"Ad" is a euphamism for behavioral management - the goal and the pièce de résistance for any successful enterprise. Always has been this way, always will remain this way. Only thing that is changing is how easy we're making it for them.
It is pretty plain to see technology enables socio-economic disharmony, to say the least. While it may not be the "cause" it is certainly a potent accelerant.
Yes but we can't stop progress while scarcity is still causing suffering. I think that communication works long term, even with algorithm suppression. Insightful ideas tend to bubble up, especially during chaotic times.
My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly.
It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt came out.
So the work is important and I am the fool because ... you think so? That is not a very intellectually-defensible position to hold. One could even reason the argument is so flawed because LLMs degrade thinking capacity.
You’re arguing in a tautological fashion - anyone who suggests that AI can do a lot of their job must not have been doing important work in the first place. It’s a convenient psychological self defense mechanism that I see often here. Take care.
> My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly.
This is what every person who's been laid off by AI says. Every single time. People really like to assume that the work they do is important, except companies don't care about important they care about pushing shit out the door, faster and cheaper. Your high level math and business reasoning do not matter when they can just let someone cheaper go wild and deliver faster with no guard rails.
My job is essentially delivering faster with no guard rails. I know it is a common HN sentiment that nobody can do my job better than me because I am the most thoughtful person to ever do it.
This is explicitly not what I am saying given that I am leading with AI getting close to being able to do much of what is currently my job. I find it hard to imagine a world where we stagnate right where we are and it takes a decade to do anything more aka I cannot imagine a world where a considerable portion of jobs are not automatable soon - and I do not even think it will be shittier.
And yet you did not read this essay, or at least did not understand it.
Whatever LLM you used to summarize it has let you down. I wonder how often that is happening in your day to day work, perhaps that's why you feel your job is at risk.
I am commenting on something in the background space of assumptions of the essay. Just because it is not the main thrust doesn’t mean I didnt read the article or used an LLM to summarize it for me. Take care
I would have thought that my issue with what you did was pretty clear from the original message, and would not require any particularly sophisticated interpretation.
">" is the notation for quotes.
You did not use it for a quote. Instead you used it to present your own distortion (not a paraphrase) as whimsicalism's words. That is not cool. Stop doing it.
Given the points I can see, other people understood what I was saying and appreciated it. I'm sorry that you're so confused but make no mistake this is your problem, not mine.
Palantir does not work in a vacuum - it requires other technology, platforms and systems to operate and succeed - many of which are designed and maintained by the users of Hacker News.
Certainly you must be aware that there are not just binary values of morality in life. The obvious answer is yes they are stained, as we all are through our participation in various systems, but with vastly varying amounts.
Is the manufacturer of the bomb responsible for when Israel drops it on a family home in Gaza? Yes. Is it the same responsibility as the general who gave the order? No. Is it the same as the pilot who followed the order? No.
Does that make it useless to hold people accountable? Of course not.
Respectfully, this is cheap cope. The bomb maker didn't know when he made the bomb, maybe. Now he knows, as do all the people turning the gears on this meat grinder, including a bunch of people here.
If you value your comfy life over the well being of others and the future of not only the country, but without an ounce of hyperbole, the human race, then keep your head down. If you don't, fuckin DO SOMETHING.
You know all those times you've said or heard others say "well if I was in Germany in the 30's...." well, guess what, games fuckin real now. So act like the person you want to be.
>If you value your comfy life over the well being of others and the future of not only the country
For people who think borders are just lines, our country as geography doesn't even exist. It's just lines. For people who think that all people are the same, everywhere, and deserve to go where they please, our country as a people doesn't exist either.
So if that's your conception of a country, why should I care about it at all? It's just a random place I happened to be born, and its disloyalty to me outweighs any I might show it. I inherited a house jointly with the rest of you, and you keep letting squatters live here for free. Once they're here, you screech if anyone tries to evict them. If I complain about them punching holes in the drywall and shitting in the kitchen sink, you tell me I'm racist. Whatever else, you and I are incompatible, and I am out of options.
I believe in borders; my taxes fund my government, and not someone else's. However, there is no US-American "people" aside from the indigenous people who have been massacred. Ever since, it has always been whoever has been here.
I don't believe borders should exist, but they do. If you say otherwise you are simply in denial. Borders are promises of violence made by nation-states, which I also don't believe in, which nevertheless exist and are harming people.
Whatever ideological differences we may have, need to be shelved. We can bicker about that later. For now, the border of the U.S. exists, and it's killing people.
> Whatever ideological differences we may have, need to be shelved. We can bicker about that later. For now, the border of the U.S. exists, and it's killing people.
The ideological differences are, in no small part (directly or implicitly) over whether the border should exist and whether it killing the people it kills is a good or a bad thing. Can’t really just shelve that.
We are all experiencing this, just at a larger scale. To call it a metaphor is to deny the reality, nothing about this is metaphorical.
It hurts all of us, but those on the left are willing to endure the torment if it they think it hurts their opponents more. They're willing to endure it if they think that tihs will swing voting numbers in their favor in the coming decades. The right to live within the United States, as an actual inalienable right and not just some temporary privilege is called citizenship, and those without it have no such right.
When those of you vote me down so you can pretend that everyone disagrees with me, you're setting yourself up for failure in the future. You will believe your own echo chamber and be sure that the Democrats will inevitably win, once and for all, because how can they not when they never hear anyone disagreeing with them? The numbers aren't on your side at all.
Palantir is built explicitly for surveillance, in a way the other companies you listed are not. There is no comparison here. It's like saying the City of Minneapolis is complicit because they maintain the roads ICE is driving on.
Not really. Palantir is data integration and analysis software that in some cases (like ICE) can be used for surveillance. There are also thousands of commercial clients who use Palantir for completely non surveillance workflows, as well as many other government teams who use Palantir for non surveillance things. This is all public information.
> Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.
Is ICE using a general purpose app for surveillance or is Palantir making a deportation-centric app for ICE?
Yes, this is how market economy works. For every organization doing horrible things, literally everyone is a small number of payment-handshakes from it.
No, it doesn't mean that "mr gotcha"[1] argument is valid. You don't have to isolate yourself from society Kaczynski-style to either criticize society or to do something smaller (like choosing who you work for).
The rage should be dependent on the contribution. You mention a third party software vendor who produces tools that aren't even "dual-use" with respect to the abuse by ICE, they are specifically tailored. That's not the same as, say, providing electricity to them.
They are dual use. Palantir creates platforms (Foundry, Gotham) which are used by ICE but also thousands of other companies. Are you saying that just because ICE tailors these platforms to their workflows they’re not dual use? That feels akin to saying some super complicated excel workflow used by a company means excel is not dual use.
Palantir does a ton of customization and consulting for specific use cases. This isn't like Microsoft Excel being used to track uranium enrichment in Iran, it is a direct, explicit part of their business.
Even if you do nothing else of impact in your life, you can stop defending the bad guys.
I’m not defending the “bad guys”. The original argument was about moral culpability based on distance from the bad deed. Microsoft could have just as easily refused Azure for the ICE contract, but they didn’t, yet somehow they are just far enough away to not be culpable.
> If you work in technology, you are part of this force, whether you like it or not.
Disappointing to see you downvoted. I agree with this partially, but only because I think it applies more broadly.
I work in tech (although not in Big Tech/Mag 7/FAANG/whatever they're called now), and I feel quite acutely that anyone in the field is culpable in part for the enabling the absolutely massive dump that the capital-adjacent class is taking on the world to have their power play fantasies play out.
To the extent that I've started apologising on behalf of the field/profession to non-technical folks when they complain about yet another dark pattern/"growth hack" designed to steal their attention and money.
> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?
No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.
As things get worse, this advice gets less relevant. You no longer have to be addicted to social media or 24-hour news to be worried about what's happening. You don't even really need to be paying explicit attention at all.
To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
I'm already there. I never use social media and I limit news consumption to once per week for catching up.
I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.
Not by colloquial usage of the term, which is often (and in this case) limited to the subset of larger global human-content firehoses where the problems inherent to that dynamic become more dramatic, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, shorts feeds, things like Instagram and Reddit maybe, etc.
HN is just as much an echo chamber as any facebook group or subreddit. You are making a mistake if you think you are immune from groupthink and herd mentality by limiting your online discourse to this platform only.
Unfortunately access to the forest is blocked by ongoing "immigration" enforcement action by masked secret police in the area. Stepping out of the front door under these circumstances may be treated as a crime, punishable by death.
What is especially insane is people STILL praise Apple for championing "privacy" - after Snowden, after China, after Trump ... the well-engineered sunk-cost fallacy is just too potent to resist, I guess.
"End to end" protection/encryption has lost all functional meaning when the masses accepted corporations as the arbiters of "ends". No one can even respond to the argument based on technical merit, because all that remains is hollow marketing bullshit.
Is there even one secondary source confirming this figure? The number of Western newspapers printing this as fact, without apparently a modicum of research, is kind of concerning. "China announces" is not the most reliable source.
Another source wouldn’t matter, the point is Trump and the US thought China was beholden to them, and surprise surprise, the global economy can sink all of the exports China can ship. The US proved its own irrelevance with this policy footgun.
> Trade with the US did weaken, but this was made up for by a rise in Chinese exports elsewhere, especially to South East Asia, Africa and Latin America.
China is going to help the rest of the world reach developed status affordably through these exports (clean tech and technology primarily) to stave off deflation and keep production and workers utilized, and the US isn’t going to replace this loss with domestic production.
