They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
Enabling a parallel construction in a surveillance state should draw hate, as it weakens the fourth amendment.
My point isn't that you shouldn't hate on Palantir, but that in doing so often the cause and effect get reversed in people's minds. They think that Palantir is the cause and eroded civil liberties is the result, when the opposite is true.
Right. That's exactly why they get hate. So what's the problem with that?
There may be a loss of interest or focus, often related to technological changes causing an atrophy over time, but that usually also just leads to long tail existence that seems to mostly be defined by the duration of the career length of those involved and/or any kind of special interests that can maintain their nepotistic/corrupt advocacy.
It is a function of the empire and the reserve currency status of it, i.e., the “infinite” money printing that causes profligacy that is also an existential threat because it distorts perceptions and reality, e.g., the belief that it does not matter and that no discipline in spending or budgeting is necessary, hence why America has essentially for 56 years now (ignoring the anomaly in 2001) not produced a balanced budget.
I used to work a defense contractor and still have some friends in that industry. One of them told me their project (related to some armored vehicle) was unceremoniously killed overnight a few months ago. As best they can tell it had nothing to do with cost, schedule, missed deliveries, etc -- it was just someone in the administration deciding they don't want to keep paying for it. They work for a very large contractor and apparently this happened to a whole bunch of projects / teams there.
Hate?
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
The problem as enunciated also 100% tracks with my time as a consultant -- delivering solutions was 40% people-fixing and 60% code-fixing.
I was in the IC when Palantir was being rolled out and took a bunch of their training courses at their facilities in Georgetown
They have the data storage that complies with DCID and RMF ATO requirements across every IL and compartment
Before Palantir the only thing that we had was Analyst Notebook and you had to have a CD to run it and manage your own data repos locally
Palantir was entirely browser based and you didn’t have to manage data at all so they killed AN almost immediately
Additional DoD SRG IL5 controls on top of FedRAMP
Physical and logical separation of IL5 workloads from lower-level workloads
U.S. citizenship and background checks for all cloud personnel with access
Hosting and data storage within U.S. territory
Continuous monitoring and incident response plans that meet DoD requirements
DoD-specific access controls and encryption <<<
Thats quite some strict list which most companies would just not pass...
[not entirely true note: PalantirFoundry is a lowCode/noCode stack on top of a Spark cluster]
Pipeline Builder : https://youtu.be/WIQA7u1tbsY?si=iG-N9xHpUPPVAqDX
OntologyManager: https://youtu.be/SOW0IA_I0bk?si=u5eha0o-yrn4pHvu
These are slogans with marketing grade truth, not engineering truth. The moment you leave the happy path wizards you run straight into Python, SQL, JVM knobs, and cluster limits. The visual Pipeline Builder drops you into a Code node the second you need anything beyond basic joins/filters. Here is an example: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/code-workbook/getting-...
>> nor scalability consideration. Foundry Spark jobs expose tunable variables, you are expected to tweak them for performance and cost: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/optimizing-pipelines/s...
Having most of those PySpark functions exposed visually as building blocks with debug points available at each step simply outperforms a codeWorkbook in term of maintainability and readability.
...Except in this case, there might be a lot of value in letting James Bond or Boris Badenov whip up a quick spy pipeline without putting up a job ad for a Python coder.
This one has 10 years of precedence: https://www.ibm.com/products/information-server
This is marketing speak who means nothing. What do you mean? Something like this?: https://www.ibm.com/products/information-governance-catalog
Here is a tool to visually explore your graph:
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/vertex/graphs-explore
And here is the search engine to search for your objects (free-text and/or types): https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/object-explorer/gettin...
And here is the tool to manage the ontology (the types and relationships of the graph, plus the mapping of the graph to the tabular datasets):
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-manager/overv...
The UI designer based on the graph data is called Workshop:
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview/
I still have to find a stack where this duality is as integrated as in Foundry.
All of these things are pretty fascinating, as they concern the meta of the meta; the nature of knowledge itself; how to slice the ineffable reality into parts and how to communicate complex things to people.
Many software engineers are happy not knowing any of those terms. This perceived boredom is part of the reason why companies, some indeed with questionable ethics, like Palantir (is there even more than one in this space?) have very little competition and are making big bucks on big contracts (and only stand to make more once ML becomes less chaotic and more structured).
Two comments here:
- the real power of Foundry is that it is REALLY scalable. Palantir is selling all the knowledge management+data management that you mentionned BUT at a level of integration and scalability that I had never seen in any other product.
- someone in the discussions mentionned IBM InformationServer as an alternative. Functionnaly that sounds quite similar to Foundry. The question is whether the implementation choices are as clever as in Foundry. #toBeInvestigated
So, lots and lots of pie charts?
Linux. Windows. Both are "operating systems"?
What actual novel data collating and anomaly detection algorithms does Palantir implement that no one else does? Oh that's right these services are all just different corporate branding atop the same old open source stacks and libraries everyone uses.
Show me a entity-relationship model management [with version control] that wraps Spark data frames into a fully ontology-based graph database.
Show me a low code/no code UI designer that is fully consuming the ontology layer abstracting your Spark dataFrames.
#meWaiting
They exist but are used in house not sold as products.
There are information theory texts with all these ideas written in them published back in the 1950s we just didn't have powerful enough computers
Thiel and Musk's only advantage is age. They were able to implement first due to a single property of physics.
Most "geniuses" today, like Tao, just like reading math. None of them have any truly novel net new ideas. They're parrots whose cages were in the nerdy section of a book store.
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
[0]: https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-former-chancellor-se...
I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.
SAP is also a good comparison, so maybe GenZ SAP.
There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
Is that because palantir takes them out for golf outings and steaks? Or is it because palantir promises certain results and outcomes to them once the product is in place?
> There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues.
Yea, it's just the ideology of their founders, it has _nothing_ to do with their actions and partnerships.
> I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
"They're evil and they don't care who's buying."
> but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives.
That's not how morality, ethics, or the law works.
> People voted for this.
Literally _no one_ voted for this. The people who wanted DOGE to clean up government spending did not in any way think that all federal data, including their own private medical data, would be, or even need to be, fed into a private company to be used in service of the problem.
This is ridiculous apologia for evil. What is wrong with this site? If there's even a single dollar of profit on the table then civil rights are the first thing the "hacker news types" sacrifice. It makes you all seem gross and unapproachable.
The real issue is that people voted for this. All of it.
Anyone who voted for Trump after J6 knew what they were getting. All the people with buyers remorse about Trump make me think of this parable:
https://www.northerncherokeenation.com/boy-and-the-rattlesna...
“You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
Yes, in that one of their cofounders and his buddies bankrolled the current administration...
Do facebook or google do this to their users?
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.