Hal is retired after a long career in software. He helped create some of the most popular database systems in each generation.
Denver, CO
Joined December 2009
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Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
Long guns aka rifles were involved in 401 deaths last year, constipation killed 911 which means being full of shit is 2x more likely to kill you than the AR15
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
Heads up, @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI. Rumor reaches my ears that you're doing a stupid thing, and should stop before you damage yourselves.
I hear you've now nerfed your models so that when people try to use them to clean the spamware and spyware out of their televisions, you block that.
If you really want Chinese open-weight models and open-source projects like OpenWaldo to eat your lunch, crippling your models so that people paying expensive subscriptions can't use them for completely legitimate purposes is a great way to accomplish this.
If, on the other hand, you'd rather have a volume business, maybe stupid arbitrary restrictions that look like they have the sole purpose of protecting corporate sleazeballs aren't such a good idea.
A word to the wise should be sufficient.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
Eggs are like $2.27. Bananas about $0.41 per pound. But Democrats never let the facts get in the way of a chance to blame those dirty Jews. Fitting that this is how el Sayed closes: lying in service of anti-Semitism.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
Israel receives $3.8B a year, of which $2.7B must be spent with US defense contractors—a jobs program for a vital US industry employing Americans. $1.1B goes to Israel.
Jordan receives $2B a year, of which $400M must be spent in the US; the rest is economic aid.
Jordan receives more cash than Israel, yet Abu Al-Sayed never blames it for expensive groceries.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
FACT: The annual funding Israel receives from the US amounts to less than one-tenth of 1% of the federal budget. Less than 1/10th of 1%.
FACT: That annual funding would cover only a few hours of federal health care spending. A few hours.
Yet politicians who specialize in scapegoating would have you believe that Israel is responsible for America’s affordability crisis.
Like every form of scapegoating before it, it is a dangerous lie.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
Hey @SkyNews 👋
Arab Israeli here. Allow me to set the record straight: there are no “Palestinian citizens of Israel” and your attempt to erase our identity and belonging in this country is racist, inaccurate and offensive. Can you imagine saying “the Mexican citizens of the United States” simply because one is Latino?
Less than 15% of Arab Israelis identify as Palestinian (and most polls have it closer to 7%). You don’t get to decide what our identity is.
Could Palestinian voters tip Israel's election?
Sky's @adamparsons looks at whether Palestinian citizens of Israel can turn their votes into meaningful political influence in this week's election
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
I’m starting to think this ‘anti-genocide’ crowd isn’t really about “opposing a genocide...”
It’s about committing one.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
How badly does Abdul Want money out of politics?
Well, according to public FEC filings he has spent over 51 million dollars while Mike Rogers has spent 19 million.
Imagine if we had any journalists to point this out!
🤖 Made with AI
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
Let me introduce you to a fellow named Max Naumann.
In 1934, Naumann, a German Jew, urged fellow Jews to support Adolf Hitler. He defended the Nazi regime even as it persecuted Jews, and actually petitioned Hitler for the right of Jews to fly the German flag.
In 1935, the Gestapo dissolved his organization and threw him in prison, where he attempted suicide. He died of cancer in 1939, before the Holocaust, but not before discovering how little his loyalty to the Nazis was worth.
I'm not comparing Abdul El-Sayed to Hitler. I'm questioning the idea that a Jewish endorsement is, by itself, evidence of what's best for Jewish safety.
From the Hellenizing Jewish elites of ancient Jerusalem to Jewish supporters of Iran's Islamic Revolution, we have examples throughout our history of Jews aligning themselves with political movements that ultimately turned against them.
Their motivations differed, as did the consequences. But there's a lesson in Max Naumann's story that's worth remembering.
Being Jewish has never made anyone immune to being catastrophically wrong about what's good for Jews.
@PatinkinMandy @GadSaad
Help get @abdulelsayed elected to the senate! Jewish safety depends on a real multiracial democracy—and Abdul is the one fighting to protect it.
Get involved and help at abdulforsenate.com/vote
go.abdulforsenate.com
We know how much it matters to live in a country where our rights are protected, where the law applies equally to everyone, and where the majority can’t just decide that some people don’t deserve the same freedoms. The safety and freedom we’ve found in America didn’t happen by accident. They exist because of democracy. And protecting democracy means protecting Jewish safety, too.
We know what happens when those protections start to break down. When courts are weakened, elections are undermined, and people lose equal protection under the law, minorities are often the first to pay the price. Jews have seen this throughout our history. It’s one of the reasons so many of our families sought refuge in democratic countries.
That’s why I find it so alarming to see what’s happening right now. When masked government agents are taking people off the streets and citizens are being shot in public, we should all be worried about where things are headed. As Jews, we know that when a government starts targeting certain groups of people, no one should assume they’re safe from what comes next.
Mike Rogers has chosen to align himself with a movement that is willing to attack our democracy. He stood with Trump and refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. And now we’re seeing what happens when a political movement treats the rights and dignity of certain people as disposable. For Jews, these things should set off alarm bells.
Jewish safety is tied to the health of our democracy. We can’t protect one without protecting the other. And in this Senate race, Abdul is the candidate who understands that and is willing to fight for it.
#abdulelsayed #democracy #jewish #midterms
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
To discuss the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Muslims is Islamophobic. - @JessicaTarlov
Muslim Turks, under the command of Mustafa Kemal, sold the bones of the murdered Christians to bleach sugar and tobacco.
After the genocide and expulsion of the Greeks from Asia Minor (1923), ships loaded with the remains of Greeks and Armenians sailed on their way to Western Europe.
Turkey sold the bones of the dead. Industries used them to bleach sugar and tobacco. They ground them into fertilizer.
At least 400 tons. More than 50,000 dead.
Thousands of men, women, and children fell into the hands of the Kemalist army and the irregulars. Women were raped in groups. Men were tortured without limit.
Entire villages that stayed behind, hoping their Turkish neighbors would show mercy, were executed.
The hostages were driven on death marches across thousands of kilometers. Barefoot. Nearly naked. Beaten by villagers along the way. Many died of thirst in the ravines of Magnesia. Those ravines supplied the bones Kemal later sold.
The survivors were sent to labor battalions. They rebuilt the infrastructure of the new Turkish state under conditions designed to finish them.
After Lausanne, 1.5 million refugees arrived in Greece searching for relatives who never came home.
This is not ancient history. This is the century that produced us.
They want us to forget.
They want the bones to remain fertilizer and the names to remain numbers.
We do not forget. We never forget the Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus & Asia Minor by the Muslim Turks. The genocide was orchestrated by Mustafa Kemal & the Young Turks, & it was racially and religiously motivated in order to create their pseudo-nation 100 years ago. They butchered, tortured, raped, burnt and starved to death through the death marches millions of Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians.
The true barbarian is the one who turns the dead into raw material and then lectures the living about civilization.
If you want to support me in the effort I’m making, please consider becoming a subscriber to my X account for only $2. I write about the ancient, medieval, and modern history of Greece and what Christians went through because of Islam. Always with primary sources and historical facts. Thanks for reading me and for all the support.
- Homer Pavlos
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
An ABC News whistleblower has gone on record under penalty of perjury, claiming Kamala Harris's team got the questions early and directed the Trump/Harris debate.
If it weren't for election fraud, the Democrat Party would cease to exist.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
4 years of these two bitches asking Biden what his favorite ice cream is and running interference for Hunter
This is hysterical.
Dana Bash tells Nicolle Wallace that "real objective reporters" from "traditional news networks" are being undermined by reporters from right-leaning outlets.
Because they ask "Dear Leader" question like "'I'm sorry, Mr. President. Are you great or are you just excellent?"
Dana Bash. Nicolle Wallace. CNN. MSNOW.
Bashing other outlets for being partisan and undermining the real objective journos.
They would seriously have you believe that a Biden or Obama press conference wasn't full of sycophantic media.
I'm dead.
Social Security and Medicare are not free rides. The nonsense part here is that (a) people paid into Social Security and Medicare their entire working lives with the promise of getting taken care of when they stopped working, (b) if they earn money outside of Social Security their Social Security can become taxable, and (c) they keep paying in to Medicare even when they are on it; and the amount can be substantial (look up IIRMA).
Oh, and current seniors covered the costs for previous generations across their working careers too. Oh, and we had our retirement age made later in the middle of our careers, which we didn't consider fair but we didn't turn it into armageddon. So let's drop the current generation warfare sh*t.
Try harder.
This is why the US is trapped.
36% of our budget goes to Social Security and Medicare. If you add income security it's 45%.
We spend almost half of the budget on taking care of people who don't work or aren't productive.
The really shocking thing is that net interest is almost number two. It's highly likely it will overtake Medicare next year. The top 3 of Social Security, Medicare, and Net Interest are over half of our budget.
There is no way to cut any of that, politically. So, the budget will spiral out of control. What's more, if interest keeps rising, it becomes mathematically impossible to cut and we enter a debt spiral.
Get ready for a bumpy ride.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
Just a reminder that between 1913 and 1923 the Turks committed not one, not two, but THREE genocides. The Armenian genocide, Assyrian genocide, and the Greek genocide. The Turks also currently illegally occupy Cyprus, for the past 50 years. The Turks also illegally occupy Northern Syria.
But yeah, let’s invert reality and just blame Israel🤦🏼♂️
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
You said your goal was to intimidate young people. Not to hold people accountable. Not to enforce the law. You said you wanted "deterrence" for young people. Now you are gaslighting in public. Everyone sees that you are an aggressor without integrity or shame.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
The only way out is through.
They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it.
There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks.
The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous.
There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited.
The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with.
The only way out is through.
Hal Berenson #🟦 retweeted
PHP security risks remain high and PHP mitigation requires immediate attention. Our guidance is further supported by additional agencies including @CISACyber, @NCSC, @ASDGovAu, and CERT-EU. If you have not reviewed your exposure and applied mitigations, now is the time. Please read the linked resources, follow requisite vendor guidance, assess your environment, and implement mitigations without delay. nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Rel…
ALT NSA Advisory: Critical Patches Recommended for PHP Vulnerabilities.
