?

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

#746

Post by stasomatic »

1-more wrote: post #717
Lambdanaut wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mention how many other sentient beings are massacred while plowing a field. Rodents, insects, snakes, birds, etc. Is that a myth? Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals. > In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery. Assuming you st…

The deer are full of Chronic Wasting Disease and we've half given up trying to stop it. Many states have stopped their targeted culling programs because they're ineffective once incidence is above 5%. You're suicidal if you eat meat that you know comes from an animal with a prion disease.

I've never hunted (yet). Have fished plenty but that doesn't count.

I lived for a year in a suburb of Charlotte NC a couple of years ago, and there were herds of whitetails on my dog walks.

I'd like to learn more about "Chronic Wasting Disease" if you have any resources, because on podcasts or r/Archery and the like, "harvesting your own food" is par for the course. Thank you.

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

#747

Post by spwa4 »

adriand wrote: post #521
tharkun__ wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is now out the window. And yes I definitely remember Colbert quite some time ago quipping about exactly that (paraphrased from memory): US no longer reliable NATO partner and nuclear deterrent. So Europe needs to step up. Let's have Germany have nukes. What could possibly go wrong! The obviously funny thing being, that the US has, for a long time and Trump doubled down, asked Europe including Germany to spend m…

> But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces? Totally! That’s what makes the situation doubly maddening. It would be one thing if these actions were bad for the world and good for the US. But they’re bad for the US too! I forget who it was that said this, and I’m sure my paraphrasing is bad, but I listened or read something I found chilling. It was something…

WTF ... this comment, the one I'm replying to is written by an LLM. Look at the last sentence:

> deal with China, Russia, AI, drones, cyber, nuclear, climate…talk about bad timing.

Note the characters used for the "..." in that sentence. I have never seen a human do that, not even once, and LLMs like ChatGPT do it all the time.

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

#748

Post by danny_codes »

tastyface wrote: post #522
theturret wrote: post #283

As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified. But I also think we need to get more smart people interested and working in national security. That’s the way you get the best balance between effective security and the minimum negative side effects to civil liberties or collate…

The trendy SV defense companies (Palantir, Andruil) seem to be all "killing is fun and good, actually" with an underlying current of white nationalism. We might need defense technology, but not like this. Super fucked up.

At first I thought their marketing was some sort of tongue-in-cheek satire of themselves. But no, they are genuinely white supremicists.. odd since their CEO is a black-ish Jew

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

#749

Post by ajkjk »

satvikpendem wrote: post #609
ajkjk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this take is irritating because it implies that people at companies don't have to bother being ethical or holding the people around them accountable at a personal level for being ethical, as if it's somehow predetermined by the environment, being at a corporation, how you behave. Certainly it's true that the incentives of corporations push you to ignore ethics. But that's why they're ethics: they're precisely the thi…

An irritating take can still be largely true simply due to how the incentives are set up.

It's not about true or false. The point is that it's true if you're conceptualizing corporations as enemies to be handled and false if you're conceptualizing them as something you're part of that you're responsible for and you're trying to hold people accountable. The truth value is relative to your moral goal.

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

#750

Post by turtlesdown11 »

stackedinserter wrote: post #720
turtlesdown11 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Send them fresh water and electricity? They tried it with Gaza, didn't help. yes, one cannot imagine why keeping millions of people in an open air concentration camp doesn't work out well

What made it "open air concentration camp"? Do concentration camps have car dealerships and jewelry shops? Funny it's not even your phrase, you heard it somewhere and keep parroting ever since.

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