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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#141

Post by joewhale »

newprint wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…

It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these large govt contracts first in their space wins.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#142

Post by walleeee »

psunavy03 wrote: post #77
stackskipton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. 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? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to…

> 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…

You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may have stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the relevant ears with no pushback

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#143

Post by sroerick »

Manuel_D wrote: post #5
newprint wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…

When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agenc…

People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my experience this is the actual hard work of producing something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS resellers will never be able to deliver on.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#144

Post by nickff »

wg0 wrote: post #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.

Seems like an application of "do things that don't scale".

https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#145

Post by bigstrat2003 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #133
ngcazz wrote: 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.

> It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared.

You've misread the situation. I don't think it would be global peace and harmony if we stopped playing world police. I simply do not care. It's not our responsibility to take care of other countries while we have serious problems at home that are going ignored.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#146

Post by bigstrat2003 »

julianeon wrote: post #89
orochimaaru wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would…

Factually untrue. I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough. > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well. About "sin" industries: > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as moral…

ChatGPT is not a valid source to substantiate a claim.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#147

Post by [deleted] »

newprint wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#148

Post by moolcool »

orochimaaru wrote: post #46
tdeck wrote: post #15

> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.

So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would…

> Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas

I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections to Meta specifically.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#149

Post by swordsmith »

newprint wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…

I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy.

Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#150

Post by julianeon »

tolerance wrote: post #105
julianeon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factually untrue. I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough. > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well. About "sin" industries: > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as moral…

Julian, I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument. However— please —there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims. You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.

Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself.

I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument.

This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which is what I did here.

Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was, in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual sources."

I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without sourcing (probably the best choice).

I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a thankless research task."

The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted, or simply say nothing.

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