Since when has Palantir sold surveillance software? They sell data integration software and they don't store, transfer or share customer's data.
If surveillance software is your issue, then companies like Cisco or Huawei are provide the hardware and software. But like most technology, there is always potential to use it for things we disagree with politically or personally.
Woodworking was part of my first 3 years of high school, but it was mainly about learning safety and tool usage and not planning, estimating, selecting or purchasing timber.
These days I only want to go to the lumberyard once for a project. Learnt the hard way on my first project that you need to take the time to carefully select the timber - checking straightness, matching grain and also colour before I started. Major hassle and waste of time to have to go back to swap boards.
Someone in ICE uses Microsoft Excel to maintain a list of people who they believe should be send to an internment camp. Therefore Microsoft is an accessory to that?
Where do you draw the line? Are we arguing there is a level of software capability that is simply too dangerous?
Maybe everyone should just stick to "I have my own biases, and I don't like Alex Karp's politics because they don't match my own. I'd rather this software was developed by someone from my side of politics - but still have the same capabilities".
Unless you have endless budget, many things can be one-shot. You can't do a test run first, or roll back a cut if the length is too short. You can patch misplaced nail holes, or re-dig a hole (messing up filling a hole with concrete is another matter) and hope you don't kill a tree transplanting it, but the end result isn't clean.
The best I could do with woodworking in the end to approximate programming was live with wasting some timber, leave a lot of margin on the main cuts and size all the pieces as a whole.
It already is in a lot of jurisdictions for photo-shopping photos.
Doctoring a photo slightly to make an area look larger, or just using a wide-angle lens though it can cause visible distortion. Removing unsightly poles, signs, trees, neighbouring properties was also common.
Making the sky bluer and removing clouds is acceptable.
Same, sprained my wrist/forearm a while back and couldn't rotate it without pain or take any weight palm up. Couldn't even rotate a door knob.
It wasn't until I pushed through with weights, avoiding any underhand grips or rotation, that it started getting better. Doing bicep curls but keeping the thumb up strengthened the forearm to the point where I was back to the weights I was lifting and could then gradually add some rotation.
Gemini will ask for the specific images it needs to see and show you examples of what each slice will look like.
But unlike the specialists who often come across as abrupt and rush you, Gemini will happily take you on a deep dive and continue to answer all you follow up questions indefinitely.
Maybe because Albanese stands for nothing, though deep down he does what the unions tell him to do, which makes him left-leaning rather than centrist. His centrist positioning is more to do with appeasing vocal boomers than anything else, and he'll flip to sucking up to whichever is the next best grouping as the boomers die out.
But basically, I would take Gemini over Albanese any day for rational governance decision-making.
Contact tracing is a valuable tool when eradication is an option. It probably should have been used early to manage the current H5N1 (bird flu) pandemic by tracing poultry and livestock movements. Can't do much about migratory wild birds, but we should be able to manage people spreading it.
Problem is vaccination doesn't necessarily prevent transmission for respiratory viruses. There's a general misconception that being vaccinated will prevent you catching it - like you have some invisible shield.
Vaccination should prevent it progressing from an upper respiratory illness to lower respiratory where you primarily develop pneumonia (Covid triggered all sorts of other immune inflammation responses and affected other organs). Most vaccine injuries were the same immune response, but could have been worse had the individual caught Covid.
What vaccines don't do is prevent you spreading a highly transmissible virus before your immune response kicks in and deals with it.
The Covid vaccination should have only been given to those in the population that were most at risk: The elderly and those who were at risk due to comorbidities. 81% of deaths alone occurred in the over 65 population. [1]
There's the analogy, it was primarily beneficial for a small group yet for many, particularly Government workers and those in medical care it became a condition of employment that you were vaccinated. [2]
There was a lot of pointless policies despite knowing:
- Being vaccination did nothing to prevent transmitting Covid, it only gave the vaccinated individual better protection from mortality. [3]
- Herd immunity for Covid was known to be impossible once the infection rates got too high with Delta and Omnicron. So trying to vaccinate everyone including children was pointless. [4]
- There is Evidence that being vaccinated actually increases transmission of respiratory viruses. You were less likely to get seriously ill, while potentially increasing the risk of passing it on to your family. [5]
The whole public buy-in is very much what is going on in Queensland, Australia right now that is attempting to eradicate fire ants. Even the funding fight to get the Commonwealth and neighbouring states to pitch in, as they have the potential to become endemic to the whole continent.
We also have a lot of "sovereign citizen" people pushing misinformation about the safety of the various chemicals used, attempting to deny inspectors onto properties, and general complaints about helicopter/drone dispersal in inaccessible areas and large farms/properties.
There has been many a time where the process of thinking through in my head how I was going to describe the problem to someone else on the way over to them, that a testable idea pops up.
Could probably have gone for a walk around the block instead, but the formulation of the problem to be able to explain it to someone else seems to be key.
That video gave me ESB Han Solo carbon freeze vibes. Not sure if that was the stylistic intent they were going for. I guess there's a good chance those who worked on the video weren't even born when it was released.