Can someone actually explain what the magic sauce is in what Palantir does? I understand it pulls data together?

mclightning 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Magic sauce is absolute lack of moral values.

But I mean in terms of technical capability? How is it different than chucking everything in Postgres or a Big Data lake or something?

	▲	salawat 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It isn't. It's just that they're doing it where others aren't. They're a child of Total Information Awareness that has never realized or just doesn't care about the societal poison pill inherent to it.

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loky4i4 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

lol and you know that based on what information ?

	▲	mclightning 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		based on what their CEO is saying...he repeats like a broken record; "we do what other companies won't because of ethics and morals"

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usrusr 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The magic sauce in terms of bubbleability is that the product is all secret and investors can't form any natural opinion beyond what's published in company performance publications. Because they aren't allowed to know anything beyond that. It's just blind trust, "governments have bought before, they might continue buying, perhaps buy more". Reminds me a bit of the psychological mechanisms that make a con work, might be something to it.

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Traster 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a few things. Let's start with the core of what they say is their value. They have forward deployed engineers - this a totally new, previously unknown innovation - who go to a company, understand their needs and build data processing tools to give them insights. Then, they generalize these tools so that they can essentially sell them as SAAS software, giving them SAAS-type economics.

What other people say is their secret sauce, is they do consulting work for the government (a forward deployed engineer is just a consultant) and they make incredible margins because their senior management and early investors have connections to the government which gets them exclusive access to incredibly juicy contracts. As these contracts paid off they leant heavily into the social media meme stock trend so their CEO spends time talking like a psychopath and doing various non-economic things like spending huge amounts of money running adverts about how they're going to use AI to unleash Americas workers (America's workers aren't able to buy Palantir software or services, but they can buy it's stock).

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dartharva 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

How is this "forward deployed engineers" model different from that of basically any tech consulting firm?

	▲	SideburnsOfDoom 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It isn't.

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gadders 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OK. The first part sounds a bit like an innovation.

I was kind of expecting someone to say it had EG really sophisticated ETL tools that can normalise loads of different data or can query across disparate data sources or something.

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_DeadFred_ 3 days ago | parent [-]

The first part sounds like a basic ERP implementation. Only instead of leaning on your in-house domain experts who have years of experience/relevant knowledge/know the relevant caveats, you pay consulting rates to train up new domain experts who don't understand/know the caveats and who will charge you consulting rates to gain access to the results of the training you overpaid for.

'But they cleaned the data up'. That data was also cleaned up during all the last major system updates. And during the implementation of those systems. And the implementation of the systems before that.

	▲	Spivak 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mean they do advertise themselves as an ERP system so that part tracks.

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pcthrowaway 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> What other people say is their secret sauce, is they do consulting work for the government

Also for the IDF

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lm28469 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Papypal mafia, thiel, musk, trump, money, oligarchy, conflicts of interests, military–industrial complex, 3 letters agencies, mass surveillance, &c.

It's kind of a conspiracy theory bingo at that point, it's probably somehow even worse than we can imagine

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willis936 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They think there is money on the table from maximizing anti-ethical behavior. This misinterprets capitalism's current state as something with ethics.