curious to hear from current or ex palantir people on hn. the company’s tech always had some dystopian potential it seems to me. did you see it from a “protect the nation” angle?
Dropbox is unavailable to huge populations. also sharing private bits with a cloud service should not be necessary to transfer files locally between devices. at least user level file encryption should become straightforward on a mobile device which it is not today.
please consider revisiting this post when/if you or a loved one are on the receiving end of a terminal illness diagnosis. which i don’t wish on anyone.
as someone who lives in that perspective, and has lots many loved ones to such diseases.. I wonder if you have ever really considered the prospect of immortality and the implications.
A lot of our worldly meaning is derived from the fact that the clock is ticking. Death of progenitors increases the quality of life for the offspring in almost every single metric, more so for long-lived species that require little protection past a certain growth milestone, and personally I see it as a specific 'human arrogance'; if someone had the idea of "Let's make all the field mice immortal" the first opinion would be "that's ridiculous, the ecosphere would be thrown entirely out of balance, the entire predatory chain would be upheaved."... but when we talk about human immortality it always falls back to "Well, don't you miss dear old Grandma serf?"
I miss her dearly, but the fact of the matter is that the world wouldn't survive long without a death/life cycle for its' inhabitants, and I think that should include the ones that are the most dangerous to the world at large.
p.s. if you need a laymen excuse : i've read enough scifi dystopia tales that begin with the concept of human immortality and the gradual fall of every single moral barrier or raison d'etre ; I don't think that premise is too far from what may happen if humanity is ever given a choice against death.
i am sorry to hear about the losses you’ve had to endure. i feel it’s an over-large step to go from which factors should guide research to whether humanity should seek immortality. if a child is stricken with glioblastoma before they’ve had a chance to experience life, i would argue that it would be positive and humane for society to have developed the tools to give that young life a chance and their family some hope.
My mother died when I was on the verge of turning my life around. There are new developments in treating the cancer - glioblastima - than there were at the time. She was worried sick about me and knew I was on the right path, but never actually saw me succeed. I think about it a lot.
I still fully believe we need to start discussing how long we want to live. Along-side maybe getting to show my mom my fortunate outcome, Putin could be up for another 25 elections.
We shouldn’t arrive at that moment without an answer to that question.
Besides, death comes for us all. It’s the most natural thing of all. We should be less scared of it, and instead use it to understand we have a limited time we must make the most of.
thank you for sharing this story and i hope the miracles in glioblastoma treatment continue to astound. i do agree that it’s fundamental to live life knowing there are no guarantees and that we must therefore make the best of every allotted bit of time. there is a famous saying about science progressing one funeral at a time because new perspectives sometimes require that the old guard step aside before they can take hold.
i do this with email from my financial institutions that i care about. i login to their “secure messaging “ portal and grab pdf export of the web page.
I’ve reluctantly come to the view that Apple is the best bet for a consumer to get a somewhat reasonable (price notwithstanding) compromise between hardware vertical integration and software that offers substantial bug bounties and large market incentives to not allow bad vulnerabilities to sit for too long. With deep enough pockets to hang tough if needed in various situations.
I completely agree about the buggy bloated software but all I’m saying is that it’s the best bet compared to actual consumer alternatives which are generally a frankenmix of the lowest cost components sourced from the lowest cost vendor with minimum effort spent to ensure and maintain any semblance of security.
I got fired at the tail end of 2023; I did have COBRA but the cost for it was astronomical; to continue my coverage for me and my wife was almost 4 grand a month. [1]
It's certainly better to have COBRA, and it does reduce the power that companies have over your health, but it's not a silver bullet.
[1] I won't say which company I was working for but it's not hard to find my work history if you want to make sure which companies to avoid in the future.
I’m sorry to hear this. I’m dealing with an insurance company right now that can’t be bothered to bring up its customer portal after a two week outage.
My goal is to help my friend who is suffering in current situation . Not give free labor to a major corporation.
One thing I wonder is whether there’s an out of the box available login system I can just adopt for such an app. In big tech these things are just ambient available. Similarly what’s the cheapest hosting option for pro bono? AWS seems expensive. Vercel?
That much is certain. My hope is that a narrow tailored action like this could show such strong nps support within the group, that the corp would have to have to look at its own internal metrics and conclude they should have taken a different course if only from a fiduciary perspective. I doubt such a thing will happen because the company already displays dystopian levels of cynicism and my friend has been there long enough to have observed bad behavior over long periods but has some strong personal incentives to remain (both reputations and financial).
