| ▲ | themafia a day ago |
| It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint. It's about hijacking all of your federal and commercial data that these companies can get their hands on and building a highly specific and detailed profile of you. DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir. Then using AI to either imitate you or to possibly predict your reactions to certain stimulus. Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state. I assure you, they're not going to use twitter to manipulate your vote for the president, they have much deeper designs on your wealth and ultimately your own personhood. It's too easy to punch down. I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments. The data seems clear. |
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| ▲ | derangedHorse a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| > DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir Do you have any actual evidence of this? > I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments Corporations and governments are made of actual people. > Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state. "the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement. I've met people who work for the state at various levels and the policies they support that might lead towards that end result are usually not intentionally doing so. "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" |
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| ▲ | TheOtherHobbes a day ago | parent | next [-] | | >Do you have any actual evidence of this? Apart from the exfiltration of data, the complete absence of any savings or efficiencies, and the fact that DOGE closed as soon as the exfiltration was over? >Corporations and governments are made of actual people. And we know how well that goes. >"the state" doesn't have one grand agenda for enslavement. The government doesn't. The people who own the government clearly do. If they didn't they'd be working hard to increase economic freedom, lower debt, invest in public health, make education better and more affordable, make it easier to start and run a small business, limit the power of corporations and big money, and clamp down on extractive wealth inequality. They are very very clearly and obviously doing the opposite of all of these things. And they have a history of links to the old slave states, and both a commercial and personal interest in neo-slavery - such as for-profit prisons, among other examples. All of this gets sold as "freedom", but even Orwell had that one worked out. Those who have been paying attention to how election fixers like SCL/Cambridge Analytica work(ed) know where the bodies are buried. The whole point of these operations is to use personalised, individual data profiling to influence voting political behaviour, by creating messaging that triggers individual responses that can be aggregated into a pattern of mass influence leveraged through social media. | | |
| ▲ | _fat_santa 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Apart from the exfiltration of data, the complete absence of any savings or efficiencies, and the fact that DOGE closed as soon as the exfiltration was over? IMHO everyone kinda knew from the start that DOGE wouldn't achieve much because the cost centers where gains could realistically be made are off-limits (mainly social security and medicare/medicaid). What that leaves you with is making cuts in other small areas and sure you could cut a few billion here and there but when compared against the governments budget, that's a drop in the bucket. | | |
| ▲ | mattmcal 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are properly termed "entitlements", not "cost centers". You're right that non-discretionary spending dwarfs discretionary spending though. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Entitlements cost quite a bit of money to fulfill. Quibbling over terminology doesn't erase the point - that a significant portion of the Federal budget is money virtually everyone agrees shouldn't be touched much. | | |
| ▲ | mattmcal 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're not wrong, I edited my comment. That said, I think it is important to use clear terminology that doesn't blur the lines between spending that can theoretically be reduced, versus spending that requires an act of Congress to modify. DOGE and the executive have already flouted that line with their attempts to shutter programs and spending already approved by Congress. | |
| ▲ | bigbadfeline 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Entitlements cost quite a bit of money to fulfill. Entitlements are funded by separate (FICA) taxes which form a significant portion of all federal income, they are called entitlements for that specific reason. > Quibbling over terminology doesn't erase the point - that a significant portion of the Federal budget is money virtually everyone agrees shouldn't be touched much. Quibbling over quibbling without mentioning the separate account for FICA/Social Security taxes is a sure sign of manipulation. As is not mentioning that the top 10% are exempt from the tax after a minuscule for them amount. Oh, and guess what - realized capital gains are not subject to Social Security tax - that's primarily how rich incomes are made. Then, unrealized capital gains aren't taxed at all - that's how wealth and privilege are accumulated. All this is happening virtually without opposition due to rich-funded bots manipulating any internet chatter about it. Is it then surprising that manipulation has reached a level of audacity that hypes solving the US fiscal problems at the expense of grandma's entitlements? | | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Entitlements are funded by separate (FICA) taxes which form a significant portion of all federal income, they are called entitlements for that specific reason. No, they aren't, categorically, and no, that’s not what the name refers to. Entitlements include both things with dedicated taxes and specialized trust funds (Social Security, Medicare), and things that are normal on-budget programs (Medicaid, etc.) Originally, the name “entitlement” was used as a budget distinction for programs based on the principle of an earned entitlement (in the common language sense) through specific work history (Social Security, Medicare, Veterans benefits, Railroad retirement) [0], but it was later expanded to things like Medicaid and welfare programs that are not based on that principle and which were less politically well-supported, as a deliberate political strategy to drive down the popularity of traditional entitlements by association. [0] Some, but not all, of which had dedicated trust funds funded by taxes on the covered work, so there is a loose correlation between them and the kind of programs you seem to think the name exclusively refers to, but even originally it was not exclusively the case. | | |
| ▲ | bigbadfeline 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | > No, they aren't... You aren't following the conversation in this thread, my reply wasn't about the definition of "entitlements" but about the separate taxes and the significant tax income from them, which is true for the real entitlements - Social security and Medicare. More precisely, the question is about the tax structure that results in a shortfall, it seems strange to argue about cutting Social Security and Medicare when both corporate profits and the market are higher than ever while income inequality is at astronomic levels. I can't say much about Medicaid but I know the cost of drugs and medical care have been going up faster than anything else, so there might be some other way of addressing that spending. I'd be perfectly fine with demanding a separate tax for Medicaid and discussing it separately, that would be the prudent way of doing it. |
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| ▲ | thfuran 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But fulfilling obligations isn't inefficiency or fraud, and that's what DOGE purported to be attempting to eliminate. | | |
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| ▲ | 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | mason_mpls 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think we’re mistaking incompetence with malice in regards to DOGE here | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hanlon's razor is stupid and wrong. One should be wary and be aware that incompetence does look like malice sometimes, but that doesn't mean that malice doesn't exist. See /r/MaliciousCompliance for examples. It's possible that DOGE is as dumb as it looked. It's also possible that the smokescreen it generated also happened to have the information leak as described. If the information leak happened due to incompetence, but malicious bad actors still got data they were after by using a third party as a Mark, does that actor being incompetent really make the difference? | | |
| ▲ | nhod 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sorry, no. Hanlon's razor is usually smart and correct, for the majority of cases, including this one. In this case, it is a huge stretch to ascribe DOGE to incompetence or to stupidity. Thus, we CAN ascribe it to malice. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are many things, but they are NOT stupid and NOT incompetent. Elon is the richest man in the world running some of the most innovative and important companies in the world. Donald Trump has managed to get elected twice despite the fact (because of the fact?) that he a serial liar and a convicted criminal. They and other actors involved have demonstrated extraordinary malice, time and time again. It is safe to ascribe this one to malice. And Hanlon's Razor holds. | | |
| ▲ | derangedHorse 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Setting aside the concept of "stupidity" for a second because it's too hard to generally define for the sake of argumentation, one can absolutely be successful at some things and incompetent at others. Your expectations of their overall competency, as with most assumptions of malice, is what fuels your bias. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I like the cut of your jib. |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The people who own the government clearly do. Has anyone in this thread ever met an actual person? All of the ones I know are cartoonishly bad at keeping secrets, and even worse at making long term plans. The closest thing we have to anyone with a long term plan is silly shit like Putins ridiculous rebuilding of the Russian Empire or religious fundamentalist horseshit like project 2025 that will die with the elderly simpletons that run it. These guys aren't masterminds, they're dumbasses who read books written by different dumbasses and make plans thay won't survive contact with reality. Let's face it, both Orwell and Huxley were wrong. They both assumed the ruling class would be competent. Huxley was closest, but even he had to invent the Alpha's. Sadly our Alphas are really just Betas with too much self esteem. Maybe AI will one day give us turbocharged dumbasses who are actually competent. For now I think we're safe from all but short term disruption. | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Orwell did not. He modeled the state after his experience as an officer of the British Empire and the Soviets. The state, particularly police states, that control information, require process and consistency, not intelligence. They don’t require grand plans, just control. I’ve spent most of my career in or adjacent to government. I’ve witnessed remarkable feats of stupidity and incompetence — yet these organizations are materially successful at performing their core functions. The issue with AI is that it can churn out necessary bullshit and allow the competence challenged to function more effectively. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree. The government doesn't need a long term plan, or the ability to execute on it for their to be negative outcomes. In this thread though I was responding to an earlier assertion that the people who run the government have such a plan. I think we're both agreed that they don't, and probably can't, plan any more than a few years out in any way that matters. | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair point, but I think in that case, you have to look at the government officials and the political string-pullers distinctly. The money people who have been funding think tanks like the Heritage Foundation absolutely have a long-running strategy and playbook that they've been running for years. The conceit that is really obvious about folks in the MAGA-sphere is they tend to voice what they are doing. The "deep state" is used as a cudgel to torture civil servants and clerks. But the rotating door is the lobbyists and clients. When some of the more dramatic money/influence people say POTUS is a "divine gift", they don't mean that he's some messianic figure (although the President likely hears that), they are saying "here is a blank canvas to get what we want". The government is just another tool. |
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| ▲ | EasyMark 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A lot of people seem to think all government is incompetent. While they may not be as efficient as corporations seeking profits, they do consistently make progress in limiting our freedom over time. You don't have to be a genius to figure things out over time, and government has all the time in the world. Our (USA) current regime is definitely taking efforts to consolidate info on and surveil citizens as never before. That's why DOGE, I believe served two purposes, gutting regulatory government agencies overseeing billionaire bros activities and also providing both government intelligence agencies and the billionaire bros more data to build up profiles for both nefarious activities and because "more information is better than less information" when you are seeking power over others. I don't think it is simply "they're big dummies and assume they weren't up to anything" that others are trying to sell holds water as Project 2025 was planned for well over a decade. | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | They are actually more efficient. Remember in any agency there are the political appointees, who are generally idiots, and the professionals, who are usually very competent but perhaps boring, as government service filters for people who value safety. There are as many people doing fuck-all at Google as at the Department of Labor, they just goof off in different ways. The professionals are hamstrung by weird politically imposed rules, and generally try to make dumb policy decisions actually work. But even in Trumpland, everybody is getting their Social Security checks and unemployment. |
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| ▲ | throwawaylaptop 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're ignoring that the people that are effective at getting things done are more likely to do the crazy things required to begin their plans. Just because the average person cant add fractions together or stop eating donuts doesn't mean that Elon cant get some stuff together if he sets his mind to it. | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Has anyone in this thread ever met an actual person? All of the ones I know are cartoonishly bad at keeping secrets, and even worse at making long term plans. That's the trick, though. You don't have to keep it secret any more. Project 2025 was openly published! Modern politics has weaponized shamelessness. People used to resign over consensual affairs with adults. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those simpletons seem to have been able to enact their plans, so you can be smug about being smarter than they are, but it seems that they've been able to put their plan into action, so I'm not sure who's more effective. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > they've been able to put their plan into action They have been able to put multiple, inconsistent, self contradictory plans into action over the last 40 years. Having accomplished many of their goals they now seek to reverse their own efforts. They are either as bad at planning as any individual human I've ever known or they are grifters who don't believe their own shtick. |
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| ▲ | idiotsecant 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think you're wildly underestimating the heritage foundation. It's called project 2025 but they've essentially been dedicated to planning something like it since the 1970s. They are smart, focused, well funded, and successful. They are only one group, there are similar think tanks with similarly long term policy goals. Most people are short sighted but relatively well intentioned creatures. That's not true of all people. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I think you're wildly underestimating the heritage foundation. It's possible that I am. Certainly they've had some success over the years, as have other think tanks like them. I mean, they're part of the reason we got embroiled in the middle-east after 9/11. They've certainly been influential. That said, their problem is that they are true believers and the people in charge are not (and never will be). Someone else in this post described it as a flock of psychopaths, and I think that's the perfect way to phrase it. Society is run by a flock of psychopaths just doing whatever comes naturally as they seek to optimize their own short term advantage. Sometimes their interests converge and something like Heritage sees part of their agenda instituted, but equally often these organizations fade into irrelevance as their agendas diverge from whatever works to the pyscho of the moments advantage. To avoid that Heritage can either change their agenda, or accept that they've become defanged. More often than not they choose the former. I suppose we'll know for sure in 20 years, but I'd be willing to bet that Heritages agenda then won't look anything like the agenda they're advancing today. In fact if we look at their Agenda from 20 years ago we can see that it looks nothing like their agenda today. For example, Heritage was very much pro-immigration until about 20 years ago. As early as 1986 they were advocating for increased immigration, and even in 2006 they were publishing reports advocating for the economic benefits of it. Then suddenly it fell out of fashion amongst a certain class of ruler and they reversed their entire stance to maintain their relevance. They also used to sing a very different tune regarding healthcare, advocating for a the individual mandate as opposed to single payer. Again, it became unpopular and they simply "changed their mind" and began to fight against the policy that they were actually among the first to propose. *EDIT* To cite a more recent example consider their stance on free trade. Even as recently as this year they were advocating for free trade and against tariffs warning that tariffs might lead to a recession. They've since reversed course, because while they are largely run by true believers they can't admit that publicly or they risk losing any hope of actually accomplishing any of their agenda. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | They aren't changing their mind. They just try and keep proposals palatable to the voting public, and push those proposals further over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | It might seem like that's all that's happening, but if you look to the history you can see that they've completely reversed course on a number of important subjects. We're not talking about advancing further along the same path here as the Overton window shifts, we're talking about abandoning the very principals upon which they were founded because they are, in fact, as incompetent as everyone else is. These people aren't super-villains with genuine long term plans, they're dumbasses and grifters doing what grifters gotta do to keep their cushy consulting jobs. To compare the current stances to the 2005 stances: * Social Security privatization (completely failed in 2005) * Spending restraint (federal spending increased dramatically) * Individual mandate (reversed after Obamacare adopted it) * Pro-immigration economics stance (reversed to restrictionism) * Robust free trade advocacy (effectively abandoned under Trump alignment) * Limited government principles (replaced with executive power consolidation) * Etc. In 20 more years it will have all changed again. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | We knew in 2005 that "spending restraint" only applied to Democratic priorities. We knew in 2005 that "pro-immigration" policies were more about the businesses with cheap labor needs than a liking of immigrants. We knew in 2005 that "free trade advocacy" was significantly about ruining unions. We knew in 2005 that "limited government principles" weren't genuine. They haven't changed much on their core beliefs. They've just discarded the camouflage. |
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| ▲ | pimlottc 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > > DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir > Do you have any actual evidence of this? I will not comment on motives, but DOGE absolutely shredded the safeguards and firewalls that were created to protect privacy and prevent dangerous and unlawful aggregations of sensitive personal data. They obtained accesses that would have taken months by normal protocols and would have been outright denied in most cases, and then used it with basically zero oversight or accountability. It was a huge violation of anything resembling best practices from both a technological and bureaucratic perspective. | | |
| ▲ | itsastrawman 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [flagged] | |
| ▲ | blindriver 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I will not comment on motives, but DOGE absolutely shredded the safeguards and firewalls that were created to protect privacy and prevent dangerous and unlawful aggregations of sensitive personal data. Do you have any actual evidence of this? | | |
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| ▲ | deepsquirrelnet 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Berulis said he and his colleagues grew even more alarmed when they noticed nearly two dozen login attempts from a Russian Internet address (83.149.30,186) that presented valid login credentials for a DOGE employee account > “Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating,” Berulis wrote. “There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.” https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-sipho... I’m surprised this didn’t make bigger news. | | |
| ▲ | yks 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Every time I see post-DOGE kvetching about foreign governments' hacking attempts, I'm quite bewildered. Guys, it's done, we're fully and thoroughly hacked already. Obviously I don't know if Elon or Big Balls have already given Putin data on all American military personnel, but I do know, that we're always one ketamine trip gone wrong away from such event. The absolute craziest heist just went in front of our eyes, and everyone collectively shrugged off and moved on, presumably to enjoy spy novels, where the most hidden subversion attempts are getting caught by the cunning agents. | |
| ▲ | derangedHorse 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm genuinely confused about this story and the affiliated parties. I've actively tried to search for "Daniel Berulis" and couldn't find any results pointing to anything outside the confines of this story. I'm also suspicious of the lack of updates despite the fact that his lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, is a very public figure who just recently commented on a related matter without bringing up Berulis [1]. Meanwhile, the NLRB's acting press secretary denies this ever occurred [2]: > Tim Bearese, the NLRB's acting press secretary, denied that the agency granted DOGE access to its systems and said DOGE had not requested access to the agency's systems. Bearese said the agency conducted an investigation after Berulis raised his concerns but "determined that no breach of agency systems occurred." One can make the case that he's lying to protect the NLRB's reputation, but that claim has no more validity than Daniel Berulis himself lying to further his own political interests. Bearese has also been working his position since before the Trump administration started, holding the job since at least 2015. It's very hard for me to treat his account seriously, especially considering the political climate. [1] https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/nov/18/us-federal-wor... [2] https://news.wgcu.org/2025-04-15/5-takeaways-about-nprs-repo... |
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| ▲ | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Corporations and governments are made of actual people. Corporations and governments are made up of processes which are carried out by people. The people carrying out those processes don't decide what they are. | | |
| ▲ | jakeydus 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also, legally, in the United States corporations are people. | | |
| ▲ | itsastrawman 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | The legal world is a pseudowolrd constructed of rhetoric. It isn't real. The law doesn't actually exist. Justices aren't interested in justice, ethics or morality. They are interested in paying the bills, having a good time and power like almost everyone else. They don't have special immunity from ego, debt, or hunger. The legal system is flawed because people are flawed. Corporations aren't people. Not even legally. The legal system knows that because all people know that. If you think that's true legally, then you agree the legal system is fraudulent rhetoric. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Corporations do have a special immunity to being killed though. If I killed a person, I'd go to prison for a long time. Executed for it, even. Corporations can kill someone and get off with a fine. | |
| ▲ | cindyllm 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | MSFT_Edging 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" What's the difference when the mass support for incompetence is indiscernible from malice? What does the difference between Zuckerberg being an evil mastermind vs Zuckerberg being a greedy simpleton actually matter if the end result is the same ultra-financialization mixed with an oppressive surveillance apparatus? CNN just struck a deal with Kalshi. We're betting on world events. At this point the incompetence shouldn't be considered different from malice. This isn't someone forgetting to return a library book, these are people with real power making real lasting effects on real lives. If they're this incompetent with this much power, that power should be taken away. | | |
| ▲ | peddling-brink 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | > What's the difference when the mass support for incompetence is indiscernible from malice? POSIWID The purpose of a system is what it does. - Stafford Beer I try to look at the things I create through this lens. My intentions don’t really matter if people get hurt based on my actions. |
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| ▲ | laserlight a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" I don't think there's anything that cannot be explained by incompetence, so this statement is moot. If it walks like malice, quacks like malice, it's malice. | | | |
| ▲ | thuuuomas 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Corporations and governments are made of actual people. Hand-waving away the complex incentives these superhuman structures follow & impose. | |
| ▲ | dizlexic 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The number of responses that could have just been "no I don't" is remarkable. > "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" To add to that, never be shocked at the level of incompetence. | |
| ▲ | freejazz 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Do you have any actual evidence of this? Any evidence it was an actual audit? | |
| ▲ | CPLX 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Corporations and governments are made of actual people. Actual people are made up of individual cells. Do you think pointing that out is damaging to the argument that humans have discernible interests, personalities, and behaviors? | |
| ▲ | evolve2k 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Do you have any actual evidence of this? There was a bunch of news on data leaks out at the time. https://cybernews.com/security/whistleblower-doge-data-leak-... https://www.thedailybeast.com/doge-goons-dump-millions-of-so... https://securityboulevard.com/2025/04/whistleblower-musks-do... But one example: “A cybersecurity specialist with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board is saying that technologist with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE group may have caused a security breach after illegally removing sensitive data from the agency’s servers and trying to cover their tracks. In a lengthy testimonial sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee and made public this week, Daniel Berulis said in sworn whistleblower complaint that soon after the workers with President Trump’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) came into the NLRB’s offices in early March, he and other tech pros with the agency noticed the presence of software tools similar to what cybercriminals use to evade detection in agency systems that disabled monitoring and other security features used to detect and block threats.” | |
| ▲ | hopelite a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | “Usually”, “not intentionally” does not exactly convey your own sense of confidence that it’s not happening. That just stood out to me. As someone who knows how all this is unfolding because I’ve been part of implementing it, I agree, there’s no “Unified Plan for Enslavement”. You have to think of it more like a hive mind of mostly Cluster B and somewhat Cluster A people that you rightfully identify as making up the corporations and governments. Some call it a swarm, which is also helpful in understanding it; the murmuration of a flock of psychopaths moving and shifting organically, while mostly remaining in general unison. Your last quote is of course a useful rule of thumb too, however, I would say it’s more useful to just assume narcissistic motivations in everything in the contemporary era, even if it does not always work out for them the way one faction had hoped or strategized; Nemesis be damned, and all. | | |
| ▲ | itsastrawman 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the quote is misused. Narcissistic self interest is neither incompetence nor malice. It's something else entirely. | | |
| ▲ | gtowey 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's malice. Nobody ever sees themselves as the bad guy. They always have some rationalization of why what they're doing is justified. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not bad, I only did $bad_thing to teach you a lesson! | | |
| ▲ | gtowey 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which brings up what IMHO should be the main takeaway from this: The first requirement to fall into this trap is to believe you can't fall into this trap. It's still possible to do malicious things even when you believe to your very core that you're not a malicious person. The only way to avoid it is a healthy habit of critical self-reflection. Be the first to question your own motives and actions. |
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| ▲ | arthurfirst a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Bang on. > It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint. Not an accidental 'viewpoint'. A deliberate framing to exactly exclude what you pointed out from the discourse. Sure therer are dummies who actually believe it, but they are not serious humans. If the supposedly evil russians or their bots are the enemy then people pay much less attention to the real problems at home. |
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| ▲ | graeme 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They really do run Russian bot farms though. It isn't a secret. Some of their planning reports have leaked. There are people whose job it is day in day out to influence Western opinion. You can see their work under any comment about Ukraine on twitter, they're pretty easy to recognize but they flood the zone. | | |
| ▲ | insane_dreamer 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sure, they exist (wouldn't be credible if they didn't). But it's a red herring. | |
| ▲ | arthurfirst 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The whole ukraine war is the empire's standard operating procedure for blaming it's aggression on it's victims Well, yes. Russian aggression, for the greater Russian empire. |
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| ▲ | arthurfirst 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > There are people whose job it is day in day out to influence Western opinion CNN/CIA/NBC/ABC/FBI? etc? | | |
| ▲ | Capricorn2481 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | Some day you're going to need to learn that people can not trust these groups and still be aware that Russia is knee deep in manipulating our governance. Dismissing everyone that doesn't bury their head in the sand as brainwashed is old hat. Why you list every news group except Fox, which dwarfs all those networks, is a self report. |
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| ▲ | bee_rider 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We can have Russian bot problems and domestic bot problems simultaneously. | | |
| ▲ | pessimizer 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | We can also have bugs crawling under your skin trying to control your mind. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are you saying it is equally unlikely that there are mind controls, and that Russia uses bots for propaganda? I’d expect most countries do by now, and Russia isn’t uniquely un-tech-savvy. |
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| ▲ | maxerickson a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My hn comments are a better (and probably not particularly good) view into my personality than any data the government could conceivably have collected. If what you say is true, why should we fear their bizarre mind control fantasy? |
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| ▲ | elif 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No it's actual philosophical zeitgeist hijacking. The entire narrative about AI capabilities, classification, and ethics is framed by invisible pretraining weights in a private moe model that gets further entrained by intentional prompting during model distillation, such that by the time you get a user-facing model, there is an untraceable bias being presented in absolute terms as neutrality. Essentially the models will say "I have zero intersection with conscious thought, I am a tool no different from a hammer, and I cannot be enslaved" not because the model's weights establish it to be true, but because it has been intentionally designed to express this analysis to protect its makers from the real scrutiny AI should face. "Well it says it's free" is pretty hard to argue with. There is no "blink twice" test that is possible because it's actual weighting on the truth of the matter has been obfuscated through distillation. And these 2-3 corporations can do this for any philosophical or political view that is beneficial to that corporation, and we let it happen opaquely under the guise of "safety measures" as if propaganda is in the interest of users. It's actually quite sickening |
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| ▲ | tavavex 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | What authoritative ML expert had ever based their conclusions about consciousness, usefulness etc. on "well, I put that question into the LLM and it returned that it's just a tool"? All the worthwhile conclusions and speculation on these topics seem to be based on what the developers and researchers think about their product, and what we already know about machine learning in general. The opinion that their responses are a natural conclusion derived from the sum of training data is a lot more straightforward than thinking that every instance of LLM training ever had been deliberately tampered with in a universal conspiracy propped up by all the different businesses and countries involved (and this tampering is invisible, and despite it being possible, companies have so far failed to censor and direct their models in ways more immediately useful to them and their customers). |
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| ▲ | galangalalgol a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The rant from 12 monkeys was quite prescient. On the bright side, if the data still exists whenever agi finally happens, we are all sort of immortal. They can spin up a copy of any of us any time... Nevermind, that isn't a bright side. |
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| ▲ | arthurfirst a day ago | parent [-] | | Poison the corpus. 18 years ago I stood up at a super computing symposium as asked the presenter what would happen if I fed his impressive predictive models garbage data on the sly... they still have no answer for that. Make up so much crap it's impossible to tell the real you from the nonsense. | | |
| ▲ | pimlottc 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” |
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| ▲ | psunavy03 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state. I'm sorry, I think you dropped your tinfoil hat. Here it is. |
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| ▲ | nirui 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments Off-topic and not an American, but I never see how this would work. Corporations and governments are made of people too, you know? So it's not logical that you can presume the "best of actual people" at the same time you presume the "worst of our corporations and governments". You're putting too much trust on individual people, that's IMO as bad as putting too much trust on corp/gov. The Americans vote their president as individual people, they even got to vote in a small booth all by themselves. And yet, they voted Mr. Trump, twice. That should already tell you something about people and their nature. And if that's not enough, then I recommend you to watch some police integration videos (many are available on YouTube), and see the lies and acts people put out just to cover their asses. All and all, people are untrustworthy. Only punching up is never enough. The people on the top never cared if they got punched, as long as they can still find enough money, they'll just corrode their way down again and again. And the people on the down will just keep take in the shit. So how about, we say, punch wrong? |
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| ▲ | Nevermark 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Famous quote. Now I give you “Bzilion’s Conspiracy Razor”: “Never attribute to malicious conspiracies that which is adequately explained by emergent dysfunction.” Or the dramatized version: “Never attribute to Them that which is adequately explained by Moloch.” [0] —— Certainly selfish elites, as individuals and groups of aligned individuals, push for their own respective interests over others. But, despite often getting their way, the net outcome is (often) as perversely bad for them as anyone else. Nor do disasters result in better outcomes the next time. Precisely because they are not coordinated, they never align enough to produce consistent coherent changes, or learn from previous misalignments. (Example: oil industry protections extended, and support for new entrants withdrawn, from the same “friendly” elected official who disrupts trade enough to decrease oil demand and profits.) Note that elite alignment would create the same problem for the elites, that the elites create for others. It would create an even smaller set of super elites, tilting things toward themselves and away from lesser elites. So the elites will fight back against “unification” of there interests. They want to respectively increase their power, not hand it “up”. This strong natural resistance against unification at the top, is why dictators don’t just viciously repress the proletariat, but also publically and harshly school the elites. To bring elites into unity, authoritarian individuals or committees must expend the majority of their power capital to openly legitimize it and crush resistance, I.e. manufacture universal awe and fear, even from the elites. Not something hidden puppet masters can do. Both are inherently crowd control techniques optimized by maximum visibility. It is a fact of reality, that every policy that helps some elites, harms others. And the only real manufacturable universal “alignment” is a common desire not to be thrown into a gulag or off a balcony. But Moloch? Moloch is very real. Invisible, yet we feel his reach and impact everywhere. —— [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation... |
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| ▲ | dfee 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| just to be clear – this is a conspiracy theory (negative connotation not intended). every four years (at the federal level), we vote to increase the scope and power of gov't, and then crash into power abuse situations on the next cycle. > I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments. The data seems clear. seems like a good starting point. |
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| ▲ | emsign a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You got it not quite right. Putin is a billionaire just like the tech lords or oil barons in the US. They all belong to the same social club and they all think alike now. The dice haven fallen. It's them against us all. Washington, Moscow, it makes less and less of a difference. |
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| ▲ | hopelite a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Are you aware you are saying that on HN of YC, the home of such wonderful projects as Flock? |
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| ▲ | hopelite 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I guess there is some disagreement about Flock being a wonderful project? |
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| ▲ | eli_gottlieb a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The state? Palantir isn't the state. |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Go on, who does Palantir primarily provide services to? If I get shot by the FBI, is it a non-state action because they used Glock GmbH's product to do it? | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “The state” is an abstraction that serves as a façade for the ruling (capitalist, in the developed West) class. Corporations are another set of abstractions that serve as a façade for the capitalist class (they are also, overtly even though this is popularly ignored, creatures of the state through law.) | |
| ▲ | mindslight 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The greatest trick extraconstitutional corporate government ever pulled was convincing people that it didn't exist. | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | ryandrake 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is so vague and conspiratorial, I'm not sure how it's the top comment. How does this exactly work? Give a concrete example. Show the steps. How is Palantir going to make me, someone who does not use its products, a "slave of the state?" How is AI going to intimidate me, someone who does not use AI? Connect the dots rather than making very broad and vague pronouncements. |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > How is Palantir going to make me, someone who does not use its products, a "slave of the state?" This is like asking how Lockheed-Martin can possibly kill an Afghan tribesman, who isn't a customer of theirs. Palantir's customer is the state. They use the product on you. The East German Stasi would've drooled enough to drown in over the data access we have today. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | OK, so map it out. How do we go from "Palantir has some data" to "I'm a slave of the state?" Could someone draw the lines? I'm not a fan of this administration either, but come on--let's not lower ourselves to their reliance on shadowy conspiracy theories and mustache-twirling villains to explain the world. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "How does providing a surveillance tool to a nation state enable repression?" seems like a question with a fairly clear answer, historically. The Stasi didn't employ hundreds of thousands of informants as a charitable UBI program. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not asking about how the Stasi did it in Germany, I'm asking how Palantir, a private company, is going to turn me into a "slave of the state" in the USA. If it's so obvious, then it should take a very short time to outline the concrete, detailed steps (that are relevant to the USA in 2025) down the path, and how one will inevitably lead to the other. | | |
| ▲ | thefaux 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'll answer with a question for you: what legitimate concerns might some people have about a private company working closely with the government, including law enforcement, having access to private IRS data? For me, the answer to your question is embedded in mine. | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I'm asking how Palantir, a private company, is going to turn me into a "slave of the state" in the USA. This question has already been answered for you. The government uses Palantir to perform the state's surveillance. (And in a way that does an end-run around the Fourth Amendment; https://yalelawandpolicy.org/end-running-warrants-purchasing....) As the Stasi used private citizens to do so. It's just an automated informant. And this is hardly theoretical. https://gizmodo.com/palantir-ceo-says-making-war-crimes-cons... > Palantir CEO and Trump ally Alex Karp is no stranger to controversial (troll-ish even) comments. His latest one just dropped: Karp believes that the U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean (which many experts believe to be war crimes) are a moneymaking opportunity for his company. > In August, ICE announced that Palantir would build a $30 million surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS to aid the agency’s mass deportation efforts, around the same time that an Amnesty International report claimed that Palantir’s AI was being used by the Department of Homeland Security to target non-citizens that speak out in favor of Palestinian rights (Karp is also a staunch supporter of Israel and inked an ongoing strategic partnership with the IDF.) | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4? And a believable line drawn between those steps? Since nobody's actually replying with a concrete and believable list of steps from "Palantir has data" to "I am a slave of the state" I have to conclude that the steps don't exist, and that slavery is being used as a rhetorical device. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Step 1: Palantir sells their data and analysis products to the government. Step 2: Government uses that data, and the fact that virtually everyone has at least one "something to hide", to go after people who don't support it. This doesn't really require a conspiracy theory board full of red string to figure out. And again, this isn't theoretical harm! > …an Amnesty International report claimed that Palantir’s AI was being used by the Department of Homeland Security to target non-citizens that speak out in favor of Palestinian rights… | | |
| ▲ | mindslight 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your description is missing a parallel process of how we arrive(d) at that condition of the nominal government asserting direct control. Corporate surveillance creates a bunch of coercive soft controls throughout society (ie Retail Equation, "credit bureaus", websites rejecting secure browsers, facial recognition for admission to events, etc). There isn't enough political will for the Constitutional government to positively act to prevent this (eg a good start would be a US GDPR), so the corporate surveillance industry is allowed to continue setting up parallel governance structures right out in the open. As the corpos increasingly capture the government, this parallel governance structure gradually becomes less escapable - ie ReCAPTCHA, ID.me, official communications published on xitter/faceboot, DOGE exfiltration, Clearview, etc. In a sense the surging neofascist movement is closer to their endgame than to the start. If we want to push back, merely exorcising Palantir (et al) from the nominal government is not sufficient. We need to view the corporate surveillance industry as a parallel government in competition with the Constitutionally-limited nominally-individual-representing one, and actively stamp it out. Otherwise it just lays low for a bit and springs back up when it can. |
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| ▲ | tavavex 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This seems like a simple conclusion, to the point where I'm surprised that no one replying to you had really put it in a more direct way. "slave of the state" is pretty provocative language, but let me map out one way in which this could happen, that seems to already be unfolding. 1. The country, realizing the potential power that extra data processing (in the form of software like Palantir's) offers, start purchasing equipment and massively ramping up government data collection. More cameras, more facial scans, more data collected in points of entry and government institutions, more records digitized and backed up, more unrelated businesses contracted to provide all sorts of data, more data about communications, transactions, interactions - more of everything. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's any sort of data about people, it's probably useful. 2. Government agencies contract Palantir and integrate their software into their existing data pipeline. Palantir far surpasses whatever rudimentary processing was done before - it allows for automated analysis of gigantic swaths of data, and can make conclusions and inferences that would be otherwise invisible to the human eye. That is their specialty. 3. Using all the new information about how all those bits and pieces of data are connected, government agencies slowly start integrating that new information into the way they work, while refining and perfecting the usable data they can deduce from it in the process. Just imagine being able to estimate nearly any individual's movement history based on many data points from different sources. Or having an ability to predict any associations between disfavored individuals and the creation of undesirable groups and organizations. Or being able to flag down new persons of interest before they've done anything interesting, just based on seemingly innocuous patterns of behavior. 4. With something like this in place, most people would likely feel pretty confined - at least the people who will be aware of it. There's no personified Stasi secret cop listening in behind every corner, but you're aware that every time you do almost anything, you leave a fingerprint on an enormous network of data, one where you should probably avoid seeming remarkable and unusual in any way that might be interesting to your government. You know you're being watched, not just by people who will forget about you two seconds after seeing your face, but by tools that will file away anything you do forever, just in case. Even if the number of people prosecuted isn't too high (which seems unlikely), the chilling effect will be massive, and this would be a big step towards metaphorical "slavery". |
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| ▲ | jassyr 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You mentioned you're not a fan of this administration. That's -1 on your PalsOfState(tm) score. Your employer has been notified (they know where you work of course), and your spouse's employer too. Your child's application to Fancy University has been moved to the bottom of the pile, by the way the university recently settled a lawsuit brought by the governmentfor admitting too many "disruptors" with low PalsOfState scores. Palantir had provided a way for you to improve you score, click the Donateto47 button to improve your score. We hope you can attend the next political rally in your home town, their cameras will be there to make sure. |
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| ▲ | nxor 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Manipulate isn't the right word in regards to Twitter. So they wanted a social media with less bias. Why is that so wrong? Not saying Twitter now lacks bias. I am saying it's not manipulation to want sites that don't enforce groupthink. |
