Hala هالة‎

tweets abt everyday absurdities, feminism, fitness, synthrock, scifi, accessibility, tech & design. I enjoy organizing things a little more than I should.

[katyakay @katyakayy]

starting to run in your 30’s is a great way to meet new people. today i met two paramedics, one nurse and almost God.

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

LMAO who made this extremely based 😭😂🤣

[Awni Hannun @awnihannun]

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:

Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
Me: Yes they're done.
Partner: Why are they still dirty?
Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

[austin petersmith @awwstn]

i made a chrome extension that removes the AI slop from my linkedin feed

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Palantir were kind enough to sum up its hideous ideology in 22 points. And I have taken the liberty of annotating each one of them. Here is my interpretation of all 22 of them (preserving the original numbering - for the original see their tweet below):

1. Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class who bailed out the criminal bankers that wrecked the livelihood of the majority of Americans. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), in the name of the majority of Americans whom they treat with contempt – i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value.

2. Palantir is eyeing the Apple Store, salivating over the prospect of creating its own technofeudal estate. Time to replace the iPhone with another device that dissolves what is left of people’s privacy.

3. Palantir shall give nothing away for free. It cares uniquely over its own growth which it pursues by sowing fear so that it can sell a fake sense of security.

4. Glory to brute force! Ethics is for suckers. The West needs more of Palantir’s murderous software.

5. AI-powered killer robots are coming. The task is to profit magnificently by building killer robots first and ask questions later. To be able to do so, Palantir will do whatever it takes to avoid at all cost any international treaties that limit AI-driven killer robots.

6. Every poor sod (lacking the connections to avoid being thrown into the trenches with killer drones targeting them from the sky) must be drafted into the army. Forget paying soldiers a salary. All payments should be directed to Palantir, where our own people will be serving their ‘national service’ – leaving the dying to non-shareholders.

7. Palantir works overtime to equip US Marines with killer bots that take away from the US Marines whatever remnants of ethical judgment they are left with on the battlefield. American society should be rendered perfectly incapable of any debate that restricts Palantir’s capacity to get the US Military to eliminate any remaining opportunity to reject its software’s choice of targets.

8. Palantir deplores the fact that the public sector is still not totally devoid of a conscience. Public servants must be fired en masse, except some very few approved by Palantir who will receive huge salaries, paid by taxpayers.

9. Palantir thinks that Donald Trump must be beatified for throwing himself into public service. Not forgiving folks like Trump everything risks our soul, not to mention that it raises the prospect of officials that restrict Palantir’s evil project.

10. Politics needs to be AI-like, devoid of anything that can be mistaken for human empathy. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self must be sent to the gulag forthwith!

11. There are some people too eager to hasten Palantir’s demise. They should rethink, or else!

12. Palantir makes no nuclear weapons but is happily developing other weapons of mass destruction. We proudly announce that we are now ready to add to nuclear Armageddon the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence.

13. No other country in the history of the world has committed so many war crimes in the name of progress and freedom. The United States offers infinite freedom to people like Palantir’s founders to profit so handsomely by inflicting so much damage upon humanity.

14. American power has feasted on causing one war after another, one putsch after another, one avoidable financial disaster after another. Too many have forgotten or perhaps have taken for granted America’s capacity to pursue forever wars in the name of peace and democracy.

15. German and Japanese Fascism must be made great again. The denazification of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly misplaced commitment to Japanese pacifism must also end immediately!

16. We should applaud those who attempt to monopolise everything by means of generous government contracts. Billionaires must not be satisfied merely with their billions. To become even more obscenely rich they need grand narratives that help them convince the poor to use their freedom to keep them, the billionaires, in power. And, by the way, Palantir loves Elon, especially his grand apartheid-inspired narrative.

17. Silicon Valley must be free to do in America’s cities what it did in Gaza. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it came to granting Palantir the right to annihilate all remaining civil liberties and human rights. This must end.

18. Epstein’s syndicate should be forgotten lest lovely people like Trump and the Clintons are deterred from entering government. The public arena must be scrutiny-free unless subversives like Sanders or Mamdani enter it.

19. We love banal public figures as long as they give Palantir all the juicy contracts. We also love colourful public figures who give Palantir all the juicy contracts.

20. We need more opium for the masses, as they are not sufficiently inebriated for us to be unimpeded in the pursuit of their complete subjugation. Questioning organised superstition is dangerous and must end.

21. Time to bring back Hitler’s hierarchy of races, with Palantir’s founders and Elon at its Aryan pinnacle. The idea that it is wrong to judge someone by the colour of their skin or their ethnicity or their religion must be jettisoned.

22. Blacks, Muslims, most Asians, and of course women, are inferior untermensch. Blokes in America, and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted putting these subhumans in their places in the name of inclusivity. It was a mistake. Such subhumans must never be allowed in, except as servants or sex service providers – at least until we can improve our robots, in which case we won’t need them at all.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document 👇 wouldn't be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated.

What are they saying, essentially?

They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure).

Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there?

Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument.

But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates.

In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly.

So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others.

The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them!

Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order.

I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish.

Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets.

But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.

So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project.

They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours."

Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action."

For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: https://t.co/3YJk88k4QY): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not.

And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart.

This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see.

A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda.

The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.

[Brian Willott Farms @BrianWillott]

They should change the name to "Strait of Schrödinger". It's both open and closed at the same time.

[Christophe Boutry @Ced_haurus]

Palantir vient de publier son manifeste. Lisez-le.

Pas pour ce qu'il dit sur la tech. Pour ce qu'il dit sur le politique. Sur l'idéologie de Karp et Thiel. Sur la guerre. Sur vous.

Quand une entreprise privée se donne pour mission de définir qui doit être surveillé, ciblé, prédit, neutralisé, et qu'elle publie simultanément un texte expliquant pourquoi contester cela serait de la faiblesse civilisationnelle, on n'est plus dans la stratégie d'entreprise. On est dans la privatisation du souverain. Le droit de décider de l'ennemi, qui fut toujours le geste politique fondateur des États, est en train d'être racheté par une entreprise cotée au Nasdaq.

Ce manifeste repose sur un seul tour de passe-passe, répété sous vingt formes différentes : rendre l'inévitable ce qui est en réalité un choix. Les armes à IA ? Elles seront construites de toute façon, alors autant que ce soit nous.

La surveillance algorithmique ? La réalité géopolitique l'exige.

Le réarmement de l'Occident, la hiérarchie des cultures, la disqualification du pluralisme comme naïveté dangereuse ? Simple lucidité face au monde tel qu'il est.

C'est le geste idéologique par excellence : ne pas interdire la question, mais la rendre indécente.

Ce que Palantir appelle réalisme est en fait une décision philosophique radicale : le conflit est la vérité permanente du monde, la délibération démocratique est une fragilité que l'adversaire exploitera, et une élite technologique privée est mieux placée qu'un peuple pour tirer les conséquences de cette vérité.
C'est du schmittisme en hoodie. C'est littéralement la structure de leur pensée.

Le danger n'est pas qu'ils soient fous. Le danger est qu'ils soient riches, cohérents, et déjà à l'intérieur des États. Palantir ne frappe pas à la porte des gouvernements pour vendre un outil. Elle arrive avec une cosmologie complète : voici comment fonctionne le monde, voici vos ennemis, voici pourquoi vous ne pouvez pas vous permettre de débattre, et voici notre contrat.

Palantir est l'ennemie des peuples et de la démocratie. Ce qu'ils construisent, c'est un pouvoir technocratique que personne n'a élu et que personne ne pourra destituer.

[Hala هالة‎ @halathinkeths]

@INCITS When will the recording be shared?

[Stephanie Cadieux @Stephanie4BC]

Well. @AirCanada left my chair in Toronto. I’m now without my essential equipment. Independence taken away. I’m furious. Unacceptable. #RightsOnFlights

[IWDTO @IWD_TO]

📢After 2 years of virtual rallies, this year Toronto International Women's Day Rally will be back in the streets!
Saturday March 4th 2023
11am rally | 1pm march
Starting at OISE/UT

[Hala هالة‎ @halathinkeths]

@DDame I'm so sorry for your loss, @DDame. Losing a loved one is unbearably tough. Please don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything I can do to support you

[Hala هالة‎ @halathinkeths]

@thebillygregory My luggage is currently traveling at Heathrow Airport without me, so I get it

[ARCHIVED - NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover @NASAPersevere]

If all goes to plan, this backup set will stay here while I deliver my primary set (incl. other samples still to come) directly to the lander, as seen below. One way or another, #MarsSampleReturn should get some amazing stuff to send back for closer study.

[Reid Parker @ReidParker_]

My kid’s teacher made toys for her class based on their drawings.
Pay teachers more

[Ҡվղց Ϛվժ 🤙🏽 @Str0ka_]

I'll get GAS in the "Morning" is one of the "Worst Decision" you can make as an ADULT.

[Community @CommunityTV]

we are all Abed Nadir today.

[Dr. Tech @doctechmd]

When your code works, but you have no idea how

[Jemedari @MrJemedari]

Glad to see so many embracing therapy. A few of you need an exorcism as well but... Baby steps

[Hala هالة‎ @halathinkeths]

@DAVIDsTEA Hello! I'm pretty sure I had free rewards on my account which I logged in today to redeem. However, I no longer see them in my account. Can you investigate? Thanks