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Customers need to already have the data they want to work with—Palantir itself does not provide any.

It blows my mind that the role of Michael Kratsios during Trump's first administration as CTO has been basically ignored by the media.

He was brought into the White House by Thiel to help the president with "technology issues." He is quoted in interviews as early as 2017-2018 saying the administration was trying to gain access to large protected government databases in order to train AI.

Thiel was planning for government data to be ready for Palantir to use ~8 years before the current administration began handing Palantir billions of dollars in contracts and giving employees military rank.

Kratsios is now science advisor for the POTUS, but still somehow barely receives press coverage. The rare coverage he does receive is never critical. Do you remember the big scary Elon Musk is running the White House, stealing our data, and we should all be terrified media narrative?

Musk was only executing the plans Kratsios made during the first Trump administration, and he stepped down as soon as Kratsios was confirmed by the Senate.

It's like we can state the obvious, "This could be a way for an authoritarian regime to destroy civil liberty." But nobody will just come out and say "Peter Thiel has already built a platform that will allow an authoritarian regime to destroy civil liberty and crush dissent, and he started planning it nearly a decade ago. Michael Kratsios is the flying monkey who made it possible for him to build it, and continues to quietly do his bidding."

For reference, Palantir are not the only ones to provide supposedly fancy UIs on top of data messes, there are many others like Talend, Datahaiku, Alteryx etc. Those platforms are not magic, they will still need a lot of little hands to wrangle the data mess to get it in a useful state, if there's ever an actual motivation to do that, and it's not all pretending to be "data driven". Usually, the data engineering community hates those graphical tools that are designed to convince executives rather than help engineers because no UI can be as powerful as a code base in this field. Palantir is special in how they managed to convince the executives of the police and administrations.

I've heard enough about Palantir to know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark but had been wondering about the specifics. Funny enough, I saw a Palantir commercial interspersed with friendly, shiny Apple commercials just the other day. (Sorry for the crap photo. I didn't want to be so obvious about recording our sinister digital overlords.) The ad makes a vague assertion about "revitalizing the American industrial base."

Enable fascism

Engineers can laterally move to more prestigious or challenging projects if they prove worthy based on their skills and connections. One former staffer tells WIRED that this made the company feel like a meritocracy where the best people, and the best ideas, naturally rise to the top.

I am very interested in the culture and psychology of these supposed "meritocratic" companies. Personally, I don't believe we have a reasonable approximation of the hyper-efficient merit-based resource allocation that is promoted by the ultra-rich.

Usually I find these so-called "meritocratic" policies do not encourage good ideas, but enable hyper-competitive environments.

These kind of environments likely do not support solid well-thought-out proposals; instead, pushes the quick implementation of mediocre ideas (a.k.a move fast and break things). A hyper-competitive environment can also discourage collaboration, which often can be crucial to "solve the hard problems".

And the article mentions that this environment boosts employee retention, which I find extremely interesting. I wonder if the constant competitions can keep triggering a sense of "winning" and "accomplishment" in a perhaps mundane job.

So Palantir sells a data management tool and deployment support. That shouldn't really surprise anyone who knows the first thing about data science.

The interesting thing about Palantir isn't what they sell but how they sell it and who buys it. They clearly market their unremarkable software as an autocrat's wet dream.

And police and military departments across Europe and the US buy their shit, which says more about those police and military departments than about the software.

"amplifying human bias" seems like a very soft way to put it. One should enquire whether if Palantir itself has any form of temporary access to the data from the companies they consult and whether or not they are allowed to analyse it themselves, even if not store it.

If, yes then we are looking at government enabled Cambridge analytica (in many fields not just politics though) all over again. If they can for instance analyse the data from NHS, insurance companies will be drooling millions over that analysis so that they can maximise their profits by getting a very precise understanding of healthcare need trends.

Fear Peter Thiel and his gangbuster crew of excel homies and consultants 😂

Don't get me wrong, they're enablers of authoritarianists, but let's not give them too much credit. Magic? 🫧🧐🪠

Their main job is immanentizing the eschaton.

it does what pornhub monetizes

also into ai hallucinations for script ideas