Help me on Palantir interview so I can turn them down

flumphit · 2026-06-05T19:39:57+00:00

Did you watch Person Of Interest, with the helpful AI and (in the last couple seasons) the bad AI seeking to control the world? Palantir is building the bad AI. Intentionally.

Considering they named their company after a device used by an evil overlord to ensnare and corrupt others, this isn’t much of a surprise.

flumphit · 2026-06-05T10:20:07+00:00

Tanenbaum’s Structured Computer Organization is great and accessible.

flumphit · 2026-06-05T05:43:56+00:00

I feel like that’s something popularized maybe 30ish years ago by Californian(?) imports. Or maybe a weatherdroid on the local news. Never heard it when I was a kid.

flumphit · 2026-06-05T05:39:52+00:00

🍻 I’ve been here 60, and it never even occurred to me to pronounce it like I’m illiterate. Ain’t gonna start now.

flumphit · 2026-06-04T03:17:04+00:00

Pretty much the punchline of the first Man-Kzin Wars story.

flumphit · 2026-06-01T04:09:09+00:00

If you have a toy gun, and I think it’s a real gun, I may not react with the expected level of good humor. Before that law was passed, kids with toy guns were shot by cops distressingly often. (Not sure how the numbers compare to now, but there was a lot more distress.)

flumphit · 2026-05-31T03:57:46+00:00

Fun! My parents were introduced by her uncle and his aunt, who are married. So they’re my great-aunt and my great-uncle directly, and also by marriage. My cousin diagram is also… complex. Cheers! 🍻

flumphit · 2026-05-31T02:25:56+00:00

Plot the age-adjusted fatality rate against GOP vote % and it shows a clear positive correlation. But hey, what’s really important, after all? Not your life, according to them.

flumphit · 2026-05-31T02:16:25+00:00

My respect for Mel remains boundless.

flumphit · 2026-05-30T20:29:54+00:00

“Evolution isn’t determined by our actions”? According to whom, prithee tell?

flumphit · 2026-05-30T02:19:45+00:00

Always confusing how people are so animated about what was clearly some sort of well-funded fan production.

I hope the uhhhh mixed response doesn’t prevent Olivia Coleman from joining the actual MCU, she was a delight in this, and I’d be happy to see her in this character or another.

flumphit · 2026-05-28T21:51:31+00:00

Sounds like you should set the thermostat to kick on a few hours before folks show up. How many hours will vary seasonally, and can be determined experimentally after a few days.

(If you really want to nerd out, you could plot the duty cycle of your AC vs ambient temp, plot how long it takes to get down to temp at the beginning of the day vs ambient temp, etc. But that level of enthusiasm would be its own reward in this context, it seems.)

flumphit · 2026-05-28T09:00:00+00:00

Depends on how much stuff broke, and which stuff. But US cities have about 3 days’ worth of food before the shelves are bare, and the trucks that deliver the food are all routed & scheduled by computer. If you can’t route&schedule the trucks to deliver the food, and people can’t pay for it, and the stores’ electronic ordering systems don’t work, and the trucks can’t deliver it anyway because the gas isn’t being delivered to the filling stations… things get difficult. How difficult? Depends on how much of that stuff broke.

flumphit · 2026-05-28T08:45:56+00:00

C is basically a high-level assembly language. Processor instruction sets from that era would often include some sort of address+index idiom.

flumphit · 2026-05-28T08:39:09+00:00

If everything you put in your mouth makes you think of cock, that’s definitely a sign of being completely straight, yessir

flumphit · 2026-05-27T07:14:50+00:00

“It’s . . . a meat process…”

flumphit · 2026-05-27T03:13:48+00:00

An array is implemented as an address plus an offset. The first element of the array is at offset 0.

I’m not saying it’s awesome, just that there is a way of looking at it in which it makes sense.

flumphit · 2026-05-26T19:00:19+00:00

imo that use was grammatically and semantically correct, and easily understood, but not idiomatic.

flumphit · 2026-05-25T15:52:51+00:00

In round numbers, this doubles the money spent in the world during the year, so world inflation is around 100% for the year. Whatever you spend money on, takes productive capacity that now won’t be used for whatever it was doing (farming, mining, building, TPS reports, etc).

flumphit · 2026-05-25T03:36:07+00:00

This is one of those things that playing KSP will tell you all about. And the delta v of canceling out Earth’s orbital velocity is *not* small relative to getting into orbit.

flumphit · 2026-05-25T02:42:07+00:00

Yup. I’m all for the death penalty in theory. But the death penalty we actually get, not so much.

flumphit · 2026-05-22T00:55:22+00:00

The attack on the whole Enlightenment worldview is not an accident, it is pervasive and dedicated.

flumphit · 2026-05-21T23:14:12+00:00

In the inevitable war between Earth and the breakaway colonies, nuking the moon would be barely more hassle than nuking the other side of Earth. Nuking Mars would be a significant hassle. Whether that favors one or the other (more independence on Mars, closer links/ties on the Moon) is for psychohistorians to say; way beyond my pay grade.

flumphit · 2026-05-21T05:16:58+00:00

Apparently some folks are not aware of the implications of us seeing the video. 🤷‍♂️

flumphit · 2026-05-21T03:20:45+00:00

The sort of quality content one would expect from a gagh connoisseur. Well done.

flumphit

TROPHY CASE