Like everyone else, I am very skeptical that it is somehow related, for several reasons.
- He is just a small time streamer, I didn't watch his videos but it looks like typical clickbait content playing on people's paranoia. Why would Palantir care about it?
- I didn't watch the videos in question, but I suppose that he says that Palentir is evil because it is used by police forces to attack poor migrants, that kind of thing. Not only he is saying what everyone is saying, but it may be good advertising for Palantir, as it shows that they are good at their (evil) job.
- Streisand effect, I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.
- Speaking of attention, it is highly likely that the streamer in question was unbanked for a completely unrelated reason but saw the opportunity to make buzz, and it seems to be working!
- There seem to be no further evidence connecting the two.
> I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.
Thiel has proved that he can hold a grudge. After Gawker outed him, he spent years shopping for anyone who could sue them, and found his guy in Hulk Hogan. He financed the lawsuit that led to Gawker Media's bankruptcy and closure.
>Thiel has proved that he can hold a grudge. After Gawker outed him, [...]
That might be true, but it's a stretch to go from this to "Thiel had a grudge for this specific streamer and was responsible for him getting banned". For one, Gawker has orders of magnitude more visibility than this guy.
Oh he does. But he uses the Streisand effect to his benefit to sell his product. Maybe you could argue it is not the Streisand effect if you want exposure by quenching stuff, though?
There should really be a rule banning these types of comments.
The response to someone’s comment regarding “x” is not “why are you defending x?”. It’s a rebuttal of “x”. Respond to the argument on its merits. Don’t dodge it.
Do you lot ever get tired of saying this type of stuff? There’s nothing new or interesting in this comment. This isn’t a fresh perspective. You’re just saying the same one liner that have been said hundreds of thousands of times before. Let’s move on.
> in just one generation user manuals went from showing you how to tune your carburetor to warning you not to drink the battery acid
The truth is just that we don't have actual user manuals anymore. Either the things that went into the manual are now built into software, or they expect you to look it up on the internet. So the only things that remain are legal disclaimers and very basic instructions, like how to turn on the thing so that the software can tell you what to do next.
So they don't tell you how to tune your carburetor because you don't need to do that anymore, it is all injection and the ECU software does the tuning, but the lawyers insist that it should be mentioned to not drink the battery acid should an idiot decide to try it and sue the company.
A promotion means you are getting a different job, typically leadership, which means working with people more with machines. If you are better with machines than you are with people, do you really want that? does your employer really wants that? If you are twice as fast and twice as good as others doing some job, and if you like that job, what you want is double pay, not a promotion to a position you won't be as good at.
That's Peter's principle, and your managers have heard about it too.
Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.
I'm sure most managers and executives on HN though doesn't think like that, surely are the exception. But out in the wild world, people truly get promoted mostly on whims and personal relationships without thinking "are they better with machines than people perhaps?", because that's the easy way. People also feel excluded if they aren't considered for promotions, even if the promotion in question wouldn't make sense.
> Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.
I'd say the opposite is true. In modern management theory, the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued.
I a big company I worked with, they had a special program for future top managers, they have them do grunt work in several departments for several years before they get the position they are hired for.
We had one of these guys working with us at one point, awesome guy: friendly, humble and good at everything he does, including partying! We only knew he was "special" much later, when he left us to continue his journey.
I have many bad things to say about this company, but this is not it: hiring people who are actually good, making them understand the work the company does by practicing, and thinking long term, hats off.
But back to the subject, even though the guy did actual productive work with us, and did it competently, he wasn't destined to be an expert, he was destined to be a manager and he was only here to get enough domain knowledge for that job. This is not the same path as a technical expert who will keep doing the same job, but better.
Story I've told here once. A director I worked under had climbed up from the bottom.
Now one weekend, us 3 ITers were going to replace the building switches and fix and cleanup the network cabling and move all servers. Massive weekend job. We start saturday morning, and deadline is monday morning or 400 people cant work. A second team is doing the phones. He promised to be there to open the door for us.
Junior me comes in, and he is at the door, with breakfast! We begin. He's not technical, so he resigns himself to sitting in the corner, popping ethernet cables out of bags as we request them.
He sees what we do, where we struggle. He sees IT take out the plan and execute it steadily, while the phoners are missing their team lead and every phone forgot its number. I learned PBXing on the fly there and had more fun than a job is supposed to be.
At the end of the weekend, all is well and monday is actually boring (except the emergency phone in the elevator wont stop ringing and connects random elevatees to customers. Oops. My bad. Forgot to reprogram that one.)
The next weekend, the bookkeepers have to do some mysterious all weekend bookkeeping thing. Director is not a bookkeeper at all. He was there, doing the bookkeeper equivalent of unbagging ethernet cables.
Now that smiling, helpfull man turns out to be a wolf in every exec meeting. He knows just enough about every job in the company. You can't fool him for 1 millimeter. You flood him with jargon, he jargons right back at you. In his circle of evil backstabbers, with life changing decisions to make, he's an absolutely scary steamwaltz. I admire him and don't want the job even if he makes a fortune.
> the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued
Sure, but you can always pick that up as you learn how things work. It's a bit harder to do that in engineering as it requires years of experience with your craft.
Just like a manager just starting out isn't gonna have the right intuition and hunches until some years of experience, you can't just "pick that up", that is the expertise, unlike domain knowledge.
Would you put a professional manager straight out of business school with no military experience in charge of a platoon of marines and send them into a war zone? How do you imagine that would pan out? if not, why would you put such a person in charge of an engineering team? Do you imagine it would go any better?
Like sure eventually the person will learn the job but only after a significant cost in bad decisions.
Eh, I'm not entirely sure if you commented this to the wrong parent comment, if not, how is this connected to what I wrote about?
Just to clarify just in case; We're talking about domain knowledge here, not management knowledge, I'm not entirely clear how that maps to your example, as you're talking about any general experience I suppose? I'm not saying we should put people without experience into management positions, if that's the misreading you did.
Every manager I've ever had sees me as an extremely competent multidisciplinary engineer. So obviously ever one of them thinks I'd be perfect for management. Every time I've tried a management role, it's been a flaming disaster.
At my last job I argued for six months on this point with my manager. I eventually relented and... disaster.
I don't know how to more clearly articulate "I cannot and will not manage others. I am not capable and it will end badly." But apparently that's not clear and understandable enough for management brain.
New job now and I think the boss is intelligent enough to understand "no, that is not possible"
We've all met many brilliant engineers with the social skills of a lettuce. The idea they cannot get a raise in salary unless promoted to management is just daft.
It appears the problem is many managers regard underlings getting paid more than them as unhealthy; despite the fact the job descriptions are vastly different.
> many managers regard underlings getting paid more than them as unhealthy
Yeah, I never understood this. As a manager I've always strived to earn less than those I help do their job (meaning pushing their salary up whenever I could), they're doing all the heavy lifting and I'm just along for the ride trying to unblock them and coordinate stuff. Not sure why there are managers who think they should earn more than the people doing the grunt-work, but then again, the world is filled with people who think they're more important than they are.
Many executives consider managing peoples is harder than managing machines, and that having many people working together have a better value than a single person.
As such, many want a raise, but no-one want to manage peoples and have responsibilities that involve human factor (state otherwise, it is easier to be sure about the result of your own work than the work of your whole team). That’s the reason why it is easier to ask for a raise as a manager than a single coder.
Yea, in the company I work in (entire country it seems tbh) - it's exceedingly rare for contributers to get a raise over a certain point. If I want to increase my income I kinda have to go into management.
I'm sure there are outliers, but this seems to be the norm.
> That's Peter's principle, and your managers have heard about it too.
All this sort of thing was true when I went to management college, last century, and it was well known to my line management, and yet, nevertheless, all the observations were still true because in effect it's an observation about human nature. It would be guidance if people were guided by it, but they aren't.
"I know that's a bad idea, but I'll do it anyway" counts for "We should fire all the people whose performance review didn't rate them above average" just like "I only had a couple glasses of wine, I'm fine to drive".
In tech companies, there’s usually both technical and management tracks, and you can be promoted up the ladder (many times over) without changing jobs. At a certain point you’ll do less design and coding, and more high level strategy, but that’s not until you’re nearing the top of the ladder.
> Yes, I know scouts learn knot-tying in general, but a lot of kids don't even get to do scouting
But do knot scouts learn to tie their shoes correctly? I never did scouting but I have done sailing, and was interested in knot tying as a kid, but shoe tying wasn't given much attention. They certainly told us how to tie a reef/square knot properly, but no one looked at our shoes even though half of us did it wrong. In most books, you had the standard shoe tie if you are lucky, but nothing more.
Ian seems to be the only one who takes shoe tying seriously, even though it may be the most tied knot in the world. I have the Ashley Book of Knots, widely considered the reference on knot tying, if a little dated, and shoe tying only occupies a single page out of 600. Interestingly, a knot analogous to the "Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot" is mentioned (#1219) but despite being, I think, the best in the book, its existence is merely acknowledged.
A PC with an Apple sticker on it is not an Apple-branded system, it is a PC with an Apple sticker on it. If you actually were to consider it an Apple-branded system, then it would be a trademark violation, which feels worse to me.
Having to put a physical device on your parallel port at the back of the computer is kind of annoying, especially if every software you use has one.
More common for games was to use the media itself for copy protection, using a variety of tricks to make copy more difficult. Other techniques involve printing some keys you have to enter using colors that don't render well in photocopies, or have you look at words a certain page of a thick user manual, the idea being that it is more expensive to go through the effort of copying this material than to buy the software legally.
One of my favorite is from Microprose games, for which the manual was a pretty good reference book on the subject of the game, that alone is worth buying. And the copy protection is about asking you about information contained in the book, for example, it may be some detail about a particular plane in a flight simulator, which means that a way to bypass copy protection is simply to be knowledgeable about planes!
Dongles were common, but mostly for expensive enterprise software. Also, dongles don't make cracking harder compared to all the other techniques, so for popular consumer software like games, it is likely to be a lot of inconvenience and a waste of money for limited results.
Partly it was an anti-Wobbler thing. Someone in America or somewhere thought it was real clever to make the game ask you little questions, like “What’s the first word on line 23 on page 19 of the manual?" and then reset the machine if you didn’t answer them right, so they’d obviously never heard of Wobbler’s dad’s office’s photocopier.
-- Only You Can Save Mankind, Terry Pratchett, 1992
Makes me sad how many person-years of effort have been wasted over the years on futile dongle-engineering, copy-protection and DRM. They're pretty much all cracked. And the industry keeps insisting on trying!
The industry doesn't want to make software crack proof, they just want to make money. Typically, in the case of games, is is about "when", not "if", they know it will be cracked eventually, but they want to hold long enough to secure their launch sales, which is where they make most of the money. It is even common to remove DRM after a few months, because it is not worth it.
As for enterprise software, pros usually don't want the potential legal trouble associated with cracked software, and dongles are just about not making is easy to violate the licence by accident.
Making games uncrackable is a solved problem: the game runs on the server and the server decides what happens, with the user connecting a client that simply sends input to the server and receives a scene to render.
This has many negative side effects, but if the game doesn't require twitchy reflexes it's usually not very noticable. It's also terrible for preservation.
Politics is a bit biased, not only because many of these people don't write their own speeches, but also because the complexity of what they say is not neutral. Simpler speech conveys the idea of being no-nonsense and close to the people, while more complexity gives the impression of being intelligent and well thought out.
Depending on who you want to target, you may go one side or the other. For example, republicans tend to use simpler words than democrats to match what their electorate value.
That the Cybertruck would fail wasn't common sense. It failed because it sucked. I was supposed to be tough but it crumbled apart, and it didn't meet the European safety standards. Its design while controversial, had personality, problem is that it is the personality of Elon Musk, it was great when he was popular, but that popularity dropped sharply during the last years.
Niche buyers are fine, Ferrari makes a lot of money doing just that, and cars made for the masses are not always successful
Also, I am not a big fan of small EVs, and I live in Europe and I like small cars. Problem with small EVs is the range. Batteries are big, heavy, and expensive. It is fine in bigger, higher-end cars like what Tesla makes, but on a smaller, budget-friendly car, you have to make compromises, and consumers may demand a price too low to make good profit. So it is not guaranteed to be a market worth taking, especially if you have to compete on price against the Chinese.
> WD-40 themselves have come out with improved "Specialist" formulations that mostly just copy other, superior products.
We all know that there is something better for the job than WD-40, its value comes from its convenience, affordability, availability, brand recognition, and the number of cases where it is "good enough".
The "specialist" brand is what its name imply, specialist products, all of them better for a specific application, but none of them as universal as the original. The original formulation is not magic, but it is the one we are familiar with and it works well enough when you don't have anything better for your specific job.
- He is just a small time streamer, I didn't watch his videos but it looks like typical clickbait content playing on people's paranoia. Why would Palantir care about it?
- I didn't watch the videos in question, but I suppose that he says that Palentir is evil because it is used by police forces to attack poor migrants, that kind of thing. Not only he is saying what everyone is saying, but it may be good advertising for Palantir, as it shows that they are good at their (evil) job.
- Streisand effect, I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.
- Speaking of attention, it is highly likely that the streamer in question was unbanked for a completely unrelated reason but saw the opportunity to make buzz, and it seems to be working!
- There seem to be no further evidence connecting the two.
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