Yeah. The data vacuum whose CEO loves to talk about how effectively their software helps the US government kill people is exactly who should have unfettered access to extremely intimate details of many people’s existence, without their permission.
Do you believe the organization that whoops-leaked 500k people’s intimate health data is capable of auditing any complex technical system? Are you asserting that Palantir is no different than any other infrastructure company? Do you think that my criticism would ever apply to the US IC or the DoD? Do you think there’s any way I would approve of the NHS or NIH using Palantir based on my earlier statements? Is there a reason you’re peppering me with tangential rhetorical questions sort of poking around the premise of what I said like a lawyer from palantir talking a deposition while glibly dismissing what I actually said? Dispensing with the rhetorical questions, let’s get concrete: do you have a Palantir logo Coffee Mug? Pajamas? … briefs?
> Do you believe the organization that whoops-leaked 500k people’s intimate health data is capable of auditing any complex technical system?
Yes I believe that it's possible that an organization capable of effective auditing could also leak data
> Are you asserting that Palantir is no different than any other infrastructure company?
For the most part, yes. Palantir is more effective and more "ideological" than most, but in the direction away from your implication that they're vacuuming up data and mixing it across customers
> Do you think there’s any way I would approve of the NHS or NIH using Palantir based on my earlier statements?
No, but the question was whether facts or data adjust your opinion or not, and in which direction if so. Duping one mostly-competent organization on security/privacy posture is much, much harder than duping dozens or hundreds of organizations, including the most security-competent on the planet.
> Is there a reason you’re peppering me with tangential rhetorical questions sort of poking around the premise of what I said
Because the premise of what you said is wrong. The phrase "data vacuum" is clearly meant to imply a fact pattern that just isn't true. The term "unfettered access" is not true either, as data infrastructure companies (Palantir more than most) have significant controls on their exposure to customer data.
The overall implication that people's UK health data would be somehow mixed into a US government effort to kill people is laughably wrong when you actually have to write it out explicitly instead of relying on nudge nudge wink wink.
And yes I do have a Palantir mug actually! Good guess.
Let's get concrete: have you ever actually used Palantir? Ever engaged in contract negotiations with them or set up their access controls on your own data to understand what is or is not allowed, and to what degree you have visibility and control into it?
Sorry buddy but it's you who's speaking in baseless rhetoric here.
For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.
I get the sense that a lot of the hams I’ve met have a framed hall-monitor sash from their high school years.
I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
I was training to be a 911 dispatcher a while ago. When they told us about getting someone’s location from the cell company outside of what was available automatically from e911 or whatever— which required them to be on the phone with you, so not useful if you get a text saying they just drove off a cliff in the middle of nowhere, or something— you had to sign an affidavit testifying that there were exigent circumstances, fax it to them, and then wait, sometimes for hours, until their legal department approved it. And you always risked being dragged to court if you made the wrong call. That’s the price of privacy, and the potential for abuse is rife, so it makes sense.
Yet these jackholes can just snag it whenever because, ya know, profit. That is obviously insane. Our corporate culture has driven our society insane with normalized greed. The unholy alliance of tech and marketing is largely to blame.
the affidavit + fax + wait for legal approval process you described is exactly how it should work, like friction as a feature, not a bug. the fact that these vendors bypassed all of that through SS7 ghost operators isn't just a policy failure, it's an architectural one. the telco ecosystem was never designed with the assumption that "legitimate" network participants would be adversarial.
IOW: We must end this "privacy" thing - think of people who might be dying!
It's all about power, anyway. The NSA doesn't need a warrant at all. When the police want to get an alleged criminal they can get a warrant in minutes. But when it's your life in danger, it takes hours. The purpose of a system is what it does.
FWIW: At 911, we were the police, organizationally. Actual sworn cops didn’t have special access to phone companies that dispatchers didn’t— we’d probably be the ones making the request for them if it was that urgent. (In some places dispatchers are cops, but is very uncommon, and the distinction isn’t important in this respect.) Phone companies aren’t going to hire a bunch of specialized workers to comply with legal orders instantly instead of soon enough. And there surely needs to be a ticket made and such… it’s not like CS reps have that info.
The NSA doesn’t need warrants in many cases because they can get the information they need from the government’s own databases. I’m not an expert, but as far as I know, if they need someone’s location from a phone company they do need a warrant or to prove there were exigent circumstances, which is why they just get shit from data brokers. Some politicians want to close that loop hole but most either don’t, or don’t care enough. Some, shockingly, even want to reform FISA.
The NSA doesn't need warrants because breaking federal law is easier to get away with when you have one of secrecy, some relation to security, presence in the meetings where you'd be discussed, and largeness (which provokes acceptance), and they have all four.
Those are the forces at play, but you’re just guessing how that manifests itself in the real world. I’ll bet it’s all a lot more bureaucratic than you think it is— secret FISA courts wouldn’t exist if it was just a free-for-all the second it was out of sight.
That’s why these agencies buy data from brokers: sidestepping the mechanisms in place to stop them from getting it straight from the source for free.
For mass aggregation of call metadata, all sorts of over-the-wire communication data, etc etc etc… yeah. For on-demand mobile phone location tracking? That’s a different animal.
I mean, it might genuinely be a good idea to start thinking about how to live in and administer justice in a society where privacy is dead and unsavory details about other people's lives are likely to find their way out into the open, and where you just kind of have to deal and go on with life. It's tough because that would force us to have to separate out crimes that do actual real damage (what's "real damage"?) from "crimes" that just make people uncomfortable, and behavior that's actually disqualifying from behavior that's, "Oh, you're into that, huh...? How interesting.".
In a sense, where already there, funhouse mirror-like - consider the sentence for selling a pound of coke vs that for a literal ton of Percocets; people will still want to hang out with you after you've laid off 1,000 employees, but god forbid you, I dunno, watch cartoons - but I guess it would still be a sea-change in the approach.
In 2026, it's Israel. The NSA is so last decade, and isn't even mentioned in this article.
Silicon Valley and global communications infrastructure has been compromised by Israel. Quoting TFA:
> This analysis identified 4G infrastructure associated with operator networks based in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the Channel Islands. Notably, in prior public reporting these same countries have been linked to CSVs targeting mobile users.
> Israel has long been a focal point in the global surveillance industry, with multiple companies developing and exporting advanced spyware, cellular communications interception, and monitoring technologies.
It depends on the situation. If someone is on fire, yes, it’s pointless. If someone is lost without good reception, no. If someone is suffering from dementia and wandering aimlessly, no. If someone has been abducted and can’t use their phone but still has it with them, no. These things do happen.
>Yet these jackholes can just snag it whenever because, ya know, profit. That is obviously insane. Our corporate culture has driven our society insane with normalized greed. The unholy alliance of tech and marketing is largely to blame.
Nothing in the article suggests the cause of this is "greed". The protocols are vulnerable and various shady companies have been set up to exploit it, but that has nothing to do with "greed", any more than the fact that there are shady hosters for spammers[1] are caused by "corporate culture has driven our society insane with normalized greed"
It can’t. It violates copyright. The big players are the only ones with the money to pursue these things, but they’re interested in replacing artists with AI trained on their models so they settle and set up some sort of agreement. The little guys have no presidential case law to help them along, and nowhere close to the resources to push it that far, so they get steamrolled. I know artists famous enough for people— even commercial entities — to regularly blatantly rip them off by name with “in the style of” prompts, but there’s no realistic path to pursue it. Fame doesn’t pay legal bills.
If you didn’t sink a career’s worth of time doing creative work professionally, then that’s a nice relationship to have with creative output. For a lot of people, AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission. Mortgages not paid, cancer not treated, birthday presents not purchased for your kids, dreams dashed… and then people telling you the real purpose of creative work ends when you expect it to be anything more than a hobby.
I completely agree. It makes something that was already very hard that much harder. I have a friend who played guitar in a "famous band". They made it. Meaning, they played on David Letterman and went on extensive tours, had a huge fanbase, etc. Some years back, he reached out to see if I had any leads on IT jobs. I was surprised to say the least, but his response was simple, "there's no money in it." That conversation really hammered it home that you can "make it" and still live without financial security. Fast forward to today, and the situation is even more dire given what is happening with AI.
I don't think highly of AI made stuff uploaded without clear labelling as such.
But it's almost certainly not AI's fault if your mortgage is not paid, your cancer not treated or you can't pay birthday presents for your kids. Music was already extremely "cheap", and success has very little with how much or little work you put into it (extremely unlikely either way).
Let's fund art, but this business model you want to do it by is hardly worth saving.
It’s not just music that is getting ripped off and what is this funding model you’re proposing? How will that help some who designs and sells a few T-shirts etc?
It goes for all other art as well. I wasn't proposing a specific alternative funding model right now, but I think just about anything (even nothing) is better than extending intellectual property laws.
A) Nobody goes into the music business from the ground up planning to support themselves selling albums, like a small business. Everybody has known for decades that doing so requires laying a ton of groundwork and for the first several years, at least, you’d be lucky to have low streaming compensation be a problem for you. Planning on any other path— persistent notoriety after going viral, being irresistibly appealing to large enough audiences to sell at least dozens of albums per week right off the bat, etc.— is like planning on winning the lottery. That’s literally the least representative market for commercial art. Even for audio!
B) There’s a universe of creative workers AI fucked over that have nothing to do with retail music sales. Concept artists, stock photographers, session musicians, copywriters, video game foley artists, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those were all reliable career paths until very recently. Disney chopped their concept art team to replace them with models Disney trained on their work… probably posturing to look pro-AI enough after their pathetic sora debacle. As an aside, they can go fuck themselves.
> AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission.
I want to be clear. I am 100% on-board with AI being absolutely shit.
Buuuut, this has always been the case. Before it was scammers taking images from the web and undercutting you with prints, now it's scammers stealing your artistic style.
It sucks, but it's not a brand new problem. What makes it particularly bad now is that there's a much larger flood of it.
As a hobbyist musician and songwriter of decades i was excited about AI music in October. I could finally take my rough demos of me singing along to my guitar and make better demos then just using garageband as Im not much of a singer. I enjoyed using Suno for a month or less then realize this is shit .... my own songs are AI slop just like everyone else - all sounds the same and my songwriting talents are meaningless now with anyone can now do this. I didnt listen to my slop for months then the band I play in asked to hear some slop of mine and then / there my AI slop had some redeeming quaility. As with my band (church band) and I listening and then playing along to my slop. Just slop writers can now play their slop like real musicians can........
At least not yet Im sure robots will and also an AI microphone with AI built in will be created so everyone sings amazingly.....
Overall AI is stealing humanity from us all, we are allowing it and it is only to the benefit of a few rich pie holes.
But just think… soon we’ll be able to pay some SV company to exercise all of the creative and intellectual effort we would have had to do manually with our squishy meat thought boxes… yuck! Disgustingly inefficient. With the convenience of simulated romance, brilliance, excitement, art, music, relationships, faith, a sense of wonder, sex, human connection, joy, exploration, and everything else that manifested itself in the real world with real obstacles and pushback and negative feelings, we’ll have plenty of time to do all of the menial jobs that are left. What a win!
The legal situation is also completely different. It seems like models IP-wash, so there is nothing legally wrong with what current people are doing with ai. In contrast, the scammer selling your photo was clearly violating IP law, and you could (at least theoretically) pursue legal remedies.
Scale makes it a completely different problem. AI has wiped out the compensation market for entire fields— like copywriting, stock photography, and concept art— practically overnight, and it happened because tech companies have conjured up a very selfish definition of “fair” in the context of fair use. (Isn’t it hilarious to see them get their knickers twisted over distillation? They can blow it straight out their assess.)
It’s comforting to think this is just an incremental change in the battle for capital-focused hyper-efficiency, but it’s absolutely not. This isn’t even the steady decline manufacturing saw over decades… it’s is like what happened to paste-up men or telephone operators but over an incomparably large swath of the creative world.
I'll be honest, I think that this line of "everyone creative is going to be out of work" is parroting exactly the same lies that VC are selling about genAI. At the end of the day, that's what VCs want people to think. There is, to date, basically no reason to use a generative AI system other than if you buy what the VCs are selling. And they reallllly want to sell genAI systems.
I certainly don't buy it, and IIRC only 15% of the broader workforce use genAI for their jobs. Offices are having to force people to use it, and even then people don't like it. Programming is an outlier in this regard because, it turns out, most of what we've been doing is solving the same tasks over and over again in different domains (which is what A Pattern Language was designed to solve). Most other work is not like this.
For the arts, and for most media, what humans have been craving for about a decade now is authenticity. They want a real person they can connect to, an artist whose work makes them feel seen. The artists who have recognized this with a good command of media have been growing sustainably and there's a big industry in this now. There is a certain proportion of people who like the slop, sure. But the actual fact of the matter is that the younger generations, 20 - 30yros, can smell slop from a mile away, and adding slop to advertising, to your media, to your art, actually makes it sell worse. Exactly because it is inauthentic. Talk to literally anyone in advertising whose company tried AI ads. You see an uptick among 50-60 year olds, and a massive, massive downturn among 16 - 30 yros.
From a media executive standpoint, most of the media properties that are inauthentic have been failing massively, with a handful of them able to turn a quick buck before they fail. Execs are verrrry slowly learning the fact that media produced for a very quick ROI and for the branding and marketing potential tend to fizzle out quickly, whereas passion projects are sustainable income, a well you can keep going back to. Whether or not they value that well as much as independent creatives do... ehhhh.
For programming, there's not much to stop people from using the stuff because barely any higher-up supports "building bridges safely". What executives want from programming is a quick ROI, they don't even care if customers complain. So what I forsee for programmers is that the field is going to be gradually flooded with people using genAI. This will drive the cost of our labour downwards, while people are expected to give 10x or 20x the output that they did 5 years ago "because AI makes them fast". This turns every job into a rush job which makes the software system as a whole much less stable. I forsee a number of Horizon IT level problems in the next 10 years. But by then, programming will be much more on the level of a truck job where you have to piss in a bottle and keep driving, or a sales call job where your manager will pull you up if you're 5% under par. Just remember, everyone jumping on the AI train did this to our field.
But, it's not inevitable. It's only inevitable if we all keep shouting that the AI bros have won, from the rooftops. That's the hype keeping this bubble alive. The entire AI bubble currently rests on marketing, and the first step in bursting that bubble is to simply not believe the lies that you are being sold.
I'm a little off being thirty years old. I've played musical instruments of my own accord since I was 3 years old learning violin in an orchestra. I did folk music through my teens. I know about 5+ instruments and I've gigged at pubs, fields, parks, events, and a wedding. I have never touched genAI for music, and I really do not need to. I've listened to the output of genAI for music. It's samey, repetitive, and bland. "Slop" is a very good descriptor. Frankly I can't see a single reason why I would want to destroy my entire creative process and have it output by a black box. Why would I contract someone else to play my own music, let alone a machine?! Baffling. Most of the people around my own age are getting super into vinyl and cassettes and records because they like the fact that you can hold something in your hands. Because they like connecting to an artist. AI slop does not give them that, cannot give them that, and artists who think that the AI slop is better than them are a) obviously not very good in the first place, b) foregoing their own personal development as an artist in service of chasing trends. Trend chasers have never lasted long in creative work, and honestly, they're selecting themselves out of the pool. They're selecting for an audience who no more likes their work than the work of any other sloptist. You can't see me but I'm giving a biiiiig fucking shrug right now, like the jurassic park guy. Nobody cares about sloptists, sloppers, soupies. They don't care about the art, they only care about the profit, and people can smell that a mile off.
"You need to learn that the product of your writing is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you, it will make your better at expressing yourself. You'll have a wonderful time, but you'll also grow as a person, you'll become more empathetic. The product of your writing is you. You are the artwork."
- Brandon Sanderton
One part of being an artist is that you are a clown who entertains people. You cannot just make music you have to be out there being outrageous and weird.
This is exactly what all the successful ones do. No AI can go on television and sing songs about how great Hitler was.
Becoming successful enough to be on TV (or get a ton of views on media sites) is so uncommon that it’s pointless to use as a comparison for any common career path in the creative world.
And I’m speaking more broadly than music— it’s much worse in other fields. Most commercial art does not involve being an entertainer.
Frankly ads are the most benign shitty thing that could come of this. I’m a hell of a lot more worried about what they’re going to sell to data brokers.
A lot of people in the Silicon Valley area spend that much ($6/day) on coffee. What they don’t realize is how out of touch they are in thinking makes sense for the rest of the fucking world. $180/mo is about 5% of the median US per capita income. It’s not going to pick your kids up from school, do your taxes, fix your car, or do the dishes. It’s going to download movies and call restaurants and play music. It’s a hobby, high-touch leisure assistant that costs a lot of money.
They aren't selling it to the median US earner. They're selling it (and trying to generate FOMO) to the out of touch people so that it becomes so entrenched that the median earner will be forced to use it in some capacity through their interaction with businesses, schools, the government, etc.
The customer they’re picturing in their mind’s eye is obvious. The out of touch part comes in when you look at the size of that market— not big— with how likely that market is to grow drastically— not very— and the amount they’re investing in building the product— all of everything plus a bazillion. With what they’ve invested, if they end up with an institutional market the likes of Microsoft split up among the winners, they fucked up.
The economics of these businesses are based way more on hope and hype than rational analysis and planning.
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