alt Hacker NewsMy understanding of Palantir's actual, technical offering is profoundly boring: a hosted platform that connects to existing diverse sources of data and organizes them according to well-defined (by Palantir's FDEs) useful schemas. I have developed this impression through actually building a product on the Foundry as well as several rounds of interviews. Frankly that is profoundly boring. The anti-Palantir propaganda, portraying them as this all-powerful Skynet software, is as much a part of their marketing as anything else.
On the other hand, their effectiveness appears to be less in question: the article above claims that Scotland Yard found hundreds of police officers to have been abusing their posts in various ways through use of the Palantir system. I am not a fan of corrupt cops, so I think this is good. Similar stories exist elsewhere, like a 68% reduction in 48-hour mortality at a Tampa hospital through deployment of Palantir's anti-sepsis monitoring tech.
Thus I arrive at the conclusion that this decision is ultimately a loss. Khan's legal standing appears to rely on them not investigating other potential suppliers—I'm not sure that there are any, and "develop these simple data systems in-house" is a bad option because if they could have they would. I suppose ultimately I don't think that Palantir's "bad vibes" among constituents should impact governments' desire to be effective in the programs they purport implement.
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Palantir revolutionized the enterprise software playbook (more government than enterprise, but I digress) by investing heavily in Forward Deployed Engineers, Palantir engineers deployed at customer sites and working hand in hand with engineers at the customers to make it happen. Most software companies pay only lip service to customer success, and seldom provide any engineering after pre-sales.
You don't have to like the company to respect the hustle. I deem them utterly despicable, on par with IBM who sold the Nazis the tools to round up and exterminate Jews during the Holocaust, and indeed their UK division is run by the grandson of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists.
Anti-Palantir propaganda? You don't need any propaganda when Palantir's actions speak for themselves.
> ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt “illegal immigrants” https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168
> ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’ https://www.404media.co/ice-just-paid-palantir-tens-of-milli...
> Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American https://newrepublic.com/post/195904/trump-palantir-data-amer...
> Palantir allegedly enables Israel's AI targeting in Gaza, raising concerns over war crimes https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
This is far more than just "bad vibes", and just a handful of many examples. The vibes also tend to be pretty bad around things that are used to enable spying, a secret police force, or bombing children.
This isn't even touching on the name of the company itself and the origin of that name, or the fact that Peter Thiel founded it, or many of the other things that give it "bad vibes".