Quite a lot packed in here. Reading Hoffman's description of blitzscaling's benefits, it focuses in how it affects the competition. Who is DOGE's competition? Why, federal employees, of course. The other thing is blitzscaling is almost exactly how Agile programming is executed in the real world, not in its defined theoretical model. The supposed engine of the Agile model is the painstaking front-end requirements gathering, plus ongoing evaluation of the evolving product by end users. The 2 most expensive parts, and the first to get cut.
Anyone, anywhere harping on efficiency as a goal in itself is selling you a pig in a poke. The efficiency is almost always in the system itself, not the product or service delivered. As that idealized description of Palantir's business model describes, efficiency applied to an end goal is difficult, expensive, and political. Far easier to make the process more efficient, plus it increases profits! Collateral damage is just another process to manage, which can in turn be made more efficient, like Amazon delivery.
I suppose one could apply blitzscaling to the dissemination of memes, like religion, that go back thousands of years. Using force to convert populations to a particular religion might be counted as blitzscaling.
The Chinese social surveillance system is partially blitzscaling by technology, and partially human scaling of censors. The US is going for full technology, which I suspect is why errors keep happening, like relying on facial recognition by machines and not checking the results, sometimes with fatal consequences. I can easily imagine AI being embodied in some Omni Consumer Products ED209 by some tech company cosying up to Trump, just as I G Farben did with the Nazi administration with Zyklon B for use in the death camps.
Someone should rephrase Vance's disgusting verbiage about dealing with immigration into a pastiche of how Reinhard Heydrich talked about implementing the "final solution" to the Jewish problem. Vance has sidled up to becoming a neo-Nazi. Dorothy Thompson would undoubtedly have picked him out in her piece "<a href="https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/">Who Goes Nazi?</a>
This makes me wonder about the relationship of tech to overriding due process in *pre*-DOGE govtech. The use of Salesforce or Microsoft Azure among civil servants, e.g.
If the guy (Hoffman) who enabled the no real employees just contractors via a jobs scam website you have to be on to be employable in most cities is one of the 'good guys' we're really in trouble.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't know how you could ever work for a digital surveillance company started by Peter Thiel, Joe Londsdale, Alex Karp and claim that the current company has "pivoted".
That ex-Palantir guy was using classic consultant-speak. What he described is the proper and practical way to actually deliver what consultant sales reps promise. Navigating the cultural and political land mines in redesigning or replacing a business process is highly complex, time consuming, and difficult. Requires massive diplomatic skills as well as the ability to locate, extract and consume a lot of arcane technical data, which is often Larry over there who's the only person who knows how that part works, and for some reason has never documented it.
As far as working for Evil, Inc, most people do, but just don't get their nose rubbed in it at the office. Palantir probably isn't any different.
Re "power law logic", I enjoyed Shalizi's slide deck, but it applies to situations where you have a definite probability generating process but have mis-identified it as a power law distribution. Asking whether the SV growth model is "really" a power law seems like a wrong question; there is no definite underlying probability generating process which is "correct", the term is just being used informally to describe a preference for very fast growth. That's either more innocuous or even more annoying than looking for a straight line on a log-log plot, depending on your perspective.
But Levine's characterization "a basket of options is worth more than an option on a basket" seems fine.
Quite a lot packed in here. Reading Hoffman's description of blitzscaling's benefits, it focuses in how it affects the competition. Who is DOGE's competition? Why, federal employees, of course. The other thing is blitzscaling is almost exactly how Agile programming is executed in the real world, not in its defined theoretical model. The supposed engine of the Agile model is the painstaking front-end requirements gathering, plus ongoing evaluation of the evolving product by end users. The 2 most expensive parts, and the first to get cut.
Anyone, anywhere harping on efficiency as a goal in itself is selling you a pig in a poke. The efficiency is almost always in the system itself, not the product or service delivered. As that idealized description of Palantir's business model describes, efficiency applied to an end goal is difficult, expensive, and political. Far easier to make the process more efficient, plus it increases profits! Collateral damage is just another process to manage, which can in turn be made more efficient, like Amazon delivery.
In the case of DOGE however, collateral damage is "managed" by sweeping it under the rug.
I suppose one could apply blitzscaling to the dissemination of memes, like religion, that go back thousands of years. Using force to convert populations to a particular religion might be counted as blitzscaling.
The Chinese social surveillance system is partially blitzscaling by technology, and partially human scaling of censors. The US is going for full technology, which I suspect is why errors keep happening, like relying on facial recognition by machines and not checking the results, sometimes with fatal consequences. I can easily imagine AI being embodied in some Omni Consumer Products ED209 by some tech company cosying up to Trump, just as I G Farben did with the Nazi administration with Zyklon B for use in the death camps.
Someone should rephrase Vance's disgusting verbiage about dealing with immigration into a pastiche of how Reinhard Heydrich talked about implementing the "final solution" to the Jewish problem. Vance has sidled up to becoming a neo-Nazi. Dorothy Thompson would undoubtedly have picked him out in her piece "<a href="https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/">Who Goes Nazi?</a>
As I was reading this "Enshitification" came to mind.
This makes me wonder about the relationship of tech to overriding due process in *pre*-DOGE govtech. The use of Salesforce or Microsoft Azure among civil servants, e.g.
If the guy (Hoffman) who enabled the no real employees just contractors via a jobs scam website you have to be on to be employable in most cities is one of the 'good guys' we're really in trouble.
Narrator: they were really in trouble.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't know how you could ever work for a digital surveillance company started by Peter Thiel, Joe Londsdale, Alex Karp and claim that the current company has "pivoted".
That ex-Palantir guy was using classic consultant-speak. What he described is the proper and practical way to actually deliver what consultant sales reps promise. Navigating the cultural and political land mines in redesigning or replacing a business process is highly complex, time consuming, and difficult. Requires massive diplomatic skills as well as the ability to locate, extract and consume a lot of arcane technical data, which is often Larry over there who's the only person who knows how that part works, and for some reason has never documented it.
As far as working for Evil, Inc, most people do, but just don't get their nose rubbed in it at the office. Palantir probably isn't any different.
Re "power law logic", I enjoyed Shalizi's slide deck, but it applies to situations where you have a definite probability generating process but have mis-identified it as a power law distribution. Asking whether the SV growth model is "really" a power law seems like a wrong question; there is no definite underlying probability generating process which is "correct", the term is just being used informally to describe a preference for very fast growth. That's either more innocuous or even more annoying than looking for a straight line on a log-log plot, depending on your perspective.
But Levine's characterization "a basket of options is worth more than an option on a basket" seems fine.