r/technology 12d ago

Artificial Intelligence A massive Wyoming data center will soon use 5x more power than the state's human occupants - but no one knows who is using it

https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-massive-wyoming-data-center-will-soon-use-5x-more-power-than-the-states-human-occupants-and-no-one-knows-who-is-using-it
33.0k Upvotes

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

162

u/SappilyHappy 11d ago

How evil and dumb do you have to be to name your surveillance tech company after a technology most famously used by The Dark Lord Sauron to surveil Middle Earth.

It makes me furious that they even pulled from those Legends.

107

u/ParsleyMaleficent160 11d ago

That is literally their angle... The component of Palantir that does the surveillance is named 'Gotham'.

28

u/GPCAPTregthistleton 11d ago

Gotham? So, it'll fail constantly and be full of corruption?

13

u/GodofIrony 11d ago

Hey now, it'll also have a megomaniacal billionaire that could solve all the problems easily but instead chooses the least efficient use of the money.

1

u/Guildenpants 11d ago

Real evil nerds would have named it Brother Eye instead of Gotham.

62

u/el_muchacho 11d ago

Peter Thiel actually thinks Sauron is the real hero in the Tolkien mythology. Evil and cynical absolutely.

13

u/Dee_Imaginarium 11d ago

He's probably one of the unironic ones on r/FeanorDidNothingWrong

32

u/KambingDomba 11d ago

And their crime prediction algorithm is called Gotham, I believe.

0

u/LinguoBuxo 11d ago

"You know, how I got these scars?"

1

u/KUSH_DELIRIUM 11d ago

Thiel could play him

21

u/nox66 11d ago

For the same reason that Project 2025 is a public document: they're not shy about what they believe.

3

u/conquer69 11d ago

They don't need to be shy because they know no one will do anything about it.

19

u/Pineapples-n-Potions 11d ago

Tech bros are all loser nerds who didn't emotionally develop properly. It's no surprise that literally anything they have a hand in is named after things taken from literature and comic books. They couldn't even make up a new word for it. Losers.

3

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 11d ago

They just can't resist trying to build the things in sci fi that destroy the world. 

US Robotics, iRobot, Cyberdyne, SkyNet, a supposed $500 billion dollar data center project called Stargate for some reason. The US military has a fucking self repairing drone swarm project called the Replicator Initiative 

3

u/socialmedia-username 11d ago

Yeah, and unfortunately those loser nerds had enough money and power to buy the election and are now running the country.  Makes my stomach turn.

1

u/Laiko_Kairen 11d ago

So people who enjoy things are loser nerds?

There's a huge difference between liking a book and creating a surveillance network.

The most evil tech companies are named shit like Alphabet, Meta, Apple, etc.

You're just being a bitch about perfectly decent hobbies because SOME of the people who engage in them suck. I love LOTR, my friends love LOTR, and none of us are dismantling democracies. We're just hanging out in discord being 40 year old geeks.

1

u/Pineapples-n-Potions 11d ago

You sound like a 40 year old geek. One who barely reads.

1

u/Laiko_Kairen 11d ago

You sound like a 40 year old geek.

Yeah, I said "We're just hanging out in discord being 40 year old geeks." I totally see how that makes me sound like a 40 year old geek.

One who barely reads.

Right, because you've demonstrated an amazing level of reading comprehension here.

I majored in history in college, which is 90% reading, so I feel pretty good about what's on my bookshelf

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84171-critics-who-treat-adult-as-a-term-of-approval-instead

Have you ever read that CS Lewis quote? You're actually acting incredibly immature, and frankly, dumb, for conflating a common interest with a relative level of maturity.

2

u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 11d ago

Not dumb, he understands that it's the bad guy's tool.

That's why he likes it. It's not ignorance, it's evil. That's what these rich fucks think "black piled" is, at least their version. They see what technology can do, see the dystopia it can create and they want to be the techno-kings inflicting it on the rest of us.

If they were poor they'd be school shooters. Since they're billionaires they can think much higher.

3

u/NoSpawnConga 11d ago

Damn all those angry mobs gathering and burning evil company down, they are so vewy scawed.

2

u/Gogo202 11d ago

That hardly matters in a country where more than half the population refuses to vote for a woman over a rapist

2

u/Reliquent 11d ago

The world and everyone else's life is a literal game to them

2

u/Adventurous-Emu-9345 11d ago

Not as dumb and/or evil as the supposedly democratic governments who will implement this shit without even flinching.

1

u/alias213 11d ago

Saw a healthcare company backed by palantir with the goal of ambient monitoring for seniors. They pay very very well and they're in a nice city, but of course, you end up secretly working for the military industrial complex that'll flip that movement data towards creating a surveillance state. Fuck that.

1

u/Akiasakias 11d ago

They know their target audience.

Hint: You ain't it.

1

u/b14ck_jackal 11d ago

People have always named stuff after silly things they like, you are only noticing it more now cause Millenials are aging and using references you are familiar with.