I still don't understand why Theil and Karp decided to name their surveillance tech company after a device that is best known for being used by an evil dark lord to decieve and corrupt. It's like the Mitchell and Webb skit "are we the baddies" except they're the ones who designed the uniforms with skulls on them.
I don't think you have to understand why they made that decision, you just have to understand who they are and what they believe in. Just have a look at what they talk about, and what they are quoted as saying.
You know what? It's all on the public record, and if someone wants to defend these guys or challenge my opinion they can do better than asking for sources of well reported behaviour.
How am I supposed to prove a negative here? Post a transcript of every statement Thiel and Karp have ever made?
You're the one making an assertion about Palantir. Apparently whatever you're referring to is well reported, but not quite well reported enough for you to actually point out the statements you're referring to.
Thiel apparently gives talks about the Antichrist. He's actually a very thoughtful Christian, following the works of Rene Girard. I think he's just got a rather dark sense of humour.
I'm not sure you can describe somebody who supports ICE in its current incarnation, who profits from surveillance of vulnerable populations, who believes in revenge (cf Gawker), who abuses wealth (NZ citizenship shenanigans) as "a very thoughtful Christian", unless you do a lot of definitional work on "Christian".
Talking about the antichrist doesn't make you Christian.
Yes, when it makes the front page of the FT (2 days ago) you know there's some interesting stuff going on. The whole article is worth a read (I didn't known JD Vance's career was "largely bankrolled by Thiel").
>US tech billionaire and Maga donor Peter Thiel is starting a series of closed-door lectures about the antichrist in Rome on Sunday, putting him on a collision course with Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff....
>Thiel apparently gives talks about the Antichrist
You forgot to mention the part where Thiel tells, in all seriousness, that the Antichrist is on Earth, now, and may literally be Greta Thunberg [1].
And that's one of the reason Greta Thunberg must be opposed.
> He's actually a very thoughtful Christian
That's one way to upsell "deranged".
Thoughtful he is (as many lunatics are).
As far as religious aspects go, him losing faith in democracy after women and "benefits recipients" got the right to vote[2] doesn't sound very Christian-like to my ears.
Neither does his argument to end affirmative action[3], if you read it carefully, but that's a whole another can of worms.
> following the works of Rene Girard.
Ah yes, the fine fellow who (like Thiel) sees religion as a technology to manage humans by designating sacrificial scapegoats, which is the Girard's final solution to all problems.
In Girard's (and Thiel's) view, scapegoating isn't only an emergent outcome, it is necessary to stave off the end of the world.[3]
Thiel's support of Trump and his influence and backing of the Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 is very consistent with this philosophy.
Trump/Project 2025 make scapegoats out of immigrants, DEI, minorities, trans people, women who don't dedicate their lives to being breeding machines, ... - the list goes on.
So, in Thiel, we have:
- a gay man (who destroyed the paper that outed him out of spite) who thinks women are not just ewww, but are the reason democracy failed and is antithetical to freedom and are to blame for the Great Depression. And one of them (Greta Thunberg) is literally the Antichrist, in all likelihood.
- a white German raised in apartheid South Africa[5], in a city described as "more German than Germany" in 1976 where "Heil Hitler!" salutes were still the norm [6], who thinks that affirmative action has never been a good idea and was utterly unnecessary by the 1990s in the US because, quote [3][7]: “There are almost no real racists . . . in America’s younger generation”, and whose politics have declared "DEI" as an enemy. Here's a reminder that DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
- a Christian who sees Christianity as an instrument of "political theology". See, aside from "let's make scapegoats" Girard, he has been heavily influenced by the writing of Carl "Hitler is good for us" Schmitt[8]. Schmitt was not just a Nazi, but a jurist who provided legal (and moral) basis for Hitler's power grab.
- a self-proclaimed "Libertarian" whose primary source of fortune is selling totalitarian surveillance products to governments
We have that person effectively controlling the US policy and executive actions (Thiel has groomed JD Vance into vice presidency[9]).
I don't see any signs that Thiel has a sense of humor at all, dark or otherwise.
But the universe in which he gets to do all that and be called a "very thoughtful Christian" sure does.
Thiel grew up in what today is Namibia, not South Africa, see your 6. His parents left for the US when the planned opening of a uranium mine nearby made clear that there would be an influx of black people.
On the notion of Thiel being a very thoughtful Christian (your parent poster): if you can define adherence to Nazi philosopher's Carl Schmitt doctrine thoughtful where he fears "the satanic unification of the world", then by all means.
This is a good point. It is not humanly possible to verify every claim you read from every source.
Ideally, you should independently verify claims that appear to be particularly consequential or particularly questionable on the surface. But at some point you have to rely on heuristics like chain of trust (it was peer reviewed, it was published in a reputable textbook), or you will never make forward progress on anything.
> In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.
Cantor Fitzgerald is an investment bank. Rather than claim a straw man, think about what they do and how it interacts with the administration. Everything they do is heavily regulated. If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict, they literally couldn't do a single thing that makes up their business and would be hobbled.
I think a lot of people feel like people who have one foot in a heavy regulated industry shouldn't have their other foot in the regulatory body that regulates that industry.
> If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict
This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.
I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.
As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.
Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.
You are just out of your depth in this area. You don't understand what Cantor has done here, you don't understand what Howard can or cannot do in his role.
Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Cantor has 10 or 12 thousand employees and is constantly doing all manner of things. Howard has no power over the supreme court. His son is the chairman, he's miles away from being in the weeds on what specific things they do. He isn't going to be comped like crazy as the chairman.
There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one and it only appears that way to people who don't understand the situation.
I'm sorry for not elaborating. My original complaint is with Anthropic! The article is about how Anthropic's published "tips" are incorrect, but I am saying of course it's flawed because there is no way for the AI to already have latent knowledge about how to use itself since that wouldn't have been part of the internet/books/github training material.
I know you qualified your assertion of three patients an hour with general practice, but there are plenty of specialty practices where six patients an hour is common. Dermatology and ophthalmology clinics often run at that pace (at least in the US). Some surgical clinics can run at that pace for follow up visits (not for initial visits)
I agree that not all nudity is porn - nudity is porn if the primary intent of that nudity is sexual gratification. When the nudity in question was a Playboy magazine centerfold, the primary intent is fairly obvious.
I'm not sure I'd call agents an
army of juniors. More like a high school summer intern who has infinite time to do deep dives into StackOverflow but doesn't have nearly enough programming experience yet to have developed a "taste" for good code
In my experience, agentic LLMs tend to write code that is very branchy with cyclomatic complexity. They don't follow DRY principles unless you push them very hard in that direction (and even then not always), and sometimes they do things that just fly in the face of common sense. Example of that last part: I was writing some Ruby tests with Opus 4.6 yesterday, and I got dozens of tests that amounted to this:
x = X.new
assert x.kind_of?(X)
This is of course an entirely meaningless check. But if you aren't reading the tests and you just run the test job and see hundreds of green check marks and dozens of classes covered, it could give you a false sense of security
> In my experience, agentic LLMs tend to write code that is very branchy with cyclomatic complexity
You are missing the forest for the trees. Sure, we can find flaws in the current generation of LLMs. But they'll be fixed. We have a tool that can learn to do anything as well as a human, given sufficient input.
LLMs have been a thing for about three years now, so you can't have been hearing this for very long. In those three years, the rate of progress has been astounding and there is no sign of slowing down.
Claude already knows who the characters Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are, what their respective character traits are, and how they interacted with each other. This isn't the same as writing something new.
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