I lived in the middle of nowhere in small farming town and the BBS scene really saved me when I was a kid. I had clear opinions about BBS software and Renegade was always my favorite. I always considered Wildcat to be boring looking and for old people. I think it was just that all of the Wildcat boards in my area were run by boring graybeards.
Every board in my area (not many) served a text file called The Alchemist's List — a huge list of regional boards — and it was absolutely responsible for a lot of very contentious long distance bills. Sometimes I miss the simplicity of that time but I do not miss the UX.
As I recall, Wildcat was one of the more expensive BBS packages that was still within reach of hobbyist budgets--I want to say a license for a single-digit number of nodes was between $200 and $300 in mid-90s dollars (around $450-$650 in 2026 dollars)--so it's not surprising that it would have been mostly older people running it. IIRC, it was pretty popular where I grew up, and the demographics in that area definitely skewed a bit older.
Especially considering this project is 2 days old and has 580 stars. 500 seems like it would be a nice round number if one were to purchase bot engagement. Not confident enough to make that claim directly, but something about this project doesn't sit right in general.
Can you link to it? I'm not able to find it on his account. Unless you mean his retweet of your tweet? If so, that retweet has just under 10k views and the tweet is in celebration of hitting 500 stars on Github.
OpenClaw opens a wide attack surface on your digital life that cannot be remediated so long as hallucinations and prompt injection remain unsolved problems. Anything built on top of it is equally insecure and probably even more insecure.
I really don't want to yuck anybody's yums or step on dev work that I had nothing to do with, because I've been there and I know it sucks, but OpenClaw is barely secure enough to even play with in a sandbox. Giving it private information about your real business and real business contacts feels like an absolutely insane thing to do.
At best OpenClaw is like a toy... if the toy was a gun and it shot real bullets. This feels like playing Russian roulette with your livelihood.
I cannot fucking believe people are letting it remote start their cars and control their garage door. Nevermind ovens. All things people have done and posted about.
As someone that has worked in the automotive space, an enormous amount of regulation and effort is spent making sure you cannot do something like forgetfully remote start the car with your garage door closed and gas yourself. Nevermind securing it so that others cannot do this to you.
And these people are plugging it into ... this, which will happily go "oh, the car turned off after 15 minutes, let me turn it back on!"
There are realistic odds that someone is rotting in their house while their lobster pays the bills and writes blog posts for them.
This rings so true. Software Engineering should have stricter bar similar to med professionals. If we have leaked such lousy products and the public crowd thinks this is usable, it's a failure of the industry as a whole.
I like the idea of OpenClaw a lot, it's a technology that I would want in my life. But in it's current form it's kinda chilling and I cannot see it become safe to use anytime soon.
It seems to me many infosec best practices that have been built over decades have been forgot in the last few months like nothing happened. People really do give this kind of software full system access, plus access to their emails, their private chats, most likely their passwords too and who knows what else via plugins. I couldn't really imagine this happening one year ago.
I'm 100% confident that any state actor and cybercrime groups are currently heavily focusing their research on these tools. You compromise the right person and you can access all kind of critical information, it would basically be the same as having some remote control software on their system with full permissions.
And everyone on the hype train seems to be absolutely unaware of this. Maybe I'm missing something, but all of this feels so odd to me.
I think a lot of them are aware of it, but also grifters, and hoping to profit off of it before the bomb goes off so that they can claim ignorance and escape blame. New and powerful thing that people don't fully understand becomes fertile ground for grifters to sew their sins. Like when Marie Curie discovered radium and everyone and their mother started forcing it into products, including toothpaste and "medicine", within like 5-10 years.
> so long as hallucinations and prompt injection remain unsolved problems
Aren't hallucinations mathematically impossible to be _solved_? Cannot believe how so many people just willy nilly give everything they have to a lying parrot.
If you don't want to receive the punishment for thought crimes, which is being threatened outright more loudly every day, it's increasingly difficult to actually have a dissenting voice online. Don't believe me? Set up a linux VM, Mullvad VPN with a killswitch, then run Tor browser. You MAY be able to get a TutaMail account, which requires a backup e-mail that disappears after a short period of time (allegedly), and then a Proton account with the TutaMail account as your required backup there, but all of the privacy-first "anonymous" services require some form of verification. Then, if the social media network isn't blocking you from signing up via a Tor exit nodes outright, you are immediately shadow banned.
I remain very annoyed with the massive number of engineers that are making it possible for people who can't figure out how to check their e-mail to utilize advanced technology to spy on us, steal our tax money, pervert the technologies we build, and indiscriminately murder innocent people.
We are a community of greedy ladder pullers and that's so disappointing.
I generally just use tor browser and proton (verified through a disposable email address only accessed via the tor browser) - seems secure enough for me?
To the extent it works that's a loophole. I can't speak to proton specifically but the majority of services don't want to permit disposable email because the entire point is to cut down on spam and abuse.
I can appreciate having the option of providing a phone number or email or whatever but I think the state of the ecosystem is telling. The option for anonymous email with PoW per outgoing email isn't provided despite largely addressing the commonly cited rationale for requiring some sort of verification. And we're still stuck bashing PGP, shilling for competing E2E message solutions while it's plain as day that the vast majority of commerce isn't going to move off of email any time soon. Meanwhile TLS can figure out how to distribute public keys via DNS as part of implementing ECH in all major browsers over a period of less than a decade.
While I don't use disposable emails I've been converting all my accounts to unique emails with either Firefox Relay[0] or using my personal website[1]. Bitwarden has made this easy as they let you import your Relay's API key and so every new site gets unique usernames and passwords[2]. It certainly is making it easier to block spam, and you get to know who is leaking your emails[3], and I've burned emails because of it. Frankly at this point the biggest problem is having a 20 year old gmail account. But the plus side of this type of system is that you can move your endpoint, so where Relay/CF directs the emails too, making you less reliant on your email provider[4].
There's pros and cons. On the plus side, unique identities for every site and by getting a catchall domain you can even generate valid addresses via pen and paper. Probably the biggest benefit is just searching emails. On the cons, document sharing can be a bigger pain than it already is (how is this still a pain all these years later?). Also, people get very confused when you tell them your email address is TheirCompanyName@godelski.mozmail.com (I don't actually have that domain, don't send emails there).
It's helpful but I think represents a fundamental flaw in our ecosystem.
> And we're still stuck bashing PGP
I can't believe we haven't normalized this in the nerdy spaces, at least not to the degree of things like Signal. It is a thing that can be entirely automated and both Thunderbird and NeoMutt are able to handle this for you and make it effectively seamless. The average person does want this stuff, but they don't want to think about it. The problem is that they think their stuff is already private, or they say it can be spied on but that they're not worth spying on so they think it is effectively the same thing.
[2] What doesn't help is how prolific OAUTH is becoming.
[3] Sorry, adding +something on your gmail won't work these days.
[4] I'm actually looking. People say TutaMail but sorry, I need something I can use with either Thunderbird or NeoMutt... This is non-negotiable. Everyone has multiple email addresses these days and I'm not checking 30 different sites. The problem is already one of poor organization.
I know its effecitvely a vendor lock-in and not what you are looking for but I love the SimpleLogin integration that Proton made with Proton Pass.
I have it setup in my browser and phone. Whenever a website or app would like an email for an order or something else, it takes a single click to generate a named alias (using the website name) e
Which forwards emails to my normal inbox. Replying to any received emails also uses the alias.
The SimpleLogin interface could use some improvement though. Deleting unused ones is a bit tidious.
I use SimpleLogin with custom domains but kinda meh.
Brilliant for quick creation of temporary emails, but app troublesome and doesn't show the all options, but much to my disappointment they don't do proper SRS, so it invalidates any, ANY benefits from DMARC or such.
Emails that with SRS would have a proper From, organisation logo from BIMI record, now immediately end up in Spam and are marked as phishing attempts.
I had a better success with personal postfix server forwarding my catch-all alias mail to Gmail than I have with SimpleLogin.
The only thing that is better is that replying to emails is easier, but that could be done while staying compliant with SRS.
I regret buying the subscription and I won't be extending it. Should've go with a proper email service, not a glorified alias generator.
>"it's increasingly difficult to actually have a dissenting voice online."
If willing, I would appreciate some examples, actual or hypothetical. I have left a few comments regarding my concerns over AI and have been surprised by the hostile reactions. Much of my research kindof revolves around a central concern matching your statement. But my perspective is in a vacuum, out of touch with what others are dealing with. Feel free to ignore this if not comfortable.
Don't apologize for your truth. A lot of people on reddit/HN fancy themselves as free-thinkers and the moment something contradicts their reality they reveal themselves to be as emotionally vulnerable as the rest of humanity.
It was already going downhill a decade ago, eg, using bad think on video games.
But my personal experience is something snapped in a lot of people during COVID when people asked reasonable questions like — “is an experimental gene therapy really QALY positive in populations not at risk, such as healthy children?”
According to government actuarial tables, the answer was no: the UK government concluded that there was no point at which for those under 40 the immunizations prevented more serious outcomes than they caused. But people were (and often still are) absolutely rabid if you point out we (in administering a QALY negative treatment to a vulnerable population) decided to poison children and young adults en masse. I’ve had people look up my mother on Facebook for calmly citing UK government actuarial reports, which did the calculation on COVID vs vaccine harms.
That’s setting aside that on HN you’d get shadowbanned for even posting the clip of BLM leaders describing themselves as “trained Marxists” and BLM itself as Marxist in ideology. Apparently, no matter how politely you state facts, if HN froths irrationally in response it is an “inherent flamewar”.
But I’m not sure I qualify for what you’re asking, as I generally post under my true identity, not anonymously.
HN is a place where people don’t ask what is true with intellectual curiosity but classify opinions as “problematic” and justify bullying people based on that.
HN becomes emotionally upset if you discuss actuarial tables or quote people’s own words from their own presentations because those facts go against the narratives many on HN believe — and like many before them, people on HN believe censorship and bullying are justified by that emotional turmoil.
As you just did, impugning my character while carefully avoiding the veracity of my claims — only saying they’re “problematic”, as a good apparatchik would.
HN was one of the best places for finding cited research regarding covid and the mrna tech at the time.
With all the other conflicting information floating around online, it was a breath of fresh air to come to HN and see articles describing exactly how mrna works and why it was likely not a health risk, complete with thoughtful discussion. I'm too lazy to go look up citations and reference those old posts, so you can take this as anecdotal.
Little bit of projection in this comment, I would say. I didn’t reference your character, just your opinions - to equate the two is a bit juvenile - which now may be a reference to your character.
Also, “problematic” is perhaps the least emotional word I could have used, and yet you still found issue with it.
I would advise you stop viewing HN as a monolith, it will help you get over your victim complex, which will in turn hopefully help you see opinions as things worth changing based on new information, rather than value for your character.
Yeah it’s a euphemism and a bit of a shibboleth, which, like all shibboleths, can be a bit triggering to those who feel outgrouped by it.
I could’ve been more precise: “opinions that are based on weak evidence that confirm a certain preimagined view of the world rather than challenge it”.
I mean they made claims about the efficacy and risks of the COVID vaccine without sourcing them and used verbiage like "poisoning our children" to refer to vaccinating them. I think tip of the iceberg for "problematic opinions" is a fair response.
Just noting that I appreciate all the examples given here and by others, many of which made me feel a bit stupid and amnesic for asking my original question. I guess I have been over-focused on AI...
> That’s setting aside that on HN you’d get shadowbanned for even posting the clip of BLM leaders describing themselves as “trained Marxists” and BLM itself as Marxist in ideology. Apparently, no matter how politely you state facts, if HN froths irrationally in response it is an “inherent flamewar”.
Funny how you mention this like you expect everyone to take for granted that Marxist=bad and worth "hiding" etc... whereas negative reactions are likely due more towards that internal judgement discrediting yourself, vs trying to "hide the Marxism."
You think you can discredit people by saying "they're Marxists!" and yet you think people today are uniquely bad snowflakes about views they don't like. You're proposing that people are more likely to cry thoughtcrime now than in the past, by inadvertently exposing how you've bought into this idea of how just invoking the name of some old philosopher is worth demonization and has been for DECADES in many western countries...
Specs and logs, motes and beams.
Which specific points from which specific Marx texts piss you off so much?
(It's also funny that you didn't actually link to any of the things you stated. I don't care about the things you brought up enough to go hunting for them myself to try do prove or disprove you, but... do you really think saying "I can't cite these simple facts without getting in trouble" *without even citing them, just asking us to believe you that they're easily cite-able, is gonna go over so convincingly?)
I've said this a million times to people in this industry: we have a Real Problem with adderall, it's abuse, and the way it robs a person of their ability to feel empathy. Yes, you're a 10x engineer, yes you write amazing code, yes you can work and work and get. it. done. But you'll also be A-OK with dark patterns, just fine with spying on people who aren't you, and hell, you might even think building the first Terminator robots is an interesting project.
Hyberbolic? Sure. But we live in a society that reinforces the idea that the performance enhancement is worth it. But there is a cost, and what you've described is it.
I've been on it, never once felt a lack of empathy, or forwent my principles. If that's happening to a person, it's likely a mask is just being lifted.
It's absolutely a continuum, which implies to me there will be people with your experience. Of course, you may not have encountered a scenario where your principles were on the line!
But then, I'd also agree there would be loads of cases where it is a mask being lifted, but isn't that the point? Is there a meaningful difference between "revealing one's true self" and "being robbed of an essential part of humanity" when the outcome results in the same antisocial behavior?
i think it's silly to think we just need gooder coders with better morals. if the tech industry didn't do what it does it wouldn't enjoy the position in society it has.
if youre going against the regime of hyperpathologization please be strong and gentle. people dont want to have their pacifiers ripped out, whether that be by lifting the veil of hypercapitalistic coercion, or simply by making plain the wealth of side effects that can be entirely avoided by ignoring artificial diagnoses and seeking solutions more in line with our biology.
like no shit people are going to be more willing to do the bidding of evil when their decision making apparatus is unnaturally saturated. and no shit people are going to have adhd symptoms in a screen based society. its completely obvious. but me saying that is going to get down voted to oblivion. people don't enjoy having a comfortable narrative questioned; dissent (no matter how minor) is equivalent to full scale assault on perceptions of existence. that being said, i dont blame anyone for this, considering that the entirety of existence is currently geared towards forcing the populace into fight or flight mode, thus rendering null the capacity to exact societal change and disrupt the status quo.
people really do think their best interests are at the heart of billion dollar companies like those producing pharmaceutical goods !
Yep. I still need to say it. I still need this audience, at least time tiny fraction, to hear it. This "community" specifically is so high on it's own supply that these things should be shouted from the rooftops:
- You're a fallible human and your ideas aren't always good
- Disruption isn't always good
- Moving fast and breaking things is a great way to leave a path of destruction in your wake and piss off everyone around you, and isn't always good
- Change for the sake of change isn't always good
Let's boil that down to: the shit you come up with isn't always good. Or to put it another way, rarely does it seem "should we?" is ever considered alongside "could we?".
Finally, as if it weren't obvious: I am not here for fake internet points.
the populace has been trained to unequivocally reject any thought that goes against the prevailing narrative. they have been lobotomized, removing the capacity to discern shades of grey. so when things are shouted from the rooftops, automatically they considered not to be worth listening to. if you really want to change people's minds it needs to be done gently, and generally on an individual basis. thats all i wanted to suggest ... internet points are relevant because the less you have, the smaller your audience.
>Where you one that downvoted every post saying we should have unions in software so we can protect ourselves as a group
In other professions such unions inevitably end up building a chummy relationship with the government and going along with whatever it says, software engineering wouldn't be any different. If anything it'd be worse because the government could pressure the union into removing the license of engineers who make privacy-preserving software.
Well currently, it's people being denied entry or re-entry to the United States due to the content of their social media accounts. Also, people getting door-knocked by the FBI for making posts on Reddit.
Historically, there won't be trials for this when it gets worse, so there won't be anyone charged or convicted. They will eventually just be murdered by a secret police force.
You’re not being criminally charged and convicted of a thought crime in this situation. You’re just not welcome to join the party. Big difference. Foreigners have no right to enter the USA other than by what the law permits.
Now, I don’t necessarily agree that we should be denying visas to people based on reasonable disagreements with US policy—after all, existing citizens are entitled to share those same opinions! But “crime” means something, and that’s not what this is.
Marketing, largely. But indeed Americans are free to think and write as they please without criminal consequences. They certainly have more protections than the British do (especially around defamation).
It is a bit different than what we are discussing, but intent plays a huge role in Western justice. The same physical action can lead to vastly different outcomes.
A high profile interesting example of this is the assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh. If you look at the details none of the actions would have been an attempt if not for the intent.
It is an interesting thought experiment as to how many actions you have to take for a crime that you don’t commit to be charged as an attempt or more broadly as conspiracy and at what point people are allowed to change their mind. We see this in terrorism cases pretty frequently.
> The same physical action can lead to vastly different outcomes.
Well, yeah, that’s kind of obvious once you realize that tools can be used for multiple purposes. A hammer can be used to pound both nails (legal) and smash a person’s head in (not).
But the notion that “thought crimes” where people are being punished merely for their feelings and where no act in furtherance of the outcome has taken place is just baloney. At least in the West.
I’m taking a low dose (and spread out beyond 1 week) of mounjaro.
I realize the risk as GLP long term use is untested, but in my case it’s that; or deal with inevitable health problems from high BP and being only moderately overweight.
I didn't mean to say don't take novel but mainstream medications you have a health reason for and are under the guidance of a doctor about.
I'm saying nicotine pouches are the tobacco industry's successor to vapes in the way vapes were their successor to cigarettes and some conservatism is warranted in light of that. Or like how every 10-15 years the evidence of health effects of some ubiquitous plastic grows too heavy and 3M comes out with a new one to replace it and the cycle repeats.
It seems as though you can basically do anything in this administration if the money is right, so selling state secrets free of punishment sounds about right to me.
To me, it's just another example of what the poor and marginalized in this country have known for generations, finally catching up to the comfortable class. It's easier to count the institutions that AREN'T pay-to-play, especially those associated with the law and courts.
Know what's fun? Facing down a trained attorney as a pro se litigant in small claims court. Want to beat the 70-90% loss rate for pro se litigants in a forum that was originally designed specifically for pro se litigants? Hire a lawyer, lol.
Small claims, true to the name, is the lowest of low stakes. It's downhill from there.
It has been for decades now, they are just open and blatant now because the corruption is so deep rooted that there is little average people can do except choose to burn down the house around themselves.
This administration has taken it to a whole new level -- basically an organized crime syndicate.
The system has always been corrupt in that the rich write the rules but this is pure kleptocracy. Remember that Nixon was told by his own party that his conduct was unacceptable and they would not support him...
Nixon also got pardoned and faced no real repercussions for his actions other than leaving. Again, I very much believe we have been this corrupt for many decades, it is only the visibility of the corruption that has changed. What few actions against corruption we have seen was just good PR work, as evident by its lack of teeth in sentencing and complete lack of any enforcement or investigation against anyone with money or political power.
I think that it's wholly incorrect to argue it has not gotten worse. The government has always been corrupt, true. They have gotten far more open and brazen about it, true. But they are also far more grotesquely corrupt in outright disgusting ways, which is different. No other president has just gifted themselves billions of dollars of taxpayer money. No other president has bulldozed the whitehouse for open ended self gratification projects on the scale Trump as. No other president has openly run family-centric money laundering schemes of this magnitude, or openly accepted foreign bribes, etc etc etc.
It was always corrupt but my word, you can't say that it's the same corruption just more exposed.
> “These zero-day and exploit brokers tend to be unscrupulous," says Cole. “They sell to the highest bidder and they double dip. Many don’t have exclusivity arrangements. That’s very likely what happened here.”
I interpreted this a different way - that a shady supplier to the US Government double dipped to the other side.
There are things that have never happened before in the 250 year history of the United States.
No sitting president has ever enriched themselves by billions of dollars.
We’re in a completely different universe from the days when Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm in a blind trust so there would be no appearance of a conflict of interest.
Or when Lincoln was given some gifts from the King of Siam. Because of the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, he went to Congress to check if he could keep them. Congress said no; Lincoln donated them.
It was understood a president could be prosecuted if he broke the law—that’s why Nixon needed to be pardoned by Ford; otherwise, he would have faced at least some consequences.
SCOTUS did a 180 degree turn by ruling a precedent is immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office.
SCOTUS just made that up out of thin air.
All of this and much more is unprecedented.
Last one: no president has ever gone to war without making a case for it to the country.
So no, what’s happening now is not the same old thing.
Hierarchies can punish this. Note that the legislature and judicial branches exert their power. Epstein files got released if you need proof.
(However, if we are International Systems Realists, there are inevitable effects that happen. I have a feeling even Biden/Harris would be in Iran right now.)
Some got released, and in the way the Executive wanted them to be.
This proves the opposite IMO - while the Legislative is co-opted, the Judicial branch has shown it is quite inadequate exerting control or punishment of the Executive.
It's not quite as bad as working for X, xAI, or Tesla, but engineers continuing to work for these companies are taking hits to their reputation as far as I'm concerned. Like, if I see it on a resume beyond a certain date, I'm not considering them types of reputational damage.
I assume you work at some small startup where you get to dictate who you will hire based on your interpretation of what a candidate’s past work history tells you about their morals/ethics. But that shit won’t fly if you are interviewing at other large companies. You can’t reject someone just because they have OpenAI on their resume. In fact I have never heard of any FAANG company ever blacklisting candidates from some other company. So you rejecting someone is not going to move the needle much. They can leave OpenAI whenever they want and Zuck will offer them 8-9 figure pay packages :)
Oh, you absolutely can; maybe not as a matter of formal policy, but if you are a hiring manager or a member of an interview team, you have wide latitude to have concerns about nearly anything (legal) about a candidate. And also, even if you don't use that explicitly, it can affect your judgement of them when discussing them to an interview committee.
Expressing qualms about hiring somebody who has voluntarily demonstrated a lack of ethics isn't 'being an asshole'. In fact, it's usually a good business decision and always an ethically-sound one.
Here's a sample question, feel free to use:
"If somebody offered you money to build the brains for fully-autonomous killbots PLUS mass domestic surveillance of the civilian population, would you accept the offer?"
"Yes" => They are unethical => No-hire.
"No" => They did do that, and thus are a liar, and thus are unethical => No-hire.
> absolutely none of these things will fly on an interview feedback in any big company
Sure, you never write "no hire because they worked at Palantir". You write "candidate didn't ask clarifying questions about {X} and jumped to answer {Y} which is not what I expect from a candidate of this level, no hire".
....this assumes that anyone at all reads your detailed notes if you submit an initial rating of "no hire", and I have very little evidence from my interviewing career across multiple companies to believe that's the case..
My experience at FAANG is that if you get a "no hire" vote, then unless several other reviewers are "strong hire" the candidate doesn't even make it to a committee and is already rejected - and this was before 2022.
If you want to blatantly lie and hide your true reason for rejecting them by making up other stuff in the debrief notes, that would be possible. But at that point, you are the unethical person. You can technically do the same thing just because you wanted to discriminate based on race, sex, etc (that would be both illegal as well as violation of corporate HR policies).
I've seen people saying that about Meta/Facebook for a decade, but I still don't see any tangible damage to former employee's ability to get jobs. The OpenAI situation seems much closer to FB-scale politics than X though.
I think Amazon is a better example. It's a thing that some companies prefer not to hire engineers from Amazon because of the culture they bring. Whether you agree with it or not, Amazon has a reputation for a toxic culture and that sort of thing can ruin a smaller or medium size company if it seeps in.
I mostly agree with you re: Meta/Facebook except that things are becoming a lot more politically volatile than they have been in the past. Generally, I think that most people believe that the more intelligent you are, the more empathetic you are, so at some point if your evil company is doing big destructive evils, the smartest engineers will probably bail.
Depending on jurisdiction, it’s maybe not that smart to hop on the internet and write “if I see it on a resume beyond a certain date, I'm not considering them” and “things are becoming a lot more politically volatile” either.
"Generally, I think that most people believe that the more intelligent you are, the more empathetic you are..."
Okay, you might need to re-evaluate the life lessons you seem to have selectively taught yourself. This is base line culture war 'You must be mentally deficient if you don't align with what I deem to be empathetic right now or I don't think you're nice enough' type stuff.
Don't judge employees for what their CEOs do bc they do not have a choice in the matter.
That resume you toss might be someone that needs to pay a mortgage, has a sick wife, or autistic kid that needs the insurance. Or it could come from an employee who genuinely disagrees with mission and quit, but its not like you would know or even care.
What if your CEO went politically rogue and started openly supporting Trump? Would you quit? I doubt that.
What a childish attitude. Get your politics TF out of the office and remember the fact that we live in a democracy where sometimes you do not get your way.
> What if your CEO went politically rogue and started openly supporting Trump? Would you quit? I doubt that.
Yes. I would. Trump is a uniquely dangerous president with uniquely unrestrained power.
I'll continue to write my representatives, publicly protest, boycott businesses and employers, and use all other legal levers of power that I can. My kids future cannot afford to let these crimes continue unchecked.
> Get your politics TF out of the office...
A large portion of our lives is spent at the office, with people we may not otherwise interact with. Former coworkers sharing their perspectives helped sow the seeds of my change in politics, both on individual issues and worldview.
It's childish to think life can be perfectly compartmentalized, like pre-K learning stations.
In my view the judicial and legislative branches should be no less powerful than the executive.
If there is truly an impasse the legislative branch should win because it is the most diverse and direct representation of the people.
I also have other crazy ideas like money isn't speech, ranked choice voting, same-day primaries, outlawing private financing of campaigns, bribery is accepting compensation even if before the action being bought, abolishing the electoral college and the US Senate, and no one is above investigation or the law--not even in their official capacity.
>> What if your CEO went politically rogue and started openly supporting Trump? Would you quit? I doubt that.
> Yes. I would. Trump is a uniquely dangerous president with uniquely unrestrained power.
Even if it meant you could lose your house? Even if you were 6 months pregnant (meaning it could put your health insurance in jeopardy at a pretty critical time, as well as your parental leave)? Even if you quitting would accomplish absolutely nothing?
Any maybe you're such a zealot that you'd rather end up homeless than working for a company managed by a CEO that supports Trump. But don't punish other people for not being willing to do the same. Other people have other priorities, and other situations going on in their life, and that's fine.
Consider that more than 50% of your fellow American citizens voted for the man you hate, and you will have to work with them no matter what. That's called "democracy."
People can elect racists. rapists, conmen, human traffickers, pedophiles, and even dictators. Doesn't mean I have to work with them or accept any of those as normal.
> People can elect racists. rapists, conmen, human traffickers, pedophiles, and even dictators. Doesn't mean I have to work with them or accept any of those as normal.
Trump is no saint, but you are turning him into a cartoonish villain. That never stopped democrats from taking his donation checks, did it?
> Resisting tyranny is a core tenant of democracy.
No, the core tenant of democracy is everyone gets a vote and you agree to live with the outcome, bc you get a vote too. And if you do not agree with the outcome, then you are the tyrant.
> Trump is no saint, but you are turning him into a cartoonish villain.
I didn't claim Trump is any of those things yet. Though courts would agree that he's a racist (in his tenant policies, never mind his retoric), a felon (financial crimes), a fraud (sending nonprofit money to Bondi's campaign), obstructs the biggest pedo investigation ever (redacting even "don't"), and the 14th amendment would disqualify him from federal office--if he hadn't packed SCOTUS (who rule for him 90+% vs 90+% against in lower courts).
> That never stopped democrats from taking his donation checks, did it?
Democrats have plenty of blood on their hands. At least some of them continue to try to reform campaign financing. Modern Republicans seem to relish in the money laundering aspects, especially Trump.
> And if you do not agree with the outcome, then you are the tyrant.
You cannot have democracy under tyranny. And if a country elects an aspiring dictator (who earlier lead a mob to overthrow an election result, sent fake electors, demanded votes be "found", demanded vote counting be stopped while he was ahead, etc) then I suppose it ceases to be a democracy thereafter.
Regardless, I'm not advocating illegal acts, despite the fact that Trump commits them on the regular. I'm advocating the exercise of freedom of speech, expression, and association in opposition to a (hopefully term limited) tyranny.
Sorry, but if you continue to work for a company that develops mass surveillance techniques that will directly result in innocent people getting their way of life unjustly and unlawfully ripped away from them, then I think you suck and I don't know how not to think that.
People said the same thing with the Nazi Regime. Im sorry at some point, you have to stop supporting a system that is destroying peoples lives. You cannot sit idly by and watch it happen because you need to pay bills.
It doesn't have to be a death camp or a gas chamber. Unlawfully arresting people based on their race or language and then shipping them out of state, where their representatives are unlawfully prohibited from inspection of the facility is vile shit. Your indifference to what that is like for those people is glaring and it makes my point for me.
Don't forget federal death row! They detain people and kill them there with poison, which is exactly what the Nazis did in their death camps. Under Trump, the US has become basically exactly like Nazi Germany.
No granular criminal-history breakdown exists for the specific individuals who died, and ICE has actively reduced oversight that might produce one, but:
ICE itself confirmed 36 deaths between Jan. 20, 2025 and Jan. 12, 2026, with two more after that date. There were 11 in 2024. ¹
73.6% of current detainees have no criminal convictions. ²
Of ~393,000 total ICE arrests between Jan. 21, 2025 and Jan. 31, 2026, about 153,000 (~39%) were "other administrative arrests" — immigrants detained solely for civil immigration offenses like overstaying a visa or being undocumented, with no criminal record. CBS News note that being undocumented is a civil infraction, not a crime.³
We are on our way to death camps.(maybe that's an over exaggeration, but we are still in a really bad place)
Secondly dissapearing people without due process is what this administration is doing. This is not about illegal immigrants, that's just a pretext for an all-out war on our constitutional freedoms. The fact that you are parreting those lies shows exactly what kind of agenda you have. Look around you if you are in fact interested in the truth of the matter.
And yes I am doing something about it. Resist and unsubscribed and training myself on non-complianace with freedomtrainers.
What are you doing? Ohh yes, parreting bullshit while the country gets destroyed. Good luck with that.
If you work at Palantir, your reputation is forever tainted in my mind.
You should not deserve a job for the rest of your life. You should be homeless and honestly, maybe end your life.
If your CEO supports Trump, that probably isn't the best thing either, although this is 1 million times better than being the tool used to break every laws, developing killing and spying machines.
Alex Karp has publicly supported Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. His company did work with the government before Trump, and you probably never had a problem with it until now.
Palantir always worked with the military, but I doubt you cared when they helped drone people during the Obama administration.
> You should not deserve a job for the rest of your life. You should be homeless and honestly, maybe end your life....I actually don't really have the biggest problem with Trump. I voted for him.
Some people here would say you should not deserve a job, be homeless, and maybe end your life bc you voted for Trump. How do you feel about that?
I don't get it. Interesting problems are interesting problems. Granted, I don't think you see those at X, but xAI, Tesla or Meta? Sure. I am not even arguing 'money' or 'man gotta eat', but just seems like such an arbitrary thing to flag.. especially since it won't be documented anywhere ( 'we are anti-Tesla house' banner on main page for example).
Interesting problems don't exist in a vacuum. I'm sure it was an interesting problem to figure out how to track people who opted out of tracking, how to build gas chambers, how to add lead to gasoline, doesn't mean one should choose to solve them.
I guess you could consider "literally building Skynet" to be an interesting problem, but you have got to have some pieces missing if "interesting" is the most appropriate assessment of that work.
If we are going to claim to be software "engineers" we have ethical obligations. That means that you don't just do whatever the person signing your paycheck says, you raise objections and refuse to do things that will cause harm.
In real engineering disciplines, engineers sign their name to key decisions and if people get hurt someone loses their license and their right to do engineering work. The world would be a better place if software worked that way, although it'd be harder for a bunch of sociopaths to become billionaires.
No, you just dont want people that will start interrupting work, causing a ruckus, starts signing open letters, or randomly quits based on whatever blue sky post they read last.
What I'm trying to say is fuck that if you're doing unethical stuff as an employer, you got problems. If you looking for am employee that sacrifices his principals for money that makes the world a worse place to be in and to ask for those things puts the employers in the seat of being fussy for the wrong things.
reply