Day: November 15, 2025

I got reading about what people are saying about the woke mind virus. Obviously, that lead me into reading about Peter Thiel and Alan Karp the billionaire CEO and well connected Trump confidents who are using their government connections to sell more business to government agencies.

The details of about what exactly Palantir do is pretty vague, but it sounds like it’s mostly a database and analysis software that takes unstructured data and structures it based on training data provided by the those contracting the software. It looks for patterns based on existing patterns, in many ways it’s likely to be like an ordinary database but with better search and organizing capacity. It likely provides a more friendly user interface, and is a lot more convenient then having to build something in house.

Chances are it’s nothing super remarkable but it’s an easy way for agencies to use something that is already off the shelf, and based on a reliable contractor who can assist when things are broke. Nothing that an individual agency couldn’t build themselves, but it’s faster to have an Off-The-Shelf solution that works out of the box. As somebody who oversees a data division, I can’t emphasize how nice it is when we have products supported out of house by a good contactor. In contrast, in house problems require in house staff to fix and there is no guarantee that it will get done perfectly or we can terminate the contract if we’re not happy.  That said, in house software usually is more customized and relevant to our own needs, while when we contract out, we are sometimes finding it necessary to hack in essential features.

Palantir most likely relies primarily on relationships for keeping it’s government contracts alive. And that is probably likely to be at risk at the end of the Trump administration when the next, likely Democratic administration, wants nothing further to do with Peter Thiel and Alan Karp. But if all the data is hosted and built around Palantir’s products, it becomes very difficult to break up with that existing contractor, as moving to a new system is never easy. Shit just breaks when you try to move to a new system. I am not convinced that Planantir is all that great or all powerful, but that agencies are just lazy and want something supported outside of their own staff, that manages, processes, filters and sorts large databases with easy while minimizing the amount of technical support staff they have on contract.