HN Reader

- [Palantir] A surveillance company used by by spy agencies

- [Meta] A social media company that has all your personal conversations & pictures, video, audio

- [Open AI] Something many people at work & school are uploading sensitive data to

- All run by acolytes of Peter Thiel

- Current president & vp are bankrolled Peter Thiel

- Top executives formally recruited into US Army.

USA is sleep walking into something very nasty. I still don't know what it is.

But please when it unravels. Let us not pretend we never saw it coming.

I am very worried about this. Something is being set up.

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270660

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268547

This seems a little weird to me, but direct commissions like this are pretty common for professionals like lawyers, clergy, and doctors.

There's apparently a long history of honorary or symbolic reservist rank being given to civilian advisors; a good starting Google search is "dollar-a-year men".

Should make them go through basic.

>The Palantir executive pointed to “exploding pagers and long-distance drone strikes from shipping containers” as attacks which “prove that technology has once again changed the battlefield,” and that “our military has to change with it.”

That's not Palantir's market segment.

If this is pointed at home, we have a problem. If this is about using the best in tech across information harvesting, artificial intelligence for use against foreign adversaries, maybe less worrying for u.s. citizens.

Grayzone is an extremely unreliable source which frequently publishes false stories with an anti-US bent [1][2]. The past discussion [3] has a WSJ link which should be preferred over this.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/02/grayzon...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268547

Maybe they'll get shipped to Iran.

I had to check if this was an April Fools joke

As a veteran, now civil servant, I think this is an excellent thing for the US military to do. BIAS: I am a PLTR shareholder and I collab with at least one of the units involved.

Another similar commissioning was the founder of Dragos, Robert M Lee who was previously a Cyber officer in the Air Force.

We need top talent from industry. These highly skilled individuals will be good pickups for the work confronting our nation in securing vital infrastructure and enabling for the future of high performance compute and AI.

https://www.robertmlee.org/back-in-military-service-from-blu...

https://www.dragos.com/team/robert-m-lee/

Does this mean if you’re under them in the org chart you are a troop?

Genuinely curious what legal waivers they’ve been afforded, since generally speaking “holding a decision-making position in the part of the uniformed services you also sell to” is very much adjacent to profiteering and disturbingly in the vicinity to honest services fraud. How do you disentangle private interests from the public good, even if these guys are operating in good faith?

Also, give a brief thought to those troops who signed on for their full hitch to defend their country and get to watch a handful of politically-connected billionaires leapfrog their way into custom-built field grade slots without having to attend basic or OCS, or even pass APFT.

This is a stupid clickbait layer on top of a neutral informative announcement: https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...

It's just a way to re-link the military with the tech industry, which is arguably how we won the previous world wars. If the US falls behind, then be prepared to learn Mandarin.

I'm wondering if maybe there's a non-anti-Semitic source for this? It seems like there ought to be, given that it's reporting on something purportedly published on Twitter.

This is just a direct commission which is commonly done to integrate people into the military who have skills necessary for its continued operation but who don't have the time or need to go through the normal training, process, and schools.

It's how Pete Buttigieg got his commission, for example.

I wonder if they asked them LeetCode questions

"If you are not a libertarian at twenty, you have no heart, and if you’re not a state nationalist at forty, you have no brain"

- Benito Friedman

Peter Thiel's 20-year pursuit of ensuring technology companies, and their accompanied data, are used as a highly-efficient machine for surveillance - and plutocratic-endorsed authoritarianism - is almost actualized.

I guess creating an ecosystem of these products in the form of having most of them come from the same venture capital company WAS the answer, and he was doing it so well - that even In-Q-Tel gave up on their efforts to compete with that strategy.

But Thiel said it best in that regard; "competition is for losers".