Maybe they should consider rebranding, then. The word comes from Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series - the palantir were telepathic communication devices which were often used to deceive others by showing selective truths and lies of omission.
Citation needed. They are certainly in the business of selling software that is useful for those who spy on people. But where is any actual evidence that Palantir spies on anyone?
Many schools of thought believe that it is impossible to prove the absence of something. Personally, I would like some firm proof that there are no pixies living in my garden, but all I can say is that I've never seen one.
See, this bomb has no fuse. It's just an inert mass of TNT in a metal shell. You can bang on it with a hammer, nothing will happen! You can scoop some of the TNT and drop it into your fireplace, and it will burn peacefully. It's completely safe to keep it in your house.
Now prove it's never going to explode.
Do you notice how a perceived risk of something really bad happening skews people's perception?
There is an obvious risk of turning a smart speaker into a eavesdropping device, because
- It has to listen to your commands.
- It has to send the commands it hears to a computer outside your control for processing.
- It receives firmware updates which you also do not control, and cannot inspect.
A perfect moral hazard.
If I were to use a smart speaker, it must have open-source firmware which I can inspect and flash, and it, or its processing software on my home server / router / NAS, should be firewalled off the internet. That would be a proof.
It's pretty trivial to construct negatives that can be proven. E.g. take a solid colored object and prove it's not a specific color. You can prove the negative statement by proving a positive statement about the true color of the object, e.g. by direct observation, measuring the wavelength of emitted light, etc.
Similarly, you could prove a speaker doesn't eavesdrop by proving it performs a finite set of operations, none of which are eavesdropping.
That's very different than your initial statement of: "Many schools of thought believe that it is impossible to prove the absence of something.". Many (all?) schools of thought believe in the law of excluded middle, which makes it possible to prove the absence of many things.
If a court determines that their behavior is illegal, this argument sounds a lot like: "Let us break the law, because someone else is doing much worse."
If it is necessary to reform how we handle copyright and IP licensing to remain competitive, we should find ways to do that.
The law should apply equally to everyone, whether they are competing with Chinese companies or not.
Is it really too much to ask for people to host their own content on a cheap VPS?
Wouldn't that neatly solve the content moderation problem? You register your server on an index or two, and you choose what your server will publish and accept. Each user would be responsible for finding a hosting provider who doesn't have a problem with what you post, and problematic content reports would go right to the hosting providers. The indexers could basically be DNS for usernames.
The AWS free tier would cover 99% of people, and between VNC and web UIs, you wouldn't necessarily need them to ever touch a shell. Plus, requiring a reasonably consistent public IP address would help to cut down on bulk spam.
Does it sound elitist to say that maybe a small barrier to entry could make for better quality social networks? Especially if the tradeoff was giving users more creative control over their spaces?
I guess you wouldn't get billions in ad revenue that way, but your expenses could be miniscule, and isn't it possible that a rapacious profit motive is part of the core problem with Meta, Twitter, & co?
Or are there really too few people in the world who could figure out how to log into a <$5/mo cloud VM?
"Is it really too much to ask for people to host their own content on a cheap VPS"
That is the most out of touch question I have ever read on the internet. It is hilariously ridiculous :)
I'm a professional developer with active AWS and DigitalOcean accounts and there's no way in hell I would spend time setting up my own mastodon instance. Can you imagine my tech illiterate cousin who likes to tweet about celebrity gossip doing this?
People hosting their own social media servers is pure delusion.
Almost a third of American adults can't achieve computer tasks comparable in difficulty to "delete an email message." Only about a third can manage tasks comparable to: "You want to find a sustainability-related document that was sent to you by John Smith in October last year."
It's easier to get good results by generating 2-8 images for each prompt, picking the best result, using that as the starting point for a new run.
Tweak the parameters of how close the new image should be to the old one and the prompts, tweak the prompts to address problem areas in the image, generate another 2-8. Rinse and repeat until you have something decent.
I doubt that the really impressive SD images are coming from submitting a prompt once and taking that output. It's better than past open-source efforts like the mini dall-es, but it also still has a way to go before it can reliably produce good results on its own.
AI art on products is an interesting idea, but personally I would use a more fully-featued SD web UI to generate the image locally.
This is one of those things where op needs to do something similar to what I think midjourney is doing and do prompt optimization.
They need to do some research into what additional prompt cues they can add for the user automatically to bring the user's prompt quality up.
They can append these to the prompt behind the scenes or provide a second text input of the additional prompt data to allow the user to modify that separately from their initial prompt input.
It might even help the user better understand how styling works with prompts.
Look, if you set up a permanent account on a pseudonymous forum, you are essentially linking it to your real identity.
Your writing voice, anecdotes from your life, what topics you understand and are interested in, it all comes together with enough time.
Not everybody wants to be bothered with all of that. Doesn't mean they're bots. It's worrying how often people assume that disagreement is necessarily inauthentic.
If I were still employed, I'd be a lot more careful about what I say here. I think in a generation or so, we'll either all use pseudonyms for everything, or the culture will be forced to be far more forgiving of our sins.
I like the theory that I heard on Wranglerstar a few days ago, that when Jesus gave his lecture about not casting stones... he wrote out the sins of those present in the sand, so that each person could see that he knew, and then he could cast that knowledge away.
In the future, everyone will see your foibles, and accept them.
OR
An Algorithm will use them to divide society by using hypocrisy as a wedge.
It would be a return to the norm. Parents used to warn teenagers not to give out any personal information online. Using someone's real name in a public online setting was considered gauche.
Maybe a generation or two of dredging up digital sins will get us there.
> It's worrying how often people assume that disagreement is necessarily inauthentic
I don't think the OP is assuming that, but it's not unreasonable to consider that lots of brand new accounts created to comment on cryptocurrency may not be authentic - primarily because they may have a vested interest to shill / be astroturfing.
"Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to."
Sure, everyone would rather be anonymous given the chance, but it's not what this site was meant to be.
I find this rule strange. The only people on HN I’ve consciously remembered are dang and a few folks who are so combative and painful to discuss anything with I just try to avoid their posts altogether regardless of interest.
I agree with you on this - I love being able to speak my mind without too much thought into building social credibility by having a comprehensive history of posts. It's an unnecessary barrier to attempt to require "credibility" to be able to contribute, most people here are in tech, and the quality of discussion is honestly pretty high compared to MANY other sites.
Implementing any barriers towards communication will incentivize people to be agreeable or not speak their full mind, if they have to reach a certain karma threshold or tie it to an easily traceable identity.
Moderation is pretty good here from my experience, and it's an excellent place to get information from others without worrying about the identity of whom you are engaging with. Honestly a breath of fresh air keeping it more old school than modern social media platforms.
