I don’t think it’s really this simple. Palantir is a major government contractor that enables it to be more tech savvy. It’s embedded through hundreds of teams / agencies. You can’t remain a credible partner if you play morality police on every workflow. Palantir has worked through multiple administrations of both parties and have to support whoever is in power to have a seat at the table.

Ultimately the question is just: would you prefer to have a competent or incompetent government?

Otherwise you can agree or disagree with government policies, but that shouldn’t be directed at tech vendors, it should be directed at politicians and people in government / at the voting booth.

Here's a better question, in line with your positioning... Is Palantir necessary to a "competent government"

I think you know the answer to that.

The government is notoriously terrible at tech. Are you debating that? Out of the top tech talent over the last 20 years, how many of them do you suppose work in FAANG vs the US government?

I'm not saying Palantir specifically is necessary, but I do think finding avenues for Silicon valley to help the US government is necessary for them to be tech competent.

> You can’t remain a credible partner if you play morality police on every workflow

Sure. That's the price to pay for not setting morality aside. One that they're not willing to pay.

Palantir's ICE contract itself is 30 million over 2 years. Thats 15 mil a year, where this past year's total revenue was ~4B. Thats about .00375 of their revenue. I hardly think it's the literal contract money they care so deeply about.

> Ultimately the question is just: would you prefer to have a competent or incompetent government?

Is this a joke? Have you looked at the current administration?

Haha, true, although I meant competent from a tech perspective. The reason Palantir is even in the building is because the government is notoriously bad at technology.

You need to separate government institutions ability to use tech from Trumps obvious buffoonery.

I am thinking that whether I want a technically competent federal government depends entirely on who I think will be running it in the future. Right now the technical incompetence, such that it exists, works to our advantage.

Sure, but in that case your rage should be directed at ICE / the federal government. Not a third party software vendor.

The rage should be dependent on the contribution. You mention a third party software vendor who produces tools that aren't even "dual-use" with respect to the abuse by ICE, they are specifically tailored. That's not the same as, say, providing electricity to them.

They are dual use. Palantir creates platforms (Foundry, Gotham) which are used by ICE but also thousands of other companies. Are you saying that just because ICE tailors these platforms to their workflows they’re not dual use? That feels akin to saying some super complicated excel workflow used by a company means excel is not dual use.

Palantir does a ton of customization and consulting for specific use cases. This isn't like Microsoft Excel being used to track uranium enrichment in Iran, it is a direct, explicit part of their business.

Even if you do nothing else of impact in your life, you can stop defending the bad guys.

So because they show people how to use their software they’re evil?

They aren't just showing people how to use their software. Stop defending the bad guys.

I’m not defending the “bad guys”. The original argument was about moral culpability based on distance from the bad deed. Microsoft could have just as easily refused Azure for the ICE contract, but they didn’t, yet somehow they are just far enough away to not be culpable.

From the article

> Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.

Is ICE using a general purpose app for surveillance or is Palantir making a deportation-centric app for ICE?

> For most people

Most people have no idea what a terminal is.

I guess they’re bringing Claude Code tools like filesystem access and bash to their UI. And running it in a “sandbox” of sorts. I could get behind this for users where the terminal is a bit scary.

You’re over thinking it. Like all top tech companies, they just want the best engineers.

On the contrary, they hire the trendiest: https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

Yeah this seems accurate, I just mean they aren’t looking at your google searches when deciding if they should hire you.

Ah yes, Palantir is "just" a tech company.

Notwithstanding the fact that tech companies hire dogshit employees all the time and the vast majority of employees of any company of size 1000+ are average at best, Palantir happens to be rating so high on the scale of evil that I'd pop champagne if it got nuked tomorrow.

If any company would do it, it would be Palantir.

That’s the point. If any company would do it, it’s Palantir, and they don’t. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Their negative public image makes hiring more difficult causing them to accept what they can get.

Also, I’m not saying they have the best talent, just that they want the best talent.

I disagree. I think it is an “accident” that stems from organizations rather than anything sinister.

Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting.

This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.

It's nearly impossible to block YouTube on a smart TV without third party apps, even worse on non-android ones. And the app is not uninstallable. I don't think this is b-tier devs, feels like intentionall neglect.

LG let's me put a PIN on apps like YouTube, so the kids can't watch it alone.

Why does this have to be TV based and not baked into YouTube app ? Considering how addictive YouTube scrolling is, and how quickly algorithm captures kids it should be mandatory.

My PS5 has play time built in.

Your kids will figure out that PIN.

Parental controls and accessibility both suffer from the fact that they are good features to add but fundamentally do not drive revenue. They only exist in the average as much as is required by regulation.

No business would build wheelchair ramps unless they were made to, that's why we make them. There's no reason to not do the same for parental controls.

I would easily believe that Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., explicitly staff these teams with childless adults.

Given how easy it is for my 13yo daughter to get around screen time restrictions on iOS in ways I wouldn't believe are possible I'm not sure these people are even adults.

How does she get around the restrictions? I'm not aware of a way to do that on iPhone

Change the region. Not time and date, that can be blocked by screentime. Change the region. Sometimes takes multiple attempts but it does work. I had to pay a bug bounty to my child to get them to tell me how they did it

uninstall app when limit runs out, reinstall used to work.

Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

Think about it that way: why would they make things harder for who they were in the very recent past.

> Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

What?

I didn’t realize Apple with in the habit of hiring people straight out of high school instead of after going through enough university education that ends up with candidates in their early to mid 20s

Yep. They hire talent. University grads will work alongside red team folks that are maybe 22 years old and have been at Apple for two years. It's a thing.

I personally know more than one person who has a background along those lines.

I was more pointing out that 22+ year olds aren’t people who were “recently children” unless we’re continuing the trend of infantilizing adults farther into their 20s.

I was also under the impression that the faangs hired a larger % of post docs into their first industry job than most companies, so you’re also getting 27+ year olds as entry level engineers and scientists

I think someone who is 22 was 17 in the not that distant past.

Apple hires talent, they don't care about anything else. Again, I am speaking to things I know from my actual life and people I know in the physical world.

> Apple hires talent, they don't care about anything else. Again, I am speaking to things I know from my actual life and people I know in the physical world.

How many people do they hire without college degrees?

I am legitimately asking. I understand that was a thing in the tech world decades ago but my understanding was that big tech’s idea of “talent” has evolved to include mandatory education credentials like at least a bachelor’s degree if not further education.

18 is recently a kid

22 is someone whose been an adult for an entire Presidential term. I might be splitting hairs but I struggle to view that as “recent”

Edit: removed an unnecessarily aggressive paragraph that added nothing to the conversation

All those companies are, or used to be, based in the US. Those 22 year olds have only been allowed to drink for a year so by one measure they were recently children.

Workaholic office cultures tend to filter out adults with kids by default so it doesn’t need to be an explicit effort.

> Companies generally want good parental controls

Nope, parental controls are fucked up since ages. And this is by design, and not because of some "b-list developers".

> Companies generally want good parental controls

Yeah, like Microsoft requesting that Firefox shall be (parentally) reviewed, while Edge happilly could connect to internet. Fixed by creating a local account.

It is sinister that this is overlooked by corporations by “accident”. What you are describing exactly what is sinister, that children’s safety controls and parents ability to decrease the risk comes last.

> If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

I've seen this first hand and yes, it's not sinister, getting dozens of services coordinated and permissioned under a single, easy to use, system is too much cognitive load for the team that inevitably gets tasked to do these things. Think about Privileged Access Management or Active Directory, but an 8 year old has to get it to work with a stay at home mom's 5 year old android device, and the PM's working on it can't think through second order effects (or even first order effects sometimes). And of course anything that negatively affects metrics will get rolled back (that part might be sinister).

We're not sinister, we just have these metrics that we prioritize at all costs, up to and including child well-being!

Maybe companies could set up comprehensive granular APIs for managing device/store permissions and outsource the parental control software that actually manages the settings. This way a vendor is getting paid to make those settings comprehensible and effective, so they have an incentive to do it well. This would also allow conservative/overly cautious parents to buy different software than more permissive parents. So everyone gets the permission model they want.

The one sitting at the throne is the one with the content, not the one with the tech. People don’t care about frivolous features. There are like 20 different streaming services, I’m sure some have better tech than others but ultimately people are only paying attention to what shows they have

Do you guys really think Gondor was a democratic society with privacy laws?

The problem with this in our current society is that staying anonymous becomes your whole identity. I have a friend who for the longest time didn’t use Venmo, Uber, etc. because of privacy reasons, but the lifestyle was just not sustainable. Ultimately convenience killed privacy.

I guess those are just examples and there are much more significant things, because Venmo and Uber seem far from indispensable.

>Ultimately convenience killed privacy.

By design, unfortunately.

We have to choose where anonymity is worth the tradeoffs, but it's still quite possible to live without Venmo, Uber, etc.

These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.

Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.

So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.

I empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.