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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

#141

Post by generic92034 »

alephnerd wrote: post #84
generic92034 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest. I have a feeling this is no longer a viable model. If "subscribers" get threatened every other day, they will be looking for alternatives.

> they will be looking for alternatives. Who do "they" as in Europe go to? China also views the EU as a junior partner [0], is running an ongoing disinfo campaign against the industrial exports of an EU member state [1], and has doubled down on it's support for Russia [2] in Ukraine in return for Russia backing China's claim on Taiwan [3]. And the EU is uninterested in building domestic capacity for most critical tec…

> And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.

I mean, that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA (lifting sanctions against Russia, no tariffs there either, but plenty tariffs for "allies"; threatening NATO members in several ways; taking over Russia's "peace" plans for Ukraine 1:1 and putting the pressure solely on Ukraine; (I could go on for pages)).

I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone.

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

#142

Post by energy123 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #78
dlev_pika wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascism puts a heavy emphasis on aesthetics

Italian fascists did have fashion forward uniforms. So did the German Nazis back then now I think about it. Maybe there is something with cult-like thinking, fascist or not, where the aesthetics seduces more people into wanting to be a part of it all?

They like purity. Purity of the body (fitness and lifestyle) and purity of society (regimentation, conformity, single race, single ideology, single sexuality, standardized architecture).

It's neurological. They feel emotional disgust if the regimentation isn't there.

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

#143

Post by miki123211 »

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.

Because it's hard for the government[1] to build computer systems.

Government salaries are pretty low compared to dev salaries. If the government wants to hire devs and pay them as much as private industry does, they'd have to pay them much more than what their superriors (and their superriors' superriors) make, which would destroy workplace morale. They could raise everyone's salaries, but that's deeply unpopular, as a large part of the population view all high-level government functionaries as crooks by definition.

The way you get around that is by using contractors. Contractors let you hide the cost of software development. Instead of paying $150k to a software developer (which is probably more than the director makes), you pay $10m to a company, not unusual when you also hire companies to build you planes and bridges. How that company allocates that 10m and how much they pay their engineers is no longer your concern, and no longer an embarrassment to your hierarchy and salaries.

However, writing contracts for software is hard, for the same reason waterfall is hard. You just don't really know what the requirements are before the project starts, and in a traditional RFP process, you can't accurately model what requirements are the costliest and should perhaps be reconsidered. This means contracted government projects usually turn into an exercise in checkbox-checking and terrible, unusable UIs which technically fulfill the acceptance criteria, and therefore have to be accepted.

Palantir has somehow managed to actually collaborate with the government, sending forward-deployed engineers to figure out what their actual needs are, and then writing software which fulfills exactly those needs, bringing techniques which modern tech companies have learned along the way. I don't actually know how they managed to circumvent the RFP process well enough to do this.

[1] "The government" here can apply to any government you like, not necessarily the US government.

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

#144

Post by kypro »

ncr100 wrote: post #123
kypro wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He acts like a villain. He talks about his company's business in inhumane terms - Karp seems to me to enjoy piercing what is a longstanding euphemism of "for national security purposes" used by nation-states and security contractors, by employing what has become his signature (paraphrasing) rhetoric of, ".. and through using our products this can have the outcome of killing of certain specific people". That seems lik…

> employing what has become his signature (paraphrasing) rhetoric of, ".. and through using our products this can have the outcome of killing of certain specific people". That seems like a deliberate rhetorical choice rather than anything to do with, "the spectrum."

I do this often. I think because I am autistic.

Neurotypical's use language in very indirect and subtle ways that I do not like. Some words mean the same things but are perceived as more offensive or more acceptable.

If I must ever eat meat I make sure I will say things like "pass me a slice of cow" instead of "beef" or "pork". I refer to the act of imprisoning people as "caging". I refer to "culling" as "mass extermination", etc.

I think we have a duty to be as brutal as possible when we are talking about harming animals and humans. If you are off put by what you are doing, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing it.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

conception wrote: post #140
epistasis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing. It says a lot about the breakdown of current US society and democracy that Palantir's leadership feels free to speak in the way that they do. People will not forget, because we all suspected that they were like this, but when given a tiny bit of power by electing a transient and weak president, they pulled their masks off…

It seems clear that the assumptions they are working off is that they will not be restored.

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by pjc50 »

crimsoneer wrote: post #74

“Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.” Sorry, but this is full on into conspiracy theory here. Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them? The exact same concerns could be articulated…

> very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems

They're hosted by the US. It would be illegal for them not to comply with orders to hand data over to US security services. This has been a concern since the Microsoft "safe harbour" GDPR case. It's now the same thing with much higher stakes.

Since this: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr... , no US tech company can give a meaningful guarantee that they won't just turn off critical UK defence systems if ordered to by Trump. Such as if we tried to carry out actions against the invasion of Greenland. I admit that was a couple of months ago, so it now seems like ancient history, but the US picks a new invasion target every month.

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

#147

Post by pjc50 »

prox wrote: post #135
iso1631 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ft.com/content/fc1e7e9a-9d5d-4217-b9b2-38069eb11... > US tech billionaire and Maga donor Peter Thiel is starting a series of closed-door lectures about the antichrist in Rome on Sunday, putting him on a collision course with Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff. This sort of stuff might go down well with fundamentalists in america, but it has no place in the advanced world.

How is this not shut down in any form? This is actual insanity.

This sort of thing has been widespread in US fundamentalist Christian circles for a long time. He probably goes (or went) to a church surrounded by people who also believe that.

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

#148

Post by rsynnott »

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.

> This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.

Have you ever used jira? They are very much not selling that thing on the basis of UX.

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

#149

Post by jgalt212 »

epistasis wrote: post #134
hermitcrab wrote: post #99

It is a complete no-brainer that Thiel and his minions shouldn't be let anywhere near anything health or security related.

Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing. It says a lot about the breakdown of current US society and democracy that Palantir's leadership feels free to speak in the way that they do. People will not forget, because we all suspected that they were like this, but when given a tiny bit of power by electing a transient and weak president, they pulled their masks off…

> Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.

Because he's speaking to his investors aiming to keep the stock price up. He's not selling his products or himself to the world. His investors are rewarding him for the way he talks and acts.

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

#150

Post by kypro »

mosura wrote: post #127
kypro wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You and many of your repliers are framing this as a “like” thing: it’s not. The key question is “can you trust this guy?” and he is so clearly not trustable it’s amazing. Makes them look like the FTX of data processing.

Unlike the other comments here, I think this is a very genuine reason to not give someone security clearance. This has nothing to do with ideology, but does question whether someone is likely to act in way that serves national interests.

Whether or not Karp can be trusted, I don't know, but I thin it's something governments should at least question, and believe most (all?) already do.

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