/tech/ - Technology

4.

At a symposium held in July 2004 at Stanford University in honour of Professor Emeritus René Girard, Peter Thiel (40) founder of Palantir Technologies Inc. and “godfather” of the PayPal Mafia (41) outlined the foundations of the new global power architecture. He based this on the premise that “the brute facts of September 11 demand a re-examination of the foundations of modern politics,” given that “Western political philosophy can no longer cope with our world of global violence.”

During his talk, titled The Straussian Moment, a tribute to the leading ideologue (42) of the neoconservative circles that instigated the “War on Terror” under the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, Thiel stated:

“The twenty – first century started with a bang on September 11, 2001. In those shocking hours, the entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and indeed of the modern age, with its emphasis on deterrent armies, rational nation – states, public debates, and international diplomacy, was called into question. For how could mere talking or even great force deter a handful of crazy, determined, and suicidal persons who seemingly operated outside of all the norms of the liberal West? And what needed now to be done, given that technology had advanced to a point where a tiny number of people could inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death?

The awareness of the West’s vulnerability called for a new compromise, and this new compromise inexorably demanded more security at the expense of less freedom. On the narrow level of public policy, there needed to be more x – ray machines at airports; more security guards on airplanes; more identification cards and invasions of privacy; and fewer rights for some of the accused. Overnight, the fundamentalist civil rights mania of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which spoke in the language of inviolable individual rights, was rendered an unviable anachronism.’’ (43)

5.

“Peace activists are war activists. … We are the peace activists.” Alex Karp

Among the companies within the “military-digital complex” that stand out most for their practical and ideological support of the Tel Aviv government’s policies, Palantir Technologies Inc. stands out as a defining case. As Alex Koller observes:

“Palantir, known for its government contract work in defense and intelligence, has provided its technology to support the Ukrainian and Israeli militaries in their respective wars. (…) [Alex] Karp said on Palantir’s earnings call last month [February 2024] he was ‘exceedingly proud that after Oct. 7, within weeks, we are on the ground and we are involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel.’ Palantir held its first board meeting of the year in Tel Aviv, Israel, in January [2024], after which the company agreed to a ‘strategic partnership’ with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply the country with technology for its military efforts. In November, Karp asserted the company’s support of the U.S. government and Israel, declaring on an earnings call that ‘Palantir only supplies its products to Western allies.’

In Wednesday’s interview, Karp reaffirmed his pro-Israel views. Eisen referenced the company’s decision in October to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times, stating it ‘stands with Israel.’”

Palantir Technologies Inc (46) was founded in 2003 “using $2 million in investment rounds from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm,” (47) and counts among its clients the FBI, NSA, IRS, various police departments, and other government agencies (48). The Denver-based company specializes in developing artificial intelligence (AI) software that supports data analytics and decision-making processes in large organizations, primarily militaries and other government agencies. It has been providing its tools to Israel’s security forces at least since 2017, starting with its predictive policing system.

Shortly after Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, Palantir entered into a ‘strategic partnership’ with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to help the ‘war effort.’ The company reported ‘seeing high demand from Israel for new tools’ and has been providing the Israeli military and intelligence agencies with at least four of its main products:

Gotham: Palantir’s flagship product for military, intelligence, and law enforcement applications. It ingestPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Footnotes:

Footnote 1: Curtis Yarvin, “Gaza, Inc.”, https://graymirror.substack.com/p/gaza-inc, 6 February 2025. But it is not over … Curtis Yarvin adds: “On the other hand, the Gazans are now a wealthy, cultured, naturally commercial people. It’s not like there isn’t a Palestinian diaspora everywhere in the world. Take over Africa maybe Uganda …], or something. Also, someone has to live in the new Gaza-there have to be residence requirements, because any country with open admissions will turn into a gigantic global slum. It will probably work like Dubai, but much more Westernized. But with enough GAZA shares… you might be able to afford it.” Ibid.

Footnote 2: Francesca Albanese, From economy of occupation to economy of genocide (A/HRC/59/23) Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Human Rights Council, Fifty-ninth session, 16 June-11 July 2025, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy-of-occupation-to-economy-of-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-palestine-2025/.

Footnote 3: “”Corporate entities’ in the present report refers to business enterprises, multinational corporations, for-profit and not-for-profit entities, whether private, public or State-owned. Corporate responsibility applies regardless of the size, sector, operational context, ownership and structure of the entity.”

Footnote 4: “The Dutch East India Company (1602-1799) was worth $7.4 trillion at its peak, more than Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft put together.” Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Private Tech Companies Are Reshaping Great Power Competition, PDF, Henry A, Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, https://sais.jhu.edu/kissinger/programs-and-projects/kissinger-center-papers/how-private-tech-companies-are-reshaping-great-power-competition# edn2, August 2023.

Footnote 5: “The English East India Company played a crucial role iPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Footnote 30: This ideology is based on a critique of liberalism in the name of freedom from imperialism, as evidenced by the National Conservatism movement and its founder, Yoram Hazony. In an insightful essay published in Jewish Currents, Suzanne Schneider states: “The clearest instantiation today of Hazony’s ideal is neither Donald Trump’s America nor Boris Johnson’s Britain, but the hilltop settlements located deep in the heart of the West Bank: tight-knit communities made up of large, traditional families, united in the face of the enemy, producing legions of young soldiers who have been schooled in the fusion of state violence and spirituality. This is the template that Hazony now offers to the world via the neutralized language of National Conservatism. Like his Zionist predecessors, he too imagines Israel as a light unto the nations—an illiberal model for the international nationalist brigade.” Suzanne Schneider, Light Among the Nations, 28 September 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations. Contrary to the unfounded claims of some contemporary journalists and politicians, the resurgence of nationalism that we are witnessing today cannot be equated with the historical European movement of the same name. The latter was characterised by a secular and anti-clerical stance, inspired by the universalist values of the Enlightenment and spread by a network of revolutionary secret societies, including the Carbonari in Italy and the Filiki Eteria in Greece. Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism movement appears to be an attempt to export the ideology and practices of the Zionist movement from the Middle East to Western countries in their most illiberal form. After all, the founder’s biography has always been consistent with his ideals, beginning with his encounter with the extremist Meir Kahane at Princeton in 1984.

Footnote 31: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Footnote 32: René Girard, The Scapegoat, Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1989

Footnote 33: In 2015, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stated: “Israel is in the forefront of the global war on terror. This is the frontline between the free and civilized world and radical Islam. We’re stopping the wave of radical Islam from flowing from Iran and Iraq all the way to Europe. When we fight terror here, we’re protecting LPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/silicon-valleys-reading-list-reveals?

In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto.

Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.”

He wasn’t alone in this assessment. My late friend Aaron Swartz, a member of Y Combinator’s first class, fled San Francisco in late 2006 for several reasons. He told me later that one of them was how few people in the Bay Area seemed interested in books.

Today, however, it feels as though people there want to talk about nothing but. Tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating the merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule.

This fervor has yielded a recognizable “Silicon Valley canon.” And as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of reengineering the government, it’s worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads — as well as the ones they don’t. Viewed through the canon, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image.

<The Silicon Valley Canon
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>29193
Pretty sure synthetic data is leading to model collapse, probably why ChatGPT 4.5 underperformed despite being degrees of magnitude larger

>>29193
>>29262
Synthetic data has to be filtered for quality and novelty, otherwise it does lead to model collapse. It doesn't always result in that, though.

However, even if they don't lead to collapse, they hit the diminishing returns wall more quickly than original data.

>>28693
>Are people using Wikipedia now for viral marketing campaigns?
Always have been. Wikipedia mainly gets edited for SEO purposes. You may think you are reading information, but look at the citations. Those citations were put there by people trying to promote their work by having it linked to by Wikipedia and therefore juicing Google's search algorithm.

So, why exactly is it not called slopcoding?

>>29621
Because they want to frame it as something positive; it's a psyop. "I'm vibing, dude! I got the vibe coder vibe! Look I'm too retarded to do the simplest programming task, I got the vibe, man!"

Just use Tor Browser in a chroot with duckduckgo, and have a protonmail, though typically just use a gmail managed by an organization.

>>31192
i heard mullvad browser is also good, but just use librewolf

search engines are all soykaf, just use bookmarks and when you really need it searxng hop

KEEPASSXC USE THE DAMN KEEPASSXC WITH A GOOD PASSWORD AND A THUMBDRIVE

onionmail.info, morke.org and cock.li

privacy is soykaf YOU WILL BE TRACKED YOU WILL BE TRACKED YOU WILL BE TRACKED

to be honest at this point just send data to palantir i dont think anything really matters. Sorry if this is a midwit doo doo post.

>>31266
Plus if you bookmark enough stuff you pretty much never need to use a search engine since you'll likely have a bookmark within a click or so of what you need.

>>31192
Also want to add on, KNOW YOUR ATTACK VECTORS!!!!

Read about how and what you want to secure, and understand what is needed for you to achieve that goal while still having good experience with the net.

you cant save yourself from psychedelic fueled computer men paid a good amount to see who you are, no matter how much you try. But you can always save yourself from advertisers and skiddies.

>>31268
exactly

Why do you spam this crap everywhere? I saw your post already on Channel4 BBS. It's not even a good list, it's just the most entry level milktoast nonsense list.
https://4-ch.net/general/kareha.pl/1757068106/l50
Please fuck off.

>>30338
Thing is there's been good posts on fedi, especially art. It's had undeniable steady growth. As the list of other options shrink, the option that fundamentally cannot die stands firm.

>>30799
It depends which project tho. I've seen this criticism directed at FOSS projects that have in fact been audited so many times that my first assumption is whoever brings it up doesn't know how to look for audits.

>>30802
>>30865
Yeah there's really no learning involved anymore. I got my dad to use NixOS with KDE and he hasn't had a single issue with it, compared to windows where he found himself confused with it weekly.

>>30211
Nothing matters as long as they control the hardware and CIA backdoors your chips. Internet was made by DARPA, backbone is privately owned. Solution is global 5g OpenWRT meshnet. Thats why they made up conspiracies about the beams melting your brain or whatever. They know the Chinese are trying to democratize the net.

Software is inconsequential if you cant make your own hardware. Thats why people are waking up to domestic production sovereignty. You need state level power and investment in domestic lithography not just using a different OS to play your vidya.

>>31140
Better optimized software means weaker hardware can meet expectations, but yeah hardware remains dominant in the hardware-software dialectic.

>>28528
I'm convinced no one who jerks off as much has played with their asshole.

Jerking off is just a bodily function, like taking a shit. If you feel like you are taking a shit too much, the solution is not to remove the toilets from your house.

>>31128
But you don't understand, they feel extreme shame at having to take a shit, so they must hold it in.

>>31129
I had a cousin that refused to shit when she was little because of that. It nearly killed her and she was forced to take medication to make her go.

Isn't there a tiny pinhole button on your router to reset it to factory settings? You should push that button so you can start jacking off again.

>>30948
>categorically anti-harm
lol philosophytards

>categorically anti-harm
"There's never any excuse to be mean" wot if theyre bourgeois tho?

>>31046
Wonder if you could have this but for the ingroup only. Sounds kinda terrible, but there could be coordination among just the people who accept the terms.

"leftism seems to be categorically anti-harm"
Theoritically only the lower left quadrant (referring to the political spectrum), though I believe that it's all bullshit

https://leftypol.org/sfw/index.html
Will show 30 most recently bumped SFW threads

>>30907
Why not a pinephone
>uber
Don't they have a browser webapp?

>>30905
>massive anti-GOS shilling

Where? Go to Reddit, Youtube or any mainstream plattform, the, are all pro Gos. Mainstream media is promoting and advertising Gos on a massive scale: "These phones are so secure, police can't break them!"

I have to own a smartphone for my job and the software my company uses is only on IOS, therefore I must own an iPhone to continue being employed. I have already lost my right to choose which devices or software I will or won't use in my work life, does it really make any difference if I take some principled stand against proprietary software during my free hours? Is everybody in the world supposed to quit their jobs if their jobs force them to use proprietary software?

kinda seems like a privacy oriented OS on your voluntary government sponsored wiretipe is not a thing

There are issues with GrapheneOS worth discussion, but most of what someone seems to be posting in this thread is very badly misinformed.

Pixels, like the Nexus before them, were the "developer focused" phone that got AOSP and similar development for it primarily, instead of contesting with whatever bullshit Samsung wanted to drop atop it, or how Samsung or Verizon decided to stop updating your OS or firmware in a year or two etc.
>Pixel hardware
Pixel hardware is exactly as proprietary as the rest of mobile hardware. Do you think that a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip is magically FOSS top to bottom? Hell, most Tensor chips were basically Samsung Exynos which again were certain proprietary bits. Like all other phone SoC, there are licensed bits and proprietary hardware elements, as well as closed baseband firmware and the use of binary blobs etc. This is common with just about any device. Do I wish it was different? Absolutely and we should leverage Google, Qualcomm and others into shipping more open hardware if possible, but there's nothing magically more locked down or suspicious with the Pixel line vs other manufacturers.
>but uh what if its compromised, i don't have any evidence it is but if it was it could be reading everything and saving everything etc
There's literally more evidence that Chinese made smartphones from their major companies have vacuumed up tons of data vs those from other brands, yet you're worried about a hypothetical like this? There's more evidence for and wider hypothetical potential for a lot of the chinese devices using chinese chips made in chinese factories etc.

These are issues with GrapheneOS and Pixel that are worth critiquing fairly, but nothing like what is being discussed here.

AVIF is a mess from a technical standpoint. designed by committee. it doesn't just store a straight up image, no no no. it splits the image up into chunks, each of which can be stored using any codec supported by the format. this is a huge hassle for the internal data model for many project, for example ffmpeg
WebP is OK, but getting support for it everywhere seems to be slow going. I'm not convinced it's sufficiently better than cjpeg to justify widespread use. JPEG itself has many features that improve its compression that no one uses for some reason. like pyramidal coding

>>30836
to elaborate on this:
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2014/mozjpeg-3-0/
>Mozilla has done a study of image formats and concluded that WebP and JPEG XR are not a big-enough improvement over well-optimized JPEG. In the study only HEVC (H.265) was significantly better, but it’s a patent-encumbered format, so it can’t be used freely (shhhh!)

>>30806
>>30836
webp seems ok to me. I guess avif is technically more fancier, but it has no support. both can do lossy and lossless so that's not an issue

It just werks™

>>24007
Tor is useful, it does its job pretty well. But the only need i had from it was to buy acid from Dr. Seuss and MDMA from Archetyp (before it closed). Only the acid was useful, that's how i became a Marxist-Leninist.

The fact of the matter is, tor is a very slow and shitty network and the only thing people use it for is child porn and buying/selling drugs and fbi sting operations and timecube-esque crankery.

>>30875
Nah, it could be useful. It used to be a lot slower than nowadays btw. Its use would benefit an insurrection in a vast manner. Used with PGP it's an even better perspective.

>>30884
>Its use would benefit an insurrection in a vast manner.

You can look at existing authoritarian regimes as sort of a testbed for what works and what doesn't work when it comes to bypassing censorship and hiding your identity from the authorities. From what I've gathered, people usually use VPNs to bypass censorship in countries like China and tor is not really a viable option because all the public tor nodes get identified and blocked by the Great Firewall, thus you can't even connect to the network at all unless you know the ip address of a private node; it's easier to just hunt around for some obscure VPN service that the Great Firewall hasn't detected and blocked yet than to look for an entry-point into the tor network which is much slower than a VPN and harder to obfuscate what it is due to all the multi-hop routing making it obvious that someone is using tor, on top of that tor nodes are often banned from many internet services due to being abused for spambots and ddos attacks etc.

Relevant keywords:
>Operational Security
>Information Security
>Communications Security
>Signals Intelligence
>Social Engineering

Software:
>Tor
>I2P
>Tails
>Linux-based operating systems

There is no magic bullet:
>https://support.torproject.org/faq/
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>30345
Well I can't imagine that a microkernel is actually minimal nor keeping it simple stupid, since otherwise we'd not have to keep calling the bastard GNU/Linux because GNU would be using the Hurd.

>>30347
But a microkernel is more aligned with the UNIX philosophy.
I have heard that the issue with Hurd is that they are perfectionists, not that they can't get a microkernel working. Doesn't harmonyOS (huawei OS) have a microkernel?

>>30220
>It's absolutely terrible
What do you mean by this? The daemontools approach to service supervision is unambiguously superior to cgroups monitoring and other hacks systemd uses (see http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html). Runit sits on the lower end of daemontools derivatives, nosh is another one that can run systemd unit files http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/worked-example.html

>>30075
>However there's something extremely pathological about not wanting well designed and implemented features.
Think have walked back on this somewhat due to my wetware being inherently memory constrained.
Because of this reducing the state-space to hold in memory, and less so what one has to search over, is very valuable.
There's probably some nuanced position that involves getting the interfaces correct, and minimal.
For example the difference between a (composable) loop macro versus a large collection of iterator procedures versus loops.

Once again this is only because of a peculiar feature of my wetware.

>>30845
>loop macro
A small collection of iterators functions works just as well.