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How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

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Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#81

Post by dredmorbius »

bazqux2 wrote: post #78
argonaut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with the ontologies approach. Palantir is not aiming for a fully automated approach. Palantir's core product is a an entity graph mostly used and manipulated by humans for analysis. Basically their software is only meant to augment human analysis. That being said, from my conversations with them, they also have a traditional machine learning team for whenever that approach is needed for a produ…

There is usually something wrong with the ontologies approach as it rarely works. There is roughly two decades of evidence for this for anyone who cares to look. Five decades if you loosen the definition to include the family of logic and constraint programming - see AI Winter. There is nothing new about these ideas. It always looks and feels like it's going to work which is why humanity has persisted with it for so…

Is this ontologies within the field of AI not working, or more generally?

Do you have references to any specific discussions on this?

Curious as I'm doing some work of my own (well outside AI) in which developing ontologies strikes me as useful, though I'd prefer not falling into any well-worn traps.

(My use is largely comping up with useful descriptive models of otherwise hairy concepts.)

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#82

Post by dredmorbius »

seizethecheese wrote: post #47
somenomadicguy wrote: post #5

Thus the reason I hang up on startup recruiters the moment they say "A peter thiel funded start-up". I'm not sure what is a sadder waste of this amazing braintrust we have in the United States today, all of the advertising start-ups, or sociopathic dreck like Palantir.

Ad Hominem attacks like this add very little value to the discussion.

That's not an ad hominem attack, it's a statement based on reputation.

Ad hominem, properly, is based on an irrelevant characteristic of the person being attacked. "I won't work for a Peter Thiel startup because he wears white shoes after Labour Day", or "... because he mixes stripes and solids".

Stating that he's got a track record of founding and backing ventures with a net-negative social value, or which simply waste talent, is absolutely spot on.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#83

Post by dredmorbius »

Aelinsaar wrote: post #11
somenomadicguy wrote: post #5

Thus the reason I hang up on startup recruiters the moment they say "A peter thiel funded start-up". I'm not sure what is a sadder waste of this amazing braintrust we have in the United States today, all of the advertising start-ups, or sociopathic dreck like Palantir.

You should see huge sectors of the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, you'd weep.

Howso?

Both of those involve actual research, which is to say, trying the impossible and unknown, to discover the possible and knowable.

Though I'm also aware that there's a tremendous difference between chasing markets, which gives you drugs such as Viagra, or lifetime (type-II) diabetes management, rather than, say, wiping out tropical disease or promoting diet which would avoid diabetes in the first place.

But what did you have in mind?

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#84

Post by bazqux2 »

avs733 wrote: post #79
bazqux2 wrote: post #15

I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. Their technology is worse than the free alternatives and their consultants are not worth the money. They are losing their big commercial customers because of this and now need 'Hail Mary' contracts from the US govt to remain in business. There is already a lot of information out how bad Palantir is. I hear from friends who work there that the BuzzFeed article on them is…

>I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his talk was incredibly disrespectful to that. If I hadn't been so disgu…

This matches my experiences with them and other Peter Thiel funded startups.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#85

Post by gaur »

dredmorbius wrote: post #80
gaur wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people replace transparent English phrases with opaque foreign abbreviations? We're not writing with quills on vellum anymore. Even "$500k/yr" is an improvement on "$500k p.a.".

Per annum, per centum, per mille, per capita, et cetera, et cetera. These are Latin phrases, borrowed especially in British English as Great Britain was occupied by Latin speakers for nearly 400 years -- 43 CE through 410 CE. Latin continued to be the language of diplomacy, religion, philosophy, and science through the 18th and 19th century. It is, for all practical intents, proper British English. https://en.m.wikti…

> borrowed especially in British English as Great Britain was occupied by Latin speakers for nearly 400 years -- 43 CE through 410 CE.

Can you explain how Latin loanwords were loaned into English during this period? In your explanation, please make use of the facts that (1) there were no English speakers in Great Britain before 410 CE, and moreover (2) there was, by definition, no such language as English until Anglo-Saxon migrations into Great Britain (around 450 CE) established a distinct West Germanic linguistic community on the island.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#86

Post by poikniok »

avs733 wrote: post #73
ajb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is a typo, but the way you wrote it, you lost $30.

no, it very much depends on what your time is worth and the time it would take you vs. someone you pay to do a job. If I pay someone $100 to raise the value of my home $70, but it would take me 10hrs and I value my time at $100 an hour then it would cost me $1,000 to do what I hired someone to do for $100

Why would you do it in the first place? By definition your EV is $30 higher by just not doing anything.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#87

Post by nitrogen »

solipsism wrote: post #76
nitrogen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might venture to say it's negative sum, because the need to advertise in order to compete diverts resources away from positive sum activities (R&D).

"zero sum" doesn't mean "zero net benefit". It's about competition, not utility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game

I know, I'm saying that one company'd ad spend negates their competitor's, and vice versa, so the more everyone spends, the more everyone loses. That is non-zero-sum, in the negative direction.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#88

Post by Tomte »

gaur wrote: post #67
trengrj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue "per annum" or p.a. isn't a foreign term and just standard English. English is full of Latin words, transparent, opaque, foreign, those are all words of Latin origin.

> I'd argue "per annum" or p.a. isn't a foreign term and just standard English. Did you notice that a fluent English speaker had to ask what "p.a." meant? Do you think that would have happened if it had been written "per year" instead?

As a counterpoint: I'm not a native English speaker, I do understand "yr" just fine, but it takes me a split second longer to read that abbreviation.

Because p.a. is also part of my language.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#89

Post by bazqux2 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #81
bazqux2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is usually something wrong with the ontologies approach as it rarely works. There is roughly two decades of evidence for this for anyone who cares to look. Five decades if you loosen the definition to include the family of logic and constraint programming - see AI Winter. There is nothing new about these ideas. It always looks and feels like it's going to work which is why humanity has persisted with it for so…

Is this ontologies within the field of AI not working, or more generally? Do you have references to any specific discussions on this? Curious as I'm doing some work of my own (well outside AI) in which developing ontologies strikes me as useful, though I'd prefer not falling into any well-worn traps. (My use is largely comping up with useful descriptive models of otherwise hairy concepts.)

I meant generally they are generally not useful. Sometimes they are. It depends on the purpose and what you want to build and who it's for.

Given that you're building a descriptive model it would depend if you're working with facts or with probabilities. If it's facts then Ontologies should work fine, for probabilities I'd recommend Bayesian techniques.

The input for these are usually small. From the sounds of it you're generating the input yourself so you should be safe.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#90

Post by bazqux2 »

gaur wrote: post #85
dredmorbius wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per annum, per centum, per mille, per capita, et cetera, et cetera. These are Latin phrases, borrowed especially in British English as Great Britain was occupied by Latin speakers for nearly 400 years -- 43 CE through 410 CE. Latin continued to be the language of diplomacy, religion, philosophy, and science through the 18th and 19th century. It is, for all practical intents, proper British English. https://en.m.wikti…

> borrowed especially in British English as Great Britain was occupied by Latin speakers for nearly 400 years -- 43 CE through 410 CE. Can you explain how Latin loanwords were loaned into English during this period? In your explanation, please make use of the facts that (1) there were no English speakers in Great Britain before 410 CE, and moreover (2) there was, by definition, no such language as English until Anglo…

You are being worse than Palantir.
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