AWS (and many others) is also then war profiteering company with JWCC, C2E, WildandStormy, not to mention all the other defense contractors that rely on their computer power to design and operate mass surveillance and killing of people. Is your agenda selectively blind?
not OP but yes, i consider the tech sphere's dive into mass surveillance to be war profiteering and have eliminated or minimized several in my life including amazon and spotify.
for the same reason GP assumed war profiteering. Guy is maybe and probably, based on his talks, interested in his homeland's defense. Maybe he's in it for the tech. Every defense company is war profiteering and thus unethical, especially this one? That's not only uncalled for, but absolutely cancerous thought as exemplified by the thread and poison it spreads.
A friend of mine did posit the quandary that an "unpalatable" individual such as Luckey appears to be one of the few making consumer-friendly products: Removable, swappable battery packs, AA battery support, standard USB-C charging, easy interoperability, open sourced designs, exposed screws, teardown instructions, etc. Apparently ModRetro is even looking into making dumb TVs for gaming.
It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Yeah I don't really like Luckey, or what I've heard from him anyways. But in the run up to launch the Chromatic, it became pretty clear that this guy, for whatever reason, is really passionate about gameboy. I have been less impressed with the other emulator/fpga machines. the chromatic is solid though.
> It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.
It's just many people have a radically different set of ethics which, once they become principles, can't be easily, or at all, compromised on. And just to be fair, it's not just the what, but the how (which extends not just to Luckey & Friends, but to Anduril & Friends).
This propaganda against Palmer Luckey completely lacks any critical thinking. Then again, I guess all propaganda is targeted at people who aren't critical thinkers to start with, so that's why it ends up working.
I've seen this astroturfing and spreading of lies increase since he delivered weapons to Taiwan so they can defend themselves. Probably the CCP amping up their influence campaign against him.
I have mixed feelings about it. I don't agree with how my country often ends up using these technologies, but defense tech and weaponry still seems pretty necessary. The US is not the only one doing this. Should they wait for their adversaries to have the upper hand? I don't think it's such a bad thing, as long as they can put the right people in charge. That's a whole other problem.
He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools.
Your claim is similar to saying nobody should own a gun, because it should be illegal to defend yourself or others. So everyone who owns any kind of weapon is evil and bad? Only bad people are allowed to own weapons and we should just roll over?
Nobody should defend Ukraine from Russia? Anduril has been helping Ukraine since very early on.
In a 2024 speech, Luckey said "Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don't lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom." ( https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/palmer-luckey-every-countr... ). He's said in a Bloomberg interview that "there are actually things I would like to build that the DoD would not use and would not deploy, that they do think are beyond the pale" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItLFpYha6Wc ), and he's said in an Axios interview that he would be willing to build nuclear weapons, as well as chemical weapons "in a specific vertical". He then elaborates by saying that it's a huge mistake that the US military isn't allowed to use tear gas in combat. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZfW3YTJ5Eg ) I'm having trouble believing that someone like this is inherently peaceful and should be getting multi-billion dollar contracts to manufacture drones that autonomously kill people. Maybe it's better to buy a Nintendo game from someone who doesn't think that the US is being held back by war crime treaties.
Starting a weapon company is different from owning a gun. You have control over that gun. Your weapons company, those weapons will be used to kill innocent people, there is no doubt. Weapons don't only get used for clean operations in war and there is almost always collateral damage.
It is a decision to start producing regardless of how well-intentioned it is. You will be profiting off of people being maimed and killed. Various people thought they solved war through new weapons only to create more effective killing machines. That's what WW1 was.
Palmer does not have to work on weapons nor justify making them. Building tech that will be used to murder people (and yes, it will happen) is a decision. Not funding his other hobby when he's getting money off US military contracts is hardly breaking his bank. He wants to build weapons? I don't want to buy his products. Easy.
Building more efficient weapons does not make us safer. Every dollar saved through "strength" and better weapons matters little to the parents who lost their kid when the most precise weapon in the world kills a bunch of schoolchildren like it did at the start of the Iran war. If you can't gaurantee your weapons won't get used for that, why would you build them? You cannot.
The problem is that China, Russia, Iran and so on have all been accelerating their weapons manufacturing. Go complain to them.
If nobody in the world was manufacturing any weapons and it was fully observable from space, nobody would have cause to manufacture these kinds of weapons. We do not live in that world.
At some point, any reasonable person should agree that if a country exists in an environment that contains many threats it might need to defend itself or others from, then it makes complete sense for it to develop weapons towards that aim. Countries are not people, people are people. So people make the weapons.
It just so happens that Palmer Luckey is a person. He can't sell weapons to any random person or country he wants, he can only sell them to the US or with permission of the US to a country that the US has a strategic interest in defending.
Precision weapons have helped reduce casualties. This is a fact. Please try to contradict this fact in the face of napalm bombing and nuclear bombs of yesteryears. Please try to tell me that precision weapons aren't better than just randomly aiming artillery at the sky and letting'er rip. Please do. I want to hear your well founded argument for this.
We're talking about a company whose primary customer is the US military. Said military is currently involved in a pointless war of aggression. It has carried out unprovoked attacks on at least two other countries just this year alone. When was the last time the it was used in self defense?
"Peace through strength" is a fine motto, but you can't claim that motto and then turn around and base your business on selling to an entity that routinely starts non-defensive wars.
If you don't understand history or what's going on in the world, everything will seem pointless and you will fall easy prey to anyone telling you what you should believe.
You have so many tools at your disposal for learning, you really have no reason to just have no idea what is going on unless you just don't prioritize your time that way. In which case, it's ok to understand that you don't know, but why hold your opinion so strongly then?
I saw a video from the ModRetro YouTube channel a few days ago and thought it was AI because it only had 10,000 subscribers. They’ve been at it since March of 2024 and have less than 400,000 views spread across 54 videos. Strong attention economy recession indicator that even a memeified billionaire can’t get organic attention on a platform like that.
I mean, that's just defense companies in general now. Would you rather have your own soldiers dying in a war, rather than robots? Ukraine is using AI in their targeting, is that something you condemn?
This is no different from the invention of machine guns or artillery. Yes, it's sad that these things will be used in war to kill (more) people. But intentionally avoiding that technology means you're just handicapping your own military and sacrificing others' lives for your principles.
No one should be surprised that this comment doesn't go over well on HN. But the multiple people replying to you like "Oh? Cool I'm gonna buy more now that I know it signals that I love war" is really disgusting. And they're all identical, like you've activated something in their programming.
They're posting flamebait in an attempt to trigger HN's cool-down autokill and bury the root post. Usual red vs blue tribal conflict, influence campaign, or people reacting to something that makes them feel bad by pretending it doesn't exist, who knows.
I wish I could just leave earth until this whole "tech industry" thing blows over.
Yeah, I’m seeing this a lot too recently. I guess polarization comes for us all eventually. Nuance and cognitive dissonance are so painful for some they simply flatten their position to something that feels safely straightforward, even if ghoulish?
It common to reply to silly comments with more silliness. It's a obvious virtue signal, which rightfully draws ridicule. Some people use mocking as ridicule, and it says nothing about the person doing the mocking, since they're likely saying it as a joke.
It's not a good or acceptable thing for the level of discourse on this website to be a bunch of 8th-grade boys on Xbox Live. You can disagree with OP or be conservative or whatever, but saying you want to support a drone manufacturer for no self-interested reason but because you like drone warfare is not a proportionate response to someone saying something "silly".
but your position that people just making nuanced non-emotional purchase decisions is somehow flawed itself is the main point of contention, its similar to how vegetarians keep pushing their views and preferences as a yardstick to measure others who don't share the same values.
so the question here is why can you not tolerate people simply separating a product from the manufacturer of another niche that is completely legal and is demanded by sovereign nations?
This is the same concept as "separating art from the artist". i.e. can you appreciate the creation without associating it with the personal foibles of the creator?
If you went around scrutinizing the personal failings of every single creator and deciding not to support their art, you would cut yourself off from a huge chunk of human creation. Creators and builders are disproportionately imperfect people.
Harvey Weinstein, for example, is a serial abuser and genuinely evil person. He also was involved in an enormous number of Hollywood productions. Do you go out of your way to make sure to never watch or consume media associated with him? My guess is probably not. It's impractical and also I think the net benefit of this mindset, where we only allow people with certain moral characteristics to succeed, is a loss for society.
After reading it I ordered an m64, I am tired of people trying to gatekeep people into boycotting or telling them what they should consume or not when it's pretty clear the author in question is largely trying to virtue signal as means to reach their target audience.
AWS (and many others) is also then war profiteering company with JWCC, C2E, WildandStormy, not to mention all the other defense contractors that rely on their computer power to design and operate mass surveillance and killing of people. Is your agenda selectively blind?
not OP but yes, i consider the tech sphere's dive into mass surveillance to be war profiteering and have eliminated or minimized several in my life including amazon and spotify.
Did AWS post this article?
Why are you presenting your unfounded assumption as a gotcha? Do you have any basis whatsoever to believe GP supports AWS?
for the same reason GP assumed war profiteering. Guy is maybe and probably, based on his talks, interested in his homeland's defense. Maybe he's in it for the tech. Every defense company is war profiteering and thus unethical, especially this one? That's not only uncalled for, but absolutely cancerous thought as exemplified by the thread and poison it spreads.
This is why I exited the tech industry.
They've all become war profiteers and fascist enablers.
The only way to live with my conscience was to choose not to be complicit.
Oh wow that’s cool, I had no idea Palmer Lucky owned this. He pumps out quality tech. Im gonna check it out.
A friend of mine did posit the quandary that an "unpalatable" individual such as Luckey appears to be one of the few making consumer-friendly products: Removable, swappable battery packs, AA battery support, standard USB-C charging, easy interoperability, open sourced designs, exposed screws, teardown instructions, etc. Apparently ModRetro is even looking into making dumb TVs for gaming.
It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Yeah I don't really like Luckey, or what I've heard from him anyways. But in the run up to launch the Chromatic, it became pretty clear that this guy, for whatever reason, is really passionate about gameboy. I have been less impressed with the other emulator/fpga machines. the chromatic is solid though.
[flagged]
29 replies →
> It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.
It's just many people have a radically different set of ethics which, once they become principles, can't be easily, or at all, compromised on. And just to be fair, it's not just the what, but the how (which extends not just to Luckey & Friends, but to Anduril & Friends).
9 replies →
This propaganda against Palmer Luckey completely lacks any critical thinking. Then again, I guess all propaganda is targeted at people who aren't critical thinkers to start with, so that's why it ends up working.
I've seen this astroturfing and spreading of lies increase since he delivered weapons to Taiwan so they can defend themselves. Probably the CCP amping up their influence campaign against him.
1 reply →
[flagged]
I don't get it. Modretro is for retro gamers. What does that have to do with those things you listed ?
[dead]
[flagged]
1 reply →
Tech killing innocents? Citation needed.
I have mixed feelings about it. I don't agree with how my country often ends up using these technologies, but defense tech and weaponry still seems pretty necessary. The US is not the only one doing this. Should they wait for their adversaries to have the upper hand? I don't think it's such a bad thing, as long as they can put the right people in charge. That's a whole other problem.
Well, are those humans Iranian schoolchildren or Russian troops invading Ukraine? Hard to make a judgment without knowing.
Good to see Kotaku's admirable journalistic practice of posting a list of histrionic tweets is alive and well
He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools.
Your claim is similar to saying nobody should own a gun, because it should be illegal to defend yourself or others. So everyone who owns any kind of weapon is evil and bad? Only bad people are allowed to own weapons and we should just roll over?
Nobody should defend Ukraine from Russia? Anduril has been helping Ukraine since very early on.
Let the guy have his little side modding hobby.
In a 2024 speech, Luckey said "Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don't lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom." ( https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/palmer-luckey-every-countr... ). He's said in a Bloomberg interview that "there are actually things I would like to build that the DoD would not use and would not deploy, that they do think are beyond the pale" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItLFpYha6Wc ), and he's said in an Axios interview that he would be willing to build nuclear weapons, as well as chemical weapons "in a specific vertical". He then elaborates by saying that it's a huge mistake that the US military isn't allowed to use tear gas in combat. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZfW3YTJ5Eg ) I'm having trouble believing that someone like this is inherently peaceful and should be getting multi-billion dollar contracts to manufacture drones that autonomously kill people. Maybe it's better to buy a Nintendo game from someone who doesn't think that the US is being held back by war crime treaties.
Starting a weapon company is different from owning a gun. You have control over that gun. Your weapons company, those weapons will be used to kill innocent people, there is no doubt. Weapons don't only get used for clean operations in war and there is almost always collateral damage.
It is a decision to start producing regardless of how well-intentioned it is. You will be profiting off of people being maimed and killed. Various people thought they solved war through new weapons only to create more effective killing machines. That's what WW1 was.
Palmer does not have to work on weapons nor justify making them. Building tech that will be used to murder people (and yes, it will happen) is a decision. Not funding his other hobby when he's getting money off US military contracts is hardly breaking his bank. He wants to build weapons? I don't want to buy his products. Easy.
Building more efficient weapons does not make us safer. Every dollar saved through "strength" and better weapons matters little to the parents who lost their kid when the most precise weapon in the world kills a bunch of schoolchildren like it did at the start of the Iran war. If you can't gaurantee your weapons won't get used for that, why would you build them? You cannot.
I thought Tony Stark already made this point.
The problem is that China, Russia, Iran and so on have all been accelerating their weapons manufacturing. Go complain to them.
If nobody in the world was manufacturing any weapons and it was fully observable from space, nobody would have cause to manufacture these kinds of weapons. We do not live in that world.
At some point, any reasonable person should agree that if a country exists in an environment that contains many threats it might need to defend itself or others from, then it makes complete sense for it to develop weapons towards that aim. Countries are not people, people are people. So people make the weapons.
It just so happens that Palmer Luckey is a person. He can't sell weapons to any random person or country he wants, he can only sell them to the US or with permission of the US to a country that the US has a strategic interest in defending.
Precision weapons have helped reduce casualties. This is a fact. Please try to contradict this fact in the face of napalm bombing and nuclear bombs of yesteryears. Please try to tell me that precision weapons aren't better than just randomly aiming artillery at the sky and letting'er rip. Please do. I want to hear your well founded argument for this.
2 replies →
We're talking about a company whose primary customer is the US military. Said military is currently involved in a pointless war of aggression. It has carried out unprovoked attacks on at least two other countries just this year alone. When was the last time the it was used in self defense?
"Peace through strength" is a fine motto, but you can't claim that motto and then turn around and base your business on selling to an entity that routinely starts non-defensive wars.
If you don't understand history or what's going on in the world, everything will seem pointless and you will fall easy prey to anyone telling you what you should believe.
You have so many tools at your disposal for learning, you really have no reason to just have no idea what is going on unless you just don't prioritize your time that way. In which case, it's ok to understand that you don't know, but why hold your opinion so strongly then?
4 replies →
Do you see all weapons companies as bad?
Is SAAB bad making JAS Gripen being soon used against Russia?
I find your and similar views to be very childish. And somewhat suspicious.
Who would benefit from the west investing less in weapons systems? It boils down to what side you are on honestly.
I saw a video from the ModRetro YouTube channel a few days ago and thought it was AI because it only had 10,000 subscribers. They’ve been at it since March of 2024 and have less than 400,000 views spread across 54 videos. Strong attention economy recession indicator that even a memeified billionaire can’t get organic attention on a platform like that.
that's wild, it's not like the videos are hosted on an irrelevant platform like bluesky or something. Who knows
> which makes human-killing robots
I mean, that's just defense companies in general now. Would you rather have your own soldiers dying in a war, rather than robots? Ukraine is using AI in their targeting, is that something you condemn?
This is no different from the invention of machine guns or artillery. Yes, it's sad that these things will be used in war to kill (more) people. But intentionally avoiding that technology means you're just handicapping your own military and sacrificing others' lives for your principles.
Anduril is not "just" anything.
The article isn't "about" ModRetro, please engage with the actual material instead of off-topic political tirades.
> Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual!
The article says the game is published by ModRetro.
And the contents of the article are almost entirely about the process of making an n64 game. This is HN not reddit.
[dead]
[flagged]
No one should be surprised that this comment doesn't go over well on HN. But the multiple people replying to you like "Oh? Cool I'm gonna buy more now that I know it signals that I love war" is really disgusting. And they're all identical, like you've activated something in their programming.
They're posting flamebait in an attempt to trigger HN's cool-down autokill and bury the root post. Usual red vs blue tribal conflict, influence campaign, or people reacting to something that makes them feel bad by pretending it doesn't exist, who knows. I wish I could just leave earth until this whole "tech industry" thing blows over.
I've never heard of cool-down autokill. Where is that mentioned?
1 reply →
Yeah, I’m seeing this a lot too recently. I guess polarization comes for us all eventually. Nuance and cognitive dissonance are so painful for some they simply flatten their position to something that feels safely straightforward, even if ghoulish?
Social media’s a helluva drug.
It common to reply to silly comments with more silliness. It's a obvious virtue signal, which rightfully draws ridicule. Some people use mocking as ridicule, and it says nothing about the person doing the mocking, since they're likely saying it as a joke.
It's not a good or acceptable thing for the level of discourse on this website to be a bunch of 8th-grade boys on Xbox Live. You can disagree with OP or be conservative or whatever, but saying you want to support a drone manufacturer for no self-interested reason but because you like drone warfare is not a proportionate response to someone saying something "silly".
but your position that people just making nuanced non-emotional purchase decisions is somehow flawed itself is the main point of contention, its similar to how vegetarians keep pushing their views and preferences as a yardstick to measure others who don't share the same values.
so the question here is why can you not tolerate people simply separating a product from the manufacturer of another niche that is completely legal and is demanded by sovereign nations?
[dead]
This is the same concept as "separating art from the artist". i.e. can you appreciate the creation without associating it with the personal foibles of the creator?
If you went around scrutinizing the personal failings of every single creator and deciding not to support their art, you would cut yourself off from a huge chunk of human creation. Creators and builders are disproportionately imperfect people.
Harvey Weinstein, for example, is a serial abuser and genuinely evil person. He also was involved in an enormous number of Hollywood productions. Do you go out of your way to make sure to never watch or consume media associated with him? My guess is probably not. It's impractical and also I think the net benefit of this mindset, where we only allow people with certain moral characteristics to succeed, is a loss for society.
I think one thing we can all agree on is that if you despite the artist, you shouldn't give him money.
Yes. It's not impractical, it's baseline human decency.
And ? Are you upset that Google/Microsoft/Oracle sells their tech to the military? Xbox controller is used on nuclear subs too.
also not a good look using kotaku as a source, were you aware of their poor journalistic standards?
I'd take a step back and assess whether the media you are consuming is dictating what to think and feel rather than from free will.
> And ? Are you upset that Google/Microsoft/Oracle sells their tech to the military?
Yes
> Xbox controller is used on nuclear subs too.
I have never played an Xbox, nor do I have any interest in doing so. There is nothing interesting about the Xbox.
You're saying things about yourself, not the Xbox or MS.
There is something interesting about the Xbox, as evidenced by its sales record.
3 replies →
[dead]
Also worth reading "Do Not Buy The War Crime N64".
https://aftermath.site/war-crime-n64-palmer-luckey-m64-modre...
Thanks for the link, just bought one!
After reading it I ordered an m64, I am tired of people trying to gatekeep people into boycotting or telling them what they should consume or not when it's pretty clear the author in question is largely trying to virtue signal as means to reach their target audience.
Giving people context is gatekeeping now?
2 replies →
[flagged]
1 reply →
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
I remain eternally grateful that HN's developers created an indicator that an account was created very recently.
For those not aware, look for the green name highlight.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Thanks for the heads up. I wouldn't have checked it out otherwise. Palmer Luckey has done some cool shit. And Anduril is super impressive.