iwan

fde @palantirtech

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

Horrifying to be listening to a human being speak and realize they’re just a vessel for Claude

[iwan @iwan]

@paulitics_ It’s fully extensible you can make it do what you want

[Louis Mosley @louismosley]

The NHS Federated Data Platform has just launched its first public application: the National Genomic Test Directory.

This modern directory specifies the targets, eligibility criteria, and order management details of tests commissioned by the NHSE Genomics Medicine Service. Link ⬇️”

[leyland @leylndd]

Palantir FDE and Chinese spy gf, colorized, 2026

[iwan @iwan]

@eliano It’s alright init

[Louis Mosley @louismosley]

Today’s @ObserverUK does something rare: it asks the people actually using Palantir’s software what they think. A Chief Constable who believes it has prevented domestic murders. NHS workers who’ve delivered 99,000 extra operations and treat patients 41 days sooner with it. A former Chief of the Defence Staff explaining how it keeps troops alive.

It asks the hard questions too - on data sovereignty, democratic accountability, and the responsibilities that come with building powerful technology.

My answers: Palantir has never worked in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. We believe in democracy, and that belief is not selective. It means supporting policies with a clear democratic mandate. The alternative - companies deciding which election results to honour - is what should frighten us.

Nowhere is that accountability more tested than on data. Privacy as a concept made sense when you could choose not to generate it. That world is gone. The data is being generated - by your phone, your car, your bank, your hospital. The real question is who controls how your data is used, under what legal conditions, and with what oversight. Governments that pretend otherwise aren’t protecting citizens. They’re just less honest about the trade-offs.

The debate about AI and data in public services is too important to be conducted without the people who actually deliver them. Today’s Observer has changed that. It’s long overdue.

Link 👇

[iwan @iwan]

I’m the oldest guy at the hellp concert it’s so over for me

[iwan @iwan]

Turns out this guy is the real deal

[iwan @iwan]

@matbogus it’s tough out here

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

This gets to the core of the issue more than any debate about specific terms.

Do you believe in democracy? Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders, or corporate executives? Seemingly innocuous terms from the latter like "You cannot target innocent civilians" are actually moral minefields that lever differences of cultural tradition into massive control.

Who is a civilian and not? What makes them innocent or not? What does it mean for them to be a "target" vs collateral damage? Existing policy and law has very clear answers for these questions, but unelected corporations managing profits and PR will often have a very different answer.

Imagine if a missile company tried to enforce the above policy, that their product cannot be used to target innocent civilians, that they can shut off access if elected leaders decide to break those terms. Sounds, good, right? Not really - in addition to the value judgement problems I list above, you also have to account for questions like:

-What level of information, classified and otherwise, does the corporation receive that would allow them to make these determinations? How much leverage would they have to demand more?
-What if an elected President merely threatens a dictator with using our weapons in a certain way, ala Madman Theory/MAD? Is the threat seen as empty because the dictator knows the corporate executives will cut off the military? Is the threat enough to trigger the cutoff? How might either of those determinations vary if the current corporate executive happens to like the dictator or dislike the President?
-At what level of confidence does the cutoff trigger, both in writing and in reality?

The fact that this is a debate over AI does not change the underlying calculus. The same problems apply to definitions and use of ethically fraught but important capabilities like surveillance systems or autonomous weapons. It is easy to say "But they will have cutouts to operate with autonomous systems for defensive use!", but you immediately get into the same issues and more - what is autonomous? What is defensive? What about defending an asset during an offensive action, or parking a carrier group off the coast of a nation that considers us to be offensive?

At the end of the day, you have to believe that the American experiment is still ongoing, that people have the right to elect and unelect the authorities making these decisions, that our imperfect constitutional republic is still good enough to run a country without outsourcing the real levers of power to billionaires and corpos and their shadow advisors. I still believe.

And that is why "bro just agree the AI won't be involved in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance why can't you agree it is so simple please bro" is an untenable position that the United States cannot possibly accept.

[malinvestment.jpeg @malinvested]

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….”

The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

[iwan @iwan]

@thetimmorgan https://t.co/fIxnJK36nY

[pedram.md @pdrmnvd]

oh you’re using claude code? everyone’s using open code. just kidding we’re all on amp code. we’re using cline, we’re using roo code. we just forked our own version of roo. were using kilo code. we were on coderabbit but their ceo yelled at us so now we’re using qorbit. apple just acquired them for $30bn so we just migrated our entire team to slash commands. one guy is still on aider. the PM is on loveable. he just shipped a new product on replit. the intern installed a slackbot that lets you chat with your spreadsheet. legal is still reviewing devin’s enterprise contract. we evaluated junie for three ukrainians using jetbrains. someone in slack just asked “has anyone tried amp?” we are using goose for scripts. next week we’re piloting augment code. the CTO heard good things about trae.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ our CEO is friends with the guy from conductor. our CFO resigned. our CISO said we’ve had fourteen supply chain attacks in the last week. we’re shipping the worlds most expensive todo app.

[trash @trashh_dev]

another day at the prompt factory

[Dame Margera @damienfarronMMA]

"My thoughts go out to a young man named Clavicular, who was brutally frame mogged by an ASU Frat leader earlier this week."

[Neil Zeghidour @neilzegh]

Me defending my O(n^3) solution to the coding interviewer.

[alaska @145k4]

new years thinking about

rothko - no.4, no.6, no.8 , 1964

[National Design Studio @ndstudio]

Two engineers walked into the government to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.​gov​ to turn six-month waits into instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.

https://t.co/aImxV8r0uF

[pedram.md @pdrmnvd]

oh you’re using claude code? everyone’s using open code. just kidding we’re all on amp code. we’re using cline, we’re using roo code. we just forked our own version of roo. were using kilo code. we were on coderabbit but their ceo yelled at us so now we’re using qorbit. apple just acquired them for $30bn so we just migrated our entire team to slash commands. one guy is still on aider. the PM is on loveable. he just shipped a new product on replit. the intern installed a slackbot that lets you chat with your spreadsheet. legal is still reviewing devin’s enterprise contract. we evaluated junie for three ukrainians using jetbrains. someone in slack just asked “has anyone tried amp?” we are using goose for scripts. next week we’re piloting augment code. the CTO heard good things about trae.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ our CEO is friends with the guy from conductor. our CFO resigned. our CISO said we’ve had fourteen supply chain attacks in the last week. we’re shipping the worlds most expensive todo app.