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Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

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Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#81

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

bayindirh wrote: post #41
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BAH was the “bad guy” in the sense that they were grifters competent at only winning contracts and then extending them indefinitely through incompetent delivery to suck as much money out of the government as possible at the expense of having good systems and taxpayer money. Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.

> Palantir is good at delivering what they promise. What's their promise?

Just kind of summarizing from the comments in this topic (I also couldn’t be bothered to Google Palantir’s thesis): sticky/useful tools to combine and enrich data sources with a focus on a sector where there is a lot of compliance-driven security, data sources that aren’t easily queryable outside of their direct users, and high barriers to entry.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#82

Post by bpt3 »

miltonlost wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's expressing more or less the same sentiment as the American founders themselves expressed.

More or less, "I don't believe in democracy" is the same as the people who founded the country? Ok, you have no idea of nuance.

That's not what Thiel said, and not what the parent poster said.

How familiar are you with the writings of the founding fathers? The ones who very intentionally avoided creating a system based on direct democracy?

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#83

Post by FergusArgyll »

TrackerFF wrote: post #45

We received a presentation/demo of their products when I worked in the gov (not the US gov. though) a couple of years ago. 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. official…

This was an article that really helped me understand it

https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#84

Post by lolive »

I will comment only on the Foundry stack that we work extensively with, at my company. Given the complete havoc that the other IT ecoaystems has become, we are constantly struggling with proper data access data exchange data transformation and data alignment. To a point where a political layer has appeared on top of that, which looks like the middle age baronies.

Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company. The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterpriseData work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.

And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#85

Post by schmidtleonard »

tiahura wrote: post #28
ants_everywhere wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel. He says "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The beginning of the essay > I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “liberta…

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Haha I like that quote, but to her unintentional credit Ayn Rand did force me to think about why she was wrong, whereas if my main exposure to capitalist propaganda were the plausibly apolitical econ classes offered in school I might never have even realized that they were propaganda.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#86

Post by zeroCalories »

grafmax wrote: post #13

I wonder if the VCs have given up on growth. AI isn’t really profitable. Unless you can get government to pay for it (“socialism for me, capitalism for thee”). That means military contracts. So we have a top heavy system with a perverse incentive to justify itself with war. Unsurprisingly, I guess, the US is gearing up to do just that in 2027 with China.

I don't buy it. The money for government contracts is so much lower than the money from regular economic activity. It seems like every other business should be conspiring to avoid war, even if a small group wants it.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#87

Post by betaby »

grafmax wrote: post #71
ants_everywhere wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel. He says "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The beginning of the essay > I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “liberta…

I mean, he’s not wrong. Libertarianism is freedom - for the rich. And concentrated wealth is antithetical to democracy because it’s concentrated power. He’s just taking libertarianism to its logical extreme by repudiating democracy. Is it any wonder that he has helped fund our decline into authoritarianism? We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned incr…

> We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned increasingly against American citizens.

Other countries got those without paying Palantir billions.

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#88

Post by rayiner »

miltonlost wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's expressing more or less the same sentiment as the American founders themselves expressed.

More or less, "I don't believe in democracy" is the same as the people who founded the country? Ok, you have no idea of nuance.

The founders created a representative government with a limited franchise and express protections for private property and economic liberty, precisely because of the concerns over populist democracy. That's why they provided for an electoral college rather than direct election of the president, and for senators to be selected by state legislatures. The push towards making that republican system more democratic started half a century later with Jacksonian democracy and expansion of the franchise, culminating in the early 1900s with direct election of senators and extending the franchise to women.

None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#89

Post by walterbell »

lolive wrote: post #84

I will comment only on the Foundry stack that we work extensively with, at my company. Given the complete havoc that the other IT ecoaystems has become, we are constantly struggling with proper data access data exchange data transformation and data alignment. To a point where a political layer has appeared on top of that, which looks like the middle age baronies. Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years…

> more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects

Do data barons attempt to replicate silo control within Palantir?

> Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative

With this profitable existence proof in the market, are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data?

Re: Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

#90

Post by adolph »

bayindirh wrote: post #41
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BAH was the “bad guy” in the sense that they were grifters competent at only winning contracts and then extending them indefinitely through incompetent delivery to suck as much money out of the government as possible at the expense of having good systems and taxpayer money. Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.

> Palantir is good at delivering what they promise. What's their promise?

From the parts I've seen (Foundry et al), the promise is ability to sense of data and controlling its stocks and flows. There is a bit of Pachyderm-like versioned pipelines, notebooks, lots of access controls and audit logging. This is a place that was bought into Oracle "data democracy", reluctantly used Foundry and then was won over by the product.
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