HN user
https://sequoia.makes.software
a hundred dollars a year for this?? What does the service even do with that money? I pay this for 20 years so you can share a google doc upon my demise?
I must be missing something.
This section is hilariously hostile towards Palantir.
"Wired wrote that some people think Palantir "maintains a giant, centralized database of information collected from all of its clients", which is untrue."
'some people' is a classic weasel word[0] used to prop up the writer's opinion. This sentence is even funnier because it initially appears to state that Palantir has a centralized DB of clients data, only to finish with "...which is untrue." If the claim is untrue, why lead the section paragraph with it unless you're intending to smear or mislead? If I were to end sentences with "...which is untrue" I could write any number of things on Wikipedia.
It's as though I wrote "A YN user wrote that 'john_strinlai works for the CCP and uses ChatGPT to write all his posts', which is untrue."
I'll keep reading but rhetorical chicanery like this colours my interpretation of the article in general.
EDIT the section goes on: "[We can't pin anything specific on Palantir here]; still it is generally accepted that abuses by governments and data management failures can happen." What does that have to do with Palantir? "data management failures can happen" why is this in the section on "Palantir:Controversy"? This article is not good.
EDIT 2: This section is just comedy gold... 'Palantir "remains open to the critique of potentially being an accessory to acts of deportation, imprisonment, and racism through its contracts".' Open to critiques of potentially being an accessory to "racism?" What is this, the Future Crimes unit from Minority Report? This "future crimes" accusation is especially ironic in relation to the critiques of Palantir itself!
So I haven't read this whole section (it's quite long) but if this is the nature of the "smoking guns" I don't think much of it. Potentially maybe doing something according to 'some people...' this shouldn't hold water for any rational person.
If someone objects to Palantir for working with ICE I understand that, and if that's the nature of Spain's objections they should just say so.
"he hilariously tries to convince people that the best way to have democracy is to not have it at all."
I'm sorry but I can't find where he said this. I'm finding it confusing and suspicious that the objections to Palantir & Alex Karp are all so vague and seem to lack the rigour typically required of assertions made here on YN. Usually if you declare something like someone "argues clearly for authoritarianism," you're expected to link to a source of this claim.
People keep telling me here it's so obvious Palantir is bad I shouldn't require any specific evidence and I'm stupid if I don't see it; I'm only reminded of the emperors new cloths.
So the objections to Palantir are political? I know nothing about Spanish politics so I assume that makes sense in the Spanish political context. This helps explain why I can't find a specific concrete concern, it sounds more vibes-based. Thank you!
OK so this is not specific to Palantir, but about entrusting sensitive Spanish data to any US based company. If so, that makes sense.
People in the comments here are praising the move, so presumably something is public. I've googled but I can't see some specific breach or documented misuse. Is the objection to Palantir strictly political?
the US seems beholden to Israel
Can you explain how Trump's MoU fits into this "beholden to Israel" model? This deal goes directly against Israel's interests and wishes.
Biden forced Israel to stay their hand during their war with Hamas, for example telling them not to go into Rafah, which delayed them for some time. So is Israel controlled by the US, or is it the other way around? (When they did go into Rafah, they found both Israeli hostages and Hamas leadership, proving that Biden was wrong for telling them not to take the fight there.)
"The decision stems directly from growing official concern over the potential misuse of classified information linked to national security."
What are the specific concerns?
This is a great example of the prejudice (pre-judging) at play when it comes to Israel. One starts with the conclusion ("Israel/Jews are evil and controlling the government with money") then works backwards to build an argument.
"They are spending so much, that's why they control the government!" They (American citizens funding AIPAC) actually spending much less than many other lobbying groups. "Aha- they're so conniving they can control the government even without being in the top 10 lobbies!"
There's no winning against this "logic" because the conclusion has been decided ahead of time & any evidence is interpreted as supporting that conclusion, no matter which way it goes.
AIPAC is not foreign, this is another misconception/lie. AIPAC is an American lobby funded by Americans.
No, I'm saying people obsessed with AIPAC to the exclusion of all other lobbying groups are not motivated primarily by an objection to lobbying.
I'm also saying the narrative that "AIPAC controls the gov't via lobbying" which many people believe is incoherent because Coinbase must control the gov't even more by this thinking.
If you think people aren't obsessed with AIPAC you are not following US politics.
People think AIPAC is some all powerful unique lobbying group, in fact they're not even in the top 10 major lobbyists. Did you know SpaceX gave 5x as much as AIPAC in 2024? AIPAC was also outspent by Coinbase, by Ripple, and several other companies[0]. And this "18th largest lobbyist" position is after a post-october-7 surge in spending. Pre-october-7 (2022) they were ranked forty sixth in terms of spending.
Can you name 10 of the groups who spent more than them? How about five? The question worth asking is why are people obsessed with demonizing the AIPAC in particular and singling it out as the one or primary 'evil lobbying group' when there are tens or dozens of groups that spent more. The 2024 AIPAC spending number (50 mil, which is donated by American voters, not foreign money) is 1/8th of the $400 million plan Qatar (a foreign government) gave Trump in 2025.
People focus on AIPAC specifically because they have a problem with Jews. Jews and other Israel supporting Americans are allowed to pool money and lobby just like anyone else. the fact that people think they shouldn't be allowed to play this game, the same one everyone else is playing in US politics, is what should be questioned.
0: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizat...
Operating an armed group out of civilian areas is not “one weird trick” that makes you immune from attacks. It means you are endangering the civilians around you by putting them in harms way.
No war has ever been waged without civilian casualties, Israel is the only country held to this standard. “Thousands” of Hezbollah pagers were exploded and there were apparently 2 children killed. This is a tragedy as is every civilian death, but that’s pretty amazingly targeted and an extremely low civilian death toll for thousands of bombs.
For contrast, Hezbollah fired one single rocket and killed 12 children: https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-dark-day-for-majdal-shams-dr...
I was wondering if I was crazy for thinking "how is what he's suggesting different than just putting that 'class' into a hook function?" I'm glad to see someone already wrote it up, kudos.
@OP: PEBKAC, respectfully.
Not clear how an LLM is going to prevent a bomb from being put in a custom-built pager, or why Anthropic should object to Israel waging war against a militia whose goal it is to destroy that country.
Ceasefires are not in place until they are in place. Before they are in place, war is still ongoing. Discussing a ceasefire does not mean there is a ceasefire currently.
Though I agree with the author & use the web version of various applications, there is another side to this. The author says s/he uses plugins to disable ads and so on. If its an ad supported site for which one does not pay, this is tantamount to expecting the provider to run the service for no compensation/revenue at all.
Furthermore, to say platform owners don't care about offending such users would be an understatement: platform owners likely want to actively repel such users. Why serve someone who neither pays a fee nor agrees to be shown ads?
"Bombadil is property-based testing for web UIs, autonomously exploring and validating correctness properties, finding harder bugs earlier."
I can't make heads or tails of this. What does it do? "Bombadil checks each property as it explores your system in its chaotic ways, reporting back any violations." what properties? checks how? does it read application state? "recording violations" what violations? "select an action and performs it" what actions?
This needs some code example, or a video, or something to explain what this tool is
The page "Language features > Properties" starts to explain what this is.
Struggling to understand what this is or how it works.
This is broadcast publishing in a nutshell. Look at the early radio shows, they had names like "Alka-Seltzer Time," "The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour," "The General Motors Hour" and so on. It was explicitly "we are playing music to get you to tune into our advertisement."
Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it.
Yes, you feel. And the author feels differently. We don't have evidence of what the impact of LLMs will be on a project over the long term. Many people are speculating it will be pure upside, this author is observing some issues with this model and speculating that there will be a detriment long-term.
The operative word here is "speculating." Until we have better evidence, we'll need to go with our hunches & best bets. It is a good thing that different people take different approaches rather than "everyone in on AI 100%." If the author is wrong time will tell.
There’s no more or less dignity to it than being a waitress or checkout clerk.
Do you imagine this is how the workers feel about it? Do you think they tell their friends "I seduce western men online for pennies an hour" the same way they'd say "I am a waitress?" You can ignore this fact if you wish, but these jobs carry a social stigma and most people would prefer not to role play intimacy with men online if there were another option.
"Sex work is work" is like saying slavery could theoretically be OK under some circumstances (We're all born under legal obligations, how is slavery different etc etc.). A tortured theoretical argument could be made to support either of these, but in reality we know that slavery is unconscionable because of the indignity and brutality of it, regardless of theory. "Sex work" is the same: in reality it is a dangerous and unpleasant job (that overlaps with slavery a lot, incidentally) done mostly be vulnerable women, and that they're often abused and left injured by it. See this article before you go saying prostitution is benign and harmless, this stance is divorced from reality: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficki...
I find it sad that there's a story of people (mostly women) doing this disgusting job for little pay (yes, chatting up horny men online because you need the money is disgusting, there's no glamour and little dignity to it), and the top comment is how this is unfair to the john (purchaser of sex work) because it's misleading.
Someone paid to have a fantasy of sex, and they got that fantasy. If they don't like it, they don't do it again, and this is true whether it's "the model" or someone else. If they do like it, what's the issue?
This is like saying you paid for a celebrity plumber & a regular plumber did the work, but you're upset because you wanted the celebrity. "The job" got done one way or another. They're selling digital handjobs here, there's no need to be precious about it.
I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.
Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.
What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?
wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!
Does grist have forms?
I also have stopped donating. I replied to a WM Foundation email explaining why and they said they don't have editorial control over wikipedia, i.e. their hands are tied. Well OK, but I'm not giving money to fund the promulgation of Jew hatred and blood libel. Sad state of affairs! I've given for years.
this is so crazy. How does this accord with wikipedia's NOR & NPV stances?
This is a case of "if you abandon your convictions when it's inconvenient, you never really had convictions in the first place."
Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").
Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.
0: https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/ 1: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180
We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us
If s/he is running a company and not a charity, this is responsible, understandable, and predictable.