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Comment by nazgulsenpai | Hacker News Reader

You can just look at their website -- it's surprisingly in depth even with their targeting systems and stuff. It's wild how open they are about it.

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https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/ ctrl-f "kill chain" and watch the video.

They have a fucking kanban board for bombing people.

I mean, let's be realistic.... should they just use an excel spreadsheet?

Back in my day we killed people using the waterfall method and we liked it.

Ha ha but you're not wrong. The waterfall methodology — to the extent that it ever existed as a real thing rather than a strawman for agile consultants to criticize — was originally defined to produce predictable results for complex defense software projects. It actually sort of worked some of the time.

Is it that surprising? Ignoring war being good or bad, you would assume there needs to be some method to the madness. I assume before computers this meant a central com center that kept track of everything using humans and chalkboards or tables.

War should be done by government, including dashboards for killing people. And then the focus should be on improving representation and accountability in the government. Doing this with private companies avoid accountability, the same way payment networks can regulate merchants, or the FBI outsources spying Americans to private contractors.

Not sure I follow. It’s a tracking board for assets.

I'm not sure how you don't follow. Is the board used for war? Can bugs in the board cause casualties?

Odd. You said nothing about bugs in your original post. What’s your point can you ELI5 why you would want the government to write software?

When software is written with the purpose to kill people, that is very important software. That makes the organizations that write it very important. The more important an organization is, the more people from outside the organization should know what they do, and the more they should have say on it. Private organizations don't meet those requirements, government approximates those requirements better.

Also, I don't know how you can't see the relationship between bugs and accountability.

So the government should make its own guns, tanks, food, planes, fuel etc.? Not trying to be pestering but again I don’t understand your point. Software to me is no different than a plane or a gun. The military does not make those either. It’s a tool that connects data sources to make decisions and I have yet to see a reason why the military has to make a tool instead of paying for one.

Ideally yes, if they are designed to be used to kill people. You don't want a whole industry that has the incentive to want more dead people just so it can stay alive.

On the contrary, these tools would cause less dead people. That’s the whole point and why the military uses it. By using tools that provide higher fidelity on threats, the military becomes more efficient and precise, which leads to less casualties and collateral damage.

Cool, but not related to whether they should be built by the government or private companies. Also, if all wars ended tomorrow, would Palantir's profits increase or decrease?

Ok so we are just talking about happy ideas that are not only unrealistic but will never happen. Which is ok but let’s be clear about that up front.

Is that surprising or bad ?

Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.

"wars will happen as long as humans exist" - I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I never once saw a child murder another, so why do we assume it's inevitable when people are grown? Why do we hold adults to lower standards than children.

These assumptions when they go unquestioned create the landscape for war to be accepted.

Perhaps OP meant that the military industrial complex will always ensure wars happen?

Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.

Nope, I mean humans are like that. We always want more, we are jalous of what another one have, there are countless unsolvable issues involving race, religions, history.

Sooner or later those transform into wars, inevitably. If by some miracle you could get all nations to agree not to arm, that would work, but of course it's unrealistic. As soon as there is 1 that don't agree (or worse, agree but arm secretely) everybody needs to arm as well.

Because we have a lot of resources, I want to keep the amount of resources that I have or increase it, and they want the same for themselves

Alternatively: the heretics will never learn and sully this world, let us convert them at the point of the sword!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger

There are, unfortunately, many examples of child murderers.

There are plenty of examples of children that aren't provided for, given the time or care required to prevent outcomes that we don't want. That doesn't mean that we accept child murder, we do everything we can to prevent it from happening. If a plane falls out of the sky, we do everything that we can do to ensure it never happens again. If we don't look at war and understand it, we won't ever have the tools to prevent it.

There will always be single things that two groups feel they both entitled to, and both sides can't share it. Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.

> Death is the only tool we were given to ensure a single side wins.

"given" implies a belief in a higher power. most of the popular ones say "don't do that".

That higher power is "if you are dead, you can no longer participate in this universe".

I can't believe a grown adult really believes something this naive.

I just assume it is a type of performance.

Maybe I am just naive. Can you shed some light and explain why you believe that war is inevitable?

he won't because all they do is project their bad childhood into a false sense of self sufficiency that is entirely based on tacticool clothes/cars while very well knowing his self sufficiency relies solely on not being part of some minority.

The way your high-powered mind leads you astray with compelling false gymnastics is impressive, but obviously satisfies its own projective emotional need. Turn your perception inward rather than finding the demons outside to make real progress?

So if you where living in Nazi Germany you still saying these words?

I know a nation need to be powerful to defend it self from evil but you don't have to be evil murdering millions of people because you don't like their faith.

I'm just stating the obvious - wars are inevitable and hence every nation is directing significant ressources to self defense (and quite a lot to offense too).

What does it have to do with Nazi Germany ?

Related to the supposed inevitability of war AND nazi Germany, I recommend Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. It’s a good catalog of the choices, both economic and philosophical, on all sides, leading up to it (and contrasted with pacifists).

I think it's a lot more nuanced than this. Defense can be perceived as threatening and cause others to increase their defense, as per Balance of Threat theory and the security dilemma, creating a feedback loop (arms race) that leads to a lose-lose situation, primarily for the weak, but also eventually for the strong.

I am not advocating against defense spending as a category. I am saying it needs to be done skilfully and as a last resort, with the understanding that it is only coherent in a world without a unipolar security architecture, and is therefore hopefully temporary.

> can we stop acting like it's a choice

By 'it', I assume you mean war? Sure, right after we stop acting like all weapons are only ever used defensively.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the particular weapons being discussed here (precision targeting capabilities) are probably a lot more likely to be useful to an aggressor than to a defender.

Why would precision targeting be more useful to an aggressor than to a defender? In the last few months Ukraine has been achieving significant results with long-range precision drone strikes targeting a few key production facilities in Russia's military supply chains. If you can knock out the one factory that is the primary bottleneck for manufacturing a key weapons system then that acts as a serious force multiplier.

That's a fair point. However I was thinking of products designed to enable the targeting of individual humans.

War will happen as long as ignorance exists. Ignorance may exist as long as humans exist, but let's not pretend that humans are not responsible for wars.

I take your general points. There is a saying "there is no right or wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong."

Violence is the unnecessary use of force. It may occasionally be necessary to kill in self defense, but it is always a tragedy. Killing people is both bad and a choice. This is actually a harder reality to face than "people be violent".

This is meaningless distinction

They're now using it on Americans in collaboration with the current regime. It's absolutely a choice.

Any non-defensive war is a choice. In otherwords every war the US has fought since the war for independence has been a choice (yes, this includes the WWs).

That would be okay if it weren't used by the US that has killed tens of millions on innocent civilians in their invasion of other countries.

This was actually surprisingly clear. This, and htrp's comment are much clearer than the entire noise article.

They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".

Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.

My understanding is this used to be done via powerpoints shared over email so I guess having SAAS for it is an improvement?

And before that, Kissinger was hand-editing military plans for strikes in Vietnam - bolstered only by an overinflated ego - that definitely pretty much just got farmers killed. So the PowerPoints were an improvement I guess lol

Looks like they make pretty dashboards for action movies like Mission Impossible.

I think of MAD and how it creates peace.

In the same way, do people who do things to paint targets on their foreheads read this stuff, and think twice?

A lot of criminals are rational.

> You can just look at their website

Do you really expect journalists to do that? What's next - expecting them to travel to countries they're reporting on? It's not the 90s for gott's sake

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