JustBe74

NEW: Palantir’s revolving door. A new investigation by @thenerve_news has found Palantir has recruited more than 30 senior officials from UK govt, a strategy transparency experts say poses an ‘acute risk’ of corruption. 1/ Link ⬇️

Israel killed every single person in this photo in Lebanon. Every. Single. One. All journalists. Targeted and assassinated intentionally. For reporting the truth from the frontlines.

Un membre de la génération Z a rejoint une équipe. Première semaine. Lors de l’intégration, le manager a dit : « Parfois, nous restons tard pendant les périodes de forte activité. » La génération Z a hoché la tête. Puis a demandé :

Quote of the day 👇

Twenty seven government agencies and counting. When a Palantir exec‑turned‑whistleblower tells us that the company intends on taking over the U.S. government, maybe we should believe him?

Because I get asked a lot. Why we must fight Palantir, in brief. 1. Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country. The Internet has been designed since its inception as a universal system for the sharing of knowledge without censorship. The Internet is not the property of any one government or nation. 2. The Internet enables mass surveillance at a scale unimaginable to the Gestapo and the Cheka. Far too many programmers have wasted their lives at building surveillance systems under the guise of Web advertising. Today, these web tracking systems are being used to monitor, control, and even kill humans by companies like Palantir that seek to combine state violence with corporate efficiency, and thus create a new form of technofascism. 3. Surveillance justified by external national security threats will be turned against citizens inside the nation-state. Mass surveillance was once the exclusive domain of the NSA, but today it has been privatized to corporations like Palantir that are unaccountable to any democratic process. What begins as fear of external foreign nation-states turns inwards to focus on immigrants, dissidents, and eventually to anyone that might challenge the status quo or try to exit an increasingly dysfunctional society. 4. Everyone is a target. The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance. The line between policing and military operations blurs, with legal frameworks being replaced by technological violence operating with total impunity. 5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves. Meek calls for regulation or moralizing demands for human rights are useless in this era. Any rights must be enforced by the hard power of code. Code, not laws, can be used to uphold the right to privacy by making surveillance difficult, if not impossible, even by nation-state adversaries. 6. We are ruled by a senile gerontocracy. Unlike the generations that fought in the world wars, most of our current rulers are degenerate pedophiles who would sacrifice the well-being of the youth and the entire planet due to their infantile desire for wealth and power. Technology of surveillance and automated warfare reflects their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain archaic forms of domination. 7. The American Empire is unraveling. Once, the United States of America presided over a globe where it could enforce its rule via the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency and a network of equally global military bases, but new regional powers now directly challenge the United States as its empire dissolves in the face of internal economic stagnation, political corruption, and the inflation of the dollar. 8. In a real war, fantasies of total technological dominance always backfire. When a faceless drone kills a child’s father, that child will one day take revenge regardless of the cost, something forgotten by those raised in comfortable suburbs. Going beyond zero-sum games, one can only truly win a battle against a people by demonstrating your victory provides a better way of life, increased prosperity, and an inspiring philosophy. 9. Oddly enough, proponents of fully automated warfare support a universal draft. Deep-down, these keyboard warriors know that their technofascist fantasies are a paper tiger when up against determined opponents that engage in asymmetric warfare. They also know none of their children will fight in a war for their state but they would be happy to see other people’s children come home in body-bags. 10. The problem is not whether AI weapons will be built; we must hold responsible those who are building them. No matter which country is deploying automated killing machines, no one is absolved from the murder of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure due to the parlour-trick of shifting the blame to AI. 11. Atomic war is on the horizon. As various states descend into wars over increasingly scarce natural resources, the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes over Teheran, Kyiv, and other areas of conflict has returned to the historical stage. Increasingly geriatric and authoritarian rulers face less guardrails than before to deploying nuclear weapons, and may even be willing to sacrifice the survival of humanity to appease their own petty egos. 12. Our goal is a world of peace where every person can be empowered by the Internet. Modern war is the quintessential game of sending young people to the meat-grinder. Why die for the profit of corrupt rulers when one could build real wealth and power for yourself using the Internet? 13. We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control, and decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression. 14. The State will not help us. The state is a dying pre-Internet institution that increasingly resembles nothing but a Ponzi scheme fueled by taxes and debt. None of the youth alive today will likely inherit any benefits, such as welfare and health care. 15. Centralized and opaque algorithms are a danger to free speech. Propaganda is the flip-side of surveillance, as continual propaganda prevents anyone from even thinking of challenging the system. Social media monopolies promote propaganda to create a generalized idiocy while silencing those that would dare to criticize the reigning order before they can organize against it. 16. Building new forms of social organization with each other is vital to survival. The traditional mediascape of politics and entertainment exists to distract us from building networked solidarity and distributed autonomous organizations across borders. The hierarchical state is as relevant to us as the medieval church and kings were to the formation of the joint-stock corporation and the labour union. 17. Digital identity is the next step in their system of control. Within the next few years, access to the Internet–including in Europe and the United States–will require biometric national identity cards, using the flimsy excuse of “protecting children.” The real goal is to gatekeep free access to subversive political content and halt cross-border communication in order to prevent new forms of self-organization and resistance from emerging. 18. Only when one can be anonymous is one truly free. The freedom to express oneself without censorship and surveillance is a vital precondition for both the autonomous use of reason and the democratic evolution of society. Technology must enable the freedom to selectively reveal ourselves to the world–so that we can become who we want to be–by preserving the right to privacy over the Internet, including not just individual privacy but the right to transact and form contracts privately. 19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten or perhaps taken for granted the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism. 20. Culture wars are a psyop. It is ironic that “Epstein class” virtue-signals about traditional morality and the superiority of forms of ethno-nationalism, while trying to return to the rule of hereditary elites, even in the United States. Rather than reverse the gains of the Enlightenment, we take the side of our ancestors who fought a centuries-long battle for individual liberty, scientific progress, decentralized markets, bottom-up democracy and the emancipation of humanity from feudal monarchs and their make-believe mythologies. 21. New forms of technology can reshape the world. Technology is not just a tool, but the world we live in and an extension of our cognitive capabilities. The co-operation of humans with the collective intelligence embedded in AI could accelerate human progress and overcome planetary crises such as climate change and atomic war that threatens the survival of our species. 22. Live free or die trying. We must bear eternal vigilance in the struggle against fascism, and the battlefield is technology. There is no middle ground: Technologists must choose whether to work for the enslavement of humanity or to create new spaces for freedom. These are my personal beliefs, not those of @nym. Yet as a philosopher that founded a tech startup, I have a responsibility to respond to this manifesto of Palantir and it's so-called "philosopher-CEO" Alex Karp.

If you live in a country that sends poor people to jail for using drugs, but doesn't send rich people to jail for raping kids, you live in a shit hole country.

Our oasis in space 🌎💙 Seeing Earth from this unique perspective reminds us how special our home planet is. Download the 2026 Earth Day poster for a daily dose of inspiration: go.nasa.gov/3QVD5ZG

Der ehem. Premier Belgiens und ehem. Präsident des Europäischen Rates, der die 27 EU Mitgliedsstaaten vertrat, über die EU-Kommissionspräsidentin @vonderleyen „Schon zu Beginn ihrer gemeinsamen Amtszeit, so sagt er, sei es ihm fast unmöglich gewesen, eine funktionierende Arbeitsbeziehung aufzubauen. Sein Vorschlag, regelmäßige persönliche Koordinierungssitzungen zu internationalen Angelegenheiten abzuhalten – um sicherzustellen, dass die EU mit einer einheitlichen Stimme spreche –, sei von von der Leyen „systematisch abgelehnt“ worden. „Ich habe meine eigene Meinung über ihre Persönlichkeit“, sagt er vorsichtig, „und es ist nicht meine Absicht, heute Kommentare über Persönlichkeiten abzugeben.“ Eine kurze Pause. „Aber ich kann Ihnen sagen: Noch nie zuvor hatte ich bei der Zusammenarbeit mit einem Kollegen solche Schwierigkeiten. Noch nie. Es geht nicht um die Persönlichkeit. Es geht um den Kern des europäischen Projekts.“ Was ihre Führungsqualitäten angeht, ist Michel vernichtend. „Es herrscht eine extrem autoritäre Führung“, sagt er. „Die Kommissare spielen absolut keine Rolle mehr.“ Der grundlegende Fehler liege seiner Ansicht nach in einem Missverständnis der Aufgabe. „Sie soll sich für die Verteidigung des Binnenmarkts einsetzen. Es wurde nichts getan. Sie soll sich um die Finanzmärkte kümmern. Es wurde nichts getan“, sagt er. „In diesem Bereich ist das Ergebnis gleich Null, und das ist eine Tragödie.“ Er hält inne. „Ich bin streng. Ich bin gnadenlos. Weil ich es von innen gesehen habe.““

Marcelo Bielsa: "I am sure that football is in a process of decline. "It is becoming less and less attractive because what made it the best game in the world is not there anymore. "If you let a lot of people watch football, but you don't protect the pleasure of what they watch, that favours business, because the business is that a lot of people watch football. "For me, the introduction of technology like VAR does a lot of harm to football. "This sport has a particularity: when it becomes completely predictable, it loses its appeal. "As time passes, as fewer and fewer footballers are worth watching and as the game produced is less and less enjoyable, this artificial increase in the number of spectators will be interrupted."

Anthropic said Mythos was too dangerous to release. Then four random guys in a Discord gained access on day one by guessing the URL... This is pretty insane: → Group in a private Discord guessed the endpoint from Anthropic's naming conventions → They figured out the conventions from the leak in the Mercor breach three weeks ago → Used a contractor's legit eval credentials to walk in → Have been using it ever since to build simple websites The AI that finds zero-days in every operating system on earth was defeated by address bar autocomplete... big yikes

When O when are we going to get real professional @BelgianReferees in the ⁦@ProLeagueBE⁩? Laforge should retire, has eyesight problems. sporza.be/nl/2026/04/22/…

🚨🎙️ Roy Keane on Haaland preventing Gabriel from getting a red card. “That head situation with Gabriel and Haaland – the lad sticks his forehead right into him, proper aggressive, pushing his head forward like that. Should’ve been a straight red card for violent conduct, end of story. But fair play to Haaland… he didn’t go down easy. He stayed on his feet, didn’t roll around looking for a decision like some of these soft modern players. He just got on with it. That’s proper mentality. None of this diving or play-acting nonsense. Well done, son – that’s how you play the game.”

You hate to say it, but Iran has a point… What are US guarantees worth after they betrayed Ukraine?

This very interesting score-settling interview with former 🇪🇺Council chair Charles Michel contains one notable detail on 🇺🇦. Michel seems to confirm that the choreographed moves toward accession are disingenuous, saying that national leaders privately told him "it will never happen". It's the highest-level admission of something Brussels reporters know well: behind the scenes, there is significant scepticism about the real prospects of Ukraine joining the union that people are afraid to express publicly. That scepticism (also coming from federalists concerned it would make ever-closer-union impossible and shift the EU's geographic centre east to Warsaw) is myriad and coming from a variety of different perspectives. But with Orban gone, it's going to become clear that other leaders were hiding behind his veto. brusselstimes.com/belgium/208261…

So, @grok FTW.

90-100% displaced 3.4% killed, 8% injured 77% face acute food insecurity 92% of buildings damaged/destroyed 93% of schools damaged/destroyed 61 million tons of debris 4% of agriculture undamaged $71 billion needed to rebuild And some people still don't call this genocide?

Mainstream media review from the @Independent after trying Tesla's FSD (Supervised) in the Netherlands: "The car behaved impeccably. And it’s so simple to use. What’s most remarkable is how unremarkable it all is. The car accelerates with confidence – not super-speedy but a very natural acceleration – and it corners smoothly. The car will overtake when it needs to (I was always checking the mirrors, just in case) and on occasions, it even swapped lanes approaching traffic lights when it spotted an advantage to be had – just as I would. And around the busy streets of the city centre, the car’s ability to spot every single hazard and react accordingly, was hugely impressive. Had I not been using FSD, I may have been a little more strident in squeezing between pedestrians and cycles, but the impeccably mannered Model Y always gave these more vulnerable road users the benefit of the doubt. The way the car turned sharply and cruised down narrow, cobbled streets – judging its width more confidently than I might in certain situations – was impressive, too. As was the fact that the hundreds of people we passed on Amsterdam’s streets seemed to have no idea that it was the car doing the driving – although there was the odd double-take when they realised my hands weren’t on the steering wheel. I’d highly recommend that you just give it a go – and I say the same about electric cars: try it, you might just like it." Great to see some mainstream media giving FSD a fair go. You can read Steve's full review here: independent.co.uk/cars/electric-…

Society needs to use the Palantir manifesto as a cue to take a big step back and question why journalists, news media, and every other forum have allowed Silicon Valley to opine on everything, not just tech, despite knowing they’re uniquely antipathetic to humans?