The Department of Homeland Security struck a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir last week, further reinforcing the software company’s role in the federal agency that oversees the nation’s immigration enforcement.

According to contracting documents published last week, the blanket purchase agreement (BPA) awarded “is to provide Palantir commercial software licenses, maintenance, and implementation services department wide.” The agreement simplifies how DHS buys software from Palantir, allowing DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to essentially skip the competitive bidding process for new purchases of up to $1 billion in products and services from the company.

Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Palantir announced the agreement internally on Friday. It comes as the company is struggling to address growing tensions among staff over its relationship with DHS and ICE. After Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed in January, Palantir staffers flooded company Slack channels demanding information on how the tech they build empowers US immigration enforcement. Since then, the company has updated its internal wiki, offering few unreported details about its work with ICE, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp recorded a video for employees where he attempted to justify the company’s immigration work, as WIRED reported last week. Throughout a nearly hourlong conversation with Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, Karp failed to address direct questions about how the company’s tech powers ICE. Instead, he said workers could sign nondisclosure agreements for more detailed information.

Akash Jain, Palantir’s chief technology officer and president of Palantir US Government Partners, which works with US government agencies, acknowledged these concerns in the email announcing the company’s new agreement with DHS. “I recognize that this comes at a time of increased concern, both externally and internally, around our existing work with ICE,” Jain wrote. “While we don’t normally send out updates on new contract vehicles, in this moment it felt especially important to provide context to help inform your understanding of what this means—and what it doesn’t. There will be opportunities we run toward, and others we decline—that discipline is part of what has earned us DHS’s trust.”

In the Friday email, Jain suggests that the five-year agreement could allow the company to expand its reach across DHS into agencies like the US Secret Service (USSS), Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Jain also argued that Palantir’s software could strengthen protections for US citizens. “These protections help enable accountability through strict controls and auditing capabilities, and support adherence to constitutional protections, especially the Fourth Amendment,” Jain wrote. (Palantir’s critics have argued that the company’s tools create a massive surveillance dragnet, which could ultimately harm civil liberties.)

Over the last year, Palantir’s work with ICE has grown tremendously. Last April, WIRED reported that ICE paid Palantir $30 million to build “ImmigrationOS,” which would provide “near real-time visibility” on immigrants self-deporting from the US. Since then, it’s been reported that the company has also developed a new tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) which creates maps of potential deportation targets, pulling data from DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Closing his Friday email to staff, Jain suggested that staffers curious about the new DHS agreement come work on it themselves. “As Palantirians, the best way to understand the work is to engage on the work directly. If you are interested in helping shape and deliver the next chapter of Palantir’s work across DHS, please reach out,” Jain wrote to employees, who are sometimes referred to internally as fictional creatures from The Lord of the Rings. “There will be a massive need for committed hobbits to turn this momentum into mission outcomes.”

Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has indicated that the company’s controversial Search Party feature might not always be just for lost dogs, . A creepy surveillance tool being used to surveil. Who could ?

“I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission,” Siminoff wrote in an email to staffers. “You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”

The words “zero out crime in neighborhoods” are particularly troubling. It is, however, worth noting that this is just an email and doesn’t necessarily indicate a plan by the company. Siminoff wrote the email back in October when , which was months . He did end the thread by noting he couldn’t “wait to show everyone else all the exciting things we are building over the years to come.”

One of those things could be the recently-launched “Familiar Faces” tool, which uses facial recognition to identify people that wander into the frame of a Ring camera. It seems to me that a combination of the Search Party tech, which uses the combined might of connected Ring cameras, with the Familiar Faces tech could make for a very powerful surveillance tool that excels at finding specific individuals.

Siminoff also suggested in an earlier email to staffers that Ring technology could have been used to catch Charlie Kirk’s killer by leveraging the company’s Community Requests feature. This is a tool that allows cops to ask camera owners for footage, thanks to a partnership with the police tech company Axon.

Ring had via a partnership with a surveillance company called Flock Safety. The companies after a Super Bowl ad spotlighting the Search Party tool triggered public outcry. Ring didn’t cite public sentiment for this decision, rather saying the integration would require “significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”

Ring has responded to 404 Media’s reporting, saying in an email that Search Party “does not process human biometrics or track people” and that “sharing has always been the camera owner’s choice.” This response did not provide any information as to what the future will hold for the company’s toolset.

The organization has been . “Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring,” founding chief Jamie Siminoff said when Amazon back in 2018.

YouTube’s “Ask” button is making its way to the living room. The Gemini-powered feature is now rolling out as an experiment on smart TVs, gaming consoles and streaming devices. 9to5Google first spotted a Google support page announcing the change.

Like on mobile devices and desktop, the feature is essentially a Gemini chatbot trained on each video’s content. Selecting that “Ask” button will bring up a series of canned prompts related to the content. Alternatively, you can use your microphone to ask questions about it in your own words.

Google says your TV remote’s microphone button (if it has one) will also activate the “Ask” feature. The company listed sample questions in its announcement, such as “what ingredients are they using for this recipe?” and “what’s the story behind this song’s lyrics?”

The conversational AI tool is only launching for “a small group of users” at first. Google promises that it will “keep everyone up to speed on any future expansions.”

The media is full of breathless reports that AI can now code and human programmers are going to be put out to pasture. We aren’t convinced. In fact, we think the “AI revolution” is just a natural evolution that we’ve seen before. Consider, for example, radios. Early on, if you wanted to have a radio, you had to build it. You may have even had to fabricate some or all of the parts. Even today, winding custom coils for a radio isn’t that unusual.

But radios became more common. You can buy the parts you need. You can even buy entire radios on an IC. You can go to the store and buy a radio that is probably better than anything you’d cobble together yourself. Even with store-bought equipment, tuning a ham radio used to be a technically challenging task. Now, you punch a few numbers in on a keypad.

The Human Element

What this misses, though, is that there’s still a human somewhere in the process. Just not as many. Someone has to design that IC. Someone has to conceive of it to start with. We doubt, say, the ENIAC or EDSAC was hand-wired by its designers. They figured out what they wanted, and an army of technicians probably did the work. Few, if any, of them could have envisoned the machine, but they can build it.

Does that make the designers less? No. If you write your code with a C compiler, should assembly programmers look down on you as inferior? Of course, they probably do, but should they?

If you have ever done any programming for most parts of the government and certain large companies, you probably know that system engineering is extremely important in those environments. An architect or system engineer collects requirements that have very formal meanings. Those requirements are decomposed through several levels. At the end, any competent programmer should be able to write code to meet the requirements. The requirements also provide a good way to test the end product.

Anatomy of a Requirement

A good requirement will look like this: “The system shall…” That means that it must comply with the rest of the sentence. For example, “The system shall process at least 50 records per minute.” This is testable.

Bad requirements might be something like “The system shall process many records per minute.” Or, “The system shall not present numeric errors.” A classic bad example is “The system shall use aesthetically pleasing cabinets.”

The first bad example is too hazy. One person might think “many” is at least 1,000. Someone else might be happy with 50. Requirements shouldn’t be negative since it is difficult to prove a negative. You could rewrite it as “The system shall present errors in a human-readable form that explains the error cause in English.” The last one, of course, is completely subjective.

You usually want to have each requirement handle one thing to simplify testing. So “The system shall present errors in human-readable form that explain the error cause in English and keep a log for at least three days of all errors.” This should be two requirements or, at least, have two parts to it that can be tested separately.

In general, requirements shouldn’t tell you how to do something. “The system shall use a bubble sort,” is probably a poor requirement. However, it should also be feasible. “The system shall detect lifeforms” doesn’t tell you how to make that work, but it is suspicious because it isn’t clear how that could work. “The system shall operate forever with no external power” is calling for a perpetual motion machine, so even if that’s what you wish for, it is still a bad requirement.

You sometimes see sentences with “should” instead of shall. These mark goals, and those are important, but not held to the same standard of rigor. For example, you might have “The system should work for as long as possible in the absence of external power.” That communicates the desire to work with no external power to the level that it is practical. If you actually want it to work at least for a certain period of time, then you are back to a solid and testable requirement, assuming such a time period is feasible.

You can find many NASA requirements documents, like this SRS (software requirements specification), for example. Note the table provides a unique ID for each requirement, a rationale, and notes about testing the requirement.

Requirement Decomposition

High-level requirements trace down to lower-level requirements and vice versa. For example, your top-level requirement might be: “The system shall allow underwater research at location X, which is 600 feet underwater.” This might decompose to: “The system shall support 8 researchers,” and “The system shall sustain the crew for up to three months without resupply.”

The next level might levy requirements based on what structure is needed to operate at 600 feet, how much oxygen, fresh water, food, power, and living space are required. Then an even lower level might break that down to even more detail.

Of course, a lower-level document for structures will be different from a lower-level requirement for, say, water management. In general, there will be more lower-level requirements than upper-level ones. But you get the idea. There may be many requirment documents at each level and, in general, the lower you go, the more specific the requirements.

And AI?

We suspect that if you could leap ahead a decade, a programmer’s life might be more like today’s system architect. Your value isn’t understanding printf or Python decorators. It is in visualizing useful solutions that can actually be done by a computer.

Then you generate requirements. Sure, AI might help improve your requirements, trace them, and catalog them. Eventually, AI can take the requirements and actually write code, or do mechanical design, or whatever. It could even help produce test plans.

The real question is, when can you stop and let the machine take over? If you can simply say “Design an underwater base,” then you would really have something. But the truth is, a human is probably more likely to understand exactly what all the unspoken assumptions are. Of course, an AI, or even a human expert, may ask clarifying questions: “How many people?” or “What’s the maximum depth?” But, in general, we think humans will retain an edge in both making assumptions and making creative design choices for the foreseeable future.

The End Result

There is more to teaching practical mathematics than drilling multiplication tables into students. You want them to learn how to attack complex problems and develop intuition from the underlying math. Perhaps programming isn’t about writing for loops any more than mathematics is about how to take a square root without a calculator. Sure, you should probably know how things work, but it is secondary to the real tools: creativity, reasoning, intuition, and the ability to pick from a bewildering number of alternatives to get a workable solution.

Our experience is that normal people are terrible about unambiguously expressing what they want a computer to do. In fact, many people don’t even understand what they want the computer to do beyond some fuzzy handwaving goal. It seems unlikely that the CEO of the future will simply tell an AI what it wants and a fully developed system will pop out.

Requirements are just one part of the systems engineering picture, but an important one. MITRE has a good introduction, especially the section on requirements engineering.

What do you think? Is AI coding a fad? The new normal? Or is it just a stepping stone to making human programmers obsolete? Let us know in the comments. Although they have improved, we still think the current crop of AI is around the level of a bad summer intern.

Even though it’s a quiet time of the year when it comes to sales events, there is always a significant number of laptop deals available each week. So, I’m here to use my years of bargain-hunting experience and uncover the top offers that are worth buying right now, with prices starting at $199.

I’ve selected a range of options to suit different budgets and needs: whether you need a budget-friendly device for light use, a great value option for everyday use and work, or a performance powerhouse for more demanding creative or productivity tasks.

You can find my 8 top picks below, including laptops available at Amazon, Best Buy, and Dell — three retailers where I often find the best deals. Just a heads up: some are leftovers from the recent Presidents’ Day sales, so they may not be around much longer.

Hanging midair may be difficult, but running an aerial or pole business comes with even higher stakes

Whether you’re suspended five metres above the ground on silks or spinning around a pole, the physical risks of aerial silk and pole classes are obvious. What’s less visible is the financial balancing act required to keep a studio open in Singapore.

The country has seen waves of fitness trends, from spin and reformer pilates to HYROX, many of which have shuttered in recent years. In contrast, aerial and pole studios have been around since over a decade ago, still surviving amid a saturated fitness scene thanks to a tight community and the versatility of the sports. 

Vulcan Post speaks to three studio owners to understand the economics behind their businesses and how the financial and operational stress keeps them on edge more than any stunt ever could.

The unglamorous side of running a studio

Setting up an aerial or pole studio isn’t as simple as renting any open space. Because both disciplines require significant ceiling height and structural integrity, not every commercial unit can accommodate the equipment safely.

For aerial silks, hoops, and pole rigs, ceilings must be high enough to allow tricks and inversions, while the floors and beams need to withstand dynamic loads—sometimes dozens of students swinging or spinning at once.

As such, for many studio owners, finding a suitable location proved unsurprisingly difficult, including the founder of Adedance Artistic & Aerial Productions (Adedance), Adelene Chua-Adams. 

“Aside from the old badminton hall in Geylang, nowhere was very big and able to cater to aerial properly,” shared Adelene. This led her to start offering small-scale aerial classes at her Yio Chu Kang family home in 2017, before eventually taking the gamble of opening her own studio in Tai Seng. 

But the hunt for her own space was far from smooth. Adelene shared that many of the units she liked were classified under Zone B1, a commercial zoning category that requires businesses to pay 12 to 24 months’ upfront government levies before they can operate legally.

“We tried many avenues of appeal, but ultimately couldn’t get around this extra cost from the URA and SLA. Lesson learned there.”

That’s just one operational cost. Adelene also shared that starting an aerial and/or pole studio requires three to four months’ rent as a deposit, and renovations can cost anywhere from S$50,000 to over S$100,000, not to mention the additional cost of purchasing and installing the truss, sound systems, air conditioning, lighting and signage. 

All in, opening an aerial or pole studio can easily require a six-figure upfront investment before the first class even begins.

Jasmine Han, founder of MAD Collection (formerly known as SLAP Studio), pointed out that finding a space with strong ceilings and flooring is essential to protect the safety of the instructors and students. However, she emphasised the need to negotiate favourable quotes for renovations, as it can set the owners back before they can break even. 

“You need to have a professional engineer to come and certify the safety and ensure the rigging is up to a certain standard,” she added. “Nothing we do is rocket science, but it’s a lot of little, little things.” 

She also pointed out that most studios often run without the help of external investors and have to pay recurring expenses, such as managing their online payment systems, studio maintenance and staff salaries, even during holiday closures. 

Beyond capital, owners must also be able to adapt to unforeseeable situations, from finding last-minute teacher replacements to handling customer complaints and even fixing broken toilets. For them, the physical fear of falling is easier to manage than the constant uncertainty of running a small business in Singapore.

As a business owner, every single day, you are stepping on Legos and eating glass all at the same time. But this is what you need to have the ability to change directions quickly, to be able to get up when somebody punches you in the face.

Jasmine Han, founder of MAD Collection

Diversifying revenue streams in a competitive market

The costs of setting up and running aerial and pole studios make steady, predictable revenue essential: businesses cannot rely on hype alone.

All three studios offer class packages for students, ranging from trial classes to weeks to months-long term-based systems with varying price points. Here is a breakdown of their offerings and prices:

With classes priced roughly between S$38 and S$48, studios operate within narrow margins—high enough to cover overhead costs, but low enough to remain competitive, especially in a market that has grown more saturated over the years.

According to Tracy Mak, the co-owner of Milan Pole Dance Studio Singapore (MPDS), there are over 30 aerial and pole studios in Singapore, among the highest per capita globally. 

“With increasing competition within aerial and pole, as well as the lifestyle dollar of travel and other fitness options, people are spoilt for choice, less committal and increasingly price sensitive,” she pointed out. 

As such, studios have to expand their class offerings to create additional revenue streams. For example, Adedance offers acrobatic, contortion and handstand classes, and MAD collection and MPDS offer heels and dance classes apart from pole. 

These studios also offer corporate packages, where they perform for events such as dinners, dances and brand launches. Adelene noted that 75% of Adedance’s income comes from classes and 25% of it comes from performances, which provide higher-ticket revenue but are less predictable than weekly classes. 

“We’ve performed for massive events ranging from F1, the SEA Games Opening Ceremony, Mercedes car launches overseas and more,” she said. 

Collaboration is key to survival and growth

Over the years, aerial and pole have grown steadily in popularity, a trend the three business owners largely attribute to the strength of their community. In the early days, studios relied almost entirely on word of mouth to attract students.

Pole, in particular, has also seen a shift in perception, according to Tracy. 

She recounted that when she tried pole 18 years ago, she was admittedly sceptical as the sport was seen as taboo due to its association with strip clubs in the West. Today, more people view it as a “serious” form of fitness that is suitable for all ages.

“There are still lingering stereotypes, but overall, people are far more open,” added Tracy. “There’s much more recognition and respect, especially as people see how physically demanding and impressive it is when we perform tricks in the air.”