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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

So it’s hygiene and structure

That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.

I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.

I appreciate the technical achievements here. However, I wonder how long before it’s standard practice to track all peoples movement, not just those suspected of a crime. I know of at least one YouTube channel that is always recording all traffic camera streams in Washington so there must be some State entities doing the same. Back in 2020 there was a twitch channel that would play a 9x9 grid of all the livestream footage from the George Floyd protests. I’m sure an archive of that exists somewhere on a LE server.

nsa is storing everything

Visualization is a fancy package. Nobody looks at visualizations, but that's what makes people buy.

I’ve known companies to spend stupid amounts of money on fake, fancy “war rooms” they staff with people doing nothing useful, filled with “big board” style maps and shit, big graphs and visualizations that aren’t used anywhere else, just as a sales tool. Walk the visiting CEO through, let them pretend what they’re involved in is way cooler and more interesting and important than it really is, and I guess that assists sales so much that such endeavors make way more money than they cost.

I connect this with comments I heard from several major management consulting firm folks stating bluntly that the best way to communicate effectively with execs is to approach them like young children.

Life is super weird. Who knew imaginative play would be such a big thing for “serious” adults? I’d never have imagined, but it’s kinda everywhere.

> approach them like young children

To take a generous go at this - my guess is that they have multiple urgent issues they're dealing with at any one time, and so the cognitive bandwidth they're able to dedicate to 'random presentation number 3 for the day' is quite low

But I do agree that a lot of day-to-day work is play acting at being cooler than our actual work.

I used to get paid to develop those war room monitoring solutions. literally just crafting dashboards that no one would ever look at directly, but just sorta had around.

> execs is to approach them like young children.

lots of images. bright colors. no more than 3 bulletpoints per slide. no more than 4 minutes to get to the point, and be unambiguous about what and why.

IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make connections between separate data sets. You're not just ingesting data about purchasing information and drug convictions and so on, you're getting automatic relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that those fields are the "SSN" field from a third dataset, and being able to automatically give you a view where those three datasets are correlated. This saves people having to go through every data set and manually map each field to each other equivalent field in each other related dataset.

I could be mistaken, but I think this is how it was explained to me originally.

That makes sense and sounds really useful

Building a panopticon is always justified as a way to fight crime and then becomes a way to control the population. Tracking women getting Plan B, tracking people buying birth control, etc.

…particularly to German chancellors in the 1930s.

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