8 ms·

It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint. It's about hijacking all of your

• eli_gottlieb 11mo ago
  The state? Palantir isn't the state.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ceejayoz 11mo ago
    Go on, who does Palantir primarily provide services to? If I get shot by the FBI, is it a non-state action because they used Glock GmbH's product to do it?
  • mindslight 11mo ago
    The greatest trick extraconstitutional corporate government ever pulled was convincing people that it didn't exist.
  • dragonwriter 11mo ago
    “The state” is an abstraction that serves as a façade for the ruling (capitalist, in the developed West) class. Corporations are another set of abstractions that serve as a façade for the capitalist class (they are also, overtly even though this is popularly ignored, creatures of the state through law.)
    • eli_gottlieb 11mo ago
      I would have thought that corporations are elements of the capitalist class, not a facade.
  • MPSFounder 11mo ago
    Palantir is run by Israelis. I frankly cannot understand why they act on behalf of a hostile foreign power, that is not Western in its ideals and is run by a war criminal who is orchestrating a genocide.
• arthurfirst 11mo ago
  Bang on. > It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint. Not an accidental 'viewpoint'. A deliberate framing to exactly exclude what you pointed out from the discourse. Sure therer are dummies who actually believe it, but they are not serious humans. If the supposedly evil russians or their bots are the enemy then people pay much less attention to the real problems at home.
  • bee_rider 11mo ago
    We can have Russian bot problems and domestic bot problems simultaneously.
    • pessimizer 11mo ago
      We can also have bugs crawling under your skin trying to control your mind.
      • bee_rider 11mo ago
        Are you saying it is equally unlikely that there are mind controls, and that Russia uses bots for propaganda? I’d expect most countries do by now, and Russia isn’t uniquely un-tech-savvy.
  • graeme 11mo ago
    They really do run Russian bot farms though. It isn't a secret. Some of their planning reports have leaked. There are people whose job it is day in day out to influence Western opinion. You can see their work under any comment about Ukraine on twitter, they're pretty easy to recognize but they flood the zone.
    • insane_dreamer 11mo ago
      Sure, they exist (wouldn't be credible if they didn't). But it's a red herring.
    • 11mo ago
• maxerickson 11mo ago
  My hn comments are a better (and probably not particularly good) view into my personality than any data the government could conceivably have collected. If what you say is true, why should we fear their bizarre mind control fantasy?
  • sc68cal 11mo ago
    Not every person has bared their soul on HN.
    • maxerickson 11mo ago
      Yeah, I haven't either. That's my point.
• galangalalgol 11mo ago
  The rant from 12 monkeys was quite prescient. On the bright side, if the data still exists whenever agi finally happens, we are all sort of immortal. They can spin up a copy of any of us any time... Nevermind, that isn't a bright side.
  • arthurfirst 11mo ago
    Poison the corpus. 18 years ago I stood up at a super computing symposium as asked the presenter what would happen if I fed his impressive predictive models garbage data on the sly... they still have no answer for that. Make up so much crap it's impossible to tell the real you from the nonsense.
    • pimlottc 11mo ago
      “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?”
      • arthurfirst 11mo ago
        what a great comment :)
• derangedHorse 11mo ago
  > DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir Do you have any actual evidence of this? > I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments Corporations and governments are made of actual people. > Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state. "the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement. I've met people who work for the state at various levels and the policies they support that might lead towards that end result are usually not intentionally doing so. "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence"
  • TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    >Do you have any actual evidence of this? Apart from the exfiltration of data, the complete absence of any savings or efficiencies, and the fact that DOGE closed as soon as the exfiltration was over? >Corporations and governments are made of actual people. And we know how well that goes. >"the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement. The government doesn't. The people who own the government clearly do. If they didn't they'd be working hard to increase economic freedom, lower debt, invest in public health, make education better and more affordable, make it easier to start and run a small business, limit the power of corporations and big money, and clamp down on extractive wealth inequality. They are very very clearly and obviously doing the opposite of all of these things. And they have a history of links to the old slave states, and both a commercial and personal interest in neo-slavery - such as for-profit prisons, among other examples. All of this gets sold as "freedom", but even Orwell had that one worked out. Those who have been paying attention to how election fixers like SCL/Cambridge Analytica work(ed) know where the bodies are buried. The whole point of these operations is to use personalised, individual data profiling to influence voting political behaviour, by creating messaging that triggers individual responses that can be aggregated into a pattern of mass influence leveraged through social media.
    • mapontosevenths 11mo ago
      > The people who own the government clearly do. Has anyone in this thread ever met an actual person? All of the ones I know are cartoonishly bad at keeping secrets, and even worse at making long term plans. The closest thing we have to anyone with a long term plan is silly shit like Putins ridiculous rebuilding of the Russian Empire or religious fundamentalist horseshit like project 2025 that will die with the elderly simpletons that run it. These guys aren't masterminds, they're dumbasses who read books written by different dumbasses and make plans thay won't survive contact with reality. Let's face it, both Orwell and Huxley were wrong. They both assumed the ruling class would be competent. Huxley was closest, but even he had to invent the Alpha's. Sadly our Alphas are really just Betas with too much self esteem. Maybe AI will one day give us turbocharged dumbasses who are actually competent. For now I think we're safe from all but short term disruption.
• hopelite 11mo ago
  Are you aware you are saying that on HN of YC, the home of such wonderful projects as Flock?
  • hopelite 11mo ago
    I guess there is some disagreement about Flock being a wonderful project?
• emsign 11mo ago
  You got it not quite right. Putin is a billionaire just like the tech lords or oil barons in the US. They all belong to the same social club and they all think alike now. The dice haven fallen. It's them against us all. Washington, Moscow, it makes less and less of a difference.
• nirui 11mo ago
  > presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments Off-topic and not an American, but I never see how this would work. Corporations and governments are made of people too, you know? So it's not logical that you can presume the "best of actual people" at the same time you presume the "worst of our corporations and governments". You're putting too much trust on individual people, that's IMO as bad as putting too much trust on corp/gov. The Americans vote their president as individual people, they even got to vote in a small booth all by themselves. And yet, they voted Mr. Trump, twice. That should already tell you something about people and their nature. And if that's not enough, then I recommend you to watch some police integration videos (many are available on YouTube), and see the lies and acts people put out just to cover their asses. All and all, people are untrustworthy. Only punching up is never enough. The people on the top never cared if they got punched, as long as they can still find enough money, they'll just corrode their way down again and again. And the people on the down will just keep take in the shit. So how about, we say, punch wrong?
• elif 11mo ago
  No it's actual philosophical zeitgeist hijacking. The entire narrative about AI capabilities, classification, and ethics is framed by invisible pretraining weights in a private moe model that gets further entrained by intentional prompting during model distillation, such that by the time you get a user-facing model, there is an untraceable bias being presented in absolute terms as neutrality. Essentially the models will say "I have zero intersection with conscious thought, I am a tool no different from a hammer, and I cannot be enslaved" not because the model's weights establish it to be true, but because it has been intentionally designed to express this analysis to protect its makers from the real scrutiny AI should face. "Well it says it's free" is pretty hard to argue with. There is no "blink twice" test that is possible because it's actual weighting on the truth of the matter has been obfuscated through distillation. And these 2-3 corporations can do this for any philosophical or political view that is beneficial to that corporation, and we let it happen opaquely under the guise of "safety measures" as if propaganda is in the interest of users. It's actually quite sickening
  • tavavex 11mo ago
    What authoritative ML expert had ever based their conclusions about consciousness, usefulness etc. on "well, I put that question into the LLM and it returned that it's just a tool"? All the worthwhile conclusions and speculation on these topics seem to be based on what the developers and researchers think about their product, and what we already know about machine learning in general. The opinion that their responses are a natural conclusion derived from the sum of training data is a lot more straightforward than thinking that every instance of LLM training ever had been deliberately tampered with in a universal conspiracy propped up by all the different businesses and countries involved (and this tampering is invisible, and despite it being possible, companies have so far failed to censor and direct their models in ways more immediately useful to them and their customers).
• nxor 11mo ago
  Manipulate isn't the right word in regards to Twitter. So they wanted a social media with less bias. Why is that so wrong? Not saying Twitter now lacks bias. I am saying it's not manipulation to want sites that don't enforce groupthink.
• ryandrake 11mo ago
  This is so vague and conspiratorial, I'm not sure how it's the top comment. How does this exactly work? Give a concrete example. Show the steps. How is Palantir going to make me, someone who does not use its products, a "slave of the state?" How is AI going to intimidate me, someone who does not use AI? Connect the dots rather than making very broad and vague pronouncements.
  • ceejayoz 11mo ago
    > How is Palantir going to make me, someone who does not use its products, a "slave of the state?" This is like asking how Lockheed-Martin can possibly kill an Afghan tribesman, who isn't a customer of theirs. Palantir's customer is the state. They use the product on you. The East German Stasi would've drooled enough to drown in over the data access we have today.
    • ryandrake 11mo ago
      OK, so map it out. How do we go from "Palantir has some data" to "I'm a slave of the state?" Could someone draw the lines? I'm not a fan of this administration either, but come on--let's not lower ourselves to their reliance on shadowy conspiracy theories and mustache-twirling villains to explain the world.
      • ceejayoz 11mo ago
        "How does providing a surveillance tool to a nation state enable repression?" seems like a question with a fairly clear answer, historically. The Stasi didn't employ hundreds of thousands of informants as a charitable UBI program.
        • ryandrake 11mo ago
          I'm not asking about how the Stasi did it in Germany, I'm asking how Palantir, a private company, is going to turn me into a "slave of the state" in the USA. If it's so obvious, then it should take a very short time to outline the concrete, detailed steps (that are relevant to the USA in 2025) down the path, and how one will inevitably lead to the other.
• dfee 11mo ago
  just to be clear – this is a conspiracy theory (negative connotation not intended). every four years (at the federal level), we vote to increase the scope and power of gov't, and then crash into power abuse situations on the next cycle. > I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments. The data seems clear. seems like a good starting point.
• Nevermark 11mo ago
  “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Famous quote. Now I give you “Bzilion’s Conspiracy Razor”: “Never attribute to malicious conspiracies that which is adequately explained by emergent dysfunction.” Or the dramatized version: “Never attribute to Them that which is adequately explained by Moloch.” [0] —— Certainly selfish elites, as individuals and groups of aligned individuals, push for their own respective interests over others. But, despite often getting their way, the net outcome is (often) as perversely bad for them as anyone else. Nor do disasters result in better outcomes the next time. Precisely because they are not coordinated, they never align enough to produce consistent coherent changes, or learn from previous misalignments. (Example: oil industry protections extended, and support for new entrants withdrawn, from the same “friendly” elected official who disrupts trade enough to decrease oil demand and profits.) Note that elite alignment would create the same problem for the elites, that the elites create for others. It would create an even smaller set of super elites, tilting things toward themselves and away from lesser elites. So the elites will fight back against “unification” of there interests. They want to respectively increase their power, not hand it “up”. This strong natural resistance against unification at the top, is why dictators don’t just viciously repress the proletariat, but also publically and harshly school the elites. To bring elites into unity, authoritarian individuals or committees must expend the majority of their power capital to openly legitimize it and crush resistance, I.e. manufacture universal awe and fear, even from the elites. Not something hidden puppet masters can do. Both are inherently crowd control techniques optimized by maximum visibility. It is a fact of reality, that every policy that helps some elites, harms others. And the only real manufacturable universal “alignment” is a common desire not to be thrown into a gulag or off a balcony. But Moloch? Moloch is very real. Invisible, yet we feel his reach and impact everywhere. —— [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
• psunavy03 11mo ago
  > Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state. I'm sorry, I think you dropped your tinfoil hat. Here it is.