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MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

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Re: MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

#61

Post by angiolillo »

readitalready wrote: post #46
angiolillo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of companies don't "need to exist". A company exists because someone decided to start it (usually to make some money) and lasts until someone decides to end it (usually when it stops making money). If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast maj…

This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for. A good design is valuable, and this applies to business processes as well. How would you design the user experience of constructing a submarine? Good design IS technological superiority.

As someone who used to teach UX grad courses, I'm happy you feel that way!

But I'm unsure why you feel that my response pointing out that a product's user interface is typically a more important factor in success than the product's underlying technologies was discounting the value of user experience?

> Good design IS technological superiority.

Hmm, I was attempting to respond to someone who wrote "It feels like a big pile of nothing... Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines" which seemed to dramatically undervalue good schemas, CRUD implementations, or sparklines as "nothing". So to contrast those I used "technical superiority" as a catchall for the sort of challenging technical implementations that some developers lionize. Does that make sense? Is there a different term you'd suggest for that? For now I've changed to "(non-UX) technological superiority".

Re: MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

#62

Post by _joel »

_joel wrote: post #47

Also, LBC exclusive about £250 million contact that came about because of Mandelson breaking today. I mean if it wasn't obvious from the get go they're, well, dubious, given the grandson of Owsald Mosley is the UK CEO.

Always interesting when you criticise Palantir on here you get downvoted, almost as if they have an "outreach department"

Re: MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

#63

Post by persedes »

graemep wrote: post #33
stephc_int13 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but this lineage should indeed encourage some scrutiny.

Especially as multiple people in his family have had fascist sympathies. Given his ancestry wearing a black shirt for a TV interview was pretty bad judgement.

If it quacks like a duck...?

Re: MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

#66

Post by basisword »

We're not a serious country anymore. We build very little. We control very little. Three years ago the war in Ukraine broke out causing the energy price crisis and the short term solution was the government paying a portion of everyone's bills. Three years later we're in the same situation again thanks to the US and Israel's warmongering. Are we prepared? No. What's the solution? Freezing the price caps and paying a portion of peoples bills.

Re: MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

#67

Post by bongoman42 »

diolophes wrote: post #42
padolsey wrote: post #11

Can anyone familiar with the technology help disillusion naive people like me as to why on earth palantir needs to exist? It feels like a big pile of nothing. But tbf that's how I feel about Salesforce and Jira too. Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines to make PMs and clients feel nurtured and fuzzy that they've done something material.

Somebody needs to wrap up open source AI/ML and sell it to governments / defense, and do the integration... (e.g. open source Python face recognition libraries, openCV, YOLO object detection, etc. and more recently LLMs.)

'Do the integration' is where all the fun and money is.

Re: MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

#68

Post by mhlansx »

The history of Palantir:

Christine Maxwell and Alan Wade found Chiliad, a database surveillance application that was used in the FBI. Then Alan Wade became CIO at the CIA. Then In-Q-Tel (CIA) co-founded Palantir with Thiel.

Karp, who was at Haverford college with Epstein's neighbor Lutnick, became the philosophical ideologue for Palantir.

With these overt and easily verifiable connections it is beyond belief that any European state would even consider using Palantir. The governments do not even work any better with all that surveillance software, they work worse than 20 years ago. So even the "we need it" argument is a fallacy.

Re: MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

#70

Post by navane »

dlev_pika wrote: post #65
iheartbiggpus wrote: post #58

Why do the worst companies have the best names.

Fascism puts a heavy emphasis on aesthetics

They're better at selling ideas than having fleshed out ideas. One could say they sell before they build.
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