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Reflections on Palantir

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131–140 of 658 posts

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#131

For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it. Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both). The amount of manual la…

This is such a hilarious oversimplification.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#132

So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_ work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality that seems to encompass this entire operation. "A boring dystopia as a service." Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|

I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was about it.

It's public relations. Palantir is Not Bad™.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#133
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the…

We should stop defending an imperialist establishment which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-based order. More like America rules. The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral high ground was shattered at the very latest with the Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of…

>You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy.

All complaints, no solutions. Typical.

So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe? It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What ethnic cleansing of the Arab world's entire Jewish population are you talking about, specifically? Just like in Europe, there have been many waves of better and worse relationships, from relative acceptance to Nazi-like persecution, in various places and at various times, even looking just at the last hundred years. Still, to a great extent, the biggest contributing factor to the current extremely low Jewish pop…

The situation described in Iran after the Islamic Revolution did not even remotely constitute genocide or similar. Genocide is defined as the intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. While the Jewish community in Iran has faced discrimination, emigration, and instances of harassment and persecution, these conditions do not amount to genocide. The term genocide involves deliberate acts aimed at the physical extermination of a group, and this has not been the case with the Jewish community in Iran, despite the difficulties they have faced. The Iranian government officially recognizes Judaism, allows for Jewish religious practices, and Jews also have a reserved seat in Parliament. There has never been widespread killings or any organized campaign targeting Jews specifically for eradication in Iran, except for isolated cases against jews accused of spying for America and/or Israel. None of this was ethnic-cleansing or genocide.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 and its Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide, made Israel an appealing destination for many Jewish emigrants from Iran, that's why the overwhelming majority emigrated, but there were also substantial numbers who resettled in the United States, particularly in cities like Los Angeles and New York.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#135
post #17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make connections between separate data sets. You're not just ingesting data about purchasing information and drug convictions and so on, you're getting automatic relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that those fields are the "SSN" field from a thi…

That makes sense and sounds really useful

…particularly to German chancellors in the 1930s.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#136

For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it. Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both). The amount of manual la…

>inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning

Getting clean data seems like a universal need, but the job is still difficult, under-appreciated and underpaid. How come?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#137
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should stop defending an imperialist establishment which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-based order. More like America rules. The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral high ground was shattered at the very latest with the Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of…

> You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. All complaints, no solutions. Typical. So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe? It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.

I'd like to think that Pakistan would be on a better road if their democratically elected leader wasn't ousted by the US.

Thats one example, there are many others.

In terms of solutions, well looking at history of the US, the only time the people at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with whatever little they could give to calm the masses.

Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was something.

We just need something like that on a worldwide level. Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US given that the EU never amounted to much more than being a US vassal state.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.

> they have 80% margin, according to the article I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Invest…

Hilarious if true. Still hilarious if not.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#139
post #112

> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectu…

In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for having the opinions they already had.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#140
TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product.

Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.

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