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USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

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Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#51

Search traffic is failing for everyone because of AI, you don't need a billion dollars to figure that out. Surprised we haven't yet seen paid advertisement interwoven into news article text in a way that feeds AI scrapers yet, wouldn't it be nice to drink a Coke right now? There's no law that says you have to disclose advertisement to chatbots, so you could mark it up in a way that only humans see the disclosure and…

I believe we saw that this week - https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-diff...

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#53
Being awful is easy when you start, but think about how much they have worked, how hard they have worked, how much an anti-anti-christ they must have proved themselves to be, what Indiana Jones traps they must have escaped to reach Palantir's CEO from the lobby, how many kids they probably have sacrificed to Satan, to get a contract from one of the most prominent and established war crime houses in history, to do what Google Analytics could do with copy-pasting three lines of code and signing in with your own Google account — just so they could burn their already-gone reputation and keep being one of the worst ways to waste human labor, office space, servers, and dead trees. This takes work, and I must admit I'm in total awe. This is going way beyond the competition to prove something, even if that something is the stupidest thing the laws of physics can handle.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#54
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this relevant?

It's a Thiel product, and the subject here is Palantir and media. Ideological adjacencies in media affairs seems relevant to me at such high levels of influence and power integrations. But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question? If that is not a fair question, maybe show me evidence supporting a falsifiable general rule showing that all, or the majority of comments in HN threads contain stri…

> But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question?

I don't see why you "must" ask such a question?

You're being way too defensive for such a simple question.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#55

I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper. I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thou…

USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.)

It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#56
post #8

Let's also remember: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/can-ai-judge-journalism-a-... Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.

How is this relevant?

[deleted]

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#58
post #54
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Thiel product, and the subject here is Palantir and media. Ideological adjacencies in media affairs seems relevant to me at such high levels of influence and power integrations. But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question? If that is not a fair question, maybe show me evidence supporting a falsifiable general rule showing that all, or the majority of comments in HN threads contain stri…

> But I must ask: in the anti eth0 club, or is this a genuine question? I don't see why you "must" ask such a question? You're being way too defensive for such a simple question.

I'm accused of being "way too defensive". For those who would consider this, tick "show dead" and review my comment history. Yes, you will find some slop, often a result of that implied above, but you will find quite a few that should not have been flagged, but were. There is a precedent here. I also get at least one downvote for every comment, however neutral, even on obscure posts with few views. That is close enough to a pattern to wonder. So I do.

Asking why a Thiel related media organization is relevant to a Thiel related media organization is odd, to me. It's not as if Thiel or Palantir aren't involved in many things. Am I supposed to voluntarily compartmentalize them?

This "simple" question has an easy answer. Sometimes questions with exceedingly simple answers do seem awkward.

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Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#59

Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?

At least in the military aspect, I have heard nothing but great things about them from service member friends/family.

I personally find the panic over Palantir, Data Centers, etc to be largely mass hysteria vs anything else. It has become an omni-cause like Israel (I mean part of the backlash against Palantir is that the CEO is Jewish, just read any internet comment thread on the topic.)

Re: USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

#60
post #52

My question is this: why is Palantir required for this kind of fairly basic data analysis? Couldn't they use much cheaper, probably open platforms for data science & analytics?

I don't see where it says who's paying whom. Maybe the deal is that Palantir gets more personal data to throw in a national profile database.
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