pedro brañas

... it’s actually possible for you to say
“I don’t know enough about this to have an opinion”
R Feynman

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

I’ve studied these two and written biographies’ worth of articles on them. They are a unique byproduct of deeply abusive families and an apartheid education system that trained them to believe they were the superior race.

They were also taught to hate people like themselves.

Peter Thiel was a young gay boy in a town & a school that were the last places in the world to use “Heil Hitler” as a greeting. Peter both believes he is superior but also that he is defective. That’s why he’s a dedicated transhumanist. He wants to ESCAPE this world—and himself—by any means necessary.

Elon is the quintessential incel—an asocial nerd with sociopathic, abusive, racist parents. He got put in the hospital for being an asshole at school. He morphed his father’s sci-fi bedtime stories and his apartheid brainwashing into a grandiose delusions of being the emperor of a colony on Mars—white people only.

The result is a messianic malignant narcissist who believes he has the right to enact a eugenics program on the world—“for our own good.” USAID was just the start.

Elon Musk doesn’t think “takers” should vote. He thinks empathy is suicidal. He actively stokes race war.

For Peter and Elon, the emotional compression of both hating everyone who doesn’t look like them AND hating themselves created genocidal monsters—because they there is nowhere to run. They’re trapped in their own private hell and they don’t care who it hurts to escape.

They found each other 30 years ago and started collaborating on the project of burning down American constitutional democracy so they can create a corporate feudalist dictatorship from the ashes. They see human life as dirty, unnecessary, and complicated. They want death—a lot of it.

Erich Fromm, who defined the term “malignant narcissist” would have called them necrophiles. They much prefer machines to people.

The American system not only failed to filter out these extraordinarily evil creatures but actively elevated them to a position of being able to present an existential danger as they do now. That failure is a cross-section of everything that needs to change.

These are the exact people we should never allow to call themselves Americans, much less give them untold billions of our tax dollars to destroy the very systems they used to obtain their obscene hoards of wealth.

We became too tolerant, too weak, and too complacent.

We have to kick this evil out or be swallowed by it. Those are the only two choices.

[Jack The Watcher @TheWatcherPL]

🤭

[Restoring Your Faith in Humanity @HumanityChad]

They put a German Shepherd in charge of babysitting a group of Doberman puppies.

I love how he just lays down, rolls over, gets dog piled, and then does it again… I could watch this shit all day. Lol

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The US loves to boast about how wealthy it is, but its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs.

US oligarchs are so insanely rich that they make average wealth seem very high.

But *median* wealth in the US is lower than in Slovenia & Portugal, and half of Italy's

[Julián Macías Tovar @JulianMaciasT]

Vaya fotón de Reuters en el día del aniversario 250 de la independencia de EEUU, una mujer negra va sola junto a decenas de supremacistas blancos en el transporte público preparados para marchar por Washington.

[Antelm Pujol, MD PhD @AntelmPujol]

🚩¿Vacaciones largas o varias vacaciones cortas?

Un estudio encontró que:

✅ El bienestar alcanza su pico en el día 8.
❌ Más días no aportan grandes beneficios adicionales.
📉 En menos de 7 días tras volver al trabajo, el efecto desaparece.

Por eso, hacer vacaciones más frecuentes podría ser una mejor estrategia para mantener el bienestar.

[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.

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

In older adults, how to keep your muscle young at multiple molecular levels (metabolomics, lipidomics, transcriptomics)
Exercise.
"We found that 50% of these age-related differences were absent in trained older adults, resulting in profiles resembling those of young adults."
https://t.co/AYIHUGyWCF

[Nick Levine @status_effects]

The Economist: "Talkie, a model trained only on text from before 1931, thinks God is extremely important and is “very proud to be a citizen of Great Britain”. It is a bigger believer in law and order than any frontier model we tested."

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Así fue el recibimiento a la selección de Egipto en Dallas (EEUU), mientras un jugador se hacía una foto con un niño, la policia estadounidense se encaró y agredió a miembros del staff nacional egipcio.

El mundial en AmeriKKKa quedará para siempre manchado por el racismo en EEUU mientras los medios a sueldo dicen que está siendo perfecto.

[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

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Meta announced it will sell excess AI compute capacity to outside customers. The company spent $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, put chips in fabric tents to speed up deployment, drafted 6,500 engineers into AI training they call soul-crushing, and cut thousands of jobs to fund the buildout. CoreWeave stock dropped on the news.

My Take
Six months ago these companies said there wasn't enough compute in the world. Now Meta is selling its leftovers. A company doesn't sell surplus of something it needs.

CoreWeave went public on the promise that demand for AI compute would outstrip supply for years. SpaceX started selling compute too. Now Meta joins them. Every new seller of excess capacity makes it harder for the next company to justify a premium price, and every one of them undercuts the scarcity story that the IPOs were priced on. Three companies are now competing to sell compute they built on the assumption someone else would buy it. The demand that was supposed to absorb all of this hasn't shown up, and nobody wants to be the last one holding unsold capacity when the market figures that out.

Hedgie🤗

[Ataque Futbolero @AtaqueFutbolero]

🗓️ 29/06/00 - Patrick Kluivert erró su penal en Semi de Euro.

🗓️ 29/06/26 - Justin Kluivert erró su penal en 16vos de Mundial.

Padre e hijo, MISMA ejecución, con Holanda siendo eliminada, el MISMO DÍA con 26 AÑOS DE DIFERENCIA.

INCREÍBLE. 😳⛔️

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

A security camera captured two Belgian Malinois puppies playing while their owner wasn't home

[The Lancet @TheLancet]

Currently approved mRNA vaccines are safe and effective at preventing infectious diseases, with promise for future disease prevention and treatment, new review confirms.

Read more: https://t.co/9N56bimWgu

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The marvel that is the Fountain of the Lions in the Alhambra, Granada, Spain.

[Beauty of music and nature 🌺🌺 @Axaxia88]

This baby elephant may have grown huge, but deep down he’s still just a little one at heart. Every night, he loves curling up beside his caretaker, as if he were still a tiny calf who simply wants to stay close to the person he loves most. 🐘💕

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Una profesora infantil de Luxemburgo llamada Fátima fue despedida de la escuela por apoyar a los niños palestinos que sufren el genocidio en Gaza, debido a las presiones del lobby sionista.

Las niñas a las que daba clase y sus familias salieron en su apoyo pidiendo que vuelva.

Vivimos en un sistema donde la empatía es castigada y perpetrar un infanticidio es impune.

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

"When you come to power, will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?" It was 1931, and American journalist Dorothy Thompson was permitted only three questions during a rare interview with Adolf Hitler that many considered impossible to secure. The leader of Germany's rapidly ascending far-right Nazi party gave her a chillingly candid reply.

"I will get into power legally," Hitler told her. "I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below."

Thompson believed he was telling the truth about his dictatorial ambitions, yet she couldn't fathom that he would be successful. The very idea struck her as absurd: "Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights."

As one of America’s most respected foreign correspondents and the first American woman to head a foreign news bureau, Thompson had been tracking the Nazi movement since 1923. At the time of the interview, she was deeply familiar with Hitler, having watched his speeches, read Mein Kampf, and interviewed numerous German politicians and Nazi supporters.

"When I walked into Adolph Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany," Thompson later reflected. "In something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog."

She recognized that Hitler was a masterful propagandist and orator in front of a crowd but she wasn't prepared for how pathetic he appeared one on one. "He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she wrote after their meeting. Thompson found the interview nearly impossible to conduct: "One cannot carry on a conversation with Adolph Hitler... In every question, he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table."

Following the interview, in numerous articles and her book "I Saw Hitler," she warned about the threat Hitler represented to democracy and highlighted Hitler's embrace of racial prejudice, noting that persecution of the Jewish people was among the first planks in his program. But ultimately, she viewed an outright Nazi victory in the upcoming election as "unlikely," not believing that German citizens would embrace such an extremist demagogue in an election.

Within a year, Thompson learned the devastating lesson of how easily democratic citizens could be persuaded to relinquish their rights to a would-be dictator who channeled their anxieties into hatred of a demonized 'other' while promising national greatness. After he came to power in 1933, Hitler began to crush his political opponents, rapidly militarize German society, and persecute targeted groups. Thompson quickly became one of the most vocal chroniclers of Hitler's growing brutality, warning a world that was largely oblivious. “It must be said, it must be re-iterated,” she wrote, “that there has been and still is a widespread terror, which extends throughout the whole of Germany.”

Hitler was sufficiently threatened by Thompson's work that he reportedly demanded the creation of a "Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad" to rush translations of her articles to him. In August 1934, Nazi government expelled Thompson from the country, making her the first American journalist banned from Nazi Germany.

© A Mighty Girl

#archaeohistories