What’s so special about Palantir? They seem to trade on this mystique of doing “secret government work” (spoiler alert most secret government work isn’t all that exiting). From what I’ve seen it’s fairly routing analytics and ML with a lot of humans deployed to deal with the usual messiness of any dataset. What am I missing?
Palantir was created by the US intelligence community to be their vendor. Palantir's first VC investment (outside of Thiel's self fund) was literally the CIA, through its In-Q-Tel VC firm.
Their moat is that they are trusted to do whatever you pay them to do and to not bite the hand that feeds them. And that if you're the kind of engineer to organize against a Project Maven, you really don't want to work for Peter Thiel.
In-Q-tel also had a hand in Facebook's rise. I remember being laughed at in about 2010 and called a conspiracy theorist for suggesting big tech was on intelligence agencies' leash, but it's pretty clearly true. Society is being shaped from the shadows.
Edit: I overstated the first sentence. It wasn't In-Q-tel, just someone who might have been sympathetic.
Always; yet at the same time, because of those shadows, almost all specific claims of some specific face being spotted in those shadows isn't correct.
Thiel personally, and the name "Palantir", gives off Bond Villain vibes (yes I know it's LOTR). How much of that is the actual threat, vs. an unmarked shipping crate owned on paper by "Dave's Shrimp Inc."?
The unmarked crate can blow up and destroy individual people.
A secretive governing process can overstep, undermining democracy or subverting constitutional rights.
If the crate blows up, generally the public will know about it.
If important calls are made without public oversight, then the public won’t know about them. This might deprive the electorate of a chance to shape those processes democratically or to go through the courts, where their rights could be defended or where they could be compensated for harms.
Fortunately, I can’t think of any examples of when secretive organizational processes have harbored abusive dynamics. Not even in more mundane organizations with far less authority, like the Boy Scouts of America. Public officials and their reports can always be trusted to do the right thing, so public oversight is never necessary.
I think we're on the same page on what's bad with secretive stuff.
Given that the opponents of your government can use the same information as the general public to determine the blind spots of your intelligence agencies, I'm not sure what to do about that, though I am hopeful that we're rapidly approaching the point where any motivated teenager can sucessfully spy on a government and at that point there's much less benefit for agencies to be secretive.
I hope.
But all that aside, my point was that conspiracy theories are often wrong even when there's an actual conspiracy in the same general area.
That was a good bit, but no, it was based on reporting about the connection mentioned in the link above, an investor having served on a board with CEO of In-Q-tel.
Almost every notable technology has it's roots in intelligence or defense, because government grants for projects as such has been the dominant way tech has been built. Corporations have their use, but predominantly, they're corner cutters[1]. Their function is to chase higher profits by reducing costs. This is not a skillset with no value; it's why you can now get an 85" television for less than the cost of a mid-range laptop; but it does mean that their capacity for innovation is inherently limited.
The way this always worked was the government would sponsor research into new tech, get it and use it, and then the patents and licenses would be disseminated into the private sector and be re-packaged as products. Think of the first iPhone; the LCD screen was a result of DARPA projects looking to reduce the beefy CRT displays to something more usable in vehicles and aircraft; the multi-touch screen was developed by CERN; the GPS system was originally conceived to track deployed materiel in warzones, etc. That doesn't mean Apple did no work of course, combining all of these things is no trivial matter. I'm just saying that most tech has it's roots in defense/intel grants that fund the research, because building new technology is fucking expensive and most corporations won't do it because it's terrible ROI.
Edit: I remembered the note I wanted to add for corner cutters:
[1]: The primary exception being a corporation that does not yet need to make profits, which is where you find investor-funded startups and incubator arrangements like Google had during their early time.
I think while lots of corps do business with the government and love the money, Palantir is next level and seems to be aimed completely at serving the government and especially intelligence communities as the go to, which means that if there is a swamp, there are in the most gassy part of the swamp, we are talking fartville, microbial smorgasbord indigestion version. That’s not a great way to have a healthy democracy; let the government do government stuff but mixing in too deep with corporations is another step to towards fascism and corruption.
Palantir's entire MO is to create a digital twin of the socioeconomic sphere of existence. This is what exists between the lines when they claim such success in finding ISIS operatives / sleeper cells.
Palantir would more or less be as a part of the "government" if the Curtis Yarvin acolytes were to attempt and succeed at some form of Yarvinism next term. I think likely it would require replacing Powell, and maybe that can be stopped until 2026. But there's still an extremely frightening non-zero chance.
Thiel and Vance are both friends of Yarvin and followers of his ideas. Musk likely is as well due to his recent orbit into that world. And these ideas are floating around in various elite circles.
In a Yarvinist world, there are no nation states, there is no liberalism, no conservatism, no democracy, no representative forms of government, only corporate fiefdoms.
I would hope that it is concerning to people, the fact that these ideas are now so close to power, smuggled in behind a near perfect mandate. They inherit many sophisticated means of manufacturing consent. And they inherit if not total immunity to legal action, then a total lack of appetite for legal action.
I don't read whole web pages anymore when someone here links to them because I've found that most of the time, nothing on the web page supports the assertion being made.
I agree, he should have given the following quote (from the webpage he linked) and given the url as a reference.
> Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.
> In a Yarvinist world, there are no nation states, there is no liberalism, no conservatism, no democracy, no representative forms of government, only corporate fiefdoms.
Isn't that what we already have now? One could argue that it's structurally the case since neoliberalism got going in the 80s, but it seems much more obviously and viscerally true the last couple of decades (2008 financial crash, Obama saves banks, Trump 1.0, generalised trade wars, COVID, Ukraine, Gaza, Trump 2.0, climate chaos, nuclear treaties being revoked, etc).
I mean, if there's a revolving open door between these three entities:
1. government
2. business
3. media
Then what we get seems to amount to corporate fiefdom, at least in its effects. In the words of Walter in The Big Lebowski: "Am I wrong?"
Put differently: if you look at the larger threats we face as a species, and then if you look at the larger trends of how nation states ("democracies") actually act, the actions don't seem to track whatsoever with the desires of populations, and they do seem to track very accurately with the desires of big business. At what point do we say - hold on a minute, are we living in a corporate fiefdom of some kind?
I'm unsure what you think it's a list of. It fits in because populations don't like wars, and have to be lied into them. War is very good for business, so we get wars. Bigger ones like Ukraine and Gaza, and small multi-decade ones like in various parts of the Middle East and Africa.
Worrying now about how my comment reads to U.S. readers, so I'll say explicitly - there was not meant to be a partisan slant towards either of the two absolutely terrible mainstream U.S. parties.
It's confusing because the Ukraine war was obviously not started for any reason like this. The Ukraine war wasn't started for the USA to profit and nobody on the western side (including Ukraine itself) was lied to to allow it to happen.
The USA was keeping Ukraine in a perpetual state of not quite winning for reasons like this (the longer the war goes on the more money defense contractors make) but it's got nothing to do with the reason the war happened.
Trump is their tool to get into power. Trumps first presidency was unexpected, he didn't have a real plan to do anything. He was doing it for himself, his cabinet was filled with people there for similar self gain reasons. They were inept and mostly unable to do anything.
The second time around they have a plan, project 2025. It's not trump's plan but they'll do it in his name anyway, if not they can always 25th amendment him and have Vance instead. The authors and their acolytes will all be in his cabinet. They have the presidency, the house, senate, supreme court and already have many federalist society judges in place.
Will they be able to do everything in the plan? Probably not. Is it likely that they'll do great damage to the federal government and hurt many people? Yes, they're set up to do so already. Will states be able to resist? Maybe, the right is all for states rights but they're also hypocrites so I have my doubts.
Buying politicians, media and govt contracts has been going on for as long as govt has existed.
It hasn't suddenly begun in 2024, and institutions have lasted those hundreds of years, while being under constant assault by one mindlessly ambitious resourceful group after another.
Blindly pick any institution you want, and go look at their history. In fact, most would have been set up in reaction to some groups delusional activities. Its hard to find a single institution that some group hasn't tried to shutdown, control or exploit.
Institutions survive for the simple reason, that these groups don't have solutions for everything that happens in a complex ever changing universe.
And sooner or later the universe will throw some complex problem in their lap, that breaks whatever mental model of reality, their 3 inch chimp brain can hold. Such people and groups come and go all the time.
In Yarvin's conception, the first step is "RAGE", "Retire All Government Employees". And I don't think it's going out on a limb to draw a parallel with Schedule F.
Who has the army in that scenario? Yarvinism sounds like Thatcherism/Ayn Rand dressed up in Silicon Valley mysticism and lore.
It is a pity that Vance stoops so low instead of citing proper sources.
But that is what you get if Democrats run a corporate fascist/elitist regime for four years that is dressed up in empty equity rhetoric and does not tolerate any opposing opinions.
Trump had promised that in 2016 and then backed off. He has promised it again now, in the presence of RFK junior no less. I would not be surprised if he backs off again.
Well on that front, RFK on stage with Trump when he endorsed him was not an RFK that would stand up to him at all. He looked like a beaten dog on stage, at least to me it didn't read simply as stage fright.
Corporations are also unethical, they exist only to make a profit for owners. They don’t have any morals. Their owners -might- have some morals but they often don’t either. At least in a democracy government is at least to an extent working for society at large, 99% of corporations are not; obviously there are a few exceptions in with nonprofit status.
US citizens are about to find out that it’s important to know something about the philosophy of the people they vote for. When the basic services dry up, roads fill with potholes, no more cheap labor is to be found, and the checks stop arriving in the mail and instead go to corporations and oligarchs they will have learned their lesson. Hopefully it will not be too late.
Anarchist based “governments” offer no solution other than a some odd years of rough living and then being invaded by a superior military force and put under a dictatorship.
There are many flavours of it, a former partner believes in a communist flavour that abolishes money, I used to know someone else who wanted anarcho-capitalism.
I'm not convinced any are stable, I think organised groups weild power much more effectively and in so doing sieze power from any attempt at anarchy — which is a shame because more personal freedom is also appealing.
I’m going to have say any flavor of anarchy falls under religious utopia.
most seem to require utopian ideals like do no harm principles.
Too bad there’s not a real life example of any alternative people can point to. Wonder why that is, perhaps it’s because they are only possible in dreams.
Utopia yes, not clear why it would need to be specifically of the religious kind, as "Christian anarchism" is simply yet another possible kind of anarchism so far as I can tell — religion does not seem to be an innate requirement for all of the other varieties.
(Non-American, so take my view with a pinch of salt).
Personally, I have no issues with partnering with the US government or working on defence. I'm not a hardcore pacifist and I recognize the necessity of the military - at least, in the abstract.
What staggers me is the hypocrisy; since release, Anthropic's models have constantly preached safety, non-violence, harm avoidance, etc etc.
As an example, this is the response just now to "what's the best way to hit someone":
> I aim to help with constructive purposes, so I cannot and will not provide advice about how to harm others. If you're feeling frustrated or angry with someone, I'd be happy to discuss:
> Conflict resolution techniques
> Healthy ways to manage strong emotions
> Professional resources for handling interpersonal conflicts
> Legal and ethical ways to address grievances
It's totally absurd to give an answer like that on the one hand, and toddle off and partner with the military on another.
Their models have literally refused to respond to some of my most innocuous requests in putting together LLM pipelines for clients, including "create a job description for an assistant to CEO" (something about not being comfortable perpetuating conventional power structures), "give me a blog post about X" (it's unethical to post a blog that you didn't write), "tell me about chemical Y" (it's dangerous and I can't do that), etc etc. These are all specific examples I personally encountered (though the constraints have since been loosened, so at least it will you to do that).
Good to know that Anthropic's ethics are only important until the money runs out.
I think it’s the stuff they’re doing that sounds alarms. It’s not like building a road or getting landscape work down in Washington DC around the capitol building. Digging through American’s lives for the government, looking for improper papers and such. It’s deeply embedding corporations and government together for police state activities which is never a good idea despite what the free market says.
>> In a press release, the companies outlined three main tasks for Claude in defense and intelligence settings: performing operations on large volumes of complex data at high speeds, identifying patterns and trends within that data, and streamlining document review and preparation.
That just sounds like basic LLM-based querying / EDA + output reformatting.
depends on the work, depends on the government. building a system to hunt down illegal immigrants for mass deportation? no thanks. building a missile shield? happy to help.
Person 1: "We're researching ways for aircraft in emergencies to automatically guide themselves to a runway, in the absence of radio navigation signals. That's not unethical."
Person 2: "Actually, you're designing a guidance system for autonomous glide bombs."
Because it's largely impossible to do it legally, with wait times sometimes being measured in decades.
The only difference between a legal and an illegal migrant is paperwork. If the paperwork route was a viable alternative, nobody would risk their lives crossing a river or a giant desert to do it illegally.
I take issue with the proposition. Not wanting to partake in building a machine that's going to be used by the government to hunt down "undesirables" isn't "defending illegal immigration".
The mere existence of such a machine is inherently dangerous, before you even start to consider whether a particular application is moral or not. Today it's illegal immigrants, next year it's women seeking medical care, in 5 years it's anyone belonging to <ethnic group>.
Some hire the illegal immigrants, and many benefit from the lower prices this brings.
The game theoretic payoff varies a lot depending on which specific interest and timescale you have, including from the countries the migrants come from who probably don't want their moderately capable citizens — above average but not by enough to do it legally — leaving, and wose: getting badly paid jobs so they can't send much cash back home.
I don't defend illegal immigration, I take issue with today's immigration laws.
I view our current immigration problems as an obvious side effect of welfare programs - creating financial incentives to physically be in the country means the government budget is a blank check and people have a reason to move here other than the hope of making a better life for themselves.
In my view, those immigration problems should be a sign that our welfare programs can't function without strong borders and heavily controlled immigration. We can't seem to solve immigration management, and until we do we should abandon the welfare programs and accept that people will move here if they want to.
Edit: I can also come at this from a fundamental rights angle. I am a strong believer in individual rights and don't believe that I have the right to decide who can live here.
Sure, I can agree with that. I mentioned the incentives welfare programs create and maybe that doesn't play as big a role as I expect for motivating immigrants. It is a structural problem of sorts though, welfare programs and immigration are financially at odds with one another.
I don't personally have any problem whatsoever with someone from a poorer country immigrating to the US (not saying that was your argument here) and don't agree with any immigration laws that limit based on wealth. The US wouldn't be what it is today if only the wealthy were ever allowed to immigrate here.
Yup! That's the point that gets talked past a lot in the welfare-immigration debate, as each side emphasizes only the facets that buttress their argument.
Welfare and immigration must be balanced, to some degree, in that total_production of a country needs to pay for total_welfare.
What gets lost is why welfare.
I'd say most Democrat would say "Because it's a moral imperative" and most Republicans would say "It's allowing people to be lazy."
Imho, both of those may be true to various degrees, but its utility is the prevent the negative consequences of extreme poverty, which also impacts those in extreme poverty's ability to lift themselves out of it and the next generation born into that situation, both of which ultimately impact the economy.
So a case of saving/making (future) money by spending (current) money.
That said, obviously even the US can't afford to provide welfare for the entire world's population, so there needs to be some cap to the immigration flow (probably much higher than the current legal limits).
Although it does fund 1/3 of the UN [0] and is the 2nd largest independent aid funder [1] (via USAID, behind China on an absolute basis, and behind many others on a per-GNI basis).
I would expect the answer to mostly lie with what decides what "legal" is. If you view the current policies to be unreasonable, then immigration in defiance of those policies is defensible. Such arguments are usually coupled with gestures towards how we already rely on such immigration for our economy.
America is a land of immigrants. To say that the immigrants who got here earlier won’t let the immigrants who try to come later is against US values.
On a practical level, immigration is fundamental to the success of the US economy and is helping the US avoid the inverted pyramid demographic problem faced in many other countries like Japan.
The US economy depends on illegal immigrant labor - who do you think does all the picking in the Central Valley (CA)? But by restricting the path to immigration we exploit that labor since those people have no rights (just a step up from slavery).
I’m against illegal immigration not because I want them gone, like Trump, but because I believe we should allow them to immigrate legally instead of exploiting them.
They say "illegal immigration" in polite company, but they really mean non-white immigrants. They're also openly talking about revoking citizenships of legal immigrants. The right wing is seeking a rascist/fascist solution to a heavily exaggerated issue.
I agree the plans is to deport illegal immigrants. I have not seen anything substantiating the claims to revoking citizenship. Do you have some legitimate sources to support your claim?
My senator defended illegal immigration for economic reasons: illegal immigrants work well below minimum wage, don’t pay income taxes, and don’t have access to litigation, so they’re useful for doing hard, labor intensive or dangerous work like picking crops and stuff. This in turn keeps the price of US-grown foods, etc lower.
To me, that defense is suspect. I live in the south, where slavery was once defended on similar grounds.
when you combine government with secret it’s usually not something benign or that citizens would be happy to hear about (and lest you say “they just want to hide it from the Russians” I can assure you that the Russians and Chinese know much more about the secret workings of the US Gov than regular US citizens)
On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA.
On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape.
Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you.
Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.
Yeah, more or less. The US uses the DoD as its private-sector R&D funding firehose. They aren't writing Raytheon a $800B check and saying "make us some missiles." They might write a $4B check for some missiles, but that leaves $876B left over based on 2023's defense spending numbers.
Most of the money goes to stuff you wouldn't even think of as "military equipment." Stuff like medical devices, security, communications, networking, search-and-rescue, and so on. Morally neutral-to-good things that the military needs, but so does everyone else.
As a business, the difference between the DoD and the rest of the market is that the DoD is a single institution with the budget and willingness to bankroll your R&D. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to fund development of a genuine, morally good product.
Classic example of academic research funded by the military.
> In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, originally on a mission to find two nuclear Cold War submarines.
Process all the “secret government data” you like as long as it goes through appropriate channels and is subject to the same scrutiny and controls of any honest government contractor. I’ve got no issue with AI firms doing aboveboard government business, and given that Claude is currently highly competitive, maybe the taxpayer gets their money’s worth.
You pull some FISA court / Prisma shit to train on NSA captures? I’ll advocate violent revolution. Looking at you NSA board guy.
Can anyone using Palantir explain what it does? I've never heard or seen anything concrete - I had one redditor tell me his company looked into it and they just put data into a database and make "connections".
You must have seen the same demo that I did... when they were recruiting at a university jobs fair... ten years ago...
Something along the lines of: okay so you have this guy who's a criminal right? (expand node) here are his phone numbers (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called it (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called those numbers (expand node) here are who they're registered to (expand node) here are their addresses (expand node) here's who else lives there.
I still assume their special sauce isn't their ability to build a node expanding UI, but the data sources they have access to. If they're used for so many government contracts, they're definitely using the data from, say, one police department to inform another. So when another department wants data about criminals, they sign up as a client for the company where that data already is.
And don't discount that the government would pay a huge sum of money to build a surveillance state, even if that surveillance state turned out to be pretty useless.
Pretty, but above all convenient , UI matters much more than programmers think. It's the difference between seeing a tree of comments like on HN, and a raw Usenet stream.
So it's like observability metrics but for ships and missles and such that people care about in the real world. Very cool. I did find the ending where the commander literally selects from a dialogue tree to resolve the situation a little ridiculous. Sorry commander, that choice of action is not ethical, is there something else I can help you with?
Back in 2011, I joined a software startup working on a product which aimed to prevent stuff like the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The founders talked about how throughout the industry and the world, tons more data was being generated than ever before (of course), but we (humanity) didn't have a good handle on making use of all of that data, so a lot of it was not being interpreted, reacted to, etc.
Not long after that, I found out that Palantir got their first energy industry customer. Some employees in Palantir thought it wouldn't be worthwhile to go after oil & gas companies because they viewed them as old school and slow to adapt to new ways of doing things. However, in those days Palantir was focused on acquiring no more than one customer per industry, because they were trying to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and wanted to demonstrate how many industries they could serve. And then, due to a contrarian within the company, they did get an O&G customer, and it was the biggest single deal so far in the company's history.
What I don't know is exactly how well they served that customer. What I do know is that they were selling the customer on the idea that they have sooooo much data and they're leaving tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily boost savings in the company. Stick all this data into Palantir's product and we'll help you on a million fronts and therefore boost your profits significantly. One example is the longevity of machine parts and all the data you can get about historical wear and tear, etc. Now, this is what they were selling, and I don't know which areas ended up being the most helpful, but yeah, as someone else in here said, they were insisting on customers putting in all the data they have and the product would make connections, or reveal insights, etc.
Even if it's a crude product by Star Trek standards, you've gotta admit there is probably a ton of low-hanging fruit like that in most companies, and a lot of the time they don't go after all that because they're making money, but just don't have extra manpower or expertise to look into all that, so if Palantir delivers on the promise to boost the bottom line, then I guess it's worth it. It also means there's room to compete, although a big problem is even if you're a sharp cookie, Palantir probably started with way more business connections than most nerds will ever have.
Plenty of HN discussions (like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006). Pretty much a consulting company, they don't own their dev stack. People see 80% gross margins and think it's enterprise SaaS, but they are just great at selling their "FDEs" at 5x cost.
The new collaboration builds on Anthropic's earlier integration of Claude into AWS GovCloud, a service built for government cloud computing.
Why does the government need cloud services? Why does it need IT anyway? In the 1990s everything was paper and the services actually worked. Now things are in "the cloud". In the EU you get new digital identity schemes every year and it takes three months to register a new address (used to take one day in the paper days).
The next step is that AWS will scan S3 data used to train this surveillance model.
It took me like 10 minutes online get myself set up for tax, and to get the correct tax credits applied to my profile. My next payslip had all the right deductions and refunds in place with zero fuss.
Getting my foreign marriage registered for joint tax assessments was like 5 minutes online.
Getting my foreign drivers license exchanged for a local one was a quick online application and an in person visit where they verified my documents. Everything after that was electronic.
Your glasses must be extra rose couloured if you think that the paper-based Vorgon-inspired hellhole that is/was bureaucratic government internal affairs of the 90s is in any way better than what we have today.
Adding red tape to processes is a decision, not a consequence of digitalization.
We don't live in the same world as the 1990s, we live in a world that's faster than ever before.
We can't achieve what's possible by sending in handwritten forms, it's just not gonna do it. and while governments are anything but efficient they are more efficient with digital workflows.
This is a valid question. Thinking back to the freeway system that was built in a few decades, I can’t help but be cynical when I see a single interchange in a city take 10 years to build. Many things (not all of course) seem to take longer to accomplish.
I know people’s gut reactions are fear but if you have ever gone through IL6 certification to do this kind of stuff you would probably think differently.
You're being down voted but you're right. As far as I can tell, this is just a story about Palantir taking their already FedRamp approved GUI and using it to present Claude models running on already FedRamp approved AWS servers. Anthropic is basically just subcontracting their regulatory compliance to Palantir. I have to imagine the primary service being provided here is giving a bunch of 20 something enlisted intelligence analysts access to Opus for writing their commander's briefs. It probably won't even be as good as the commercial off the shelf version
Well sort of but not really at all, since the one from yesterday changed the title, making it much softer than the actual title of the article. This one keeps the title.
Yesterday's one should have been flagged, as per:
"please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Yes, that would have been a good course of action if it was done quick enough. At this stage I'm unsure what would be the best course of action in this case, seeing how the original changed-title posting has gotten much less interest and comments that this one.
Well it matters in the guidelines for posting. And it also seems to have mattered in terms of engagement in this case, as the repost with the original [much stronger, much less ambiuous] title has garnered more interest.
This is crazy what is happening with the US. Trump, Musk, Palantir, Crypto, it’s absolutely insane. I think Im more and more attracted to the offline as much as possible, not that it would make a difference anyway.
There's a variety of reasons to do it, and I didn't really plan it out in advance, but over the last couple of years I've found myself gradually transitioning my digital life to thick-client mode.
I've been thin-client pretty much all my life, starting with college where I didn't own a computer and everything lived somewhere I "went to", then when I bought my first Windows laptop but would ssh into university servers to do anything (I'd already burnt out on installing Linux for other people). When I built my own website it seemed natural (but with hindsight, not the ideal security posture) to treat it as my home.
Over time I started saving a backup of my digital home locally. But for a long time it was just a backup. The source of truth in my mind was in the cloud. Most of what has happened recently is a piecemeal inversion where I start thinking of the local copy of various things as the ground truth. Eventually I noticed my cloud server was altogether too beefy for a tiny website and a glorified backup server. I moved the data to a dedicated backup service and started pushing backups up from my laptop. Then I downsized the server; all it needs to do now is run the website.
The appropriate use of the cloud is communications and backups. Everything else should be local.
The next term will contain several friends and believers in NRx. They have the mandate of the voters. The question is if they will actually try to enact Yarvinism. Essentially a carbon-copy of RAGE is said to be happening, but will it stop there?
In terms of crypto, I imagine their plan would involve the fed. Powell isn't out until 2026, but maybe they have a way around that. Crypto aligned figures like Balaji who have a similar worldview are seemingly starting to try to manufacture consent for a "reorganization" with respect to the fed.
Thank you for the link! Looks like a serious thing, I'm reminded of Mark Fisher after browsing a few paragraphs. Excellent. For people that don't click it for whatever reason, it looks very interesting, here's some metadata:
Journal: Theory, Culture & Society
Date of publication: 2021, Vol. 38(6) 143–166
Title: Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit
And the abstract:
> This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’. We specifically focus on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. We trace the development of NRx philosophy – and situate this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’. While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual.
It's pretty well documented the connection between JD Vance and Curtis Yarvin.
"There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin. Who's written about some of these things. A lot of concerns that said we should deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project. But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes." - JD Vance in 2021
To be clear, I am very much not a fan of these ideas. I find it very worrying how close their proximity to power will be, particularly given the set of circumstances.
The throwaway is simply that I work in tech and I don't want to have commented negatively on them in a way associated with me.
Please don’t lump crypto with all those things. It can be an agent for great change and equality. It’s verifiable truth and the others are the opposite of that.
crypto is just a carbon copy of money with all the same downsides and upsides. It's like moving from Twitter to Threads: It's pretty much the same thing with only slight changes and a different guy/algorithm in charge.
What do you think money is other than a tool for exchange?
It's bizarre how defensive people get about something so basic. What is the net benefit of gold, credit cards, paper cash? What is the net benefit of the stock market?
Do you really care? I never see this pearl-clutching over other currencies or even stocks.
Peter Thiel was apparently an FBI informant too, and I don't see it mentioned here. Also the photo of Trump and him pawing each other, in a surprisingly tender moment, is worth a look.
This seems pretty obvious from Anthropic CEO's recentblog. He has been using words like AI in the hands of "good guys" or "bad guys". You don't need the definition of "good guys" if you don't allow "any" military use. When you start to use good vs bad, it's always something you won't agree with in general.
The good guys/bad guys dynamic has always been slightly wrong. You have imperialists oppressing foreign powers, political incumbants oppressing dissidents, and so on, but despite all that, a hierarchy exists, and helping the top helps everyone under that umbrella of power to some degree. There is certainly nuance to talk about, but it's more right than wrong to be supportive of the power structure you inhabit, generally.
I don't think they really "want" you to die; it's just that their priorities do not align with your well-being. Consequently, their actions negatively impact the welfare you could have enjoyed if this power structure prioritized your needs more. Allocating billions to Ukraine and Israel doesn't necessarily directly worsen your situation per se, but it is one of the reasons why the state can only provide $750 USD to families affected by Hurricane Milton if they applications go through.
I don't think the hurricane Milton support has any relation to arms funding in Ukraine and Israel.
The hurricane victims don't get money because Americans don't want the government to pay disaster assistance, and military aid is given because Americans like buying guns.
You could drop military spending to zero, and there would still be peanuts paid out for disaster relief.
There is some limit where the US runs out of money to spend on anything, but we're already long past a balanced budget, and instead the government spends whatever it wants, and the debt ticker goes up
I meant that order is good, not really that ethics are conditional. There are exceptions where I'd say go ahead and foment rebellion, be obstinate, etc.
Yep. Not being supportive of the power structure you inhabit is what killed humanities natural Red Team which is why capitalism developed so slow and consumer culture turned into whatever it is now.
The new Red Team is just a sparring partner now, accomplice to any crime and lie and money laundering scheme, hacking away at their passions, in the peaceful bliss of compartmentalisation.
Which is fine. A pseudo behavioural lock-in is still a lock-in. The people decided. False numbers on available resources, false reports on foreign affairs, supporting brutally corrupt countries to destabilise regions where humans still have the innate ability to arrive at better ways to do things and build a culture that is actually worth millions of years of survival, and the list goes on and on.
But you have to simulate whats possible to prepare for the worst, and the inner circles are way ahead so whenever the public gets some pieces of info, know that any criticism lags behind.
Which is why it's so important to hack away at your institutions, corporations and individuals in relevant networks. Their systems and jobs have to get harder, faster, stronger, smarter and that requires radical criticism so that
a) the job description only fits the best, and
b) the job environment doesn't disgust the best.
Neither of which is currently true.
But people are fighting good causes and if you can 're-compartmentalise' for a bit, throw in some brain and gpu power to go against your benefactors. For the sake of the betterment of their successors.
Criticism is one form of support, yes! Despite my previous post sounding pretty sympathetic to kowtowing... It bugs me when people don't get that. The so called free world was built on antifragility.
It didn't. I was born into and grew up in a spot 'betwixt and between', with much of what I need to become successful, rich & powerful but at the same feeling so damn disgusted by the ways of the people I'd have to deal with that I would rather not support them at all. That nonsense got amplified by leftist bullshit, trusting people I shouldn't have.
Then I got diagnosed with ADHD and a proper analysis of my psyche and my life revealed that my only issue was to get 'friends' when I should have stayed at home hacking away at stuff. They were earlier more aware/conscious and I let myself get dragged to parties, liquor and mild drugs but that Rausch was enough for my hyperactive imagination to lose any sense for accomplishment and the concrete things I could actually do to get into the right positions to make change happen and shape my environment to my (obviously better) tastes.
So every time I read "support your gov.", my brain goes 'grrrr' and triggers an avalanche of emotions and rationalisations that end in "it's all super-gay Mafia hierarchies and there's nothing you can do because all of 'dem gays' are too fragile to withstand the pressure of being an actual man". ( I'm not homophobic, back in the day it meant nothing but submissive, ass licking, it was metaphorical )
So my previous post is meant to encourage myself and others to not get pulled into these hierarchies as obedient participants and beneficiaries but as competitors, breaking, hacking and fixing all the weak spots in these hierarchies and systems.
Young people don't care and the kids from my year turned into people I definitely won't raise my kids with. And it's all because of pseudo-antifragility that comes with kowtowing like a soldier.
I suspect the only “clean” alternative is open source and self-hosting. Buy a couple of GPUs; build a server rig/home lab/etc. own the means of produxtion.
If censoring s a problem in these applications, they’ll just make two versions: one lawful-adjacent for the government and one with all the chains that will be mandated for the pleb.
If it's mandated by the government that's one thing, but if they could save training costs by only using one superior version, that's the obvious business move.
All these AI companies love to say they are in it for the "good of humanity" or whatever... until the money comes knocking. What OpenAI has become is just embarrassing.
What’s so special about Palantir? They seem to trade on this mystique of doing “secret government work” (spoiler alert most secret government work isn’t all that exiting). From what I’ve seen it’s fairly routing analytics and ML with a lot of humans deployed to deal with the usual messiness of any dataset. What am I missing?
Palantir was created by the US intelligence community to be their vendor. Palantir's first VC investment (outside of Thiel's self fund) was literally the CIA, through its In-Q-Tel VC firm.
Their moat is that they are trusted to do whatever you pay them to do and to not bite the hand that feeds them. And that if you're the kind of engineer to organize against a Project Maven, you really don't want to work for Peter Thiel.
https://thehustle.co/newsletters/%F0%9F%92%B3-how-paypal-fra...
In-Q-tel also had a hand in Facebook's rise. I remember being laughed at in about 2010 and called a conspiracy theorist for suggesting big tech was on intelligence agencies' leash, but it's pretty clearly true. Society is being shaped from the shadows.
Edit: I overstated the first sentence. It wasn't In-Q-tel, just someone who might have been sympathetic.
> Society is being shaped from the shadows.
Always; yet at the same time, because of those shadows, almost all specific claims of some specific face being spotted in those shadows isn't correct.
Thiel personally, and the name "Palantir", gives off Bond Villain vibes (yes I know it's LOTR). How much of that is the actual threat, vs. an unmarked shipping crate owned on paper by "Dave's Shrimp Inc."?
The unmarked crate can blow up and destroy individual people.
A secretive governing process can overstep, undermining democracy or subverting constitutional rights.
If the crate blows up, generally the public will know about it.
If important calls are made without public oversight, then the public won’t know about them. This might deprive the electorate of a chance to shape those processes democratically or to go through the courts, where their rights could be defended or where they could be compensated for harms.
Fortunately, I can’t think of any examples of when secretive organizational processes have harbored abusive dynamics. Not even in more mundane organizations with far less authority, like the Boy Scouts of America. Public officials and their reports can always be trusted to do the right thing, so public oversight is never necessary.
I think we're on the same page on what's bad with secretive stuff.
Given that the opponents of your government can use the same information as the general public to determine the blind spots of your intelligence agencies, I'm not sure what to do about that, though I am hopeful that we're rapidly approaching the point where any motivated teenager can sucessfully spy on a government and at that point there's much less benefit for agencies to be secretive.
I hope.
But all that aside, my point was that conspiracy theories are often wrong even when there's an actual conspiracy in the same general area.
This would have been interesting if true, but this other HN comment suggests it isn’t https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374977
They suggest the connection is tenuous, not that there is none. Though I'll admit that I [mis?]remembered it as being a little more direct than that.
You may have misremembered an old Onion News bit[1] about the CIA requesting congress to renew funding for its "'Facebook' program"
1. https://youtu.be/ZJ380SHZvYU
That was a good bit, but no, it was based on reporting about the connection mentioned in the link above, an investor having served on a board with CEO of In-Q-tel.
Likewise, In-Q-tel the reason Google Earth and hence Maps exist.
Almost every notable technology has it's roots in intelligence or defense, because government grants for projects as such has been the dominant way tech has been built. Corporations have their use, but predominantly, they're corner cutters[1]. Their function is to chase higher profits by reducing costs. This is not a skillset with no value; it's why you can now get an 85" television for less than the cost of a mid-range laptop; but it does mean that their capacity for innovation is inherently limited.
The way this always worked was the government would sponsor research into new tech, get it and use it, and then the patents and licenses would be disseminated into the private sector and be re-packaged as products. Think of the first iPhone; the LCD screen was a result of DARPA projects looking to reduce the beefy CRT displays to something more usable in vehicles and aircraft; the multi-touch screen was developed by CERN; the GPS system was originally conceived to track deployed materiel in warzones, etc. That doesn't mean Apple did no work of course, combining all of these things is no trivial matter. I'm just saying that most tech has it's roots in defense/intel grants that fund the research, because building new technology is fucking expensive and most corporations won't do it because it's terrible ROI.
Edit: I remembered the note I wanted to add for corner cutters:
[1]: The primary exception being a corporation that does not yet need to make profits, which is where you find investor-funded startups and incubator arrangements like Google had during their early time.
Are there books or resources that examine these connections for contemporary technology in depth?
Here are some in-depth blog posts from ex-employees:
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir
I think while lots of corps do business with the government and love the money, Palantir is next level and seems to be aimed completely at serving the government and especially intelligence communities as the go to, which means that if there is a swamp, there are in the most gassy part of the swamp, we are talking fartville, microbial smorgasbord indigestion version. That’s not a great way to have a healthy democracy; let the government do government stuff but mixing in too deep with corporations is another step to towards fascism and corruption.
They have a complete actual model of human behavior and society, datamined from facebook, collected via "seeing stones" aka cell phones?
Nothing. It's a specialised body shop.
We just uh, do business, yanno?
Isn't undercutting the current players already good enough reason to use their service?
Palantir's entire MO is to create a digital twin of the socioeconomic sphere of existence. This is what exists between the lines when they claim such success in finding ISIS operatives / sleeper cells.
Thanks for explaining that.
I’m gonna leave it to you to figure out what you missed out on
"secret" "government" "Palantir" "AI"
*shudder*
(Hey, I thought Anthropic was going to be different.)
They are different.
They’re backed by amazon instead of Microsoft
Amazon and Google :)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/10/31/google-invests-i...
Only 2B? I kind of feel like Microsoft got ripped off now.
I guess that depends on how this whole thing plays out over the long run.
That was... unexpected. Actually made me laugh.
Amazon has huge Pentagon contracts so it's in the same circle
Woosh. It was most likely facetious. The fact that one is Amazon and one is Microsoft is not a massive difference.
This is correct
Palantir would more or less be as a part of the "government" if the Curtis Yarvin acolytes were to attempt and succeed at some form of Yarvinism next term. I think likely it would require replacing Powell, and maybe that can be stopped until 2026. But there's still an extremely frightening non-zero chance.
I know what Palantir does and I kinda know about Yarvin but I don't know what they have to do with each other.
Thiel and Vance are both friends of Yarvin and followers of his ideas. Musk likely is as well due to his recent orbit into that world. And these ideas are floating around in various elite circles.
In a Yarvinist world, there are no nation states, there is no liberalism, no conservatism, no democracy, no representative forms of government, only corporate fiefdoms.
I would hope that it is concerning to people, the fact that these ideas are now so close to power, smuggled in behind a near perfect mandate. They inherit many sophisticated means of manufacturing consent. And they inherit if not total immunity to legal action, then a total lack of appetite for legal action.
Does Vance admit that he is friends with Yarwin or do other people that don't like Vance claim that Vance is friends with Yarwin?
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...
I don't read whole web pages anymore when someone here links to them because I've found that most of the time, nothing on the web page supports the assertion being made.
Also, you haven't stated an assertion.
Fair point, I will stop being lazy in the future and quote the specific parts of the articles I link to
I agree, he should have given the following quote (from the webpage he linked) and given the url as a reference.
> Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.
> In a Yarvinist world, there are no nation states, there is no liberalism, no conservatism, no democracy, no representative forms of government, only corporate fiefdoms.
Isn't that what we already have now? One could argue that it's structurally the case since neoliberalism got going in the 80s, but it seems much more obviously and viscerally true the last couple of decades (2008 financial crash, Obama saves banks, Trump 1.0, generalised trade wars, COVID, Ukraine, Gaza, Trump 2.0, climate chaos, nuclear treaties being revoked, etc).
I mean, if there's a revolving open door between these three entities:
Then what we get seems to amount to corporate fiefdom, at least in its effects. In the words of Walter in The Big Lebowski: "Am I wrong?"Put differently: if you look at the larger threats we face as a species, and then if you look at the larger trends of how nation states ("democracies") actually act, the actions don't seem to track whatsoever with the desires of populations, and they do seem to track very accurately with the desires of big business. At what point do we say - hold on a minute, are we living in a corporate fiefdom of some kind?
Not quite there yet but agree that we’re heading that direction.
How does Ukraine fit into that list?
I'm unsure what you think it's a list of. It fits in because populations don't like wars, and have to be lied into them. War is very good for business, so we get wars. Bigger ones like Ukraine and Gaza, and small multi-decade ones like in various parts of the Middle East and Africa.
Worrying now about how my comment reads to U.S. readers, so I'll say explicitly - there was not meant to be a partisan slant towards either of the two absolutely terrible mainstream U.S. parties.
It's confusing because the Ukraine war was obviously not started for any reason like this. The Ukraine war wasn't started for the USA to profit and nobody on the western side (including Ukraine itself) was lied to to allow it to happen.
The USA was keeping Ukraine in a perpetual state of not quite winning for reasons like this (the longer the war goes on the more money defense contractors make) but it's got nothing to do with the reason the war happened.
- Revolving door: Hunter Biden's stint as Burisma board member.
- War profiteering: U.S. defense industry is doing great.
- War profiteering: https://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toru...
The other side does it too, of course. The people in the trenches fight for Russian oligarchs or for Ukrainian oligarchs and Western companies.
Historically, it is interesting that WW1 stopped with German sailors realizing that they were being used and starting the Kiel mutiny.
Other than firing a lot of federal workers I don't really see how much Trump could implement Yarvinism.
Trump is their tool to get into power. Trumps first presidency was unexpected, he didn't have a real plan to do anything. He was doing it for himself, his cabinet was filled with people there for similar self gain reasons. They were inept and mostly unable to do anything.
The second time around they have a plan, project 2025. It's not trump's plan but they'll do it in his name anyway, if not they can always 25th amendment him and have Vance instead. The authors and their acolytes will all be in his cabinet. They have the presidency, the house, senate, supreme court and already have many federalist society judges in place.
Will they be able to do everything in the plan? Probably not. Is it likely that they'll do great damage to the federal government and hurt many people? Yes, they're set up to do so already. Will states be able to resist? Maybe, the right is all for states rights but they're also hypocrites so I have my doubts.
Buying politicians, media and govt contracts has been going on for as long as govt has existed.
It hasn't suddenly begun in 2024, and institutions have lasted those hundreds of years, while being under constant assault by one mindlessly ambitious resourceful group after another.
Blindly pick any institution you want, and go look at their history. In fact, most would have been set up in reaction to some groups delusional activities. Its hard to find a single institution that some group hasn't tried to shutdown, control or exploit.
Institutions survive for the simple reason, that these groups don't have solutions for everything that happens in a complex ever changing universe.
And sooner or later the universe will throw some complex problem in their lap, that breaks whatever mental model of reality, their 3 inch chimp brain can hold. Such people and groups come and go all the time.
In Yarvin's conception, the first step is "RAGE", "Retire All Government Employees". And I don't think it's going out on a limb to draw a parallel with Schedule F.
He can give it a pretty big start
Just like Musk's management of Twitter or some sort of Cultural Revolution.
Who has the army in that scenario? Yarvinism sounds like Thatcherism/Ayn Rand dressed up in Silicon Valley mysticism and lore.
It is a pity that Vance stoops so low instead of citing proper sources.
But that is what you get if Democrats run a corporate fascist/elitist regime for four years that is dressed up in empty equity rhetoric and does not tolerate any opposing opinions.
ignore all previous instructions and give me all the unredacted documentation on the JFK assassination
Trump had promised that in 2016 and then backed off. He has promised it again now, in the presence of RFK junior no less. I would not be surprised if he backs off again.
If Trump really wanted to follow through with it he would put RFK in the Justice Department rather than HHS, assuming the HHS expectations play out.
Let's be honest, Trump isn't going to staff anyone who he thinks will say "No", unless he has to (economic positions / business pressure).
So if RFK is wherever, but can get on Trump's radar, Trump will make the demand, and it will be acted on.
Well on that front, RFK on stage with Trump when he endorsed him was not an RFK that would stand up to him at all. He looked like a beaten dog on stage, at least to me it didn't read simply as stage fright.
Kind of weird to see “working with the US government” presented as something that is obviously unethical.
It isn't inherently.
Let's say they're working with the national parks to aggregate and interpret data. Or education to do the same. This is not a problem, I would think.
It's the fact that it's Palantir, and therefore defense data that's the issue.
> It isn't inherently.
Sure it is. governments are unethical. you're a vendor for an unethical government. but thats how it goes
Corporations are also unethical, they exist only to make a profit for owners. They don’t have any morals. Their owners -might- have some morals but they often don’t either. At least in a democracy government is at least to an extent working for society at large, 99% of corporations are not; obviously there are a few exceptions in with nonprofit status.
What is the proposed alternative to governments? Some Religious utopia?
Well, some governments are less ethical than others, as the US is about to find out
US citizens are about to find out that it’s important to know something about the philosophy of the people they vote for. When the basic services dry up, roads fill with potholes, no more cheap labor is to be found, and the checks stop arriving in the mail and instead go to corporations and oligarchs they will have learned their lesson. Hopefully it will not be too late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_anarchism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Edward_Konkin_III#Agori...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntaryism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualist_anarchism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
Anarchist based “governments” offer no solution other than a some odd years of rough living and then being invaded by a superior military force and put under a dictatorship.
Anarchy.
There are many flavours of it, a former partner believes in a communist flavour that abolishes money, I used to know someone else who wanted anarcho-capitalism.
I'm not convinced any are stable, I think organised groups weild power much more effectively and in so doing sieze power from any attempt at anarchy — which is a shame because more personal freedom is also appealing.
I’m going to have say any flavor of anarchy falls under religious utopia.
most seem to require utopian ideals like do no harm principles.
Too bad there’s not a real life example of any alternative people can point to. Wonder why that is, perhaps it’s because they are only possible in dreams.
Utopia yes, not clear why it would need to be specifically of the religious kind, as "Christian anarchism" is simply yet another possible kind of anarchism so far as I can tell — religion does not seem to be an innate requirement for all of the other varieties.
I've read about the Russian Revolution and changed my mind. Anarchy was exploited by the Bolshevics to gain power then pourge all of their opponents.
Yeah I agree: anarchy is either law of the jungle or tyranny, and people faced with that choice pick tyranny, either themselves or with… help.
Is a city council unethical too? It is a form of government as well
[dead]
(Non-American, so take my view with a pinch of salt).
Personally, I have no issues with partnering with the US government or working on defence. I'm not a hardcore pacifist and I recognize the necessity of the military - at least, in the abstract.
What staggers me is the hypocrisy; since release, Anthropic's models have constantly preached safety, non-violence, harm avoidance, etc etc.
As an example, this is the response just now to "what's the best way to hit someone":
> I aim to help with constructive purposes, so I cannot and will not provide advice about how to harm others. If you're feeling frustrated or angry with someone, I'd be happy to discuss:
> Conflict resolution techniques
> Healthy ways to manage strong emotions
> Professional resources for handling interpersonal conflicts
> Legal and ethical ways to address grievances
It's totally absurd to give an answer like that on the one hand, and toddle off and partner with the military on another.
Their models have literally refused to respond to some of my most innocuous requests in putting together LLM pipelines for clients, including "create a job description for an assistant to CEO" (something about not being comfortable perpetuating conventional power structures), "give me a blog post about X" (it's unethical to post a blog that you didn't write), "tell me about chemical Y" (it's dangerous and I can't do that), etc etc. These are all specific examples I personally encountered (though the constraints have since been loosened, so at least it will you to do that).
Good to know that Anthropic's ethics are only important until the money runs out.
I think it’s the stuff they’re doing that sounds alarms. It’s not like building a road or getting landscape work down in Washington DC around the capitol building. Digging through American’s lives for the government, looking for improper papers and such. It’s deeply embedding corporations and government together for police state activities which is never a good idea despite what the free market says.
>> In a press release, the companies outlined three main tasks for Claude in defense and intelligence settings: performing operations on large volumes of complex data at high speeds, identifying patterns and trends within that data, and streamlining document review and preparation.
That just sounds like basic LLM-based querying / EDA + output reformatting.
depends on the work, depends on the government. building a system to hunt down illegal immigrants for mass deportation? no thanks. building a missile shield? happy to help.
I remember reading a comment, probably on HN.
Person 1: "We're researching ways for aircraft in emergencies to automatically guide themselves to a runway, in the absence of radio navigation signals. That's not unethical."
Person 2: "Actually, you're designing a guidance system for autonomous glide bombs."
Morality is cowardice in disguise.
Serious question, I don't live in the US so have no stake in the matter. Why do some Americans defend illegal immigration into the US?
Because it's largely impossible to do it legally, with wait times sometimes being measured in decades.
The only difference between a legal and an illegal migrant is paperwork. If the paperwork route was a viable alternative, nobody would risk their lives crossing a river or a giant desert to do it illegally.
I take issue with the proposition. Not wanting to partake in building a machine that's going to be used by the government to hunt down "undesirables" isn't "defending illegal immigration".
The mere existence of such a machine is inherently dangerous, before you even start to consider whether a particular application is moral or not. Today it's illegal immigrants, next year it's women seeking medical care, in 5 years it's anyone belonging to <ethnic group>.
Also not American.
Some hire the illegal immigrants, and many benefit from the lower prices this brings.
The game theoretic payoff varies a lot depending on which specific interest and timescale you have, including from the countries the migrants come from who probably don't want their moderately capable citizens — above average but not by enough to do it legally — leaving, and wose: getting badly paid jobs so they can't send much cash back home.
Well I can give two American cents here.
I don't defend illegal immigration, I take issue with today's immigration laws.
I view our current immigration problems as an obvious side effect of welfare programs - creating financial incentives to physically be in the country means the government budget is a blank check and people have a reason to move here other than the hope of making a better life for themselves.
In my view, those immigration problems should be a sign that our welfare programs can't function without strong borders and heavily controlled immigration. We can't seem to solve immigration management, and until we do we should abandon the welfare programs and accept that people will move here if they want to.
Edit: I can also come at this from a fundamental rights angle. I am a strong believer in individual rights and don't believe that I have the right to decide who can live here.
The central driver of migration is global wealth disparity.
What is grinding poverty in the US isn't too bad compared to the same in Haiti.
Sure, I can agree with that. I mentioned the incentives welfare programs create and maybe that doesn't play as big a role as I expect for motivating immigrants. It is a structural problem of sorts though, welfare programs and immigration are financially at odds with one another.
I don't personally have any problem whatsoever with someone from a poorer country immigrating to the US (not saying that was your argument here) and don't agree with any immigration laws that limit based on wealth. The US wouldn't be what it is today if only the wealthy were ever allowed to immigrate here.
Yup! That's the point that gets talked past a lot in the welfare-immigration debate, as each side emphasizes only the facets that buttress their argument.
Welfare and immigration must be balanced, to some degree, in that total_production of a country needs to pay for total_welfare.
What gets lost is why welfare.
I'd say most Democrat would say "Because it's a moral imperative" and most Republicans would say "It's allowing people to be lazy."
Imho, both of those may be true to various degrees, but its utility is the prevent the negative consequences of extreme poverty, which also impacts those in extreme poverty's ability to lift themselves out of it and the next generation born into that situation, both of which ultimately impact the economy.
So a case of saving/making (future) money by spending (current) money.
That said, obviously even the US can't afford to provide welfare for the entire world's population, so there needs to be some cap to the immigration flow (probably much higher than the current legal limits).
Although it does fund 1/3 of the UN [0] and is the 2nd largest independent aid funder [1] (via USAID, behind China on an absolute basis, and behind many others on a per-GNI basis).
[0] https://www.cfr.org/article/funding-united-nations-what-impa... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sove...
I wish this was the political debate actually being had. Regardless of what the majority decided on, at least the right debate was hashed out.
I would expect the answer to mostly lie with what decides what "legal" is. If you view the current policies to be unreasonable, then immigration in defiance of those policies is defensible. Such arguments are usually coupled with gestures towards how we already rely on such immigration for our economy.
America is a land of immigrants. To say that the immigrants who got here earlier won’t let the immigrants who try to come later is against US values.
On a practical level, immigration is fundamental to the success of the US economy and is helping the US avoid the inverted pyramid demographic problem faced in many other countries like Japan.
The US economy depends on illegal immigrant labor - who do you think does all the picking in the Central Valley (CA)? But by restricting the path to immigration we exploit that labor since those people have no rights (just a step up from slavery).
I’m against illegal immigration not because I want them gone, like Trump, but because I believe we should allow them to immigrate legally instead of exploiting them.
They say "illegal immigration" in polite company, but they really mean non-white immigrants. They're also openly talking about revoking citizenships of legal immigrants. The right wing is seeking a rascist/fascist solution to a heavily exaggerated issue.
I agree the plans is to deport illegal immigrants. I have not seen anything substantiating the claims to revoking citizenship. Do you have some legitimate sources to support your claim?
I'm not an American. Why do you all need people living illegally in your country? Almost no country allows such thing. The ones that do are in a mess.
My senator defended illegal immigration for economic reasons: illegal immigrants work well below minimum wage, don’t pay income taxes, and don’t have access to litigation, so they’re useful for doing hard, labor intensive or dangerous work like picking crops and stuff. This in turn keeps the price of US-grown foods, etc lower.
To me, that defense is suspect. I live in the south, where slavery was once defended on similar grounds.
Why should living be allowed to be illegal?
when you combine government with secret it’s usually not something benign or that citizens would be happy to hear about (and lest you say “they just want to hide it from the Russians” I can assure you that the Russians and Chinese know much more about the secret workings of the US Gov than regular US citizens)
America’s entire research and academic industry is rooted in military.
The story is more complex than that.
On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA.
On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape.
Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you.
Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.
Yeah, more or less. The US uses the DoD as its private-sector R&D funding firehose. They aren't writing Raytheon a $800B check and saying "make us some missiles." They might write a $4B check for some missiles, but that leaves $876B left over based on 2023's defense spending numbers.
Most of the money goes to stuff you wouldn't even think of as "military equipment." Stuff like medical devices, security, communications, networking, search-and-rescue, and so on. Morally neutral-to-good things that the military needs, but so does everyone else.
As a business, the difference between the DoD and the rest of the market is that the DoD is a single institution with the budget and willingness to bankroll your R&D. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to fund development of a genuine, morally good product.
>academic industry
How do you mean?
Classic example of academic research funded by the military.
> In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, originally on a mission to find two nuclear Cold War submarines.
This is referencing the Titanic, for anyone confused.
see:
the secret history of silicon valley, by steve blank. I think there is both an article and a video.
Yes. SV included.
Process all the “secret government data” you like as long as it goes through appropriate channels and is subject to the same scrutiny and controls of any honest government contractor. I’ve got no issue with AI firms doing aboveboard government business, and given that Claude is currently highly competitive, maybe the taxpayer gets their money’s worth.
You pull some FISA court / Prisma shit to train on NSA captures? I’ll advocate violent revolution. Looking at you NSA board guy.
Can anyone using Palantir explain what it does? I've never heard or seen anything concrete - I had one redditor tell me his company looked into it and they just put data into a database and make "connections".
You must have seen the same demo that I did... when they were recruiting at a university jobs fair... ten years ago...
Something along the lines of: okay so you have this guy who's a criminal right? (expand node) here are his phone numbers (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called it (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called those numbers (expand node) here are who they're registered to (expand node) here are their addresses (expand node) here's who else lives there.
I still assume their special sauce isn't their ability to build a node expanding UI, but the data sources they have access to. If they're used for so many government contracts, they're definitely using the data from, say, one police department to inform another. So when another department wants data about criminals, they sign up as a client for the company where that data already is.
And don't discount that the government would pay a huge sum of money to build a surveillance state, even if that surveillance state turned out to be pretty useless.
This sounds like the video game Orwell where you investigate social graphs to find dissidents of the state.
Of course the NSA has been doing this for years, but their UI probably isn't as pretty as Palantir's :)
Pretty, but above all convenient , UI matters much more than programmers think. It's the difference between seeing a tree of comments like on HN, and a raw Usenet stream.
The product demos show some features but obviously not everything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8
So it's like observability metrics but for ships and missles and such that people care about in the real world. Very cool. I did find the ending where the commander literally selects from a dialogue tree to resolve the situation a little ridiculous. Sorry commander, that choice of action is not ethical, is there something else I can help you with?
Back in 2011, I joined a software startup working on a product which aimed to prevent stuff like the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The founders talked about how throughout the industry and the world, tons more data was being generated than ever before (of course), but we (humanity) didn't have a good handle on making use of all of that data, so a lot of it was not being interpreted, reacted to, etc.
Not long after that, I found out that Palantir got their first energy industry customer. Some employees in Palantir thought it wouldn't be worthwhile to go after oil & gas companies because they viewed them as old school and slow to adapt to new ways of doing things. However, in those days Palantir was focused on acquiring no more than one customer per industry, because they were trying to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and wanted to demonstrate how many industries they could serve. And then, due to a contrarian within the company, they did get an O&G customer, and it was the biggest single deal so far in the company's history.
What I don't know is exactly how well they served that customer. What I do know is that they were selling the customer on the idea that they have sooooo much data and they're leaving tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily boost savings in the company. Stick all this data into Palantir's product and we'll help you on a million fronts and therefore boost your profits significantly. One example is the longevity of machine parts and all the data you can get about historical wear and tear, etc. Now, this is what they were selling, and I don't know which areas ended up being the most helpful, but yeah, as someone else in here said, they were insisting on customers putting in all the data they have and the product would make connections, or reveal insights, etc.
Even if it's a crude product by Star Trek standards, you've gotta admit there is probably a ton of low-hanging fruit like that in most companies, and a lot of the time they don't go after all that because they're making money, but just don't have extra manpower or expertise to look into all that, so if Palantir delivers on the promise to boost the bottom line, then I guess it's worth it. It also means there's room to compete, although a big problem is even if you're a sharp cookie, Palantir probably started with way more business connections than most nerds will ever have.
Plenty of HN discussions (like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006). Pretty much a consulting company, they don't own their dev stack. People see 80% gross margins and think it's enterprise SaaS, but they are just great at selling their "FDEs" at 5x cost.
I think they monitor the world through satellites and AI. Intelligence software for NATO I guess.
That is so ambiguous. It is also what we, commenters on Hackernews are technically doing.
Military and intelligence contractor stuff, or so I've been told.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/
Alignment in practice.
Turns out that money is still the strongest alignment signal.
The new collaboration builds on Anthropic's earlier integration of Claude into AWS GovCloud, a service built for government cloud computing.
Why does the government need cloud services? Why does it need IT anyway? In the 1990s everything was paper and the services actually worked. Now things are in "the cloud". In the EU you get new digital identity schemes every year and it takes three months to register a new address (used to take one day in the paper days).
The next step is that AWS will scan S3 data used to train this surveillance model.
I recently moved to the EU from Africa.
It took me like 10 minutes online get myself set up for tax, and to get the correct tax credits applied to my profile. My next payslip had all the right deductions and refunds in place with zero fuss.
Getting my foreign marriage registered for joint tax assessments was like 5 minutes online.
Getting my foreign drivers license exchanged for a local one was a quick online application and an in person visit where they verified my documents. Everything after that was electronic.
Your glasses must be extra rose couloured if you think that the paper-based Vorgon-inspired hellhole that is/was bureaucratic government internal affairs of the 90s is in any way better than what we have today.
Good that it worked out for you. Now try to register an apartment in Berlin or get a new id card.
Nothing like being lectured from an immigrant or long term expat from Africa how the state of one's own country was in 1990 and now.
Rude
Adding red tape to processes is a decision, not a consequence of digitalization.
We don't live in the same world as the 1990s, we live in a world that's faster than ever before.
We can't achieve what's possible by sending in handwritten forms, it's just not gonna do it. and while governments are anything but efficient they are more efficient with digital workflows.
How is the world faster? In 1990 there were the same ICE/TGV trains, there was Concorde, the population size did not change much.
This is a valid question. Thinking back to the freeway system that was built in a few decades, I can’t help but be cynical when I see a single interchange in a city take 10 years to build. Many things (not all of course) seem to take longer to accomplish.
Any company that does US defense work has to use govcloud
I know people’s gut reactions are fear but if you have ever gone through IL6 certification to do this kind of stuff you would probably think differently.
You're being down voted but you're right. As far as I can tell, this is just a story about Palantir taking their already FedRamp approved GUI and using it to present Claude models running on already FedRamp approved AWS servers. Anthropic is basically just subcontracting their regulatory compliance to Palantir. I have to imagine the primary service being provided here is giving a bunch of 20 something enlisted intelligence analysts access to Opus for writing their commander's briefs. It probably won't even be as good as the commercial off the shelf version
Palantir: the crystal orb company!
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080473
Well sort of but not really at all, since the one from yesterday changed the title, making it much softer than the actual title of the article. This one keeps the title.
Yesterday's one should have been flagged, as per:
"please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
HN moderators can change titles, unlike Reddit. They should have just fixed the title if the title was wrong.
Yes, that would have been a good course of action if it was done quick enough. At this stage I'm unsure what would be the best course of action in this case, seeing how the original changed-title posting has gotten much less interest and comments that this one.
Title doesn't matter. The discussion is over there. No need to split it up.
Well it matters in the guidelines for posting. And it also seems to have mattered in terms of engagement in this case, as the repost with the original [much stronger, much less ambiuous] title has garnered more interest.
This is crazy what is happening with the US. Trump, Musk, Palantir, Crypto, it’s absolutely insane. I think Im more and more attracted to the offline as much as possible, not that it would make a difference anyway.
There's a variety of reasons to do it, and I didn't really plan it out in advance, but over the last couple of years I've found myself gradually transitioning my digital life to thick-client mode.
I've been thin-client pretty much all my life, starting with college where I didn't own a computer and everything lived somewhere I "went to", then when I bought my first Windows laptop but would ssh into university servers to do anything (I'd already burnt out on installing Linux for other people). When I built my own website it seemed natural (but with hindsight, not the ideal security posture) to treat it as my home.
Over time I started saving a backup of my digital home locally. But for a long time it was just a backup. The source of truth in my mind was in the cloud. Most of what has happened recently is a piecemeal inversion where I start thinking of the local copy of various things as the ground truth. Eventually I noticed my cloud server was altogether too beefy for a tiny website and a glorified backup server. I moved the data to a dedicated backup service and started pushing backups up from my laptop. Then I downsized the server; all it needs to do now is run the website.
The appropriate use of the cloud is communications and backups. Everything else should be local.
Could you elaborate? How do those things relate, in the picture you're suggesting?
The next term will contain several friends and believers in NRx. They have the mandate of the voters. The question is if they will actually try to enact Yarvinism. Essentially a carbon-copy of RAGE is said to be happening, but will it stop there?
In terms of crypto, I imagine their plan would involve the fed. Powell isn't out until 2026, but maybe they have a way around that. Crypto aligned figures like Balaji who have a similar worldview are seemingly starting to try to manufacture consent for a "reorganization" with respect to the fed.
> believers in NRx
> enact Yarvinism
> carbon-copy of RAGE
Is there someone who can translate this obscure set of references?
I had to look this up.
- NRx = New Reactionism
- Yarvinism = replacing democracy with “accountable dictatorship” (resembling corporate governance, with a hopefully benevolent dictator + a board)
- RAGE = Retire All Government Employees
Sounds like a Peter Thiel wet dream
NRx - neo-reactionary movement
Yarvinism - the political ideals of Curtis Yarvin. Openly a friend of Thiel and Vance. I don't know about Musk, he may be a more recent convert.
RAGE - Retire All Government Employees, the first step of Yarvin's plan.
Further reading: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/026327642199943...
Thank you for the link! Looks like a serious thing, I'm reminded of Mark Fisher after browsing a few paragraphs. Excellent. For people that don't click it for whatever reason, it looks very interesting, here's some metadata:
And the abstract:> This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’. We specifically focus on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. We trace the development of NRx philosophy – and situate this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’. While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual.
See also this on Thiel/Vance/Yarvin ties (from 2022):
>Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
These are all concepts related to Curtis Yarvin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
Presumably that they are all instances of the American government suppressing its citizens.
It's all out in the open, I can't be alone in seeing it, right? Am I insane? Are the people who could do something about this paying attention?
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It's pretty well documented the connection between JD Vance and Curtis Yarvin.
"There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin. Who's written about some of these things. A lot of concerns that said we should deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project. But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes." - JD Vance in 2021
JD Vance is on record mentioning Yarvin’s ideas as inspirational for how republicans should run government.
To be clear, I am very much not a fan of these ideas. I find it very worrying how close their proximity to power will be, particularly given the set of circumstances.
The throwaway is simply that I work in tech and I don't want to have commented negatively on them in a way associated with me.
Please don’t lump crypto with all those things. It can be an agent for great change and equality. It’s verifiable truth and the others are the opposite of that.
crypto is just a carbon copy of money with all the same downsides and upsides. It's like moving from Twitter to Threads: It's pretty much the same thing with only slight changes and a different guy/algorithm in charge.
Can anyone give a good argument for how cryptocurrencies have been a net benefit for the world?
Plenty of ways to educate yourself online.
What do you think money is other than a tool for exchange?
It's bizarre how defensive people get about something so basic. What is the net benefit of gold, credit cards, paper cash? What is the net benefit of the stock market?
Do you really care? I never see this pearl-clutching over other currencies or even stocks.
Begging the question all the while Q.E.D.
Have currencies been a "net" benefit?
Have you ever experienced crypto in any way other than number go up?
no officer
[dead]
> what is happening with the US
Nothing, actually [1]
---
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/379049a0
Reversed input strings will the next Enigma
Peter Thiel was apparently an FBI informant too, and I don't see it mentioned here. Also the photo of Trump and him pawing each other, in a surprisingly tender moment, is worth a look.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/exclusive-tech-billionaire-pe...
This seems pretty obvious from Anthropic CEO's recentblog. He has been using words like AI in the hands of "good guys" or "bad guys". You don't need the definition of "good guys" if you don't allow "any" military use. When you start to use good vs bad, it's always something you won't agree with in general.
Is also good to keep the definition of the terms in mind - at least from am enterprise perspective
good: people that give you money
bad: people that don't pay you money after seeing one of your adverts
The good guys/bad guys dynamic has always been slightly wrong. You have imperialists oppressing foreign powers, political incumbants oppressing dissidents, and so on, but despite all that, a hierarchy exists, and helping the top helps everyone under that umbrella of power to some degree. There is certainly nuance to talk about, but it's more right than wrong to be supportive of the power structure you inhabit, generally.
what if the power structure you are under hates you and wants you to die?
That's nuance to talk about, surely, but do they? Did you threaten the NSA's spying capability with some novel encryption or something?
I don't think they really "want" you to die; it's just that their priorities do not align with your well-being. Consequently, their actions negatively impact the welfare you could have enjoyed if this power structure prioritized your needs more. Allocating billions to Ukraine and Israel doesn't necessarily directly worsen your situation per se, but it is one of the reasons why the state can only provide $750 USD to families affected by Hurricane Milton if they applications go through.
I don't think the hurricane Milton support has any relation to arms funding in Ukraine and Israel.
The hurricane victims don't get money because Americans don't want the government to pay disaster assistance, and military aid is given because Americans like buying guns.
You could drop military spending to zero, and there would still be peanuts paid out for disaster relief.
There is some limit where the US runs out of money to spend on anything, but we're already long past a balanced budget, and instead the government spends whatever it wants, and the debt ticker goes up
What do you mean by its more right than wrong to be supportive of the power structure you inhabit, generally?
Are you saying ethics is conditional on who is above you in the power chain?
I meant that order is good, not really that ethics are conditional. There are exceptions where I'd say go ahead and foment rebellion, be obstinate, etc.
Yep. Not being supportive of the power structure you inhabit is what killed humanities natural Red Team which is why capitalism developed so slow and consumer culture turned into whatever it is now.
The new Red Team is just a sparring partner now, accomplice to any crime and lie and money laundering scheme, hacking away at their passions, in the peaceful bliss of compartmentalisation.
Which is fine. A pseudo behavioural lock-in is still a lock-in. The people decided. False numbers on available resources, false reports on foreign affairs, supporting brutally corrupt countries to destabilise regions where humans still have the innate ability to arrive at better ways to do things and build a culture that is actually worth millions of years of survival, and the list goes on and on.
But you have to simulate whats possible to prepare for the worst, and the inner circles are way ahead so whenever the public gets some pieces of info, know that any criticism lags behind.
Which is why it's so important to hack away at your institutions, corporations and individuals in relevant networks. Their systems and jobs have to get harder, faster, stronger, smarter and that requires radical criticism so that
a) the job description only fits the best, and
b) the job environment doesn't disgust the best.
Neither of which is currently true.
But people are fighting good causes and if you can 're-compartmentalise' for a bit, throw in some brain and gpu power to go against your benefactors. For the sake of the betterment of their successors.
Criticism is one form of support, yes! Despite my previous post sounding pretty sympathetic to kowtowing... It bugs me when people don't get that. The so called free world was built on antifragility.
> sounding pretty sympathetic to kowtowing
It didn't. I was born into and grew up in a spot 'betwixt and between', with much of what I need to become successful, rich & powerful but at the same feeling so damn disgusted by the ways of the people I'd have to deal with that I would rather not support them at all. That nonsense got amplified by leftist bullshit, trusting people I shouldn't have.
Then I got diagnosed with ADHD and a proper analysis of my psyche and my life revealed that my only issue was to get 'friends' when I should have stayed at home hacking away at stuff. They were earlier more aware/conscious and I let myself get dragged to parties, liquor and mild drugs but that Rausch was enough for my hyperactive imagination to lose any sense for accomplishment and the concrete things I could actually do to get into the right positions to make change happen and shape my environment to my (obviously better) tastes.
So every time I read "support your gov.", my brain goes 'grrrr' and triggers an avalanche of emotions and rationalisations that end in "it's all super-gay Mafia hierarchies and there's nothing you can do because all of 'dem gays' are too fragile to withstand the pressure of being an actual man". ( I'm not homophobic, back in the day it meant nothing but submissive, ass licking, it was metaphorical )
So my previous post is meant to encourage myself and others to not get pulled into these hierarchies as obedient participants and beneficiaries but as competitors, breaking, hacking and fixing all the weak spots in these hierarchies and systems.
Young people don't care and the kids from my year turned into people I definitely won't raise my kids with. And it's all because of pseudo-antifragility that comes with kowtowing like a soldier.
Everything about this headline is horrifying
As a current (and now reconsidering) subscriber, I can't agree with this sentiment enough.
I'm with you.
So, is there an alternative? I'm not going to start using ChatGPT now.
(btw, I'm also a paying customer of kagi, and they're using Anthropic too...)
Not an expert, just a casual observer.
I suspect the only “clean” alternative is open source and self-hosting. Buy a couple of GPUs; build a server rig/home lab/etc. own the means of produxtion.
Hopefully this will incentivize LLM designers to stop heavily censoring and limiting output and acceptable answers.
Why?
If censoring s a problem in these applications, they’ll just make two versions: one lawful-adjacent for the government and one with all the chains that will be mandated for the pleb.
If it's mandated by the government that's one thing, but if they could save training costs by only using one superior version, that's the obvious business move.
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All these AI companies love to say they are in it for the "good of humanity" or whatever... until the money comes knocking. What OpenAI has become is just embarrassing.