We used one of their products, Foundry, where I work. It is really more of a suite of products that all center on making it easy to connect and interact with data. Before I understood what they were and who was behind them, I was a huge fan. They are objectively impressive tools.
For example, there is a tool that helps you visually understand the lineage of data, essentially showing the different joins behind a given data table.
There was another tool that was pretty amazing at making it easy to interact with, and clean/prep, huge datasets. It very quickly became my preferred method of browsing a new dataset. I could see every column in it, all the metadata of the column, obviously it’s format, but also based on that format, some quick visual insights. For example, a data field that was all dates would quickly show a distribution of the min and max dates and bars representing the number of records in each year. It was just really easy to determine whether the dataset I was looking at would have what I needed, at the granularity or frequency of refresh I would need it. I think my favorite thing is that you could write rules to transform, combine, obfuscate, divide, etc, etc, various columns of a dataset, or even add new columns based on some math of existing columns. Then you could have that output into a new copy of that dataset. I called these cleaners. Then, if the parent dataset happened to be a live one, any updates to the parent dataset would run through the cleaner and into the new dataset, at whatever cadence the parent is being updated. And that relationship chain would be illustrated and represented on that visual lineage tool automatically.
I’m sure a skilled coder or SQL master could accomplish a lot of this, but I am a total generalist and have googled 100% of the SQL I’ve ever run. The visual approach to handling data is just really intuitive and easy to pick up, so it made it really easy for me to wield data I might otherwise not have been able to in the course of my work.
There’s more but I’m starting to feel dirty because I feel like I’m gushing over this monstrosity. None of that simplicity is worth all of This.
Nah that’s great info, although very unfortunate to think of the implications of Palantir being competent.
They’re a data analytics platform: https://www.palantir.com/docs They got in close with the intelligence agencies early on and have some big money with connections behind them.
From what I’ve seen, though, they don’t “have your data” as that’s not their thing. A government that does have your data could use their analytics tools to do some highly dodgy stuff, though, which is why they’re popular with governments and feared by everyone else.
From what I’ve seen, though, they don’t “have your data” as that’s not their thing.
That’s what they claim, and yet people were able to hack their Discord age verification tech and discover otherwise. Where have you even heard this, because I hope it’s not from their CEO, He often goes on religiously fueled technofeudalist rants about the antichrist, the end of the world, and the justification for unified warrant-less mass surveillance of it all.
Oh, and: https://lemmy.world/post/44485368
While everyone is busy hating on Musk and the like, many forget that utter evil pieces of shit like Peter Thiel exist. Palantir is just the tip of the iceberg, he’s been manipulating the entire digital ecosphere for nearly two decades now, with a well placed venture capitalist firm, grants for the “right” software and teams, while suffocating others…
The “not having your data” part is pretty interesting. From what I’ve read, they build software that links data from various sources, and specifically promises not to send it back to HQ.
From what I understand : Palantir is doing everything what Facebook does but the end game is not the same. Facebook want to sell your metadata to publicist to sell you a dream that you will buy. Palantir, however, is doing this and selling it to fascist governments and buying lobbyists to push fascist legislation
Bold of you to assume that Facebook is not selling your data to Palantir to be recombined and re-sold…
They had CIA funding before, and they helped Israel plan their attacks in the Gaza zone, so they actively partake in stripping data from any source to help governments be horrible
Their moat is a total lack of ethics
And you think Meta and Google have ethics?
No but their business is selling ads basically, not getting people emprisoned.
imprisoned
It is all about who you know as they say.
