It's true that the UK public sector could save insane amounts of money by working together better (e.g. 150 NHS trusts should not all be procuring their own systems, but they do - or rather, if they do, they shouldn't be complaining about a lack of money).
It's also true that Palantir should be nowhere near this, both from an infosec perspective and a "why do we keep giving money to US companies?" perspective.
I've thought quite a lot about how to establish key software infrastructure in the UK, particularly regarding EHRs. Has anyone else (Louis Mosley no need to respond)? How do we do it? What challenges/benefits did you spot?
We should not be giving money to these mega corps because that also implies giving them our most personal health data. For sure they'll say that we can trust them — maybe it's even true right now, but that can change on a dime, and I don't want to have no option but to trust a crook with no way to pull our public money and my personal data out.
We do need to make things more efficient. But it's lazy of us tech types to fall for centralisation in its most naive form — centralisation of personal data storage always comes with huge risks. We overstate the benefits, and we're not around to pay the price when the benefits fail to pass and the hidden costs creep out.
Instead, we should be pushing the health record out to individuals, and away from the centre. We should own our own data — perhaps it should even reside on our own device. Our governments should be pushing to store less data, not more.
> Instead, we should be pushing the health record out to individuals, and away from the centre
One of my observations was that trusts think the opposite. I was in a call with one, and I said at one point, "Of course, the patient is the Data Owner" and I was corrected by a trust staff member who said, "No, the trust is the Data Owner".
Because - as I learned and saw later - trusts will sell data for studies. So they want the data.
It rather assumes you could enforce them. Those rights will be great against a responsible outfit. But if the data is exposed in a breach, or if the outfit goes rogue (or if a future government decides to change the law and sell your data, as, by the way, the previous Conservatives tried to do), then you're lost.
I thought you may mean that the legal rights provide protection, so one need not worry until deidentification or detachment. Maybe your emphasis was same.
But for clarity, I think we need to worry long before deidentification and detachment — basically the Trusts are not to be trusted, and our legal rights will vanish in a heartbeat.
My favourite anecdote on health service bureaucracy - a few years ago significant other worked for local NHS trust using software A to record all their interactions with service users. Trust decided to migrate to software B, and spent significant time and money migrating data from one to the other.
Mere months later, the service contract is won by the neighbouring trust. Their standard system is, of course, software A!
Migration happened in reverse, but without budget to move historical records back over. Staff were left scrabbling around manually copying data for current cases from one system to the other…
> Why is it up to Palantir to make this suggestion
It isn't but also people have been saying this kind of thing for years and it just doesn't get anywhere or make the news.
e.g. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmpu... from 2006 is all about « The National Programme for IT in the NHS
(“the Programme” or NPfIT) was set up to provide such services, using centrally managed procurement to provide impetus to the uptake of IT and to secure economies of scale." »
> The National Programme for IT in the NHS (“the Programme” or NPfIT)
That programme definitely made the news because it was a ludicrously expensive disaster. Some useful things came out of it (e.g. better hardware and bandwidth for trusts) but so much money was wasted. It's one of the UK's most famous failures.
IIRC there was talk of that being a disaster because they wanted to avoid giving the contract to one single company and mandated it was split up with different companies doing different bits.
So they deliberately sharded the contract and so there was endless bureaucracy and politics and blame-gaming between the companies who are normally competing against each other for work and so on.
It's kinda interesting really. I don't think it would have gone much better if a single company did everything as the often seems to be a clusterfuck regardless (example: post office horizon system)... Then you look at a big company like meta or Google and they're churning out systems that pretty much work and at huge scale.. are the people incompetent at consulting companies? Are the customers incompetent? Perhaps there are a million legacy dependencies that needs to be dealt with (but that is true with meta etc al too).
Interesting interesting. I know freelancers whose line of work is basically to get contracted in while Fujitsu or Accenture or IBM or whoever is there doing work, and basically just try to stop them pulling the wool over the eyes of the clients. Their whole careers have basically been calling bullshit on consultants.
> Then you look at a big company like meta or Google and they're churning out systems that pretty much work and at huge scale..
They are but they also have a margin for breakage that, e.g., the NHS doesn't really have. If your Facebook or Instagram feed is missing everything from the last 3 days because a node went down, they can fill that in with other stuff and you might not even notice. Same with stuff missing from Google Search, etc. If stuff is missing from your medical notes because a node went down, that could be fatal if you're just about to have a procedure done. Same with, e.g., tax records, police records, etc.
I guess financial institutions are the better option (but again they still have a bunch of "reconcile stuff at the end of the day" options that don't necessarily translate to the NHS et al.)
I think if you saw the volumes of emails sent inside a trust from IT saying that things were down or back up, you might be surprised. Google and Meta have insanely better track records and standards for themselves, because they have more money and more of an incentive to be working. Meta created a planet-scale messaging service which just went live and worked straight away under full load. They have insane testing ability and desire.
Palantir are operating nationally, and have the government’s ear, as does delloitte. They also have the expertise, time and motivation to write out a plan for making things better, rather than local firefighting.
After all, who are you going to listen to? one single admin in a trust somewhere, or a very large data company who you've paid lots of money to do all this stuff?
It's not the number of trusts that's the problem - it's the massive trust-based pushback against centralisation. Remember NHS Digital? NHS England? Things keep being established to try and centralise for efficiency, and it's not working. My observation (caveat emptor) is that trusts push back so hard, and aren't necessarily staffed with technical top performers in the first place, and have such misaligned incentives to centralisation from IT to doctors to everything else, that it can't happen.
I see it as a case of forced decentralisation leading to bad incentives. When you had few NHS trusts covering entire UK, you could easily handle common issues because their scale matched close enough to cover entire vertical slice.
Now you have trusts cut in size creating incentives against cooperation if only because of how funding is going to be arranged, and even if there's centralised service like NHS Digital... it's not the entity that is going to fight for budget for trust-local employee training and support needs.
They way I read it around here, those trusts would love it very much to get a healthcare system similar to the US one. Aren't they already well on the way?
As a UK citizen, my concerns are that U.S. companies are difficult to trust with PII data as they're not really covered by a sane equivalent of GDPR that I know of. If they do break UK law about how they treat our data, then there's a good chance that the U.S. administration may step in and tell the UK to get lost and start imposing punitive measures against us.
There's a remarkable lack of trust over here now with regards to U.S. companies.
This is a bit of recency bias, I think. Privacy Shield, the regulation governing US<->EU (and then, UK) data transfer, was struck down in 2020.
Its replacement is on the table between US<->EU, and, hilariously, here is Nick Clegg (yes, that Nick Clegg) from Meta talking about it:
> the deal “will provide invaluable certainty for American & European companies of all sizes, including Meta, who rely on transferring data quickly and safely.”
I don't know of any news for US<->UK data agreements, but I haven't been keeping track.
Palantir's goal is to make a data monopoly. This is laid out quite plainly in Peter Thiel's book 0 to 1. As he said: "Competition is for suckers.". This is also pushed internally (I worked for Palantir as an FDE or "delta").
The financial purpose is to create a J curve with income. Lose a bit or money first, then charge monopoly prices.
I don't like Palantir at all. Anecdote: I got drugged without consent _twice_ while employed there. The first time was minor but the second time hurt me and I'm still hurt from it. I can only guess but I think I got dosed with a large amount of Adderal or meth. I quit after that. I wanted to get authorities involved, but Palantir contracted for them, so I didn't out of fear.
This being said, if you're a UK employee and think this is a good idea: you're about to get screwed out of a lot of money long term. And you won't be able to leave because Palantir's tactic is to be as sticky as possible.
My government uses an in-house designed and built self-serve portal for pretty much everything from tax to healthcare etc. Its been around a long time - I remember being impressed with it when scheduling childcare benefits - and its grown in features if not so much in looks.
A government agency employs normal average developers etc.
They offer non-stellar wages in an economical backwater so has quite a boost on the local economy and gives programmers wanting to live more rurally employment opportunities, but I imagine today a lot could be remote too.
And it works great. No thrills but functional. Excellent value for money.
(The uk's gov.uk websites that I've had to interact with have a similar look and feel if a less integrated feeling; I don't know how they are developed.)
I've seen and known the the outsourced contractor systems in normal companies from the big names and all have always been an unending disaster. The goal is to 'grow the engagement' not finish. The incentives that keep it going in normal companies are not really about getting a good system quickly.
The UK's gov.uk is done by the Government Digital Service, which used to be part of the cabinet office. In my view it's one of the great successes of the Cameron ministry (without breaking the rules on politics, I take a dim view of his premiership in general).
They focused a lot on UX. For example, they avoid dropdowns - "the select component should only be used as a last resort in public-facing services because research shows that some users find selects very difficult to use." [Source](https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/select/).
I'm currently managing several Government contracts for a third party, and the GDS + Government Technology Code of Practice are woven into the contracts and milestone evidence we have to provide. The two standards are clear and sensible.
I have had many meetings with Government back-end and dev staff and they all seemed knowledgeable, rational, non-beaurecratic and keen to listen as much as talk. They are also accessible and helpful.
What country are you from? Is there a link to the agency that maintains the portal? I worked in local government in a unit that was arguing for in-housing developers rather than hiring contractors. That team could maybe learn from your country's experience.
Anytime my (developed and well-educated) country's government tries to build or have built any IT system it ends in disaster. I wish we could have what you have, but at this point I don't trust my government to do anything themselves when it comes to digital.
Given the anti Europe stance expressed in the leaked Signal chat [1] any consideration of embedding Palantir in the fabric of European life is to say the least, foolish.
Palantir don't care about this, they will likely turn it into a massive cluster fuck and charge £2000+ per day person and extract probably billions from the tax payer.
If you ask anyone who has worked for these bastards (I have worked at several similar companies) they NEVER actually do the project correctly and there are a million different reasons why something which should be simple should take a million years.
All of these type of things can be done in the open without Palantir involved at all for next to no money.
Actually, thinking about this for a second, this is a billion dollar AI company - you could probably write a system now that can extract patterns and organise data in internal systems and automatically create a nice API, documentation, how to use it and dashboards etc. without having to do any of the work to change current systems. Anyone want to help me build this?
You underestimate the work that would be, and overestimate the ability of current-gen AI systems. The work – technical, and social – to get the data out of the existing systems and exposed via a common interface, is the hard part, and not something that anything yet called AI can do.
Once you've done that, sure, you could get ChatGPT to make dashboards, some text resembling API documentation, etc; but that's the easy part: a few hours' work from conception to production, or a few minutes' work if you only need a proof-of-concept.
How would a European government accept any service from a company that has Peter Thiel as a major investor, the guy who funded JD Vance, the current USA VP set to push the propaganda to promote hate and the destruction of the European Institutions, and Russian propaganda?
Plenty of people on UK and Europe thought that putting full trust in Palantir was a terrible idea, 6 months or 18 months or more ago. I agree that the temperature on this has risen a lot recently, but the concern is longstanding.
TBF, the same applies to the F 35. In kind of the same way. Not only is it expensive to buy, you're committing to high sustainment costs from what should be a reliable ally.
There are many parallels, yes. The Lockheed Martin F-35 is the flying manifestation of the US military-industrial hardware corporation complex, and Palantir's software is the Silicon valley military-surveillance big-data software corporation complex equivalent.
It's debatable which is more dangerous. Warplanes or lack of air defence poses one risk in a hot war, surveillance data poses a different risk but is in the background all the time.
Well, if you want to go there, you might as well go straight to the point and highlight precisely which ideologies you're referring to:
JD Vance, and Elon Musk, supports the far right German anti-european party AfD[0] which has connections to Neo Nazism... You know the guys that are trying to rehabilitate Nazism and Hitler.[1]
JD Vance also expressed his support for a Romanian candidate who illegally took Russian funding for his election run, after a major Russian propaganda campaign in Romania.[2]
So let me clarify your statement:
> Destroying the current European institutions can mean destroying Europe, according to extreme far right nazi rehabilitating parties and Russia.
So yes, according to those ideologies, it can mean that.
This is the company, of the guy who sponsored Vance, right? The very same Vance, who already outraged the public. Why is this company not banned already for anti-democratic extremism?
An article about Admiral Rickover appeared here a few days ago, and I think it's apt to quote him in this context: "Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients."
I think that is the gov.uk website, not any UK government software.
I think it is quite normal for individual sites to enforce a tech stack for their own site. gov.uk is quite huge - all sorts of things from passport applications, tax returns, car licensing and so on.
My CTO is always talking about Palantir and how they are the future and how we need to figure out how to implement their services into our work.
However, I can't find any examples of what they really do or what kind of product they offer. I've watched multiple videos about Palantir including many interviews with Alex Karp. But I still can't figure out exactly what they do and how their products/services would help us at work.
Pretty bog-standard analysis & import tools on top of a database, with a promise to give you the entire universe (but all of that's custom work, and you'll be paying dearly for it)
IOW I have yet to see anything that makes them look like more than your average data-centric service company. Pretty sure they're a normal business with a fairly typical offering that's been hyped so people in decision-making positions think it's Magic Sauce. Like a lot of companies that get talked about on HN, actually.
As compared to Argo et al, I'll say it's pretty slick, but it is unquestionably very "do things the Palantir way" and thus even as slick as it is I don't think it's appropriate for just any ole random startup. It's also evidently just recently been exposed outside of Palantir so it definitely is v0.0.00000009-alpha when trying to use it in anger
It's mckinsey but with tech people, not consultant babys. they actually have people who know how to speak to politics people, & they don't come from think-tanks like some other brands of loser. think outside the box. not every company is "really" a product company, i.e. Google is not computers company, it's an ads company, & so on.
Seems like a bad idea to involve a corporation with deep ties to tyranny and genocide in medical information systems. I wonder why the politicians are willing to take the risk of a harsh popular response.
It's also true that Palantir should be nowhere near this, both from an infosec perspective and a "why do we keep giving money to US companies?" perspective.
I've thought quite a lot about how to establish key software infrastructure in the UK, particularly regarding EHRs. Has anyone else (Louis Mosley no need to respond)? How do we do it? What challenges/benefits did you spot?