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Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

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Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#91

Post by BLKNSLVR »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #83
holistio wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's _raison_, but "raisin d'être" would make an excellent name for a haute cuisine dessert.

Well you could just say ”purpose” rather than ”reason of existence” in French. Some expression of course only exist in French - about 70% of English language - but the purpose of this francoism I never quite understood. And yes, I’m fully aware I am annoying.

Purpose doesn't have the gravitas of raison d'être: the very reason for its existence; the thing without which it would have no reason to exist.

I can't be too annoyed, for I can also be annoying and appreciate some level of pedantry. Words mean things!

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#92

Post by jjgreen »

holistio wrote: post #42
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've pointed this out before, but there's an interview clip of Alex Karp saying that Trump won the election in a landslide[0]. If you look at the actual numbers, no one, with any idea of mathematics or statistics or even just basic analysis skills, would call Trump's election victory a landslide. It calls into question the fundamental raisin d'etre of Palantir. It makes Palantir look like a pure propaganda tool. Ther…

It's _raison_, but "raisin d'être" would make an excellent name for a haute cuisine dessert.

... or a minor work by Sartre

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#93

Post by [deleted] »

emptybits wrote: post #13
holistio wrote: post #6

Anyone who has read The Lord of The Rings has exactly zero reasons to trust Palantir.

Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in literature !) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not if ) they fall into evil hands.

[deleted]

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#94

Post by setr »

emptybits wrote: post #13
holistio wrote: post #6

Anyone who has read The Lord of The Rings has exactly zero reasons to trust Palantir.

Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in literature !) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not if ) they fall into evil hands.

If my understanding is correct, the use of palantir by creatures leads to their own downfall, both for evil and good characters. So following through, it's very useful for it to be in evil hands

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#95

Post by mindslight »

close04 wrote: post #69
pstuart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alex Karp's transformation from progressive to MAGA is fascinating; more so knowing that his father was jewish and his mother was black. I can understand a zeal to "protect the country", but FFS, to be the brains of the secret police is a bit much. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/opinion/alex-karp-palanti...

It’s easy to explain once you realize the real ideology of these people is money. Even if they have other internal beliefs they’ll get buried under the desire to make more money.

Money is just a metric. I'd say their real ideology is power. It's the classic authoritarian delusion that has fueled every "web 2.0" startup, now writ large - it's okay if we centralize power, because we will only ever use the power for good. Of course this completely ignores how power agglomerates in the real world, especially in the presence of the strong Moloch attractor accelerator that is state-orchestrated capitalism (why it's tempting to focus critiques on money).

And ironically (or not), this overarching dynamic is exactly the core lesson of the One Ring! It's like their main takeaway from the books was "having that ring would be awesome!!1!".

Maybe the facile fascination with Tolkien comes from having read them too early in life, before they were able to understand adult concepts like burden ? If you think of Frodo as merely having to do some chore that The Adults are making him do, then at least he gets to play with some pretty awesome toys and see some pretty cool stuff. And this would seem to be the level of moral development underpinning the contemporary neofascist movement (or "autocratic authoritarian", for those who are triggered by the F-word).

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#96

Post by snowpid »

inigyou wrote: post #30
zzzeek wrote: post #16

> Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, has faced growing scrutiny in parts of Europe as governments reassess their dependence on American technology companies. I think it's great. Europe and other regions will be building out their own tech stacks, decreasing global dependence on big US players like AWS and Palantir, creating lots more jobs for programmers and much broader…

No evidence for this. Europe talks a big game and consistently fails to deliver.

Mistral and stackit begs to differ

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#97

Post by comfysocks »

lukan wrote: post #81
close04 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. Nobody. The extreme power this gives will corrupt anyone in the real world.

So fantasy novels aren't a great playbook for actual government? Too bad that too many people are still heavily influenced by this.

A bullied kid finds refuge in sci-fi and fantasy books. This kid builds a mental fantasy world where they get revenge on their tormentors. In this mental fantasy world, every self-serving thing they do is “righteous”, because it undoes the harm that was done to them. Their manifesto is a mish-mash of ideas from the books, but twisted to make them into the good guy.

Some of these kids eventually grow up and meet people who are kind to them. They find positive lessons in real human social interactions. They leave their protective fantasy bubble behind. They eventually learn to seek justice where there was injustice.

Others never grow up. They end up seeking to fight injustice with a new form of injustice. Only this time, they get to be the tormentor.

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#98

Post by pstuart »

xg15 wrote: post #90
pstuart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alex Karp's transformation from progressive to MAGA is fascinating; more so knowing that his father was jewish and his mother was black. I can understand a zeal to "protect the country", but FFS, to be the brains of the secret police is a bit much. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/opinion/alex-karp-palanti...

Might be a hint that a lot of tech/SV signalling was just "woke capitalism" the whole time, and they dropped the pretense the moment it became politically advantageous.

Tech was never woke. It's a boys club and on the "good" side was geeky nerds who just cared about hacking and the "bad" side about financial velociraptors hunting money. Nothing woke about that.

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#99

Post by reaperducer »

mentalgear wrote: post #23

To all investigative Journalists: Thank you for your hard work, and for being an inspiration and beacon of hope in these dark techno-feudalistic times.

Thank you for your hard work, and for being an inspiration and beacon of hope in these dark techno-feudalistic times.

The best way to thank them is to pay them for the work they do.

Donate to a journalism collective. Subscribe to a newspaper or magazine. Some even have gift shops, so just buy some swag. (Do not send pizza, unsolicited food always goes straight into the trash.)

"Information wants to be free [as in beer]" is great for t-shirts, but leads to societal downfall.

Journalism is absolutely one of those things in life where you get what you pay for.

Re: Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

#100

Post by reaperducer »

cluckindan wrote: post #35
sschueller wrote: post #2

https://archive.ph/lXw7j

Please don’t use these sites, they alter archived content and use visitor browsers as a ddos botnet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

they alter archived content and use visitor browsers as a ddos botnet.

Interesting. I'm surprised I didn't notice it on HN. From Wikipedia:

In January 2026, archive.today added code into its website in order to perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a blog.[2] This code uses the computers of visitors of the site to repeatedly send requests to the blog, with the goal of overwhelming the blog's ability to handle legitimate traffic. The code is still present as of 5 June 2026, but has been modified to reduce the frequency of malicious calls. [3] On June 12, at least two users reported their requests were redirected to tehrantimes.com. Some common ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin, are currently stopping these malicious requests. It was later discovered that archive.today tampered with archived web pages.[4] It was also later discovered that this was not the first DDoS attack Archive.today has performed.

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