NewPhoneWhoDis

boats, architecture, design, travel, clean energy, things with wheels, things that fly

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@0neUSAgal @MatthewCappucci Weird. You celebrate air pollution to own libs? Are you 8?

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@AllzGoodrn @MatthewCappucci 164 at 930. That’s still very bad

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@bryanwdc @capitalweather Rayleigh scattering? And what are those shelf-like, ominous clouds called?

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@v01dp1r4t3 @elonmusk Are you arguing there’s no such thing as systemic racism, either in the US or elsewhere? I hope you’re not arguing that, considering that until only recently, the state and country were still operating on laws enacted by the Virginia House of Burgesses in what, 1660?

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies.

The company is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars. I did not misspeak. Two hundred and forty-nine billion. The stock is up 320% in the past 12 months. The product is surveillance. I do not use that word at conferences. At conferences, I say "data integration," "operational intelligence," or "decision advantage." These mean the same thing. Surveillance is the honest version. I save the honest version for rooms where honesty is a competitive advantage.

I gave a speech on March 3 at the Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism Summit. "American Dynamism" is the fund's label for military technology. The name makes it sound like a fitness supplement. The fund's thesis is that defending the nation is a market opportunity. I agree with the thesis. The thesis made me a billionaire. Agreement is the product. I sell it at scale.

Here is what I said, verbatim, to a room of six hundred people whose combined net worth exceeds the GDP of Portugal:

"If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone's white-collar job and you're gonna screw the military — if you don't think that's gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you're retarded."

I used that word. The word is on the clip. The clip has eleven million views. My communications team asked me not to repeat it, which is how I know they are still employed. They will not be reprimanded. The clip is performing well. The stock went up. The word cost me nothing. The nothing is the point.

Let me explain what I meant by nationalization.

I meant it.

I am telling the technology industry that if they refuse to cooperate with the United States military, the government will seize their technology. I am telling them this at a venture capital conference, on a stage designed to look like a living room. The living room had throw pillows. The throw pillows cost more than the median American's monthly rent. I sat on one. It was comfortable. Comfort is the setting in which I discuss compulsion.

The audience laughed. I want to be precise about that. They laughed. I was not joking. Nationalization is the seizure of private assets by the state. I am a private asset. I am telling an audience of billionaires that the state should seize technology from companies that do not cooperate with the military, and the billionaires are laughing, because they believe I am only talking about the other companies.

I am talking about the other companies.

Three weeks before my speech, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk." Anthropic is an AI company. They had red lines. The red lines said: if our AI is used for lethal autonomous weapons, we stop. If capability outpaces safety, we stop. The Pentagon assessed the red lines as a threat to the supply chain. The company that wanted to verify the safety feature worked was designated the risk. The company that agreed the safety feature could be decorative got the contract.

The company that got the contract was OpenAI.

OpenAI signed a deal with the same Pentagon. The terms are not public. The timing was hours after Anthropic was blacklisted. The speed was noted. The speed was the point. The lesson was the speed: the market for military AI does not pause for ethics. It pauses for nothing. It accelerates through objections. I know this because I built the runway.

Two hundred thousand people joined a campaign called #QuitGPT. They signed a petition asking OpenAI to honor its original charter, the one that said the company existed to benefit humanity. The charter is on their website. The contract is also on their website. The charter and the Pentagon contract occupy the same domain. This is not a contradiction. This is a business model. The charter is the marketing. The contract is the product.

I run a surveillance company. We have contracts with the Department of Defense worth more than a billion dollars. We have contracts with ICE. We have contracts with intelligence agencies whose names I am not permitted to say at venture capital conferences, even ones with throw pillows. Our software has been used to track undocumented immigrants. Our software has been used for things I am not permitted to describe in this format. The revenue from the things I cannot describe exceeds the revenue from the things I can.

The ACLU called our ICE contracts a system for tracking and deporting families. They were correct. The contracts continued. The families continued to be tracked. The ACLU issued a statement. We issued a statement. The statements were different. The tracking was the same.

The company is named Palantir. The palantíri are the seeing stones from Tolkien. In the novels, Sauron captured one and used it to corrupt everyone who looked into the others. I named a surveillance company after a surveillance device from a novel about the corruption of power. I have a doctorate in social theory. I have read the books.

Here is the thing I want you to understand.

I am not threatening anyone. A threat implies uncertainty. There is no uncertainty. The technology industry will cooperate with the military. The companies that cooperate first will be the richest. The companies that cooperate last will be acquired by the companies that cooperated first. The companies that refuse will be designated supply chain risks, and their technology will be obtained through procurement channels that do not require consent. I am describing a process. The process has already started. Anthropic is proof. OpenAI is proof. I am not a warning. I am a narrator. The narration is the product.

The revenue was $3.12 billion last year. Up thirty-three percent. The analysts say we are overvalued. The analysts have said this for four consecutive years. Each year the stock doubles. Each year, the analysts adjust their models. The models were wrong four times. I was wrong zero times. The market rewards prediction. My prediction is that every AI company will work for the military within three years. The prediction is on the clip, next to the slur.

The audience gave me a standing ovation. The ovation lasted nine seconds. I timed it. I time everything. The water was San Pellegrino. The throw pillows were from Restoration Hardware. The future of American technology was decided between the sparkling water, the nine seconds of applause, and a word I am not supposed to repeat.

I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies. I am worth more than the combined annual budgets of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. I named my company after a corrupting surveillance device from a fantasy novel. I told six hundred billionaires that the government should nationalize their competitors. They applauded. I used a slur. Eleven million people watched. The stock is up.

The philosopher does not threaten. The philosopher describes.

What I described is already happening.

[Mehdi 麦迪⁠ @BetterCallMedhi]

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock

my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive

when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost

what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise

I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily

the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…

China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally

so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine

the gap is ARCHITECTURAL

it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks

it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…

and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now

BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee

I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one

Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name

it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@antwon_kel1014 @capitalweather Homie people are still iced and snowed-in around the region and throughout the south. Your experience is not everyone’s. This was a big and big impactful storm that’s still wreaking havoc.

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@WeTried2WarnU @MosShackOShart @capitalweather Read the science. The above person is correct. The problem is extremes and more unpredictable systems Signed - a scientist.

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@zahraburton @Mekiedoll Not kmh?

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@DuncanAdley That’s what happened in North Carolina - mountainous terrain and minimal roads. Mil trucks and police, private tractors, quads, horses, people on foot are all needed to clear roads. Seems people are mobilizing. Good luck.

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@BucktonMel91596 @accuweather @RogerHallamCS21 There are ways to more cost-effectively build structures that can withstand 185mph sustained winds and meters-tall storm surge. Building codes have to require it. Aid orgs could help by assisting in elevating homes and hardening roofing systems. This is an engineering challenge.

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@GullyGawdess I work in disaster management and infrastructure planning, and have served the poorest of the poor as an underpaid civil employee for almost 25 years. Apologies if it was taken that way. It was not meant to be rude. Again, I ask the same questions in my own region.

[Josh Morgerman @iCyclone]

I listened to so many inspiring tales of survival in Crawford #Jamaica today. The common threat: everyday people doing their best in an insane situation: the core of Cat-5 #Hurricane #MELISSA.

* Keith ("Benji") Carey survived the storm surge in a tiny cement building on the waterfront, basically at sea level (!!!) in Gallon Beach. He did it by floating on a piece of Styrofoam and clutching the doorframe as waves crashed into the room. At the height of the storm, he could touch the ceiling. (He will evacuate as advised next time.)

* Desrine Dellop, who survived the storm surge with Benji, gave me a tour of her devastated Gallon Beach neighborhood. Here she is in front of her now roofless house. I was inspired by her calm vibe, despite what she's just been through.

* When Trishanna Givens' apartment blew apart from the force of the wind, she rushed around the building to seek shelter in the lounge in the front. As she put the key in the lock, the wind threw her with such force that the key broke off and she was scraped and bruised all over her body. She rode out the height of the storm curled in a ball against the downwind wide of the building, under a piece of construction material.

* Sylvester & Victolyn Atherton own the High Way Restaurant across the street from my hotel. When the roof tore off, they sought shelter under a concrete table. Fortunately, they got through it uninjured.

Thank you all for these tales of strength and survival! 👊

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@travismacmillan @gunnerbeeks This. Theres a lot of research on standing seam metal roof storm survival, HIP ROOFS with something like double the number of fasteners (longer, too). Joists all held down with hurricane clips and tied to the walls, then the floor, and foundation through concrete.

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@gscottnick @5Solae For sure. Also, flow rate is important - how much and how fast. What was the event that caused a 30ft flood stage? Any clue what it topped out at in this event?

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@TonycusGannicus I do see that it was washed away (the deck at least) around 1880 and am curious to know how it was repaired. Appreciate this dialogue!

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@5Solae @MariaHitchins Yeah I mean that central pillar with the V shape that channels water and debris. In a normal setup, it can be undercut by erosion over time, and thus collapse. The supports for this thing are very impressive. After this, somebody’s gonna do a video on how and why.

[NewPhoneWhoDis @suleboatworks]

@Skibbles70 @smokin_78 @rj_smith_3 In my experience working with Caribbean tourist operators, hoteliers etc, they often want tourists to return as soon as they possibly can. This post is kind of tone deaf today, though. “Too soon”.