you show this in the first paragraph, before many other details
> We would love to welcome builders and tinkerers
Love? really .. cognitive dissonance here.. I read this as " we are security state friendly so we can get that big security state funding" plus "people who work for free like love, so we say that word"
coupled with the free-riding of VC capital on decades of open work, I just can not, not say this
To sarcastically reword someone's statements using fake quotation marks* to depict them as exploitative is at minimum an accusation of insincerity, and the snark adds an additional layer of aggressiveness. You also used "cognitive dissonance" as a trope to basically accuse them of lying. All this is personal and, since it was an attack, crosses into personal attack.
I learnt a lot at Palantir, though always worked in commercial so no ties to security state (for the better or worse).
(Also side-note, we are working towards enabling frontier performance with smaller open models that allows our customers to protect their data. https://www.parsewise.ai/officeqa-sota )
And I do get genuine joy from helping our users, so love it is:)
Have you really ever thought deeply about your reasoning that it’s all fine and dandy and just love when your paycheck every two weeks of what you spent 50 hours a week doing was coming from, pretty convenient to look the other way when it’s a categorical fact your old employer knowingly assists in genocide, mass deportations, democratic backsliding.. your intentions may be genuine and good natured and if that’s the case then hopefully this new chapter of your company will serve good things, and hopefully not more triangulation of data points vis a vis document parsing to help continue what palantir and the likes are doing
Noted — and I did wish the founder success. I have no personal ill will towards them. But what I'd ask HN to consider is this: our world, and the technology we introduce into it, isn't apolitical or free of normative stakes and real, harmful implications for people. Treating where you've worked and what technology you've stewarded into being as an ethically neutral fact isn't neutral at all. What concerns me is that there's an increasing firewall against calling out things that ACTUALLLY harm people — while an objection gets reframed as a personal attack on someone willingly able to propagate problematic things. But this seems to be where the corporate tech world is moving as it cozies up to the authoritarians.
Sure, and HN hosts many threads where people debate these points. We're not against that and often as not agree with them.
But this is a startup launch thread about something unrelated, and hounding someone about an ex-employer is a tenuous ground for bringing such material up. It's the sort of thing this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) asks people not to do, even apart from the personal aspect:
Planning to serve good things for sure, and appreciate your note.
Ofc I didn't agree with everything Palantir was doing (also to the extent that we even knew about them at the time). I was working on vaccine distribution and cancer research as well, so definitely felt like helping.
`llama-server` looping mitigations --repeat-penalty something greater than 1.0, set reasoning/thinking OFF explicitly, prefer a gguf with more than 4bit quant
Doesn't at all. You can take cash, keep cash and spend cash without any bank being involved. Cash is more anonymous than crypto and (if it's USD) accepted just about everywhere.
Banks give you an advantage with transaction security and deposit insurance, but that's dealing with money and not cash.
MSFT declared open source a "cancer" and "a threat to American Values" .. later, almost the entire Internet is run fundamentally on OSS.
What motivations might MSFT have had in 1998 ? Are there clear lessons from the extremes of the past that could be applied now?
Do authors have a right to LICENSE software they write? which ones, only Linus or Daniel Stenberg ? are there others? does a LICENSE mean anything ?
##-- related
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Microsoft and the Big Lie
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:47:38 -0400
...
In the last three months, Jim Allchin and Craig Mundie and Steve Ballmer ... have described it (open source code ed.) as "un-American", "a destroyer", and "a cancer". They have deliberately confused the GPL with non-infectious open-source licenses, and they have deliberately confused active combination of code with passive aggregation of data.
OK you are right but that is selective for an "overview". The attention to documentation has always been outstanding for substantial packages. The culture is to make many repetitive steps into one liner "magic" that sometimes is very very useful; lastly, the completeness of advanced statistical methods in standard libraries is real. ps- I do not like the R language at all myself, but to be fair there are reasons it is widely used in higher ed.
> I do not like the R language at all myself, but to be fair there are reasons it is widely used in higher ed.
In the same boat... from a PL perspective, yikes (especially the macro mechanism that somehow never seemed to be planned, but somehow exists). As a working statistician? It really does get work done quickly.
To pass inputs with complex unevaluated syntax, I've seen...
– ad-hoc string parsing (lavaan etc.)
– formulas (which somehow the tidyverse doesn't use),
– base R syntax manipulation by round-tripping between as.list and as.call;
– and whatever wheel reinvention with bizarre semantics that the tidyverse uses.
You can learn about the theory that underlies tidyeval at https://adv-r.hadley.nz/quasiquotation.html. I'd claim that it's neither reinventing the wheel (because it solves problems that the base equivalents do not) nor bizarre (because it is backed by a deep, well-founded theory).
I only dipped into it a little bit while helping out a friend. It looked weird to me but I didn't mean to sound so negative. Sorry. I am sure it does get the job done or people wouldn't be using neither R nor the CRAN.
Newsom aside, the idea is to change from oil to non-oil, efficient from mono-industrial.. The US Oil minions claim to be blind to this and cite quarterly profits, again
Jobs had some vestige of the value system of Reed College in him - respect for literature, typesetting, fine arts ... which dramatically evolved into a taste for the power-money politics of Silicon Valley, distantly akin to big-business Hollywood at the time.
The "Barbarians of the North of Seattle" had a frat-guy MBA wolf-of-wall-street element that actively mocked and preyed upon artists.. artists were weak and whiny entitled people.. their product was not art with a markup value, but something to be commoditized in the spreadsheet That Must Be Your Master. Bill Gates, after building a what, thirty thousand square foot house? prominantly announced that he had massive digital screens to display art, not purchasing any physical paintings or similar design pieces.. maybe it sounds distant today but at the time it was a specific statement to do that, and announce it.
Even as a lifelong Apple fan since the early 90s, I had never heard this POV before, but I think it's accurate. Is there a place to learn more about it?
you show this in the first paragraph, before many other details
> We would love to welcome builders and tinkerers
Love? really .. cognitive dissonance here.. I read this as " we are security state friendly so we can get that big security state funding" plus "people who work for free like love, so we say that word"
coupled with the free-riding of VC capital on decades of open work, I just can not, not say this