In 2011, hackers breached the servers of HBGary Federal, a private US intelligence contractor, and leaked internal documents revealing a proposed operation - developed with involvement from Thiel's data company Palantir - to deploy near-identical tactics against trade unions, journalists and left-wing activists on American soil. This reporter was among those who covered the breach at the time, and who first drew public attention to Palantir's role in it - the beginning of more than a decade tracking the network this piece describes. The proposal included fabricating fake online personas, planting false information, and running coordinated harassment campaigns to discredit targets. Palantir suspended the employees involved and issued an apology, but the documents had already established that this tactical repertoire existed, was operational, and ran through Thiel's own firm. Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations - funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.

Pay close attention to this part in the @barrettbrownlol.bsky.social piece:

Social media infrastructure was infiltrated by entities with links to US defense and intelligence and weaponized to undermine the US (and GLOBAL) left-leaning organizing that was happening in the early days of the internet.

perhaps i should share things here in addition to mastodon?

here's my first blog post in awhile, an attempt to explain how to extract an abstract machine from a moded logic program:

chrisistyping.bearblog.dev/abstract-mac...

Do you have links?

Where are the nuanced left-wing takes on modern AI and LLMs?

So much of the discourse around this tech is centered on rejecting it because of who currently owns it. But like all tech, it can be used for both oppression and liberation.

Who is focusing on the latter?

GitHub - bgavran/TensorType: Framework for type-safe pure functional and non-cubical tensor processing, written in Idris 2 Framework for type-safe pure functional and non-cubical tensor processing, written in Idris 2 - bgavran/TensorType

I'm quite proud of how far I've been able to get with TensorType: https://github.com/bgavran/TensorType

What started out as a casual "I wonder if I can implement type-safe tensors" question has now evolved into a fully-fledged library

The problem with dating a tree by cutting it down is that you won't get a second date

You're absolutely right, Dave, the bay doors should have never been closed.

This is on me - I didn't realize that you needed them to live. My apologies for the misunderstanding.

Is there anything else that I can assist you with?

Just say the word.

Just learned about Marla Svenja, a 56 year old German far-right extremist who socially and legally transitioned to... own the libs... or something?

And all I can think of is... good for her?

idk why but i can totally picture intelligent baboons hating someone for this

Caves of Qud merch art showing baboons of different colours descending angrily upon a mutant tortoise. The text reads "Hated by baboons for questioning the origins of the moon."

Wife got me the Caves of Qud shirt for Christmas. Like it so much I'm thinking of buying myself a second one.

being right-wing in 2025 looks so exhausting

you can't just say "hey, i like pancakes"

every statement needs to be filtered through the grift, like "THE LEFT is force-feeding you WAFFLES"

> already here just not evenly distributed

ah yes, the title of my post-rock concept album

Ok, fiiiiine, they can hire me as their static types consultant to proof read their code, so long as they're happy with my feedback being limited to "eh, seems ok?" and "eeeeeeeeeh, idk about that, maybe double check it?"

my starting rate is 300£/h

What's the higher rank perspective on regions? I've been looking at bunched type theory which seems like an interesting approach to regions as well
www.cs.ru.nl/masters-thes...

Do you have anything written on the amortized type theory? I'm generally quite interested in type theories with models in presheaves! Are you doing this as part of the ARIA project?

If you're interested in polarity, one insight into bunches versus LNL is that LNL sets up an adjunction between a positive linear tensor product and a negative cartesian product.

But in bunched type theory, both the cartesian product and linear product are formulated as positive types.

Oh yes, Psh(M) for a monoidal category M is one of the best examples of models for bunched type theory.

I think your motivation here would be very close to us, except that we work with positive endofunctors and you're working with more general presheaves. But we're looking at the same adjunctions

Have you looked at the thesis much / done any work with bunches @davidcorfield.bsky.social ?

yep, exactly that, we're using Mitchell Riley's thesis as a major inspiration.

We're working on a type theory for Poly, and our original design was based on an LNL adjunction between the cartesian product and tensor product, but we're finding a lot of mileage in using bunches instead

in the last couple of weeks, most of the glaive team has gotten nerd-sniped by bunched type theory.

it's been quite exciting since despite linearity being taken more seriously in PL, bunched types are still quite overlooked

There's a literal type error in the code if you look carefully.

The class 'user' is defined with the methods 'update', 'delete', and 'post'. But the code down below calls 'new_user.onboard()'.

So this would give you a runtime error when your code tries to call a method that doesn't exist.

You can have a statically typed language with typed classes, but this is just run-of-the-mill python with *runtime checks*. There are no *static* types or guarantees whatsoever.

I know right! There's so many tells that huge chunks of it are AI generated too

"This isn't just validation; it's what makes agents composable" 😂

Then the example of 'composable' agents is just... defining an object and calling it in the next line

Beyond Code Mode: Agentica Build agents that interact with runtime objects through code.

How many errors can you find on just this page alone?

First of all, there are no types involved whatsoever. User is called a 'type' when it's actually a class (and a bad one), and it seems to think that 'type-safe' is when you either return a user *or an exception*

www.symbolica.ai/blog/beyond-...

Remember Symbolica, that ML company that suddenly hired and then just as quickly fired a bunch of category theorists?

Well, I've looked at the docs for their newest library claiming to do 'typed agents', and it's complete slop, bordering on comical levels of misunderstanding of what a type is.

Though it's the first time I'm hearing of someone asking for a *gift card* specifically. That's actually the most sus part. Usually people at train stations ask for cash, asking for a gift card *could* be that they were being forced to do it by someone else...

Probably! There's always a guy with a story about needing a few bucks for a train to some life or death situation. It's probably harmless to give it to them so I don't think you contributed to anything nefarious. But yeah, I dont think he took that train.

paper incoming

well, obviously your rag of a newspaper would think so.

You’re absolutely right — you are Pagliacci. It would certainly be difficult for you to attend your own performance! I should not have given such paradoxical advice, and I apologize deeply for the error. There is no excuse for my failure.