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I assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partners

I assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partnership. From that lens the funding makes sense.

imdsm 7mo ago
There's no federal government in the UK, nor constitution
- codeduck 7mo ago
  There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin... More importantly, the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy, with ultimate legislative power vested in Parliament rather than the Monarch.
  - howerj 7mo ago
    I find it weird that people would downvote this, I know you should not complain about it, but this comment is correct. The UK does have a (uncodified) constitution. Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
    - dataflow 7mo ago
      >> There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document. <link> That's got to be the understatement of (many) centuries. AFAIK the UK constitution isn't even even codified into millions of documents, let alone a "single" one. Saying it's not in a "single" document is like saying my trillions of dollars aren't in a "single" bank account. The number of partitions really isn't the problem with that statement here. Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution", let alone an arbitrary citizen who needs to be able to become aware of them to be able to follow them? (Note I'm not asking for interpretation, but literally just listing the sentences.) Could they even do this with infinite time? Is it even possible to have an oracle that, given an arbitrary sentence, could indisputably tell you if it is in the constitution? Maybe that's asking too much. Forget enumerating the laws. Per your own link: "...this enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched." If this doesn't itself sound silly, hopefully you can at least forgive people for getting irritated at the proposition that there totally exists a "constitution"... that nobody can point to... and that doesn't actually do the one thing many people want from a constitution: being more entrenched than statutes. > Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified. Not sure what countries you're referring to, but at least in the US, this is not the case. There is a single document that is the constitution, and (thankfully, so far) nobody is disputing what words are in fact written on that document. And that document absolutely is supreme to statutes. Interpretation of the words is obviously left to courts in the US, and courts can interpret it differently changing the effective law, but "constitution" is not a synonym for "effective law", and nobody argues over what the words to be interpreted are. And even those interpretations are still written down!
      - AlecSchueler 7mo ago
        > Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution" No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not?
        dataflow 7mo ago
        >> Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution" > No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not? Do you never write down or sign contracts? Are verbal promises adequate for you in all transactions? If you don't see the value of laws being written down - especially the most important ones! - I can't really convince you of it here on HN. But what I can tell is that most people who care about the legitimacy of government believe it is fundamental to fairness that there be a single source of truth that can tell them the laws under which they would be rewarded or punished, before those happen.
        howerj 7mo ago
        I think you have diverged too much...well from reality, in order to try to prove a point. Do you think most people, or lawyers, or judges in the UK spend their time trying to enumerate all the laws of the land before they proceed in their court cases? Do you think that people think that the UK system of government is illegitimate? What point are you trying to make? Because it is not grounded in reality. You can debate the merits of a codified constitution versus an uncodified one, but the UK does have a constitution, the vast majority of which is codified into many documents. The following two links might help you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncodified_constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncodified_constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_(political_norm)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_(political_norm)#Un... Note the second one applies to the US - a country with a mostly but not completely codified constitution.
        AlecSchueler 6mo ago
  - OJFord 7mo ago
    And that's absolutely not what the commenter up-thread meant.
  - istjohn 7mo ago
    From your link: "This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched." It doesn't look like a duck, it doesn't quack like a duck, yet you insist that this goose-shaped creature is a duck.
    - ponkpanda 7mo ago
      >It doesn't look like a duck Some special amendment procedure is not the only or even defining feature of constitutional law. There is non-constitutional law that has this property and there is constitutional law that does not.
      - istjohn 7mo ago
        I notice you are using the phrase "constitutional law" now, where as the original question was whether the UK can be said to have "a constitution." The oddities of this "duck" go far beyond its lack of entrenchment. It also lacks form and definition in the way that a puff of smoke lacks form and definition. It includes such nebulous elements as common law, unwritten convention, and even legal commentary of various law scholars. It's also said to be in constant flux as it evolves over time. It may be a useful abstraction within the context of UK law to refer to this amorphous blob as the "constitution," but for anyone unfamiliar with the UK's system of government, to say the UK has a constitution is grossly misleading in as much as all of the conclusions the listener will draw from that assertion will be false. It's like characterizing a chicken eating grain out of your hand as being "attacked by a dinosaur." The chicken may belong to the clade "Dinosauria" and may have inadvertently pecked your palm in its feeding frenzy, but in as much as it communicates information contrary to fact, it is a confabulation. At best, it's a lawyer's lie, to coin a phrase.
    - FuriouslyAdrift 7mo ago
      I've heard it said that they have a constitution but it's written in pencil...
      - istjohn 7mo ago
        ...in the air
- Zigurd 7mo ago
  You are technically correct. But the distinction between devolution and a Federation of states gets very blurry when you take a look at what's happening with voting in the US these days. You are technically incorrect about the UK not having a constitution. It's just not all compiled into a single written document.
  - mrob 7mo ago
    Technically correct only if you accept "vague set of traditions" as a valid definition for "constitution". This both contradicts common usage and enables tyranny, so I recommend rejecting it.
    - rounce 7mo ago
      The UK constitution isn't a "vague set of traditions", it is spread across a number of acts of Parliament.
      - mrob 7mo ago
        Where can I find the official list of which acts are part of the constitution? And what additional obstacles exist to changing those acts beyond the obstacles to changing non-constitutional acts of parliament? In common usage, a constitution is something that restricts changes to ordinary law. If a "constitution" is made entirely from ordinary law it cannot function as a constitution.
        Zigurd 7mo ago
        Before you demand more explanation on the spot, you know there's a Wikipedia page for that. It explains the components how they are legitimated and the mechanisms of the UK government that rely on it.
mapt 7mo ago
The purpose of Palantir is to watch over Mordor and the other lands of Sauron. He's only got one eye, one attention span, he needs intelligent agentic processing to administrate the realm. Who are you going to entrust, Gorthak The Orc? The Nazgul? They have their own priorities, their own limitations. It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof. Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"
- da_chicken 7mo ago
  NB: The Palantir were created by the Elves, not by Morgoth or Sauron. The problem is that it takes a lot of will to use one and not have things of importance hidden (it shows what you think is important, not what is important), and as it turns out holders of one stone can influence what holders of other stones can see, if their will is greater. The Enemy doesn't get ahold of a stone until Minas Ithil falls and becomes Minas Morgul, and that's well into the Third Age. Two thousand years after the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, the second defeat of The Enemy, and the first destruction of Sauron. Which is still a thousand years before the start of Frodo's adventure. Lots of time in Middle Earth. The rest of your comment is, unfortunately, spot on.
  - mindslight 7mo ago
    It's amazing how some people can read Tolkien's works and come away with an idea that it would be a good thing to create new powerful artifacts that will inevitably fall under the control of evil. Perhaps because their minds have already been corrupted by the One Ring. I suppose it's just the Don't make the Torment Nexus effect with a different motif.

imdsm 7mo ago

There's no federal government in the UK, nor constitution

codeduck 7mo ago
There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin... More importantly, the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy, with ultimate legislative power vested in Parliament rather than the Monarch.
- howerj 7mo ago
  I find it weird that people would downvote this, I know you should not complain about it, but this comment is correct. The UK does have a (uncodified) constitution. Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
  - dataflow 7mo ago
    >> There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document. <link> That's got to be the understatement of (many) centuries. AFAIK the UK constitution isn't even even codified into millions of documents, let alone a "single" one. Saying it's not in a "single" document is like saying my trillions of dollars aren't in a "single" bank account. The number of partitions really isn't the problem with that statement here. Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution", let alone an arbitrary citizen who needs to be able to become aware of them to be able to follow them? (Note I'm not asking for interpretation, but literally just listing the sentences.) Could they even do this with infinite time? Is it even possible to have an oracle that, given an arbitrary sentence, could indisputably tell you if it is in the constitution? Maybe that's asking too much. Forget enumerating the laws. Per your own link: "...this enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched." If this doesn't itself sound silly, hopefully you can at least forgive people for getting irritated at the proposition that there totally exists a "constitution"... that nobody can point to... and that doesn't actually do the one thing many people want from a constitution: being more entrenched than statutes. > Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified. Not sure what countries you're referring to, but at least in the US, this is not the case. There is a single document that is the constitution, and (thankfully, so far) nobody is disputing what words are in fact written on that document. And that document absolutely is supreme to statutes. Interpretation of the words is obviously left to courts in the US, and courts can interpret it differently changing the effective law, but "constitution" is not a synonym for "effective law", and nobody argues over what the words to be interpreted are. And even those interpretations are still written down!
    - AlecSchueler 7mo ago
      > Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution" No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not?
      - dataflow 7mo ago
        >> Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution" > No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not? Do you never write down or sign contracts? Are verbal promises adequate for you in all transactions? If you don't see the value of laws being written down - especially the most important ones! - I can't really convince you of it here on HN. But what I can tell is that most people who care about the legitimacy of government believe it is fundamental to fairness that there be a single source of truth that can tell them the laws under which they would be rewarded or punished, before those happen.
        howerj 7mo ago
        I think you have diverged too much...well from reality, in order to try to prove a point. Do you think most people, or lawyers, or judges in the UK spend their time trying to enumerate all the laws of the land before they proceed in their court cases? Do you think that people think that the UK system of government is illegitimate? What point are you trying to make? Because it is not grounded in reality. You can debate the merits of a codified constitution versus an uncodified one, but the UK does have a constitution, the vast majority of which is codified into many documents. The following two links might help you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncodified_constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncodified_constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_(political_norm)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_(political_norm)#Un... Note the second one applies to the US - a country with a mostly but not completely codified constitution.
        AlecSchueler 6mo ago
- OJFord 7mo ago
  And that's absolutely not what the commenter up-thread meant.
- istjohn 7mo ago
  From your link: "This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched." It doesn't look like a duck, it doesn't quack like a duck, yet you insist that this goose-shaped creature is a duck.
  - ponkpanda 7mo ago
    >It doesn't look like a duck Some special amendment procedure is not the only or even defining feature of constitutional law. There is non-constitutional law that has this property and there is constitutional law that does not.
    - istjohn 7mo ago
      I notice you are using the phrase "constitutional law" now, where as the original question was whether the UK can be said to have "a constitution." The oddities of this "duck" go far beyond its lack of entrenchment. It also lacks form and definition in the way that a puff of smoke lacks form and definition. It includes such nebulous elements as common law, unwritten convention, and even legal commentary of various law scholars. It's also said to be in constant flux as it evolves over time. It may be a useful abstraction within the context of UK law to refer to this amorphous blob as the "constitution," but for anyone unfamiliar with the UK's system of government, to say the UK has a constitution is grossly misleading in as much as all of the conclusions the listener will draw from that assertion will be false. It's like characterizing a chicken eating grain out of your hand as being "attacked by a dinosaur." The chicken may belong to the clade "Dinosauria" and may have inadvertently pecked your palm in its feeding frenzy, but in as much as it communicates information contrary to fact, it is a confabulation. At best, it's a lawyer's lie, to coin a phrase.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 7mo ago
    I've heard it said that they have a constitution but it's written in pencil...
    - istjohn 7mo ago
      ...in the air
Zigurd 7mo ago
You are technically correct. But the distinction between devolution and a Federation of states gets very blurry when you take a look at what's happening with voting in the US these days. You are technically incorrect about the UK not having a constitution. It's just not all compiled into a single written document.
- mrob 7mo ago
  Technically correct only if you accept "vague set of traditions" as a valid definition for "constitution". This both contradicts common usage and enables tyranny, so I recommend rejecting it.
  - rounce 7mo ago
    The UK constitution isn't a "vague set of traditions", it is spread across a number of acts of Parliament.
    - mrob 7mo ago
      Where can I find the official list of which acts are part of the constitution? And what additional obstacles exist to changing those acts beyond the obstacles to changing non-constitutional acts of parliament? In common usage, a constitution is something that restricts changes to ordinary law. If a "constitution" is made entirely from ordinary law it cannot function as a constitution.
      - Zigurd 7mo ago
        Before you demand more explanation on the spot, you know there's a Wikipedia page for that. It explains the components how they are legitimated and the mechanisms of the UK government that rely on it.

mapt 7mo ago

The purpose of Palantir is to watch over Mordor and the other lands of Sauron. He's only got one eye, one attention span, he needs intelligent agentic processing to administrate the realm. Who are you going to entrust, Gorthak The Orc? The Nazgul? They have their own priorities, their own limitations. It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof. Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"

da_chicken 7mo ago
NB: The Palantir were created by the Elves, not by Morgoth or Sauron. The problem is that it takes a lot of will to use one and not have things of importance hidden (it shows what you think is important, not what is important), and as it turns out holders of one stone can influence what holders of other stones can see, if their will is greater. The Enemy doesn't get ahold of a stone until Minas Ithil falls and becomes Minas Morgul, and that's well into the Third Age. Two thousand years after the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, the second defeat of The Enemy, and the first destruction of Sauron. Which is still a thousand years before the start of Frodo's adventure. Lots of time in Middle Earth. The rest of your comment is, unfortunately, spot on.
- mindslight 7mo ago
  It's amazing how some people can read Tolkien's works and come away with an idea that it would be a good thing to create new powerful artifacts that will inevitably fall under the control of evil. Perhaps because their minds have already been corrupted by the One Ring. I suppose it's just the Don't make the Torment Nexus effect with a different motif.