harry a

We kick the balloon of mind away from bare experience. Masters of this game spend days relitigating arguments that already happened, or arguments that haven’t happened yet. Or watching short form video constantly, or compulsively optimizing themselves in some fashion. Whatever it takes to get away from the gritty immediacy of being here.

I asked whether these tools should nevertheless not exist, knowing that human nature is forked, politics are fallen, and people in positions of power over others will find ways to abuse it, regardless of technical controls. “That’s just crazy to me,” he replied. “We should expect our institutions to operate really well. They serve the citizen at... See more

The second demo, of Warp Speed, was described as Shyam’s “big pet project” to reinvigorate America’s defense manufacturing base. In a user interface more befitting industrial rather than hospital aesthetics, a notional shipbuilding scenario showed the system tracing a problem backward: When it noticed that weld inspections had started failing, or... See more

“Our view is that all the economic value accrues to chips and ontology,” Shyam explained. “The ontology is a semantic representation of the enterprise. It’s the common thread through Gotham and Foundry and it’s why those platforms can interoperate. Foundation models understand semantics, and Palantir’s ontology becomes a set of tools for those... See more

“If you don’t know him, it seems like he’s being a little brash or aggressive,” said Ted Mabrey. “But the reason he can do it is because it’s not personal at all. He completely depersonalizes it.”

In 2016, Palantir marked Shyam’s first decade with the company by suing the U.S. Army over its plan to buy the next version of its main intelligence-data software system. Palantir argued that the army violated the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act by pursuing costly custom development without considering commercial off-the-shelf systems like... See more

Shyam says it began with a claim Karp had made one day that French restaurants are good because the wait staff are part of the kitchen staff—rather than merely fulfilling orders and transporting plates, their knowledge of the kitchen’s techniques, methodology, and combinations, he explained, is as intimate as the cooks’. Karp’s point was that he... See more

“But they were so full of piss and vinegar,” he said. “They were building software to fight terrorism. And their thesis was: After 9/11, the political discourse was about privacy versus security. Americans were arguing that one or the other was more important, but of course if you had more of one you’d have to accept less of the other. But as... See more

or else they’d take turns role-playing dialogue from The Little Rascals (when Shyam was still young), or from Rocky , Rambo , The Hunt for Red October , Red Dawn , Knight Rider , and the John Ford classics(as he got older). “The Westerns were big for me and Dad,” he said. “You’re alone and not afraid. Life is hard, it is what you make of it. Even... See more