10 comments

  • timoth3y 2 hours ago
    Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.

    The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.

    Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements.

    We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall.

    And even Sauron himself was misled in this way! The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring.

    I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.

    • WhatIsDukkha 2 hours ago
      Saruman was already rotted by lust for the ring when he began to use the Palantir and then came into the presence of a dominating and corrupting will.

      So yeah... plenty of real world versions of that.

    • BLKNSLVR 1 hour ago
      I've pointed this out before, but there's an interview clip of Alex Karp saying that Trump won the election in a landslide[0].

      If you look at the actual numbers, no one, with any idea of mathematics or statistics or even just basic analysis skills, would call Trump's election victory a landslide.

      It calls into question the fundamental raisin d'etre of Palantir. It makes Palantir look like a pure propaganda tool.

      Therefore, also entirely useless for strategic decision making.

      Interesting analysis of Palantir and Alex Karp:

      Part 1, Palantir: https://youtu.be/PpEg0XIeFtA

      Part 2, Alex Karp: https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I

      [0]https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I&t=1119s

      • holistio 8 minutes ago
        It's _raison_, but "raisin d'être" would make an excellent name for a haute cuisine dessert.
    • warumdarum 46 minutes ago
      Its cellphones ? They show the rulers accurate predictions of human behaviour after the the fall of the towers proofed that the left only had enbarassing cofabulations to explain behaviour at scale. Thats the most valuable thing you can gain out of social network sensor data.
    • GolfPopper 28 minutes ago
      >I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.

      Yet the choice is very effective at telling those with eyes to see that the one who chose the name possesses only a surface-level understanding of what appears to be his favorite piece of literature.

      • themafia 8 minutes ago
        Or he's broadcasting his intention to destroy world governments and institute a new global order under technocratic control. He's banking on a US General not understanding the deeper lore behind of the name.
    • teravor 36 minutes ago
      someone will name their company Ashnazg, probably an AI company
    • AndrewKemendo 1 hour ago
      As though the ego of Peter Thiel has any grounding in reality or ironic metaphor
    • antonvs 1 hour ago
      I can think of a worse name: Peter Thiel. Oh wait I'm confused. That's a better name for this.
  • tremon 3 hours ago
    > “We welcome that the Zurich Commercial Court confirmed our right to publish a counterstatement”

    Well that certainly is one way to spin having 22 of your 23 counterstatement requests dismissed by the court.

    • saghm 2 hours ago
      Their right to publish multiple counterstatements is left unsettled by current law
  • holistio 3 hours ago
    Anyone who has read The Lord of The Rings has exactly zero reasons to trust Palantir.
    • emptybits 2 hours ago
      Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in literature!) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not if) they fall into evil hands.
    • DoktorDelta 2 hours ago
      Crazy that there's a weapons company called Anduril as well
      • nickff 2 hours ago
        Why? Naming a weapons company after Aragorn's sword makes sense. "The Daily Beast" on the other hand is a rather cynical name...
      • scns 2 hours ago
        Creative people seem to be rather pacifistic. Warmongers seem less so, they have to "borrow" from the creative ones.
      • inigyou 1 hour ago
        I'd call my company Sauron's Eye (we'll figure out what the company does later), but sadly that's trademarked to the LOTR franchise.
      • goldenarm 2 hours ago
        Anduril is quite a positive name, it is a broken sword reforged later to save humankind. Quite a metaphor about western reindustrialization.
        • Barrin92 1 hour ago
          except of course that Tolkien, as a Catholic was quite adamant that he didn't write a story of Western chauvinism. The sword is not a metaphor for industrialization, which is quite literally the villain of the story, it's a symbol for restored kingship and hope.
          • cmrdporcupine 33 minutes ago
            Right, and his concept of nobility and just kingship was about mercy love justice and a love of nature, good food, merriment, harmony, and treating others with respect. His works are full of cautionary tales of people who reached for immortality, power, self-aggrandizement, and control over others and fell as a result.

            (Though he was obsessed with lineage and blood quotients and pale skin)

            • holistio 10 minutes ago
              It's very difficult to judge the attitudes and held values of people who lived in the past - I mean the parentheses.

              We don't know how much of it is real flaw or corruption and how much is just the zeitgeist they lived in.

              I wouldn't be at all surprised if Musk's capital T today would end up becoming the beginning or turning point of a cautionary tale in the future. And, for better or worse, I know a lot of otherwise great and talented people who are still his fans.

      • alterom 1 hour ago
        Crazy? It's backed by Thiel as well IIRC.
    • za3faran 1 hour ago
      It's enough to hear what their genocidal maniac of a CEO says.
    • z3c0 2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • mentalgear 2 hours ago
    To all investigative Journalists: Thank you for your hard work, and for being an inspiration and beacon of hope in these dark techno-feudalistic times.
  • sschueller 4 hours ago
    • cluckindan 46 minutes ago
      Please don’t use these sites, they alter archived content and use visitor browsers as a ddos botnet.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

    • catlikesshrimp 3 hours ago
      If Cannot resolve archive.ph host

      Access the .is domain https://archive.is/lXw7j

      internet archive cannot resolve either

      • buildsjets 1 hour ago
        Find a better network service provider, you are being censored by yours.
      • tremon 3 hours ago
        archive.ph works fine for me. Resolves to

          168.222.241.49 archive.ph
          2a09:b280:fe00:5a:d197:eab6:9aa0:f22 archive.ph
        • akerl_ 2 hours ago
          Archive.ph returns different results to Cloudflare’s resolvers intentionally, preventing Cloudflare DNS users from resolving it correctly.
  • Yokohiii 2 hours ago
    Wait europe doesn't want to buy spy tech that spies on europe? Shocking.
    • scottyah 1 hour ago
      Some people in Europe don't want new sources of data coming in outside of their control.
  • dyauspitr 1 hour ago
    Get this cancer out of Europe.
  • zzzeek 2 hours ago
    > Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, has faced growing scrutiny in parts of Europe as governments reassess their dependence on American technology companies.

    I think it's great. Europe and other regions will be building out their own tech stacks, decreasing global dependence on big US players like AWS and Palantir, creating lots more jobs for programmers and much broader ecosystems for doing things.

    • inigyou 1 hour ago
      No evidence for this. Europe talks a big game and consistently fails to deliver.
  • baobabKoodaa 2 hours ago
    Fine. Thiel will just fund a Hulk Hogan lawsuit against the Swiss magazine, then.
  • mistrial9 3 hours ago
    > officials in Denmark and the Netherlands have similarly expressed a desire to uncouple from the US-based software group

    oh that is clever writing

    • tokai 3 hours ago
      I wonder which Danish official they are talking about. Lots of voices against it, but not from officials. The danish state is going full steam ahead. Just yesterday the Greenlandic police was integrated with Grotham from Palantir.