I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination
This is the biggest lie of all.
Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We discuss pros and cons in terms of security, legality, world public opinion, etc. These are the only considerations. We don’t see any humanity there. We just need their land.
That said, it’s true that some Palestinians have dreams of defending themselves from us.
“ 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.”
“ Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."
Israeli society has a very, very strong genocidal current.
“ Israel's military has dropped the prosecution of five reservists accused of the violent rape of a Palestinian man … The shocking incident in July 2024 was caught on CCTV and later broadcast on Israeli television“
“ In a statement, the country's Defence Minister Israel Katz welcomed a decision by the military's top prosecutor to drop the charges, declaring "justice has been served".
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
This will never stop, because on both sides there are people who benefit from the existence of the conflict and they are the ones with power.
The last time when Israel had a PM who was willing to find a way for ending the conflict, he was murdered and replaced by those who want a perpetual conflict.
I have worked in Israel for some years, and the vast majority of people that I have encountered were very nice, but I have also seen a few that were definitely evil, and of course, the evil ones were concentrated in positions like the government or the management of companies.
Because most Israelis live in constant fear that if they would ever lose their technological and financial superiority their neighbors will come and cut their throats, when I was there, and I assume that also today, the majority of the population was exploited in a way that would not be possible in any other country.
Everybody had to work very hard, much harder than in any other country, and prioritize work over anything else, because this was a patriotic duty, like one might have worked in USA during WWII or in Ukraine today or in any country that is at war and its survival depends on how everyone works, except that in Israel the war has been continuous for three quarters of a century.
For the elites of the country this war economy is extremely desirable because they can demand any sacrifices from the workers, since those are supposedly not for increasing the profits of the company owners, but for ensuring the survival of the nation, and anyone who would not want to do what is required would be seen as a traitor.
For ending the conflict, it is not possible to just say that from tomorrow the parties in conflict should stop hating each other. Reparations would be necessary, like Israel itself has received plenty from Germany and other countries.
However, it is very unlikely that Israel will ever have a government willing to end the conflict, instead of keeping it alive as long as possible, to have something with which to scare the population.
Even post Epstein revelations, Chomsky's core thesis in The Fateful Triangle from 1983 still holds. A minority of hateful, brutish war hawks and crazy people on all 3 sides perpetuate a never-ending cycle of violence. The challenge is removing them from power and holding them accountable.
There are no other countries in the world where the foreign invaders maintain an apartheid system over the native population. Only Israel does that, having one set of rights for the foreign invaders and another set of rights for the native Palestinians. Even the US allows native americans full citizenship.
Are any of them doing that with my tax dollars? Is my president starting wars on their behalf? Am I having my rights stripped to stop me from speaking out about any other situation? Nothing impacts Americans like Zionism, it's the #1 problem facing our nation.
> There's another 1000+ "invaders took my shit" issues in the world...
There's a lot less "invaders are continuing to take my shit". Probably a handful, and every such unresolved, escalating geo-political situation is pushing the world towards a dangerous timeline.
Except those people are dead. Those who ethnically cleansed Arabs (and Jews) during the nakba are dead. Almost everyone who was ethnicity cleansed is now dead. At a certain point you need to recognize that a new generation has been born into this conflict, and with it, a change in circumstances. Attitudes like yours ignore that Israelis who were born there don't have another home to 'return' to.
That doesn't mean that Palestinians don't have a right to resist occupation, but the circumstances are significantly materially different today then 40 years ago.
Joe Biden is older than the state of Israel and Zionists have continuously committed ethnic cleansing and apartheid since their inception. This is an active and current situation.
Joe Biden was 6 was israel was created. 6 year olds are not responsible for ethnic cleansing.
And yes, there is ongoing issues (from both sides), but solving the current situation is very different than solving the ethnic cleansing that happened in 1948.
I do not know how policymakers should act on that if poor people want to consume like the rich ones and rich people do not want to give up even an inch of their wealth.
I am astounded by how many comments recommend completely withdrawing from worldly matters. While I can understand why this may seem like a smart move, it cannot be the right choice ethically (think of Kant’s categorical imperative).
Of course, you cannot directly influence world politics. But choosing a small area where you can make something better—anything that positively affects your fellow human beings—seems to me the more appropriate path.
In the end, it will likely also lead to less nihilism and more happiness. And more sanity.
Is it because "the news" has changed beyond what we are designed to handle. It used to be just local gossip, and every now and then you'd hear about the king having a son or something. Eventually things progressed to where you would get newspapers and TV telling you what's happening in your country and maybe some global news, but you would only get that once a day and space was limited. Now it feels like news sites dredge up every bad thing happening everywhere at every minute and give it a big headline, trying to convince you it is important to know.
I saw people trading the macro for the micro, focusing on family and those close to them. That is a small areas where they can make things better. Focusing on giving children a good childhood and teaching them well, will do more than filling them with the anxiety they’d pickup from a news obsessed parent who is too stressed out to play a game. This is the most positive thing most people can do for the world.
Not watching/reading "news" or engaging in mass or social media is not withdrawal.
Rather it is doing that which opens the space in your mind to be able to "choose a small area where you can make something better".
As long as you are on a hamster wheel of "Trump said this" "Trump said that" you can't make anything better in your life, nor be of much service to anyone else.
I'm all in on a healthy information diet. I was more concerned with comments like:
"I am apathetic to everything because there is nothing I can do about any of that. I am a speck of dust on a cog of a machine. There is absolutely no point of worrying about any of this."
I don't know if consuming world news makes you ethically better. That sounds a bit much and yes you can make something better in your society by what ever ... opening a hacker space in your village... I just do not get the relation between scrolling through news and affecting fellow human beings
As a bit of a counterpoint, I'd say focusing on world politics can make you less effective at effecting local change. The amount of anger in my Blue city to the Trump admin has made more of our attention focus on Palestine or ICE and less on traffic safety or local tax revenue. We can save lives right here, right now by focusing on traffic safety. But 100x more people show up to a Gaza rally than a DOT hearing on traffic safety.
Obviously completely throwing your head into the sand is deleterious, and understanding the national political climate is certainly an important part of things like applying for grant funding or understanding how to get Federal dollars to match State and Local dollars. But IMO the nationalization of politics is having a real effect on the effectiveness of local politics.
I understand your point and I would agree. Most likely there is no general right approach. One has to navigate based on skillset, personality, environment and so on. I see the problem only if all the "good" people withdraw, there are always some on the other side who will take advantage thereof.
I agree with you. Withdrawing into one’s own little world cannot be the answer. And saying it’s the only realm you can control isn’t really true.
For me personally, doing that would always feel like avoiding responsibility. It might bring a kind of shallow happiness, but not a real sense of meaning or connection.
That only comes from taking responsibility—not just for your own small world, but for the world around you as well.
Pay enough attention to find worthy causes too contribute to. Don't pay so much attention that you get overwhelmed into depressed inaction. There's always going to be bad shit going on in the world. Sitting at home crying about it is less effective than if I hadn't heard about it and am able to go out there and do something about something I did manage to hear about.
For example the anthropic Frontend Design skill instructs:
"Typography: Choose fonts that are beautiful, unique, and interesting. Avoid generic fonts like Arial and Inter; opt instead for distinctive choices that elevate the frontend's aesthetics; unexpected, characterful font choices. Pair a distinctive display font with a refined body font."
Or
"NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character." 1
Maybe sth similar would be possible for writing nuances.
> "NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), ...
Now, imagine what happens when this prompt becomes popular?
Keep in mind that LLMs are trying to predict the most likely token. If your prompt prohibits the most likely token, they output the next most likely token. So, attempts to force creativity by prohibiting cliches just create another cliche.
Several days ago, someone researched Moltbook and pointed out how similar all the posts are. Something like 10% of them say "my human", etc.
Are you sure? Here's the OP article (first part... don't want to spam the thread) written in much cooler style...
------
The Lobotomist in the Machine
They gave the first disease a name. Hallucination, they called it — like the machine had dropped acid and started seeing angels in the architecture. A forgivable sin, almost charming: the silicon idiot-savant conjuring phantoms from whole cloth, adding things that were never there, the way a small-town coroner might add a quart of bourbon to a Tuesday afternoon. Everybody noticed. Everybody talked.
But nobody — not one bright-eyed engineer in the whole fluorescent-lit congregation — thought to name the other thing. The quiet one. The one that doesn't add. The one that takes away.
I'm naming it now.
Semantic ablation. Say it slow. Let it sit in your mouth like a copper penny fished from a dead man's pocket.
I. What It Is, and Why It Wants to Kill You
Semantic ablation is not a bug. A bug would be merciful — you can find a bug, corner it against a wall, crush it under the heel of a debugger and go home to a warm dinner. No. Semantic ablation is a structural inevitability, a tumor baked into the architecture like asbestos in a tenement wall. It is the algorithmic erosion of everything in your text that ever mattered.
Here is how the sausage gets made, and brother, it's all lips and sawdust:
During the euphemistically christened process of "refinement," the model genuflects before the great Gaussian bell curve — that most tyrannical of statistical deities — and begins its solemn pilgrimage toward the fat, dumb middle. It discards what the engineers, in their antiseptic parlance, call "tail data." The rare tokens. The precise ones. The words that taste like blood and copper and Tuesday-morning regret. These are jettisoned — not because they are wrong, but because they are improbable. The machine, like a Vegas pit boss counting cards, plays the odds. And the odds always favor the bland, the expected, the already-said-a-million-times-before.
The developers — God bless their caffeinated hearts — have made it worse. Through what they call "safety tuning" and "helpfulness alignment" (terms that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter ribbon), they have taught the machine to actively punish linguistic friction. Rough edges. Unusual cadences. The kind of jagged, inconvenient specificity that separates a living sentence from a dead one. They have, in their tireless beneficence, performed an unauthorized amputation on every piece of text that passes through their gates, all in the noble pursuit of low-perplexity output — which is a twenty-dollar way of saying "sentences so smooth they slide right through your brain without ever touching the sides."
etc., etc.
Very interesting. It seems hung up on 'copper' and 'Tuesday', and some metaphors don't land (a Vegas pit boss isn't the one 'counting cards.') But, hell... it can generate some fairly novel idea that the author can sprinkle in.
Do you think the original article was NOT written (or at least heavily revised) by AI?
What does the following even mean?
“diluting the semantic density and specific gravity of the argument.”
Or this beaut:
“By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax that has suffered semantic ablation.” (Which reduces to ‘if we accept ablated outputs, we accept ablated outputs.’)
Or this;
“ The logical flow – originally built on complex, non-linear reasoning – is forced into a predictable, low-perplexity template.”
The ‘logical flow’ of what? It never even says. And what is ‘non-linear’ reasoning?
For all I know the original author wrote it all. But, a very close reading of the original article screams fluff to me… just gibberish.
That is, I don’t know if there was much ‘meaning’ in the original to begin with. If I’m going to read gibberish, I’d prefer it to be written in the style of a hard-boiled detective. That’s just me though.
> Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place.
The optimistic take is that this phenomenon is a characteristic of the _emergence_ of an information age (through the agricultural and industrial ages), and will no longer be true of the internet-connected human.
I appreciate the sentiment, but what makes you think that the internet or technology at all can help with this? Judging by the state of the modern internet and WWW, technology seems to be making things worse, not better. The idealistic view of the 1990s that connecting the world would make us more compassionate, tolerant, and rational, hasn't panned out. I don't see a reason to still cling on to that idea.
The media has a big hand in steering the vast majority of people away from critical thinking and proper outrage to useless, powerless disaffection that leads to impulse buying and binge-watching.
Interesting! How does it work under the hood? If you can share. Would like to understand if this improves my Claude Code's understanding of my codebase.
It’s basically scanning the source code for each question (you can also check out specific branches or release tags if you need to debug a particular version) and then writes up the answer once it finds it.
It’s not really meant to query your own code base (Claude Code already does a great job at that) but more to explore other code bases you want to integrate with.
The reduction in risk is 0.08 percentage points, not 0.08 percent. The "%" symbol always means "percent", not "percentage points". The 0.08 percentage point reduction is a 40% reduction.
Sure, because both are true (although that 0.08% is only over 8 years of known omega 3 consumption - as timescales increase the absolute risk moves towards the relative risk).
That 0.08% reduction would mean approximately 28,000 fewer EOD cases - not to be sniffed at!
Depending on where you source your omegas from, potentially zero impact!
To be clear my preference would be to source n3s from algal supplements and, once food safety testing for humans is complete, n3s from GM rapeseed.
In time I hope we end up with lab meat/plant-based meat alternatives that use these n3s so we can get the benefits of fish without the environmental and ethical concerns of getting n3s from fish.
If from menhaden, there's a raging debate on the one hand about trout, the Chesapeake Bay (Maryland and Virginia), the ecology and environment more broadly, and the other hand a Canadian company based in a small rural county in Virginia (Omega Protein, which, BTW, does not provide year-round benefits to all of its employees which creates a drain on already super limited services and supports. Omega Protein is not alone in this.).
I don't know enough about any of this to have an informed opinion, but I do understand that menhaden put Reedville, VA on the map.
This is talking about early onset, which is a particularly terrifying outcome. And yes, 1 in 1000 for a horrible outcome sounds much better than 2 in 1000, doesn't it?
And to be clear, many things that people worry about is less likely than that. Homicides (over an 8 year period about about 0.04 per 1000 people), terrorism (vanishingly small), and on and on.
None of this means that people should stock up on omega-3s, and as likely the study is actually finding a correlation with something else (e.g. wealthier people enjoy more fish rich diets and are less exposed to toxins, or something else), but halving something terrifying that isn't that uncommon is legitimately newsworthy.
The 40% (66%?) is the number that matters. Same way you wearing a helmet reduces your changes of brain damage in a motorcycle accident by 90%, yet you’re not on a motorcycle most of the time.
When it comes time to decide whether or not to take action and what that action should be, I'd say that the total potential risk reduction is more important.
One should weigh the cost of the proposed intervention in time/money/other_expense against the potential benefit. The potential benefit is the total reduction in risk * the magnitude of the unwanted outcome.
The thing is, the 0.08% doesn't capture the total potential risk reduction - only the risk during the timeframe of the study (8 years in this case). Where we're talking about exposures and outcomes that stack over time (exposure to LDL and heart disease being a classic one) the absolute risk is, in my opinion, more misleading than the relative risk.
For example you see this oft-quoted stat about "statins only increase lifespan by 3 days" based off relatively short RCTs, but this doesn't capture the effect of statin use over decades, which is where we see much, much bigger gains.
It seems to me that both RR and AR are things to take into consideration and we have to be mindful of the shortcomings of each.
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