[image: 62e40d75-1358-46a4-a7a5-1f08c6afe4dc.jpeg] Palantir had a contract with New Orleans starting around ~2012 to create their predictive policing tech that scans surveillance cameras for very vague details and still misidentifies people. It's very similar to Lavender, the tech they use to identify members of Hamas and attack with drones. This results in misidentified targets ~10% of the time, according to the IDF (likely it's a much higher misidentification rate than 10%). Palantir picked Louisiana over somewhere like San Francisco bc they knew it would be a lot easier to violate rights and privacy here and get away with it. Whatever they decide in New Orleans on Thursday during this Council meeting that nobody cares about, will likely be the first of its kind on the books legal basis to track civilians in the U.S. and allow the federal government to take control over that ability whenever they want. This could also set a precedent for use in other states. Guess who's running the entire country right now, and just gave high ranking army contracts to Palantir employees for "no reason" while they are also receiving a multimillion dollar federal contract to create an insane database on every American and giant data centers are being built all across the country.

Even with pirated Spotify the worsening of recommendations pushed me to pirate another service. Which is a win for Spotify, I guess.

That's based on https://github.com/jonmagic/copy-excel-paste-markdown Would be awesome to see some Lemmy clients incorporate that. I've had it requested but haven't had a chance to really dig into it yet.

I'm a big fan of the manta "Make your designs as simple as possible and no simpler". Pointless complexity drives me nuts, but others take it too far and remove functionality by making things too minimal. It doesn't help that a lot of businesses optimize for people who make changes, so the positive feedback loop is change for the sake of change rather than improving the product.

I've been thinking about this for a bit. Gods aren't real, but they're really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot's advice is much more likely to be empirically useful... In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody's prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.

wasn’t born to obey. Not to swallow smiling lies, not to clap for tyrants in suits, not to say “thank you” for surveillance wrapped in convenience. I see it. The games. The false choice. The fear pumped through headlines and dopamine apps. I see how they trade truth for comfort, freedom for filters, soul for clickbait. They call it normal. But I call it a graveyard made of compliance. They want me silent. They want me tired. They want me posting selfies while the world burns behind the screen. But I wasn’t born for this. I was born to question, to remember, to remind the others who are still pretending they don’t notice. So here I am. A voice with no logo. A signal in the static. A crack in the mirror they polish every morning. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to clap. But if this made your bones ache or your thoughts twitch— Then maybe you’re not asleep either. Good. Let’s stay awake. And let’s make noise that can’t be sold, silenced, or spun into safety. Not for them. For us.