Ride the wave

Former civil servant, researcher, journalist and proud Remainer. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Samuel L. Jackson is at the Australia vs Egypt game, and he shook Mo Salah's hand.

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

The pub that kicked Katie Hopkins was vandalised.

Also, what does she mean by "I'm even not Jewish but I have a big nose"?

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

After reflection, this new narrative by Palantir is probably much more consequential than people may assume.

Palantir is basically being the canary in the coal mine announcing the death of two major assumptions propping up the US economy right now:

1) that AI labs will be able to extract significant economic rent - as opposed to AI models being mere commodities

2) that other countries can accept structural dependency on US technology and services without pushing back on sovereignty concerns

Why are Palantir specifically starting to be vocal about this?

First off, major middle-powers, even US “allies”, are one by one showing them the door. In June, France announced that the DGSI - its domestic intelligence agency, which had relied on Palantir since the 2015 Paris attacks - would replace it with French firm ChapsVision, with Prime Minister Lecornu explaining (https://t.co/SLhEGprBZC) that France “cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere” and shouldn't depend on the goodwill of companies “capable of turning off the tap.”

Germany moved even earlier: its domestic intelligence service, the BfV, also selected ChapsVision over Palantir (https://t.co/pDZVj4SYUY), and the German military has said it will no longer use Palantir at all. Then, just this week, Spain instructed state-controlled companies - including strategic firms like Telefónica, Indra and Navantia - to avoid signing any new contracts with Palantir (https://t.co/0ik4UAFrT7).

Even in the UK, Washington's most loyal vassal, the NHS's £330 million data contract with Palantir is under review following parliamentary pressure (https://t.co/uJl6g4BMsW), and London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50 million Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police.

Palantir making a lot of noise around them caring about sovereignty makes a lot of sense: it's damage control since they keep being told they're a sovereignty risk.

I doubt it will work - because it's true: they are a sovereignty risk - but the fact that they feel the need to be vocal around this tells you where the wind is blowing: they're not shaping the narrative, they're reacting to one they're losing.

What they're saying against closed-source AI (basically a broadside attack on OpenAI and Anthropic), is again highly self-serving. Palantir's sudden love of open-weight AI models conveniently coincides with them launching 2 days before a partnership with Nvidia to sell exactly that: open models models (NVIDIA's Nemotron) in sovereign environments.

So it's essentially a product launch.

It doesn't make what they're saying wrong: it is factual that the value proposition of closed-source AI labs looks increasingly unsustainable. I mean: you're paying 10X the price of Chinese open-source AI models for something that's not really better (or just marginally) and on top of that you have zero control over your data, or the models themselves.

When Palantir says that "the architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha," they're right. I'd add that this also means you shouldn't trust Palantir either with that "tribal knowledge"... they obviously left this part out 😉

When you take a step back, these two things have major implications on many other US companies.

SpaceX - which just went public at the largest IPO valuation in history - is one clear example as I describe in my latest article on the new space race with China (https://t.co/JK3ELAyEVO).

If countries like France concluded with Palantir that they couldn't depend on a company “capable of turning off the tap” when it’s merely analyzing their data, what should they conclude about a company that aims to literally control their entire connectivity - at one man's whim, from space?

What percentage of SpaceX's crazy market cap is based on the assumption that foreign governments will not do to Starlink what they're currently doing to Palantir?

And SpaceX - or Palantir - aren't alone: a significant proportion of the top US tech giants, who rose in a world where no one questioned American technological hegemony, now face an environment that's much less conducive to the kind of lock-in their business models - and valuations - depend on.

When you pair this with the fact that it increasingly looks like the US made a wrong bet with closed-source AI - an extremely expensive wrong bet - the picture that emerges is of a country that bet its economic future on two things - proprietary AI and captive allies - and is losing both at the same time.

And to compound the problem, it doesn't help that the official narrative of the US government - via the voice of Jacob Helberg, the Under-Secretary of State (https://t.co/Z1rotPl9Ee) - is to be vocally opposed to "AI Sovereignty": essentially telling everyone "you know what, your worst fears are real, our tech companies are really out to undermine your sovereignty."

Read Helberg's post (the one I linked) and put yourself in the shoes of - say - a European or Asian leader and ask yourself how you'd react to being told that building your own AI capabilities is "marching in perfect formation into the past," that your pursuit of sovereignty is really just "synchronized mediocrity," and that your only path to the future runs through American technology.

If it was me in a position of power, I'd read this as a massive wakeup call: when another country's official position is that your sovereignty is a problem, history says you're about to need it.

So yes, it looks like - unexpectedly - Palantir, of all companies, is being quite the canary in the big tech mine. Yes they obviously do this for self-serving and cynical purpose, and yes they're of course also very much part of the problem and not the solution. But it doesn't make them wrong: sometimes it takes a vulture to tell you something is dying.

[JonnyUtd @Fx1Jonny]

The Great awakening is well and truly underway.

Spread this video far and wide, it should be on every major media platform in the world!

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

‘There’s no money in politics , if you’re straight.’

- Nigel Farage

[Ride the wave @frothywave]

@NeilDotObrien What a witty post. You pretentious twit.

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

Spain has blacklisted tech giant Palantir, barring it from contracts with public and private companies over national security data concerns.

It is worth noting that Palantir has also been involved in supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

[Ewan MacKenna @EwanMacKenna]

Always remember @DouglasKMurray is a racist, a xenophobe, supports facism and apartheid, and took Israeli money to try and convince us that murdering brown babies and starving their siblings was a good thing. Don't let the posh accent fool you. He's low life, scumbag, rent boy.

[Ride the wave @frothywave]

@MohdTaqi11 ترى الذل ان تعود لمن تامرت عليه مثل القحبة العورة وتطلب رضاه. لا تتفلسف ولا تجيب طاري اسيادك على لسانك

[Ride the wave @frothywave]

@AAbdulsaeid تخسي. انت ما عرفت الله يوما.

[Ride the wave @frothywave]

@montie If a party I belonged to didn’t push you further and further away, I would swim out to sea until I couldn’t swim anymore and give in to the exhaustion.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

If you don't care about sexual violence unless it's perpetrated by an ethnicity you don't like, you don't care about sexual violence.

[Senator Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen]

Not enough people are paying attention to this. The UAE is fueling the civil war in Sudan, arming the RSF who the Trump admin admits is committing a genocide. And yet, this admin refuses to hold them accountable.

We should be asking why.

[Israel Exposed @xIsraelExposedx]

It took a little longer than expected, but we have created a website for people to view the footage collected from Gaza in one place. You no longer have to download the entire archives to see them.

It includes:

64,537 videos
17,905 photos
Ability to download individual videos
Searchable index
Exhaustive sources list (300+ journalists)
Geolocation data
Livemap with minute to minute updates
Victim list

It can be accessed here: https://t.co/s0Se94PXWF

Please share & quote tweet to help this post break out of the twitter algorithm prison.

We will keep adding the rest of the archives to the site, be patient- it is difficult work. Continue to seed the torrents provided, as that is the best way to ensure the footage remains stored in decentalized way.

God bless all those who sacrificed their lives to get this footage out, and everyone invovled in collecting/archiving it.

Join our telegram:
https://t.co/bvcis3b9GT
Follow our backup accounts:
@ZionismExposedx & @IsraelExposedAr

[Economicopoly @Economicopoly]

He is one of the most irritating charlatans ever. Citing transparently inaccurate nonsense about the "Hitler loving" Irish with his comically contrived accent. He apparently got into Eton for a year and appears to spend his life compensating for the fact he is not authentic to that world by caricaturing the worst delusional superiority arrogance & personal social repugnancy associated with it.

[Richard Sefton @richardosefton]

I wonder if #TommyRobinson holds the record of ‘most photographs with paedophiles’?

[Ride the wave @frothywave]

@kevinnbass Hahaha. Yes Rhodesia, last bastion of vicious land grabbing colonisers. Indeed, then it got fucked and the land went back to the rightful owners.

[Ride the wave @frothywave]

@TRobinsonNewEra He shoukd sue you into 2050.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

To be clear, if you're a Somali who doesn't work and doesn't integrate, you're BAD. If you're a Somali who does work and does integrate, to the point that you're an elected official proudly serving your community, also BAD.

[JimmyTheGiant @jimthegiant]

Why are the British right always America first?