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tombert 3 hours ago

The more I read about Palantir, the creepier and weirder it becomes. The CEO brags about wanting to kill all journalists with fentanyl, or brags about how their software will be used to kill people, and how readily they're willing to work for the convicted fraudster that America felt fit to give the nuclear codes.

And despite this company being creepy and weird and bizarre and secretive, they are also trying to make themselves a lifestyle brand by selling merchandise. If I felt like spending $150 for a Palantir-based hoodie, I guess I can normally do that [1], but disturbingly it is apparently "sold out". Apparently a lot of people really want to buy an overpriced sweater, or maybe they're trying to preemptively buy social credit.

Who knows. Everything is terrible.

[1] https://store.palantir.com/

gabaix an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Karp is a philosopher by training that has fallen into ideological blindness. He claims that he is on the right side of history. Democracies need Palantir badly.

He preaches his views to his employees. No one in his flock seems to wonder what would happen if their tools were to be used against democracy.

tombert 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I just find it odd, because their entire business depends on being a creepy entity that has access to "all the data". There would be no reason for ICE or any government organization to actually use their services if they didn't have access to a lot of data that they didn't.

jacquesm an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By that kind of reasoning the Mafia is doing just great.

Not everything is about money.

assaddayinh 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Karp is a philosopher who had to look at humanity as it is without the idealizations. Longtermism, dark enlightenment, yada ya.. all just fancy terms for enlightenment, actual progress. Not the delusions that you can talk yourself into when high on resources.

The points made while on drugs are worse than worthless they are dangerous to longterm survival and those who engage in this are deeply amoral. Most of humanity is basically glorified stoners, congratulating themselves on how high they get while their futures starve. The opinion of the retarded about the warden is always that he is evil.

Go, get yourself some access to a database collected from the seeing stones(aka cellphones) and write your own behavioural queries. Look at the damage and weep. Realize the best we can manage is stabilization in shitty conditions because the warmode species is to retarded. And then go on the web and listen to the blabber of the retarded. Fusion and mini reactors will save civilzation. Meanwhile they handed out proliferation "tracking nukes" aka lookalikes with gps) in every war since the coldwar and guess what the fanatics already have blown it up, several times. Thats why panopticon, thats why electric drugs (games), thats why scenario root hardening, including hardening against government tribalist retardation. Go buy yourself a hoodie. Oh, and its all good, we are going to mars.

nextos 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ironically, the Danish Government is a heavy user of Palantir systems, including creepy predictive policing solutions.

I would be keen to know if citizen data is being handled correctly, following GDPR/LED.

Given previous Danish client-state-like cooperation with NSA to spy on other EU countries, I can imagine the answer.

anton001 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Which predictive policing solution from palantir are they using?

lostlogin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> including creepy predictive policing solutions.

Minority Report coming right up.

izacus an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

GDPR has carveouts for governments and law enforcement so they can do whatever for those purposes.

hexbin010 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I love how powerful the GDPR marketing was that it made people forget that there are massive exceptions for prevention of crime and for the government

gyanchawdhary an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This reads like someone who replaced thinking with the word “creepy” and hit paste until it felt like an opinion. If your critique is just moral panic (and I guess merch anxiety) you’re not exposing anything … and speaking of merch, their Karp “Dominate” shirt is absolutely killer

tombert an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'm sorry, which forum do you think you're on? This isn't a fucking "publication", it's a discussion forum for a bunch of software geeks. I'm not trying to "expose" anything, I'm saying that when I read about how much crap they do, how much they work with ICE, and how deeply unlikable the CEO is, then yeah they're creepy. It really is just an "opinion", so you trying to call that out shows a lack of comprehension of the forum and honestly the English language as a whole.

Frankly, I think the fact that you're so willing to simp for a creepy billionaire and a creepy multi-billion dollar company so much as to call one of their shirts "absolutely killer" says a lot more about you than anything else.

gyanchawdhary 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

no need to apologise .. but see you are doing it again .. hiding behind “it’s just my opinion” after dumping a slurry of buzzwords and vibes .. also no one is confused about what forum this is … people here still expect opinions to have content…

However screening “creepy billionaire” and then accusing anyone who disagrees of “simping” is reddit tier brainrot .. not discourse. If that’s your bar, don’t get mad when someone notices you cleared it by crawling ;)

noitpmeder 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think the sentiment the poster you're interacting with is anything novel or surprising to find on HN. To be honest it's largely the prevailing outlook from what I understand (maybe with some more reserved language) ESPECIALLY for those not intimately connected with SV in America.

I'd definitely be having these thoughts a bit more often if I was someone in another country that found out my govt is using their services, even more so with the recent migrate-off-us-tech momentum.

tombert 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I mean, isn't this kind of the point of Palantir? Like don't they want to be known as a technological Big Brother? If they weren't Silicon Valley Big Brother, then why would a government even want to use their service?

It feels like they want to have their cake and eat it too; they hate the negative press calling them creepy, but also depend on that press to do their marketing because if they weren't creepy then they wouldn't have a product.

gyanchawdhary 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

imn a software engineer/entrepreneur .. and i’m british, and that article is about UK public services ... so this isn’t distant or abstract for me .. aslo, SV isnt some monolith I’m disconnected from .. even without living there .. its companies (especially those ones that can be seen from this original poster (imbecile ?) view point as evil have materially shaped my career and opportunities in ways that wouldn’t have existed otherwise .. btw .. you can be skeptical of Palantir or US tech influence without collapsing everything into an us verus them narrative or assuming disagreement maps cleanly to geography ..

tombert 13 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

"Please, senpai Alex, please notice me! I've been so loyal to you!"

I'm not "hiding" behind anything. I made the assertion that what Palantir does (and discusses publicly [1] [2] [3]) is "creepy". I'm disappointed in your second grade teacher if you don't know what an "opinion" word is, but I guess I will assume the duty: subjective terms, like "creepy", are terms that typically describe a subjective perspective. As there's no claim of objectivity there's also no need to "prove" this, though it can be justified by specific claims, as were linked below. You are of course free to not think that stuff is creepy, that's fine, but I do think it's creepy and I doubt I'm the only one.

I don't accuse everyone who disagrees with me as simping. I'm accusing someone who thinks that a really, really ugly T-Shirt with the word "dominate" written on it as "absolutely killer" of simping. You would not think that that shirt was "killer" if Daddy Alex weren't on there.

That or you're one of those "social media consultants" that directly works for Palantir, in which case I have some other, less polite ways to describe you if you'd prefer.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/palantir-delivers-ice-doss...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/politics/palantir-ceo-makes-anothe...

[3] https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-sa...

gyanchawdhary 3 minutes ago | parent [-]

when you fall back to “it’s subjective' .. "senpai" .. and accusing people of being paid shills .. ur not defending an opinion .. you’re advertising that you don’t have anything sturdier to stand on, you worked up imbecile ;)

popalchemist an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The moral panic is justified, if you take 5 minutes to look into what they do, and who's behind it (YC's own neo-nazi billionaire, Peter Theil, of course, who is actively undermining western democracy and norms in conjunction with Trump, his hand-picked puppet JD Vance, and so on). For example, they created the facial recognition database and national surveillance system that ICE is literally currently using to hunt down and kidnap, torture, deport, and murder political dissenters who have previously been recorded taking part in their right to protest.

If you are too lazy to Google all of that -- it's all fact, not conjecture -- here's one more thing:

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". -Peter Theil, Palantir founder.