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Reflections on Palantir

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371–380 of 658 posts

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#371
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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They're fleeing Putin's strategically-created crises in Syria, Venezuela and elsewhere. He gives you the flu, blames the aspirin, and sells you the Ivermectin.

Ah yes Russia is the only country creating crisis abroad. I couldn't really name any other country that constantly does that as well.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#372
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus The immigration has always existed, laws of it shifted, and AFAIK the current level of illegal immigration is not that high. So it's not really a large economical or humanitarian problem, and looks like it's much bigger political one.

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I'd argue that legal immigration is changing the US more than illegal immigration because illegal immigration largely originates from other countries in the Americas and therefore more easily fits in with the USA's existing history and culture.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#373
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…

They're like Oracle in that they focus their sales activity on the untouchable managers of managers, but their focus is on data integration and data analytics.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#374

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider wo…

> We need to teach our students...

Teach your values to your own kids, man

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what extent is repeated mass-murder of civilians, total destruction of healthcare and education systems, etc. part of the "moral gray area"? That's just not a serious argument. You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist values and so on.

If you have a military enemy that blatantly hides itself within civilian areas and builds its underground infrastructure underneath civilian infrastructure, and that military enemy kills 1200 of your citizens in an attack, that creates a fair bit of moral ambiguity.

> If you have a military enemy that blatantly hides itself within civilian areas

And if you don't just claim that you do anyway and keep bombing hospitals.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#376
post #173

Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza. In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance. from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f... """ Not only did it provide information to…

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People complain about cancel culture but this guy can go around saying genocide is good and absolutely nothing seems to happen to him as a consequence.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#377

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider wo…

What a brilliant example of self-righteous post-rationalization. Maybe we all need to recalibrate our moral compasses. Yes, ethics is nuanced, but not in the case of Palantir, who directly enables the abuse of human rights on a massive scale. They are not in the grey, they are pitch black - arms dealers selling to the highest bidder[1][2]. Same as NSO but with better PR.

The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way.

1. https://archive.ph/LwvMA 2. https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#378
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…

This all just sounds like any other consulting company, really?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#379
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.

he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".

Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on higher quality ethical discussions on this topic? I've found it hard to find these, but I love reading these perspectives and dissections.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold claim from a single service provider. Here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "…

It is completely self service by now. I have my own stack for testing purposes. Of course if you want to deploy this to an enterprise things will differ, but that is the same for Snowflake, Databricks etc.
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