From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.

They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.

Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.

    I'm so free, I'm so free

    I'm so free, I'm so free

    Feel so good, now, I'm so free

    Oh oh oh, I'm so free

I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.

That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government things. It's up to voters to keep the government in line.

it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy

Ironically the best solution for this is for websites to start de-anonymizing users to the extent necessary to block fake accounts from polluting the airwaves.

It's all or nothing.

Even smart people are capable of hate.

I mean, yeah - it’s “he’s not hurting the right people” turned into a product or enterprise and then sold specifically to people who really like that message, and which employs people who desperately want to be in charge of hurting those people as much as possible.

It doesn’t even have the plausible deniability of being a social media company.

Anyone in disagreement needs to read about Palintr and what has intentionally been said about it

The line blurs when you consider Thiel's personal motivations (e.g. Project 2025) and investments/involvement in the current administration.

Yes, that it is a set of things that it is possible one could believe.

That is not an argument for it being a set of things that one ought to believe, as opposed to that ICE has a legal mandate that it isn't actually pursuing, and the mandate which it is pursuing is both intentionally murky, unethical to the extent that evidence suggests what it is, and also pursued by methods that are illegal and inhumane even irrespective of the bad ends that they are directed at.

> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.

Again, that it is certainly a set of things it is possible to believe, but it seems pretty silly to believe. A queue is at best an undesirable consequences of particular choices about how to manage concerns about quantitative levels of immigration and particular impacts those levels might have, not an ideal to be pursued.

> Nuance is possible.

“X is possible” is not an argument is that X is, factually or morally as appropriate to the shape of the proposition at issue, justified. And an extended argument that sets of beliefs are possible is something people only engage in when they recognize that they are unable to make the case that they are justified, but nevertheless want to suggest that people are bad for failing to adopt them.

I don’t think I ever seen a CV from an ex Pal*ntir employee though. Perhaps they are automatically filtered or working for good morals doesn’t attract them.

Honestly, There is no queue for poor people, this is their only way, most of these people aren't even eligible for farm worker temp visa. US has created bureaucracy over the years in such a way that these people can never become legal. They are not skipping the line and taking some tech worker's spot or anything.

... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period.

The existence of that app is an abomination; the fact tax payer money is being allocated to it is tragicomic. Not spending it and just giving it as tax returns to the population would be so much better than kidnapping people over being born in the wrong place.

"No really, I do consequential stuff! See, I met CCP premiers and shit, I supply analytics to help North Koreans assassins kill exiles living in the US! Trust me bro"

I've trolled so many Palantir employees since my freshman year in undergrad that if even 1% of their claims about their power and connections held any water, I would have been audited by the IRS at least once in my life and a "clerical error" would have happened with my car title leading to a weekend in jail for stealing my own car.

I only know 2 Palantir employees in real life, and they are both at least as lame as you would expect someone who says their uncle works for Nintendo to be.

One of them is married to a furry who cheated on him before they got married and supports "consensual love between adults and children", and the other displayed all the outward signs of an incel. The former looks like the old "Carl the Cuck" meme guy (Drew Pickles haircut and Frank Grimes glasses), and the latter told me some copypasta-tier story about how he was friends with "Chinese Princesses". I wish I had my screen caps of this conversation back in 2014, but I deleted Facebook a decade ago. It was bombastic compared to even the Navy Seal copypasta.

If I had to sum it all up, imagine a sysadmin for the Worcester, MA police department pretending to be Lex Luthor on HN for clout.

I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.

Well, at least they're paying those consultants a lot of money, since they're charging a lot for them... right? Right?

> But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.

That’s certainly your right and choice. But when we’re spending tens of billions a year on harassing immigrants, you should ask if it is better to just spend the money on supporting them instead. Our economy benefits greatly from immigrants.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

I find it nonsensical to dismiss an anti-ICE argument because of one word.

I mean sure but you have to acknowledge that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports. The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.

people think Palantir makes a lot of money. did Palantir make a lot of money? No. Accenture Federal Services, Leidos Defense Civil IT & Services, Booz Allen Hamilton Gov Consulting & Cyber, General Dynamics Technologies, SAIC, and CACI combined made $61.9b in 2024, compared to all of Palantir which made $2.9b. so if you just look at some IT and defense companies' gov IT sales segments - we're not even including Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing where calculating such a thing is complex - Palantir's revenue looks very, very small.

people think Palantir makes vanilla "consultants" and “typical enterprise vendor vibes" products. does the thing that Palantir make work? we're talking about it! I think the reason we don't talk about Raytheon's version of this app is that Raytheon's (or Accenture's or...) version doesn't work haha

The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.

I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.

What happens when there's a bug in the software? Would that mean God is fallible after all? Could this be the plot line of Dogma++?

Clearly is it not a belief that no one in the USA supports, as seem in the discourse against ICE and immigration contrl.

> The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.

Not necessarily, no. "The debate" is too vague to elaborate in favor or against what you're saying.

But yes, there are people against immigration control period, and period in favor of reforms to make immigration easier for workers, not harder. But propaganda will keep putting workers against each other, instead of companies lobbying against workers.

See also: Parallel Construction (i.e. evidence tampering) and most of the times a "drug-sniffing" dog is called to "test" something the police already want to search.

On a somewhat related note, it always bothers me that the discussion is about whether it’s appropriate for the government to buy this sort of data as opposed to whether it is appropriate for anyone to sell, or for that matter collect, that data.

I would prefer if neither the government nor any data brokers or advertisers had this data.

Or how are people fleeing from prosecution, looking for a better life, or just feeling like living somewhere else exactly hurting you? It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required.

If you're thinking about jobs, skilled workers immigrating will compete with you much more than less-privileged people. And "we cannot pay for them" is BS made up the system as well. It is possible to pay for social security for everyone, but not if all profits go to shareholders of course.

Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.

of course when shit actually hits the fan you'll still wait 4 days for a response

Worse, that spy apparatus inherently corrupts its users.

People forgot this once Maduro was noped

>It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required

Bhutan, Barcelona

edit: Added the little patronizing smiley face at the end. Eat shit.

We don't fund out national parks with advertisements. We don't fund our libraries with advertisements. We could create the same structures for the internet as well, where crucial internet resources are protected and stewarded. They don't necessarily need to be in the hands of ad companies.

Sure, I will not deny that having things be "free" (and paying for them in other ways) has been a huge boon from one perspective, but we can also evolve to put "free" things in different places. Because things are never free. Advertisements are funding mass surveillance. They are encroaching our civil liberties and normalizing it. There is a total cost to things that extens beyond money. What we don't pay out of pocket we pay as a society.

Trump won the election mostly on a strong anti-immigration policy this is the popular will of the people.

> one of the good guys

Uhhhh...

Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).

Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.

Such actions does not a good guy make.

The immigrants are just an excuse for the fascist goons in the street.

that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.

Yet.

When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.

But I think that Feanor’s character is irrelevant. An evil person could create a tool that ends up being useful for good purposes. Tools are neutral; they don’t inherit the character of their creator or their user.

While I agree with your assessment of Fëanor I don't think anything in Tolkien's texts indicate that there were nefarious intents for palantiri creation.

I mean, that's worse.

Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.

I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.

This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.

Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?

That said, if some ex-Palantir worker was somehow working for UNICEF – to take an extreme example – it would be a little awkward unless they had denounced their old company in a fairly public manner.

One can't just ignore that kind of subtext...

1. They provide tech that is used to select targets for drone strikes and apparently also for targeting violent attacks on US civilians. I don't know too much about how the algorithm works but simply outsourcing decisions about who lives or dies to opaque algorithms is creepy. It also allows the people behind the operations to avoid personal responsibility for mistakes by blaming the mistakes on the software. It also could enable people to just not think about it and thus avoid the moral question entirely. It's an abstract concern but it is a legitimate one, IMO.

2. I don't know if this is 100% confirmed but we have heard reports that Elon Musk and DOGE collected every piece of government data that they could get their hands, across various government departments and databases. These databases were previously islands that served one specific purpose and didn't necessarily connect to all the other government databases from other departments. It's suspected that palantir software (perhaps along with Grok) is being used to link all of these databases together and cross reference data that was previously not available for law enforcement or immigration purposes. This could enable a lot of potential abuse and probably isn't being subjected to any kind of court or congressional oversight.

If you couldn't go backwards Palantir wouldn't have a market. So, I would consider that a loophole.

You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?

(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)

I certainly think that Palantir has ethical issues; as I stated in my parent comment, it wouldn't be high on my list of choices for places to work.

But, when it comes to things like (2), this is a failure of regulation and oversight and needs to be treated as such. Note that this doesn't make Palantir "right" (building a platform to do things that are probably bad is still bad), but there's no reason anyone with basic data warehousing skills couldn't have done this before or after.

Essentially, I think people give Palantir specifically too much credit and in turn ignore the fundamental issues they're worried about. Panic over "dismantle Palantir" or even the next step, "dismantle corporate data warehousing" is misguided and wouldn't address the issues at hand; worry about government data fusion needs to be directed towards government data fusion, and worry about computers making targeting decisions needs to be directed at computers making targeting decisions.

Do they? I don't think they even do this, either.

I have really strong knowledge of this from ~10 years ago and weak knowledge from more recently. I'm happy to be proven wrong but my understanding is that they don't sell any data at all, but rather just consulting services for processing data someone already has.

One of those consulting services is probably recommending vendors to supply more data, but as far as I know Palantir literally do not have a first-party data warehouse at all.

If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).

That’s why I invoked the Torment Nexus.

I have unfortunately lived long enough to see my passion cross this line.

This is about the morality and judgment of any person who'd consciously choose to found "One-Ring Controls" (ORC inc.) selling the "Ringraith 3000" that spies on employees and punishes them for not working hard enough.

"Don't criticize me for my branding because fictional crystal-balls and rings are just objects" is not a credible defense.

My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).

In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.

I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.

If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.

> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.

The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.

> There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.

Where does one draw the line and under what conditions? Reasonable minds can differ on the definition of foreseeable.

After all, Some of the most beneficial inventions to mankind have also aided its worst tendencies. For instance, the 20th and 21st centuries as we know them wouldn't exist without the combustion engine. Simultaneously, it's this same device that has significantly contributed to the pollution of the air.

Secondly, how does one mean to stop society or any individual from learning and building on new ideas in the Information age? Is such a thing even possible?

Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.

Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”