In another comment, I referenced Eichmann. A train is not a good thing or a bad thing. A rail car is not a good thing or a bad thing. Having an app that aggregates multiple different data sources and puts them together is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the morality behind the hands into which we put that tools that matters. The more capable the tool, the more good or evil you can do with it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if this kind of a tool should exist at all, or there should be some level of process before it can be used. But the engineer at Palantir is just as guilty or not guilty in your eyes as the engineer fixing the trains or laying new track.
any opinions on the german WW2 engineer laying neutral tracks toward Auschwitz
EDIT: sorry, that was glib. However I want to make the argument that the argument of doing "neutral" physical work is not absolutely morally absolving.
Yes. It's not, and I agree. There's no bright line that says you're morally culpable or you are not morally culpable for what you do. But all of us should think about our roles in that light. If Palantir uses Git, does that mean new Git contributions are part of what is arguably an ethnic cleansing? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night and work on this project. (I do not work at Palantir).
But the point is also that maybe we should take one step back and think about the morality of the people we put in decision making roles. The technology is morally neutral, but the intention is not. And helping to realize that intention is not. And sometimes the things we build can be used in horrible ways unless we also think about safeguarding their use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is my very real fear that a lot of information has been aggregated into Palantir and other applications and is usable with no restraint. And that even if you just run the build system, across hundreds of apps, you might be culpable as well.
Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.
Okay, that's where you draw the line. But someone provides power to their data center and their offices. Someone provides hand-held devices. Someone provides network connectivity. Someone has a contract to house and feed these agents. Someone has the logistical and fleet services for their vehicles. Someone is likely the landlord to their buildings. Someone has a contract to clean the buildings. Someone is a deciding to buy a block of Palantir stock versus some other software company. Someone runs the private prison into which people are herded. An attorney has a choice to file a charge or not file a charge. A judge has the choice to bend over backward to give ICE/CBP the benefit of the doubt, or be skeptical.
Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.
There are people who would not sleep at night knowing that the tool they created was enabling such things. I believe some are looking to make "semi-open" source licenses that add more restrictions.
Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
>Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently?
Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.
My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person.
In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.
But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.
A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
No, but it's also the engineer at Palantir who is enabling it with their efforts. If every engineer there immediately resigned and no other agreed to work there, the situation would end. One can try to hide behind the idea that they are only 1/n_employees responsible (typical corollary: therefore not responsible at all), but this doesn't change the fact that they are participants in what is happening.
I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement.
A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.
A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.
A fence contains the intent of separating things.
A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.
The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.
(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)
I think you're right and it's possible to have something that exists with no other purpose than to cause harm. And it's not moral to make that thing. I also don't think it's fruitful to find the specific circumstances it's moral to eat babies (go down philosophical rabbit holes until you find the one time that doing something despicably immoral is actually the moral thing to do). But I would say the technology is the least important part of the problem. A moral person uses dangerous tools sparingly and intentionally harmful tools never. If Palantir did not exist, would they perform the raids? I think so.
Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.
Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene.
On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it.
In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.
IBM wasn't only providing commodity infrastructure. They designed schema for labeling Jews and other categories of people for targeted internment and extermination
You're missing the part where they named their train after a iconic artifact of evil famously used to do evil train stuff with for this metaphor to work
Mmmmhhhhhh it depends on what the engineer knows about the realistic uses of the tool. As a sibling comments, fixing the railroads to Auswichz might me morally wrong.
Eichmann knew what he was doing and, in any case, forcing dozens of thousands of people to move with less than a week's notice does not soynd quite "amoral".
I for one would find it far more acceptable if the people carrying out the deportations would be a little less "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" about it.
“Not listening” is really an incredible framing for trying to flee being detained for obstruction, and in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in your SUV.
Where did I say that? It’s ultimately up to a jury to decide whether lethal force was justified. Obstruct and provoke law enforcement at your own peril.
It’s ultimately up to a jury to decide whether she was trying to flee being detained for obstruction and was in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in her SUV.
The person you are referring to rammed an ICE agent with their vehicle and the agent suffered internal bleeding as a result.
Sorry but there is no scenario where you can strike law enforcement with your car after being repeatedly ordered to exit your vehicle where their wouldn't be a justifiable use of lethal force. Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
The "interal bleeding" thing is so unbelievably ludicrous. He got a bruise because he was lurching for the car while juggling his phone in one hand and a gun in the other. She was clearly neither trying to, nor succeeding in "ramming" him.
So the “ICE agent” presented identification to her showing he was law enforcement? Nope. Oh so he got out of a vehicle marked as ICE? Nope.
Do you want to live in a country where an unidentified masked individual with a gun can say “im a fed”, stop a car and force someone out without proper ID? That’s what you’re in support of. I’d say one would have a right to self defense.
Also internal bleeding was literally just a bruise, like the internal bleeding I get from walking into the corner of my coffee table.
This is such a bizarre argument because the entire reason the two women were there in the first place is because they thought they were following ICE agents. Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group. They had been following the agents around throughout the day, attempting to disrupt them, which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident.
So to claim the women didn't know it was Federal law enforcement ordering them to exit the vehicle is baffling to me because that was the entire reason the women were there in the first place.
> Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group
Based.
> which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident.
That giant ass street that could fit three of her car across its entire width? The one where she was signaling them to go around her? It doesn't sound like she was very effective at disrupting ICE.
But even if she was the most effective giant-road-blocking ICE inconveniencer Minneapolis has ever seen, she still should not have been murdered by ICE. It's morally indefensible, there's no world wherein she deserved to be shot unless she had a gun and was shooting first.
While I agree she knew who they were and disagree with the other person’s implication that she could have not known, in the US we are entirely within our rights to monitor law enforcement, despite attempts to end it (see what recently happened in Louisiana with bans on filming police within 25ft). So what you see as a provocation or “looking for trouble,” I see as exercising her rights and doing her civic duty. I imagine your opinion would change if you agreed with what she was doing a la “ one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
The sad reality is these people need to be monitored. If they think nobody is watching then they will behave worse than they already are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_Cave
Regardless of the exact circumstances of that scenario, there has been no efforts towards even the most token forms of accountability, and your echoing of state propaganda only furthers their success. You are on the wrong side of history with this one. An armed state police force that exists above accountability (except to the executive) is by definition a Geheimestaatspolizei.
> Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
Describing what she did as "ramming" an ICE agent is extremely disingenuous. She tapped him, probably on accident[†]. He got a bruise, and she got shot in the face.
15 years ago I think Arduino was the best choice for educational purposes. I still think it's a great choice now. The fact the IDE and board are basically the same as they were 15 years ago, means you can figure out how to set everything up once and focus on teaching, rather than PC trouble-shooting. Which, for basic concepts, or younger kids, is great. And if they find a 5 or 10 year old video on how to do something, it's still relevant.
If I were putting teaching materials today - I would pick something like Micro python. The down side is it isn't as "canned" a solution, meaning there might be something new to figure out every so often. Which means you spend more time helping people trouble shoot why something isn't working, instead of teaching something useful. On the up side, Python is pretty much the introductory language of choice, today. With lots of available materials.
That's not to say Arduino was perfect. Far from it. Just easier to do, and more consistent over time, than other options.
From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful. That hero-loop programming is not what anyone should ever do. And experienced developers can get better results from something like FreeRTOS (or if you're a masochist Zephyr). And ESP32s are cheaper, as are RP2040s. ...
But take a room full of kids and get them to write a program that blinks an LED, or drive a simple 'robot' forward, and it's awesome. Easy to use. I've never burned out a board (even driving considerable current through them). Things are tolerably well marked. Lots of teaching tools. Lots of different suppliers of easy to connect motors, servos, lights, sensors, etc.
For the same reason, if you are not an embedded engineer, but need a simple micro-controller to turn something on an off like a heater in a chicken coop, it's fantastic. And if you want, buy the $5 knock-off Uno. It should be the same, except that it doesn't support the (now defunct) foundation.
> From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful.
Specific AVR Arduino annoyances I remember:
* Strings loaded to RAM instead of program memory, so you use up all your RAM if you have a lot of text. Easily fixed with a macro
* serial.println blocks, so your whole program has to stop and wait for the string to be transmitted. Easily fixed with a buffer and ISR
* Floating-point used everywhere, because fuck you
* No printf(). It's in avr-libc, and it's easy plumbed in, but the first C/C++ function that everybody ever learned to use was somehow too complicated or something.
* A hacked-together preprocessor that concatenated everything, which meant you could only have your includes in one place, thus breaking perfectly good, portable code.
I think they ultimately did a disservice to novice programmers by giving them something that was almost a standard C++ environment, but just not quite.
Modern AVRs have program memory mapped into the RAM address space. The GCC linker scripts for the parts that support this put strings into .rodata within that memory region, obviating the need for special macros to retrieve them. However, you won't find this on most of the usual suspects in the Arduino AVR ecosystem.
> A hacked-together preprocessor that concatenated everything, which meant you could only have your includes in one place, thus breaking perfectly good, portable code.
While it does concatenate, does it break something regarding the include mechanism, assuming said files use include guards? You can include stuff wherever anyway (though doing it within a scope needs special considerations).
The cool thing about an Arduino is you can just buy the boards and use them in a commercial product. This isn't something you can do with other boards. Some people have said the license requires you to disclose your firmware, but that's not the way I read it and I've never heard of anyone being compelled to release anything (unless they modify any GPL covered code).
Not all platforms give you the right to do this. For example, if you buy a dev board from STM - it's only licensed for research and development. Also, because you might want to continue to sell the same thing for years, and the board designs were open-sourced, you could buy the same part for years and years. So you can continue to sell your CNC kit that uses an Mega 2560 without worrying about Arduino coming after you or that they'd discontinue that part.
Not in the short while since they've purchased Arduino, but I could see them restricting the licensing for commercial use, while keeping it freely usable for education. Like STM.
It won't be just one big move that kills the community. Eventually, I could see it as locked down as the STM32 ecosystem. Nor do I see them continuing to sell the same parts for over a decade. They'll just want to use it to promote new kit. Nor do I see them keeping to board designs open over the long term. That will come one little step at a time.
