this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools." - Concerning Hobbits
The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.
Sigh.
I think at least Excession has one of the protagonists transition at the end of the novel.
They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen. Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.
Is their profitable business model based on the fact that they're good at enabling & profiting from authoritarianism and corruption?
Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee, which is wild.
Revenue 2023: $1.30 billion[1]
Employees: ~1000
So they are at Palantir levels, which still is wild.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-unraveling-two-pentagon...
No wonder the deficit is expanding.
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV > And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmKm_LhXXgqRbNwHCSD4Wb-lI...
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
so beautiful.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
It's such a disgusting modern day leviathan, I roll my eyes to the back of my head when people casually say you should buy their stock
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Another stock on this trend: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/axon-reports-q2-2025-revenue-...
Earning beat after earning beat, increased guidance after increased guidance
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
They have a fucking kanban board for bombing people.
And for the city-level mass surveillance and targeted assassination systems, seeing how much off the shelf tech got repurposed for modern Russian and Ukrainian drones, I'm quite sure quite a lot of this tech could be replicated by a couple dozen highly skilled individuals (not going into specifics) who are sufficiently motivated.
For example remember the guy who harvested all the photos off internet photo sharing sites, and insecure IP cameras, and combined with facial recognition built a huge tracking database he then sold to various police forces?
Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend
Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=citizens+abducted+by+ice (See the Guardian story)
> - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data
Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
They had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about it, though not under its now-leaked codename.
It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
wkat4242•22h ago