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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#581

Post by arolihas »

andsoitis wrote: post #424
avmich wrote: 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…

> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..." ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim. Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial gove…

Gaza...

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#582

Post by jiggawatts »

rudnevr wrote: post #576
jiggawatts wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to watch these "talking points" bouncing around when there's a politically charged topic like the war in Gaza. (For reference: I have no skin in the game and support neither side.) Having said that: 65% killed being women and children is because of the demographics of Gaza , not because of any specific behaviour by Israel other than just "being at war" with their neighbours. It's a talking point used…

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I’m just trying to stay as close to the facts as possible… which is that yeah, about 50 kids died daily on average during this war. Even the low estimates divided by the number of days since the start result in about 50 daily deaths.

I would expect that number to vary a lot day to day, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were at least a few days near the beginning where over 100 kids died in a 24 hour period.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#583

Post by scottyah »

mistermann wrote: post #518
wonnage wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the mental gymnastics it took to write this hot take must be "force" too

At least there is a logical path in that claim (if we ignore that I didn't specify that there was meat in the sandwich...I do eat a lot of plain tomato sandwiches, but not exclusively , so I do to some degree drive demand for animal slaughter)! I think it's kind of neat that we got from Palantir to sandwiches... I wonder if Palantir's software supports mapping metaphysical causality like this, because bizarre metaphy…

You're the one who directly took us from Palantir to sandwiches, in a clear attempt to distract from the core subject of manipulating humans on a mass scale without using "force"

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#584

Post by BlueTemplar »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #326
master_crab wrote: post #61

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…

Grafana is a better approximation. I used to say back in the day that Peter Thiel complains about no flying cars but is making a data ingesting platform with a Chart Js frontend.

And yet at the same time I can totally see how it would feel like science fiction to a cop :

https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/

(And a very different kind of science fiction for a non-cop.)

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#585

Post by [deleted] »

scott_w wrote: post #573
llamaimperative wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you actually said is ridiculous: "Your (and the sibling) responses also beg the question: must governments contract to big foreign consultancies? It's not illegal to do things in-house if they so choose, you know." No, they don't must do this. No, it's obviously not illegal to do things in-house. They choose not to because it's obscenely hard to build what Palantir has already built and to battle test its securi…

> They choose not to because it's obscenely hard to build what Palantir has already built and to battle test its security anything close to what Palantir has done. While true, it also doesn’t answer legitimate concerns that the British public had that their medical data was being shared with a foreign entity that had actively participated in foreign government programmes of questionable morality. The response to that…

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#586

Post by rudnevr »

pphysch wrote: post #502
dralley wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evidence-free allegations of "human shields" is not an excuse to repeatedly commit mass murder. Israel has already executed a proportional response to Oct 7, at least 100 times over. The extra 99+ times represent unprovoked war crimes.

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#587

Post by jiggawatts »

arczyx wrote: post #336
jiggawatts wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t speak knowledgeably about the first point (I doubt many people can, fog of war and all that) but it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals to use them as human shields. Are you telling me that Hamas deserves none of the blame?

> it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals This is patently false. Israel single-handedly claimed this without any evidence other than CGI render. Think about it, ALL hospitals in Gaza has been bombed by this point, but have you ever see the actual footage of Hamas command centres? Also pretty sure there was no Hamas involved in the case below: > In one of the most egregious cases, the…

US intelligence agencies agreed with Israel, journalists that have never stepped foot in a Gaza hospital disagreed. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle: just because injured combatants are taken to a hospital doesn’t necessarily mean that that hospital is a military command centre. However at least one hospital was more than likely (but not certainly!) used as such.

The tunnels under the Al Haifa hospital were built by Israel and are widely acknowledged to exist.

Do the other hospitals have bunkers and tunnels? I doubt it. They would not be easy to add after initial construction.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#588

Post by rudnevr »

arczyx wrote: post #314
samatman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Defeating Israel is moral imperative. There was no Hamas on 1948 but they massacre people anyway. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre > The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, killing at least 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.[1] The attack was conducted primari…

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#589

Post by anitil »

vundercind wrote: post #290
fijiaarone wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’ve known companies to spend stupid amounts of money on fake, fancy “war rooms” they staff with people doing nothing useful, filled with “big board” style maps and shit, big graphs and visualizations that aren’t used anywhere else, just as a sales tool. Walk the visiting CEO through, let them pretend what they’re involved in is way cooler and more interesting and important than it really is, and I guess that assists…

> approach them like young children

To take a generous go at this - my guess is that they have multiple urgent issues they're dealing with at any one time, and so the cognitive bandwidth they're able to dedicate to 'random presentation number 3 for the day' is quite low

But I do agree that a lot of day-to-day work is play acting at being cooler than our actual work.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#590

Post by anitil »

rsynnott wrote: post #378
Manuel_D wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps with the additional level of security clearance that government entities are able to hand over very sensitive data sets.
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