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.

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.

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 ..