Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.
The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.
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.
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.
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.
I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
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].
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.
It calls into question the fundamental raisin d'etre of Palantir. It makes Palantir look like a pure propaganda tool.
Therefore, also entirely useless for strategic decision making.
I don’t know why we keep platforming these people. Go interview a normal person with normal thoughts. Karp is one of the most vile, insensitive, and immoral people in charge of anything tech. Just ignore him and his antics.
Well, Aragorn used the information he got from the Palantir of Orthanc to make a correct and very important strategic decision, to take the Paths of the Dead so that he could stop the Corsairs in time to save Minas Tirith.
So the lesson is that you have to use the intel you get wisely, or else very bad things will happen. I'm not sure if that makes the name any better for the tool it's applied to, though.
The actual lesson was that you need to be the trueborn king who can claim the palantiri by birthright if you want to use them for good. Even then, it requires great effort. Bad things will happen if anyone else tries to use the palantiri, no matter how great and powerful they are.
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 honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
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.
Or he's broadcasting his intention to destroy world governments and institute a new global order under technocratic control. He's banking on a US General not understanding the deeper lore behind of the name.
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.
Thank you for your hard work, and for being an inspiration and beacon of hope in these dark techno-feudalistic times.
The best way to thank them is to pay them for the work they do.
Donate to a journalism collective. Subscribe to a newspaper or magazine. Some even have gift shops, so just buy some swag. (Do not send pizza, unsolicited food always goes straight into the trash.)
"Information wants to be free [as in beer]" is great for t-shirts, but leads to societal downfall.
Journalism is absolutely one of those things in life where you get what you pay for.
Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in literature!) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not if) they fall into evil hands.
If my understanding is correct, the use of palantir by creatures leads to their own downfall, both for evil and good characters. So following through, it's very useful for it to be in evil hands
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.
This is the price of that dark pattern. These sites wouldn't exist if they acted like publishers instead of retailers.
they alter archived content and use visitor browsers as a ddos botnet.
Interesting. I'm surprised I didn't notice it on HN. From Wikipedia:
In January 2026, archive.today added code into its website in order to perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a blog.[2] This code uses the computers of visitors of the site to repeatedly send requests to the blog, with the goal of overwhelming the blog's ability to handle legitimate traffic. The code is still present as of 5 June 2026, but has been modified to reduce the frequency of malicious calls. [3] On June 12, at least two users reported their requests were redirected to tehrantimes.com. Some common ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin, are currently stopping these malicious requests. It was later discovered that archive.today tampered with archived web pages.[4] It was also later discovered that this was not the first DDoS attack Archive.today has performed.
> 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.
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.
I wonder which Danish official they are talking about. Lots of voices against it, but not from officials. The danish state is going full steam ahead. Just yesterday the Greenlandic police was integrated with Grotham from Palantir.
Anecdote: When I was looking for a job in 2014, they were present at a student job fair in Zurich. Barely knowing that company, I started off the conversation with "hey, you are creating all these intelligence tools for governments, right?".
The representative somehow started rambling incoherently about what wonderful work they do for NGOs and non-profits. Without acknowledging that their main customers are the intelligence community and law enforcement. Or telling me anything concrete their software is supposed to achieve.
Color me not surprised. Needless to say, I applied for a supposedly much lower-paying job where I actually knew what the work was about.
"Protecting privacy and upholding liberal democratic values have been central to Palantir's identity and mission since our founding in 2003." - Palantir
Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.
The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So yeah... plenty of real world versions of that.
Do you have a citation for that? I read the books a long time ago, but I was sure that he was corrupted through the palantir
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].
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.
It calls into question the fundamental raisin d'etre of Palantir. It makes Palantir look like a pure propaganda tool.
Therefore, also entirely useless for strategic decision making.
Interesting analysis of Palantir and Alex Karp:
Part 1, Palantir: https://youtu.be/PpEg0XIeFtA
Part 2, Alex Karp: https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I
[0]https://youtu.be/6YWFDhOps6I&t=1119s
It's _raison_, but "raisin d'être" would make an excellent name for a haute cuisine dessert.
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I would argue that it just shows Karp understands that the US is transitioning to a hybrid regime.
Alex Karp's transformation from progressive to MAGA is fascinating; more so knowing that his father was jewish and his mother was black.
I can understand a zeal to "protect the country", but FFS, to be the brains of the secret police is a bit much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/opinion/alex-karp-palanti...
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I don’t know why we keep platforming these people. Go interview a normal person with normal thoughts. Karp is one of the most vile, insensitive, and immoral people in charge of anything tech. Just ignore him and his antics.
Well, Aragorn used the information he got from the Palantir of Orthanc to make a correct and very important strategic decision, to take the Paths of the Dead so that he could stop the Corsairs in time to save Minas Tirith.
So the lesson is that you have to use the intel you get wisely, or else very bad things will happen. I'm not sure if that makes the name any better for the tool it's applied to, though.
The actual lesson was that you need to be the trueborn king who can claim the palantiri by birthright if you want to use them for good. Even then, it requires great effort. Bad things will happen if anyone else tries to use the palantiri, no matter how great and powerful they are.
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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 honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
Well their motto is basically "Be Evil and Get Rich" so I think the name fits.
Peter Thiel routinely defends Mordor - "they had technology! The rest of the world was just agricultural luddites."
>I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
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.
Or he's broadcasting his intention to destroy world governments and institute a new global order under technocratic control. He's banking on a US General not understanding the deeper lore behind of the name.
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The man seems to have severe difficulty interpreting fiction. See: his antichrist ramblings (sorry, "lectures").
As though the ego of Peter Thiel has any grounding in reality or ironic metaphor
someone will name their company Ashnazg, probably an AI company
Already happened. Ashnazg Enterprises LLC https://ashnazg.com
No AI though, just fully stacked...
I can think of a worse name: Peter Thiel. Oh wait I'm confused. That's a better name for this.
Here are the series of articles that the Swiss investigative magazine, Republik + WAV, published and Palantir looked to silence: https://www.republik.ch/dossier/die-republik-vs-palantir
> “We welcome that the Zurich Commercial Court confirmed our right to publish a counterstatement”
Well that certainly is one way to spin having 22 of your 23 counterstatement requests dismissed by the court.
Their right to publish multiple counterstatements is left unsettled by current law
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.
Thank you for your hard work, and for being an inspiration and beacon of hope in these dark techno-feudalistic times.
The best way to thank them is to pay them for the work they do.
Donate to a journalism collective. Subscribe to a newspaper or magazine. Some even have gift shops, so just buy some swag. (Do not send pizza, unsolicited food always goes straight into the trash.)
"Information wants to be free [as in beer]" is great for t-shirts, but leads to societal downfall.
Journalism is absolutely one of those things in life where you get what you pay for.
Good point. Thank you.
Anyone who has read The Lord of The Rings has exactly zero reasons to trust Palantir.
Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in literature!) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not if) they fall into evil hands.
If my understanding is correct, the use of palantir by creatures leads to their own downfall, both for evil and good characters. So following through, it's very useful for it to be in evil hands
Crazy that there's a weapons company called Anduril as well
Creative people seem to be rather pacifistic. Warmongers seem less so, they have to "borrow" from the creative ones.
Why? Naming a weapons company after Aragorn's sword makes sense. "The Daily Beast" on the other hand is a rather cynical name...
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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.
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Crazy? It's backed by Thiel as well IIRC.
Anduril is quite a positive name, it is a broken sword reforged later to save humankind. Quite a metaphor about western reindustrialization.
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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
I thought RAND was just a contraction of Research And Development?
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> 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
In the case of Ayn Rand, it is questionable whether there's nuance to be found.
It's enough to hear what their genocidal maniac of a CEO says.
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https://archive.ph/lXw7j
If Cannot resolve archive.ph host
Access the .is domain https://archive.is/lXw7j
internet archive cannot resolve either
Find a better network service provider, you are being censored by yours.
2 replies →
archive.ph works fine for me. Resolves to
2 replies →
Please don’t use these sites, they alter archived content and use visitor browsers as a ddos botnet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
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.
This is the price of that dark pattern. These sites wouldn't exist if they acted like publishers instead of retailers.
3 replies →
they alter archived content and use visitor browsers as a ddos botnet.
Interesting. I'm surprised I didn't notice it on HN. From Wikipedia:
In January 2026, archive.today added code into its website in order to perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a blog.[2] This code uses the computers of visitors of the site to repeatedly send requests to the blog, with the goal of overwhelming the blog's ability to handle legitimate traffic. The code is still present as of 5 June 2026, but has been modified to reduce the frequency of malicious calls. [3] On June 12, at least two users reported their requests were redirected to tehrantimes.com. Some common ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin, are currently stopping these malicious requests. It was later discovered that archive.today tampered with archived web pages.[4] It was also later discovered that this was not the first DDoS attack Archive.today has performed.
> 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.
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.
No evidence for this. Europe talks a big game and consistently fails to deliver.
Mistral and stackit begs to differ
Wait europe doesn't want to buy spy tech that spies on europe? Shocking.
Sadly german law enforcement is definitely on the Palantir train..
https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-...
Switzerland is not part of the European union (nor a member of the European Economic Area) but your point still stands
OP did not say EU, he said europe. Switzerland is part of europe.
1 reply →
Some people in Europe don't want new sources of data coming in outside of their control.
Ontological systemd-report: 130 mn series-B funding to floating data center startup.
[1]: https://www.republik.ch/2026/06/13/palantir-gegen-die-republ...
> officials in Denmark and the Netherlands have similarly expressed a desire to uncouple from the US-based software group
oh that is clever writing
I wonder which Danish official they are talking about. Lots of voices against it, but not from officials. The danish state is going full steam ahead. Just yesterday the Greenlandic police was integrated with Grotham from Palantir.
Is that for real? After all the Trump wanting to take over Greenland stint? I I should not be surprised if Iran would integrate with Palantir as well.
Maybe being Danish they're cautious and want to test it on polar bears first, you know, before widespread adoption.
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Fine. Thiel will just fund a Hulk Hogan lawsuit against the Swiss magazine, then.
Anecdote: When I was looking for a job in 2014, they were present at a student job fair in Zurich. Barely knowing that company, I started off the conversation with "hey, you are creating all these intelligence tools for governments, right?".
The representative somehow started rambling incoherently about what wonderful work they do for NGOs and non-profits. Without acknowledging that their main customers are the intelligence community and law enforcement. Or telling me anything concrete their software is supposed to achieve.
Color me not surprised. Needless to say, I applied for a supposedly much lower-paying job where I actually knew what the work was about.
Get this cancer out of Europe.
We don't want this cancer in the US or anywhere else in the world either. Maybe they belong on some libertarian floating islands or Mars or something.
Streisand effect?
Excellent.
Although, while I enjoy watching them lose. I don't appreciate the waste of time.
"Protecting privacy and upholding liberal democratic values have been central to Palantir's identity and mission since our founding in 2003." - Palantir
lol
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