Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.<p>The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to <i>disastrous</i> strategic decisions.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
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.<p>So yeah... plenty of real world versions of that.
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].<p>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.<p>It calls into question the fundamental raisin d'etre of Palantir. It makes Palantir look like a pure propaganda tool.<p>Therefore, also entirely useless for strategic decision making.<p>Interesting analysis of Palantir and Alex Karp:<p>Part 1, Palantir: <a href="https://youtu.be/PpEg0XIeFtA" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/PpEg0XIeFtA</a><p>Part 2, Alex Karp: <a href="https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I</a><p>[0]<a href="https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I&t=1119s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I&t=1119s</a>
It's _raison_, but "raisin d'être" would make an excellent name for a haute cuisine dessert.
Alex Karp's transformation from progressive to MAGA is fascinating; more so knowing that his father was jewish and his mother was black.<p>I can understand a zeal to "protect the country", but FFS, to be the brains of the secret police is a bit much.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/opinion/alex-karp-palantir-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.p1A.LAuX.GjBlPn4mMKVZ&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/opinion/alex-karp-palanti...</a>
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.
><i>I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.</i><p>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.
someone will name their company Ashnazg, probably an AI company
As though the ego of Peter Thiel has any grounding in reality or ironic metaphor
I can think of a worse name: Peter Thiel. Oh wait I'm confused. That's a better name for this.
> “We welcome that the Zurich Commercial Court confirmed our right to publish a counterstatement”<p>Well that certainly is one way to spin having 22 of your 23 counterstatement requests dismissed by the court.
Here are the series of articles that the Swiss investigative magazine, Republik + WAV, published and Palantir looked to silence: <a href="https://www.republik.ch/dossier/die-republik-vs-palantir" rel="nofollow">https://www.republik.ch/dossier/die-republik-vs-palantir</a>
Anyone who has read The Lord of The Rings has exactly zero reasons to trust Palantir.
Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in <i>literature</i>!) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not <i>if</i>) they fall into evil hands.
Well it’s kind of the same with Rand. That’s their thing, they read these books as preteens and the nuance is lost on them
Crazy that there's a weapons company called Anduril as well
Why? Naming a weapons company after Aragorn's sword makes sense. "The Daily Beast" on the other hand is a rather cynical name...
Creative people seem to be rather pacifistic. Warmongers seem less so, they have to "borrow" from the creative ones.
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.
Anduril is quite a positive name, it is a broken sword reforged later to save humankind. Quite a metaphor about western reindustrialization.
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.
tolkien largely copied the nibelungsenlied and accidentally inherited western chauvinism and many other ideas from that lore, including especially a great amount of racism
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.<p>(Though he <i>was</i> obsessed with lineage and blood quotients and pale skin)
It's very difficult to judge the attitudes and held values of people who lived in the past - I mean the parentheses.<p>We don't know how much of it is real flaw or corruption and how much is just the zeitgeist they lived in.<p>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.
Crazy? It's backed by Thiel as well IIRC.
It's enough to hear what their genocidal maniac of a CEO says.
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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.
<a href="https://archive.ph/lXw7j" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/lXw7j</a>
Please don’t use these sites, they alter archived content and use visitor browsers as a ddos botnet.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...</a>
Then I'd have to ask of publishers please don't use subscription oriented paywalls. I'd be happy to pay for an article here and there. I do not want to understand your subscription model, compare benefits between "tiers" of subscriptions, or think about how to cancel when I eventually realize I'm not getting the value I hoped for.<p>This is the price of that dark pattern. These sites wouldn't exist if they acted like publishers instead of retailers.
If Cannot resolve archive.ph host<p>Access the .is domain
<a href="https://archive.is/lXw7j" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/lXw7j</a><p>internet archive cannot resolve either
Find a better network service provider, you are being censored by yours.
archive.ph works fine for me. Resolves to<p><pre><code> 168.222.241.49 archive.ph
2a09:b280:fe00:5a:d197:eab6:9aa0:f22 archive.ph</code></pre>
Wait europe doesn't want to buy spy tech that spies on europe? Shocking.
> 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.<p>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.
Fine. Thiel will just fund a Hulk Hogan lawsuit against the Swiss magazine, then.
Get this cancer out of Europe.
> officials in Denmark and the Netherlands have similarly expressed a desire to uncouple from the US-based software group<p>oh that is clever writing
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