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Reflections on Palantir

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271–280 of 658 posts

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#271
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.

That's like telling a woman with a beating husband that it's better to stay with him because the other men are worse.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#272
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it’s hygiene and structure

That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.

Visualization is a fancy package. Nobody looks at visualizations, but that's what makes people buy.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#273
post #5
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…

So basically data warehousing, and making it possible to do joins?

Super boring, but super important stuff, which I've seen neglected at far too many places I've worked.

Sounds like data engineering with a dash of ML.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost tripled. It’s quite expensive now. I would encourage you to do your own research. For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100. I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.

HN has always lacked economic and stock market knowledge and instincts generally speaking. Most comments tend to say it’s rigged, evil capitalist, etc. Guessing because hackers generally tend to swing far left and socialist though weird as a lot of founder and entrepreneurs are active on HN as well. There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the oppos…

Common sense gets in the way of gamblers instinct.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#275
post #13

Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755

Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read…

>Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity.

That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating...

Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#276
post #262
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week ago Alejandro Arcos was decapitated right after he took office as mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people. Some approximate stats: Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has about 25k a year. The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the US is 350m. One can't derive the distribution of motivations that bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd cal…

People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that. Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent? That’s our problem to solve. Mexicans have their own problems to solve. Of course electing a socialist probably won’t help. They need their own Milei. Early in our history we had a violent…

> People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that

I included stats in my post acknowledging the existence of murder in the United States. To your point, if Trump decided to flee to Mexico to escape the violence, I don't believe dems would gloss over that.

> Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent?

I would applaud Buenos Aires if they made a compassionate allowance for hypothetical people fleeing Chicago violence.

> Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.

Everyone is doing the best they can for those within their radius of compassion. It is the way it is.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#277
post #269
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.

Essentially their competitive advantage is having access to these companies. You can't just show up at Airbus and propose to build them a system for their data flows. Palantir does that and charges multiples of the market rate.

If you want to pick winners, look for companies that hire connected companies.

In hindsight, the fact that Palatir went to Airbus meant that the fix was in and it was already decided that Boeing was going down. Or for the less cynical, it was Palantir's magic that made Airbus successful and if Boeing were competent they would have hired Palantir.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#279
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s…

as I said, ICE is not even close to the spiciest thing it worked on

Are you ashamed of that or proud?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#280
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s…

I think things are getting worse, JD Vance is Peter Thiel's high-rank implant to possible upcoming Trump administration. Will evil techno-cons replace neocons?

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