cheese_greaterHow does Palantir work, what is so special about what they do that some other big tech company wasnt already doing that or what is their moat?
Greg ClarkeTheir moat is a total lack of ethics
And you think Meta and Google have ethics?
northernlightsNo but their business is selling ads basically, not getting people emprisoned.
imprisoned
tx, not my native language so I appreciate being corrected.
Meta and Google have no ethics but that’s a side effect of a lack of regulations and being a publicly traded company. With Palantir the lack of ethics are not a side effect, it’s a feature.
They’re a data analytics platform: www.palantir.com/docs They got in close with the intelligence agencies early on and have some big money with connections behind them.
From what I’ve seen, though, they don’t “have your data” as that’s not their thing. A government that does have your data could use their analytics tools to do some highly dodgy stuff, though, which is why they’re popular with governments and feared by everyone else.
The “not having your data” part is pretty interesting. From what I’ve read, they build software that links data from various sources, and specifically promises not to send it back to HQ.
I think what they do is host an instance/shard of their tools for each customer, probably on a public cloud provider like AWS. Palantir manage the software, the customer provides the data.
Palantir’s engineers absolutely could have access to any data in their tools if they wanted it enough (they write the software, after all), but I would assume that there are various safeguards in place - the CIA absolutely wouldn’t want Palantir staff accessing their data, but on the flipside the CIA might be very keen for Palantir staff to help them access data owned by another country’s intelligence agencies…
From what I’ve seen, though, they don’t “have your data” as that’s not their thing.
That’s what they claim, and yet people were able to hack their Discord age verification tech and discover otherwise. Where have you even heard this, because I hope it’s not from their CEO, He often goes on religiously fueled technofeudalist rants about the antichrist, the end of the world, and the justification for unified warrant-less mass surveillance of it all.
That’s what they claim, and yet people were able to hack their Discord age verification tech and discover otherwise.
No, Palantir doesn’t have any Discord age verification tech.
Persona, the age verification thing from the Discord hack, did store data. But that’s Persona, not Palantir. They are different, unrelated companies. The connection is that Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir, has invested money into Persona, but that’s it. For reference he has invested in 97 companies. Whatever these 97 companies do, has nothing to do with Palantir.
They are different companies in the same way Cambridge Analytica and Emerdata are different companies. Who’s one of Persona’s biggest invester through Founders Fund is Peter Thiel.
This is such a basic tactic that it literally is used for tax avoidance: shell companies. If you think Palantir is not going to have their data, I have a bridge to sell you.
So you are telling me that Persona somehow became Thiel’s shell company when he bought a 10% stake in it? What about the 90% of investors? How is a company that exists for 7 years and has tons of products and customers a shell company? That’s the opposity of what a shell company is.
No, I’m telling you what I’m literally telling you. If you think Palantir is not going to have their data, I have a bridge to sell you.
Shell companies are what used for tax avoidance, the tactic is the same: work influence through separate companies also controlled by you. I am not surprised someone from the .ml is defending the worst aspects of capitalism, take that as you will.
Nobody said anything about Palantir not having any data, so don’t try to strawman, of course they can have the data.
I said the identity verification tech was Persona, not Palantir. If you want to say that Palantir has access to Persona’s data, be my guest. That doesn’t change the fact it was not Palantir’s identity verification tech that was hacked.
Please consult any dictionary on “shell company” and let me know how Persona fits the definition of having no assets or operations, and doing no business activities. Because it sure looks to me like they have assets, business activities, and are quite an active, real business.
Isn’t the stereotypical .ml user a pro-Russian tankie? Why would they defend capitalism, they all want capitalists to burn, lol.
I already explained to you what I meant. If it is not getting through, it is not getting through.
Isn’t the stereotypical .ml user a pro-Russian tankie?
It’s the why.
Other commenters have addressed the Discord question - it sounds like that was a completely separate company and technology (just the same investors).
And no, I didn’t get any info from Thiel or Karp.
Ah, yes, that completely separate company where one of the biggest investors is from a fund belonging to Peter Thiel. Completely separate.
It is all about who you know as they say.
We use one of their products, Foundry, where I work. It is really more of a suite of products that all center on making it easy to connect and interact with data. Before I understood what they were and who was behind them, I was a huge fan. They are objectively impressive tools.
For example, there is a tool that helps you visually understand the lineage of data, essentially showing the different joins behind a given data table.
There was another tool that was pretty amazing at making it easy to interact with, and clean/prep, huge datasets. It very quickly became my preferred method of browsing a new dataset. I could see every column in it, all the metadata of the column, obviously it’s format, but also based on that format, some quick visual insights. For example, a data field that was all dates would quickly show a distribution of the min and max dates and bars representing the number of records in each year. It was just really easy to determine whether the dataset I was looking at would have what I needed, at the granularity or frequency of refresh I would need it. I think my favorite thing is that you could write rules to transform, combine, obfuscate, divide, etc, etc, various columns of a dataset, or even add new columns based on some math of existing columns. Then you could have that output into a new copy of that dataset. I called these cleaners. Then, if the parent dataset happened to be a live one, any updates to the parent dataset would run through the cleaner and into the new dataset, at whatever cadence the parent is being updated. And that relationship chain would be illustrated and represented on that visual lineage tool automatically.
I’m sure a skilled coder or SQL master could accomplish a lot of this, but I am a total generalist and have googled 100% of the SQL I’ve ever run. The visual approach to handling data is just really intuitive and easy to pick up, so it made it really easy for me to wield data I might otherwise not have been able to in the course of my work.
There’s more but I’m starting to feel dirty because I feel like I’m gushing over this monstrosity. None of that simplicity is worth all of This.
chickenMakes me wonder if the big market for data science didn’t signify the end of decent life on Earth.
Amro