I don't see them conflating Zionism and Judaism. 100% of Zionists will reference the Holocaust as one of the justifications for committing genocide against the Palestinians. I think the parent is pointing that out.
I disagree, but you could be right. however, if so, then they should have pointed out this distinction themselves.
also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.
reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.
but that's not what's happening.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.
> Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives
How so? I honestly haven't heard this before. I like Anduril's tech and have some friends who work there. I would be excited to work at Anduril but my skills have diverged away from what they do and so I wouldn't make a very good hire.
you might wonder, reading this, how a person could say "I honestly haven't heard this before" about such a widely-discussed topic, in a thread about that topic, when the OP is a paper about a very closely related topic. it is, under the circumstances, a surprising assertion.
the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.
> companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started
this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.
first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.
second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.
third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.
What you said re moats might be true but can't actually be concluded from the Tailwind story. Traffic to the funnel dropped by more than half. That easily explains their problems, and says nothing about moats.
Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business.
If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.
I was imagining their moat was having a monopoly on where you go to get documentation for the free product, and that's how they sell the for-profit product. If that monopoly is lost (people get the answers they need without going to the store), the moat is gone.
I think this is reasonable but incorrect. Tailwind didn't say "our conversion rates went down." They said the traffic to their docs site went down.
Their funnel depended on SEO, and LLMs took SEO out of the equation. What you said about the value of pre-built components might also be true but can't be determined from a situation where consumers suddenly all stopped learning that the pre-built components exist. Occam's Razor says it's the funnel.
the post says: I wanted to start from scratch and learn music from first principles, and I began that journey by writing code.
but we know that's not true. you began that journey in Claude Code, or Codex, or ChatGPT, or whatever. you just want to demo your startup that embeds JavaScript in web pages.
> If "free speech" was a valid defense for you, then Meta would be doing the same.
Meta lobbied heavily for this. The fact that they have not decided to use free speech to fight the move that they are lobbying for is not an argument that free speech is irrelevant here.
This is not legal advice but a personal request: please do not get your legal advice from Hacker News. Get it from a lawyer.
> If "free speech" was a valid defense to any legal compliance laws that affect software, then any software company would raise this defense this rather than comply.
And in fact, Apple in 2016 went to court rather than comply with the government's order to put a backdoor in the iPhone, and they argued their case in part on free speech grounds.
Whether other companies do the same depends on what they consider the most profitable path, including legal fees and risk.
Don’t read too much into the Apple case. There was no precedent set by that. The FBI withdrew their demands after they found a different mechanism to obtain what they needed.
Of course there was no precedent set. They were using a precedent that had already been set. We'll never know how it would have turned out, but the previous comment implied that corporations always comply rather than going to court on the grounds that code is speech, so I posted a well-known counterexample.
this conflation is extremely unhelpful
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