Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by malthaus 313 days ago
isn't palantir just a bottom-tier consulting company (ie a body shop) with a brand, track record & contacts that get them on those "evil" projects?

if not them, someone else would staff the grunts to fill up the demand in manpower

it's not like they have a magic box that "does evil" that they sell to others, even though in the beginning that's what they seemed to market (only for good causes on the right side of history, obviously)

3 comments

They claim they've built more of a 'platform' now and so are less of a consulting shop. It's not a new narrative and I haven't really see a lot of examples of how this platform is especially powerful compared to other say low-code tools to build interfaces on top of datasets but given it's so secretive and there is so much money sloshing around, it seems like people are believing it.
If anyone is skeptical, I'd encourage them to read the tweets of Lonsdale, or Karp, and see what kind of twisted mindset the creators of this huge surveillance machine have
They sell survailance tools and platforms with heavy AI/ML integration. Tools that frankly have no real rivals for most western countries, since we still consider it better to hand all our data over to USA than other nations with similar products. I think you could view them as a company with the capabilities of the Captain American Hydra styled algorithm to determine whether you are a good citizen or not.

Whether you consider that to be evil or not, is probably up to your personal morals. One of the reasons they are in the "spotlight" in countries like mine (Denmark) is because of their ownership and managment being questionable. The reason we still buy their platforms is because we have no alternative, and frankly, the USA has all our data anyway.