I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper.
I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thought I was being pranked. The writing, tone, complexity had all plummeted to the level of a child. That paper is basically for people who can’t figure out how to get their news from Yahoo. The Same people who get value from TV Guide.
Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.
With that going on, it's hard to imagine there once was a time where the news paper publishers hat little to no signal on what actually sold news papers. Given that papers were only sold as a bundle of articles and most sold through subscribers, they pretty much had to guess. So they had a rough direction they knew their readers expected and they had some sparse feedback from the "letters to the editor" but you had to be really angry to follow through on writing a physical letter, getting a stamp and walk to the post box just to complain.
I would argue, that helped journalism because journalists probably assumed that their readers would hold them to the same standards they hold the writers of the other papers too.
Even with moral issues aside, Palantir is absurdly expensive and seems to be focused on selling buzzwords over actual value and tech. It’s like crack for non-technical big wigs.
My question is this: why is Palantir required for this kind of fairly basic data analysis? Couldn't they use much cheaper, probably open platforms for data science & analytics?
I'm curious to see what the crossing of a newspaper network and a mercenary kill optimizer will produce. Is Palantir getting a propaganda arm extension?
Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?
This will be fun. Currently dealing with Palantir trying to work their away into where I work. All I can say is I’m glad it’s going the way it is and thankful the CEO has gone public that he is “leading all AI” decisions
Yeah it’s a complete disaster. They are trying to usurp all data; even employee personal data off devices via MDM that has no relevance to the project. They also asked for api keys to everything (in a regulated environment). And if you thought their forward deployed team knew anything about GRC, think again
Being awful is easy when you start, but think about how much they have worked, how hard they have worked, how much an anti-anti-christ they must have proved themselves to be, what Indiana Jones traps they must have escaped to reach Palantir's CEO from the lobby, how many kids they probably have sacrificed to Satan, to get a contract from one of the most prominent and established war crime houses in history, to do what Google Analytics could do with copy-pasting three lines of code and signing in with your own Google account — just so they could burn their already-gone reputation and keep being one of the worst ways to waste human labor, office space, servers, and dead trees. This takes work, and I must admit I'm in total awe. This is going way beyond the competition to prove something, even if that something is the stupidest thing the laws of physics can handle.
"After 12 months of data analysis, we have arrived at the conclusion that our average customer was born before 1957 and thinks the country to going to hell in a hand basket."
Search traffic is failing for everyone because of AI, you don't need a billion dollars to figure that out.
Surprised we haven't yet seen paid advertisement interwoven into news article text in a way that feeds AI scrapers yet, wouldn't it be nice to drink a Coke right now?
There's no law that says you have to disclose advertisement to chatbots, so you could mark it up in a way that only humans see the disclosure and poison the bot to remind everyone that not only are we at war with Iran, but Coca-Cola is still America's favorite soft drink.
Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.
This is the continuation of Operation Mockingbird. After it was exposed in the 70's by the Pike and Church Committee's, they reorganized privately using Allen & Co's Billaionaire's SummerCamp to consolidate the media (and now Social Media) industries for maximum control of the narrative. Each year they meet to further consolidate the media industry.
I've been protesting there for 7 years now, and this was the first year the Democratic Socialists of America showed up. It was a major improvement. Next year the rest of you need to show up.
Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies. The propaganda was much too obvious. I don't think a Palantir partnership is going to change my mind.
Hacker News occasionally indexed Palestinian voices but this was a breath of fresh air compared to outlets like USA Today. I'm actually constantly conflicted about the sources I consume and still seek alternatives. If they want me to view more of their content, including more authoritarian surveillance technology is not the right move.
USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data
(niemanlab.org)188 points by cdrnsf 17 hours ago | 75 comments
Comments
I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thought I was being pranked. The writing, tone, complexity had all plummeted to the level of a child. That paper is basically for people who can’t figure out how to get their news from Yahoo. The Same people who get value from TV Guide.
Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.
I would argue, that helped journalism because journalists probably assumed that their readers would hold them to the same standards they hold the writers of the other papers too.
Also, I remember staying at a hotel once where they delivered one to every guest room.
My, how times have changed.
Yeah it’s a complete disaster. They are trying to usurp all data; even employee personal data off devices via MDM that has no relevance to the project. They also asked for api keys to everything (in a regulated environment). And if you thought their forward deployed team knew anything about GRC, think again
Surprised we haven't yet seen paid advertisement interwoven into news article text in a way that feeds AI scrapers yet, wouldn't it be nice to drink a Coke right now?
There's no law that says you have to disclose advertisement to chatbots, so you could mark it up in a way that only humans see the disclosure and poison the bot to remind everyone that not only are we at war with Iran, but Coca-Cola is still America's favorite soft drink.
Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.
https://webdoodle.substack.com
I've been protesting there for 7 years now, and this was the first year the Democratic Socialists of America showed up. It was a major improvement. Next year the rest of you need to show up.
Hacker News occasionally indexed Palestinian voices but this was a breath of fresh air compared to outlets like USA Today. I'm actually constantly conflicted about the sources I consume and still seek alternatives. If they want me to view more of their content, including more authoritarian surveillance technology is not the right move.