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You really have to wonder at what point there will be legal consequences from these incidents.

Disgusting that they are, unintentionally but incredibly irresponsibly, actively vandalizing cyberspace with impunity.


"Palantir-like"

I guess you've chosen to do the editorializing for the writers in lieu of their presence here.


Explain, it looks like samdesk is in a more narrow domain but overlapping and very related methods and business. Un-palantir-like seems like it would be a stronger editorialization.

Palantir sell consulting services ("forward deployed engineering") around graph and map database platforms, using data supplied by customers. Some of their customers ask them to make surveillance aggregation systems, others ask them to make totally banal and random enterprise software (this is why you commonly see freak-outs around hospitals buying "Palantir," for example; usually they are operating as consultants making some kind of medical records warehousing system owned by the customer).

Samdesk provide risk analytics using traditional risk analysis investigation and research, which they have now welded an "AI platform" to, like everyone does these days. They aggregate crime and protest data to make a map of "places your employees might be at risk" and sell it to companies.

Samdesk would be a Palantir _customer_ if they liked parting with their money, not a competitor; Palantir operate at a much "lower level" and don't do the data collection or research on their own.


If by "overlapping and very related methods" you mean "use any form of data analysis whatsoever" then, yup, they are basically the same company.

If I heard Palantir-like I wouldn't assume something like a perfect mirror competitor company.

Well they're also actually partnering with Palantir too. Claude was the model integrated into their Maven system that helped the US military determine targets in Iran (including the Minab elementary school)

They are literally a Palantir competitor: https://www.samdesk.io/about-us

Weird that they don't compare themselves to Palantir then!

https://imgur.com/a/eKAQKSN


Why would you take any of these companies at their word? They know Palantir is toxic.

Your 4D chess model of their thinking is that the risk they run of mentioning a direct competitor, that their potential customers would also be considering, is so great that the value of that comparison is dwarfed by the costs of the risk, so they don't do it. This is some next level strategic thinking.

I have to wonder, though, why doesn't Palantir mention them? https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apalantir.com+samdesk

They seem to mention actual competitors: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apalantir.com+c3

Given your 4D chess logic, they really should be mentioning all their competitors to poison their wells.


This isn't as complicated as you're making it. Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes. Flock is similar. Do they have exactly the same business model? No. But their brand is spying on the public and protecting those in power.

"Motte? Meet Bailey."

> Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes.

Look at some of these "surveillance tools" that they are marketing to "oppressive regimes". Their website brags about these deeply oppressive surveillance features:

- Identifying material threats to your workforce - Integration with Concur and your HRIS

Look at some of the "oppressive regimes" they sell to, such as the evil Amnesty International: https://imgur.com/a/U4Zef3x


We're literally commenting on an article where this company tracked anti-AI activists and Anthropic actioned on that.

We're literally commenting on an article where Samdesk flagged a public protest to Anthropic security and Anthropic employees chose to not go by it. The absolute EVIL of a public protest being avoided by people is UNSPEAKABLE. That a company would ever even consider offering information about public protests to people is OPPRESSIVE.

Unironically yes.

Unironically oppressive: https://www.actiontogetherwest.org/bayarea

Unironically oppressive: https://indivisiblesf.org/events

Unironically oppressive: https://aroc.herokuapp.com/events/

Per you.


Again, tracking anti-AI protests to help AI executives avoid being held responsible for their company's actions is oppressive. I don't care what PR this company does to try to whitewash its image. Their actions speak louder than their propaganda.

This is not at all what Palantir OR SamDesk does. SamDesk processes and sells data (eg, has agreements with various news/social media websites etc and converts that to a nice API of events). Palantir sells software to use all sorts of data, including stuff like SamDesk (hence why I suspect plenty of Palantir customers are ALSO SamDesk customers). They're complimentary rather than competing products.

> I'm a paid Gemini subscriber via Workspace Standard accounts and yet I also only have access to 3.6.

Same and I have found it extremely annoying. I actually really like the Gemini models for question/answer stuff and reach for it before Claude (the other model family I have purchased) but it's getting long in the tooth at this point and I'm finding my Gemini usage shrinking to nearly 0.


  You are right that this is hard from a prompt alone, but for a slightly stranger
  reason than the obvious one. The model never sees columns. It sees tokens, and a
  token can be one character or nine, so "make this line 80 wide" asks it to run a
  hidden tally over pieces it cannot count by looking at them. Any slip early in a
  line compounds, and there is no backspace key to reach for once it is committed.
  That said, the failure is not total. A model can lean on a learned feel for line
  length, pick shorter or longer synonyms to land close to the target, and rewrite
  a sentence when it overshoots. It will not be perfect every time, but it lands a
  lot more often than pure chance would suggest. The sampling trick you mention is
  the real fix: mask each token that would push a line past the limit, and force a
  newline the moment the count hits the mark. That converts a fuzzy instruction to
  a hard constraint with zero training. Fine tuning helps too, but mostly sharpens
  the same internal counter rather than replacing it. This reply is a small proof;
  if any line here is off by one, feel free to consider your point demonstrated...


> I saw a couple video demos recently, and was horrified that it seemed one had to memorize a dozen key binding shortcuts to really use it.

Whoa! You have to _learn_ something to use it well? Yikes. Not for me.


conventions are a good things so you can minimise relearning.


Learn emacs once and use ratpoison, readline and rlwrap everywhere.


People REALLY want the open models to be better than the frontier labs'.


investors REALLY want the closed models to stay frontier forevery. mmw the future of AI will be local and offline


The writing really is inscrutable at times.


Gruber is always happy to lead with his emotions and backfill justifications for them. See his recent debacle with App Store review: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...


It's so weird how distorted your view of any of these concepts are from what these people actually say. I don't think you've ever seriously looked into either group if you believe any of their views support what you say. In fact, many EAs and "longetermists" are explicitly AGAINST the development of AGI.


If you say so. I’ve been following the development of both groups since almost a decade, I’m pretty confident I understand their concepts and what values they stand for


Please explain an EA position that could possibly suggest that they would deprioritize human lives in order to make AGI more comfortable when, for example, the largest EA philanthropy organization, Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy, has given millions to Yudkowksy's MIRI which is currently among the most anti-AGI organizations on the planet?

Can you find any explicitly EA organization that is at all aligned in perspective with anything you suggested?


Open Philantrophy was founded by Holden Karnofsky who was Dario Armodei's roommate and is married to his sister Daniela Armodei. He now works for Anthropic, a company that is explicitly building AGI.


Thanks for making an account to post this.

Working to build AI at the company that is most publicly discussing the risks posed by AI to humanity and most advocating for guardrails (while getting an immense amount of flack for implementing them independently) doesn't seem to support anything about what you, or rather the other person said, about sacrificing humanity for anything AI related.


I don't really agree with the other commenter, I don't think EAs are intentionally sacrificing humanity for AI, but the fact it's unintentional doesn't really change the fact this is what they are doing.

Anthropic are explicitly building ASI, using recursive self improvement, with no knowledge of how to control it. They spend only a minimal fraction of their funds on safety work, none of which relates to controlling ASI.

I am open to being wrong about Anthropic, but it will be hard to convince me that a company developing ASI is prioritising safety. Do you really believe what they are doing is safe?


I truly don't see any major problem with what they're doing. For any current significant risk (security, bio risks), their models are notoriously useless.


This is an odd take. OpenAI models you use are pretty useless for hacking. The models they have seem to be pretty damned good at it.

It's kind of like saying you can't kill everyone with weapons when you're looking at what you can buy at the local Walmart and not what's in the 1000 foot deep missile silo.

Also, it's kind of a once you build it, it's too late kind of issue. No model will be good enough, the problem is still in the future, we're all dead.


If he believes it is as dangerous as he says while raisimg money and building it, he should STOP and work on slowing down the bubble.

Instead, he is turbocharging development, otherwise said choosing to cause harm he warns about.

That is literaly example of causing harm now and in near future, not caring about people now, only about vision.


https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/anthropic-hired-president-dan...

He works on the safety team and their responsible scaling policies. He literally may be working on slowing down AGI progress at Anthropic.


They are not stopping. Simple as that. The quadrilles and regulations they ask are all about slowing down competition but not them.

Hiring own husband to safety team while you raise money for (their words!) doom machine, while you do your utmost to scare people while you try to raise even more money from investors on doom ... does not show OP was not correct in their assessment.


Ah yes, the public health representative of the tobacco company.


Out of curiosity, what does an explicit "anti-AGI" AI research organization do? Train a "definitely not AGI" AI?


The EAs told me a monster will come get me if I don't put all of my effort into developing an AGI...


[flagged]


Specify the action for which you wish violence on these people?

BTW, not sure what gets more anti-human and evil than wishing violence on whole groups of people!


This is the perfect example of a delusional HN comment. None of it makes any sense, most notably the idea that VCs are buying any of this server hardware.

It's so bad I can only guess that it's purposefully so. "sell like cupcakes"????


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