I can not imagine the mental gymnastics of people working for Clothoff
They have two types of people:
- Software Engineers and Computer Scientists that don’t care who gets hurt as long as they get to work on their interesting problem. I call them the Wernher von Braun club.
- The ones that are also prospective customers
The Venn Diagram might be close to a circle.
Yeah I think a lot about the guy I knew that took a job at palantir. When asked about working on questionable stuff, he just shrugged. He was always nice to people he knew personally, so far as I can tell, but bigger picture stuff didn’t seem to matter to him
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
—Upton Sinclair
That’s the thing, Software Engineers have choices.
Yes, all big companies will do some dubious things.
But then you have big tech that does all those dubious things and is also breaking democratic institutions everywhere with a sledgehammer.
And then you have Palentir, which are literally Hollywood movie villains.
At this point they are light years of their livelihood depending on it. There’s no way they don’t notice where the bombs are falling, they had plenty of time to look around and have decided they don’t care.
