Comment on What Does Palantir Actually Do?
oce@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
For reference, Palantir are not the only ones to provide supposedly fancy UIs on top of data messes, there are many others like Talend, Datahaiku, Alteryx etc. Those platforms are not magic, they will still need a lot of little hands to wrangle the data to get it in a useful state, if there’s ever an actual motivation to do that, and it’s not all pretending to be “data driven”. Usually, the data engineering community hates those graphical tools that are designed to convince executives rather than help engineers because no UI can be as powerful as a code base in this field. Palantir is special in how they managed to convince the executives of the police and administrations.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
And the underlying problem of relevancy can’t be solved by any amount of UI tinkering. It’s a matter of data integrity, and that’s costly and complex to fix.
Aggregation of multiple data messes just amplifies the noise at the expense of any signal there might be. And these tools have appalling false-positive rates if they have any sensitivity at all. My concern is that the high false-positive rate in this case is a desirable feature, since more people get purged/jailed/whatever, which is just what power-mad psychopaths want.