Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
It says a lot about the breakdown of current US society and democracy that Palantir's leadership feels free to speak in the way that they do. People will not forget, because we all suspected that they were like this, but when given a tiny bit of power by electing a transient and weak president, they pulled their masks off fully.
Seems like a crucial miscalculation on their part, as they lose all international revenue and will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
Not just an assumption, but a goal. If some semblance of democratic society returns they know they’ll be held accountable, so they’ll fight with every means available to prevent that from happening.
> Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
Because shedding the sheepskin is the point. It's performative. A display of power.
It doesn't matter that Karp has destroyed his brain with cocaine, nor that he's a massive bigot. It's a signal. "We have won. You can't stop us".
> will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
The gamble and taunt being that they're stating that this will not happen. Thiel has won. US democracy is dead. The moment Trump croaks they try to seize the fed entirely.
The actual miscalculation is deeper. They may seize the US government. It won't save them, they'll only drag it down with them.
Globalism is not some evil ploy by which [we all know exactly who they're accusing] try to subvert the US. It is the foundational mechanism of the US' imperialism. And in trying to unmake globalism, they're unmaking the American Empire.
Similarly with democracy. Democracy is not some weakness forced upon the west. It is the winning system of government after all others have collapsed. Even the smartest god-king is useless if all his advisors are coked out nutjobs. Thiel's idea of disposing of democracy will doom not only the US, but himself personally as well.
> Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
Because he's speaking to his investors aiming to keep the stock price up. He's not selling his products or himself to the world. His investors are rewarding him for the way he talks and acts.
When most people are running databases on AWS RDS, or on ridiculous EBS drives with insanely low throughput and latency, it makes sense to me.
There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency, and if one has to go off the standard path of easy, but slow and expensive and automatically backup up, people will pick the ease.
Having the best technology performance is not enough to have product market fit. The execution required from the side of executives at Intel is far far beyond their capability. They developed a platform and wanted others to do the work of building all the applications. Without that starting killer app, there's not enough adoption to build an ecosystem.
> There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency
Basically any RDBMS? MySQL and Postgres both benefit from high performance storage, but too many customers have moved into the cloud where you can’t get NVMe-like performance for durable storage for anything remotely close to a worthwhile price.
I'm saying that there are very few downstream applications that use databases that benefit from reducing latency beyond the slow performance of the cloud. Running your database on VMs or baremetal gives better performance, but almost no applications built on databases bother to do it.
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it. Like what do you mean you put an entire computer inside the monitor just to run the webcam? And at the very least, couldn't you have put in the A18 pro that you put in the neo? Did you really need more RAM and compute than the entire Neo uses to be a whole computer to drive a single webcam? In theory that thing could turn into iMac.
Of course Trump will try something outrageous that would result in prison time for any other person. But I think that the states are also still independent, mostly ruled by law rather than man, and there's limited troop power to interfere.
Trump is not all powerful, unless everybody gives up their power. Not everybody is as weak as the SV elite, and the failures of Big Law and others that bent the knee were very instructive to everybody else. Bowing down to the king makes you his servant, but it does not protect you in any way.
This time he has his own brown shirts, even fast tracking to to service without any training. DoJ had been getting their hands on voter rolls from swing states. Bondi and other trump top advisors and relocated to living on military bases. Idk where it's going but it's really not looking good.
Yes, it's going to look bad, and Jan 6 was just a trial run. Now all those criminals that have been freed are in the ranks of a supposed "police" force that self-equips from US Patriot Tactical.
But there's not enough of them. Even for Minneapolis, a mid-size city. There might be a few targeted attacks, lots of voter intimidation, but the US is a very big place, and the ranks are too small, and their popularity is tiny compared to other authoritarian regimes.
It's going to be ugly, maybe really really ugly with violence and innocent voters hurt, but the forces of democracy will win out. Minneapolis shows that there's a strong backbone to this country still, even if some swing voters were tricked.
There's more than enough of them to materially affect election outcomes. The number of votes you'd have to change to flip the outcome of the last few elections was very small, and the parties have a very good idea of which locations they'd have to disturb to achieve the greatest effect.
Now imagine you're a voter who shows any signal of potentially being Dem-aligned - for example a slightly darker complexion, or maybe dyed hair. On your way to the polling station, masked ICE goons "scan your face" with their AI apps, and the apps tell them you're illegal, so they put you into a van and drive you to a holding facility.
What recourse do you have? Even if they let you go the next day, you've lost your vote. And that's not a given, what if they hold you for weeks or months? How many people have others who depend on them, so they can't risk this?
I don't mean to sound dramatic, but if anything like this happens (and there's basically no way it won't) the fascist takeover is complete, and your only recourse left is civil war.
The Biden administration was actually extremely competent, handled global inflation after the pandemic and Russia's war fairly well relative to peer nations, and set US manufacturing on course to provide us with all the batteries, solar panels, and EVs to prevent oil crunches like this from causing future inflation.
I expect more competency from US Presidential administrations, and also expect more competency and indpendence from the various parts of the executive branch, which should execute their missions without micro-management from the President, and I further expect far more competence from Congress and the US Supreme Court in setting law and enforcing law. It's bad enough that we have an incompetent Presidential administration, but that damage should be limited by the independence of the other parts of the government. The blast radius should be far smaller, we shouldn't have a King.
Biden held back arms support for Ukraine on dubious "we don't wanna test Russia's red line" grounds, gave unlimited support a wannabe despot's (Netanyahu's) wars of aggression even as he tried to backstab democracy in the US, arguably also enabling him to start the current situation in Iran, failed to prosecute an attempt to overturn the US election, and stayed in the presidential race for too long when his body and mind was in visible decline.
We wouldn't be having a discussion about the US having a king if Biden's administration was actually competent at doing its job.
I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't call Biden incompetent on any of that.
Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost. Biden was not incompetent, but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
> I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Maybe if they were actually competent they wouldn't have made the mistake then?
> Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost.
Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back. Furthermore if Biden knew he would be unelectable in 2024 earlier he could have dropped out earlier and allow Harris (or other Democrats) more time to campaign. But he chose to stay until a disastrous televised debate forced him out, out of… what, exactly?
> but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
Biden defenders always bring up how we shouldn't criticize him because Trump is worse. Ok. But you realize that's an absurdly low bar to clear, no? We are not upset that Biden is worse than Trump, we are upset that Biden is worse than what we expect from a someone with a letter D next to his name.
> Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back.
Is that so?
"Vice President Kamala Harris was asked by the co-hosts of The View on Tuesday whether she would have done anything differently than President Biden, responding 'not a thing comes to mind,' before coming back to the question and adding that she plans to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if she is elected in November."
Bothsides-ism is such a plague. While I don't agree with everything you said, I feel like the pandemic response doesn't get enough credit. Everyone hated how the Biden admin responded in the moment, but looking back the US really came out ahead compared to almost everyone else
The current situation we're facing can be traced back to, in some parts, Trump pulling out of JCPOA and Biden's tepid resistance to Israel's war in Palestine, leading to this situation.
Huh? That's a pretty far out there statement that needs substantial support to be taken seriousl.
By all accounts Israeli leadership also tried to rope Biden and Obama into attacking Iran, but they were stronger presidents that paid more attention to US interests rather than being easily tricked.
Agreed. And I'd say pulling out of the TPP is an equivalently big mistake, and will honestly have far worse consequences for the US but in far different ways. Letting China be the leader of the Pacific by pulling out, in combination with the terrible hostility to all countries there now, especially to South Korea, massively weakens the US economically and military. We just handed everything over, no fight, no fuss, no benefit to the US. Ugh.
It's still completely unclear to me why you'd say an obviously false thing like "tracking isn't working." I was hoping you'd have some new information to back up such a claim, because that would be very useful!
This is two years old, it should have had some decent replication by now if it was of any merit. Because this points to new treatment possibilities, and there's really nothing more exciting to most scientists, those happen so infrequently. I suspect this paper will be read far more for the culture war opportunities than its scientific merit, but hopefully something did pan out here...
What is an exclusionary safe space? I've never heard of or encountered such a thing. Or are you saying that safe spaces are necessarily exclusionary, because they are welcoming people that have reasons to feel unsafe other places?
It seems like a very confusing concept to just throw out there without explanation!
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