Just to list a few things, no it’s not a war crime to attack hospitals, if they are being used for military purposes. Same with schools, kindergartens, residential buildings, etc. The Geneva Conventions explicitly permit this in order to discourage the use of human shields, which they define as a war crime, because if one side does this all the time - and Hamas have openly celebrated the use of human shields - then this might motivate the enemy to assume that behind every group of civilians, there might be fighters. When North Korean soldiers fired at US soldiers out of crowds of refugees during the Korean War, this led to US soldiers driving refugees away with their guns and even killing a number of them, fearing to be ambushed. Fighters not wearing uniforms puts every fighting age male in the combat area at a risk - and guess what, Hamas only wears uniforms during parades, not in combat. Hamas have used human shields successfully to prevent Israel from performing attacks on weapons depots, rocket launch sites, command centers, etc. They were under the impression that they could attack from these positions, from behind civilians with impunity. If the other side doesn’t attack, that’s a win, the terrorists get to live for another day and can continue what they are doing. If Israel does attack and civilians die, this particular cell might lose a few fighters and equipment, but they can use the innocent civilians they put into the crossfire for propaganda against Israel, both domestically in order to recruit new fighters and internationally to put pressure on Israel. What should Israel do in this situation? Just eat the rockets? The Iron Dome is far from perfect and every alert means people only have seconds to interrupt whatever they are doing and rush to shelter. That’s no way to live. Meanwhile, in Gaza, there are no civilian bomb shelters, not even air raid sirens. Gaza is the only place since WW2 that attacked an enemy they know have air power, but provides no shelters nor warnings for civilians. Kind of odd, if you think about it.

Until reading your post and then doing more research, I fell for the “higher civilian casualty rate” headlines. I was aware that it is legal to strike a normally civilian location if it is being used for military purposes, but felt that the IDF was being unusually imprecise during this conflict.

It turns out that the headlines are very misleading. You can’t compare a single conflict in a densely-populated urban area to the average of all 20th century conflicts (especially not when the government of said urban area uses human shields). The only really fair comparison points are previous Israeli conflicts in Gaza and a handful of battles against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The civilian casualty rate is about half of what we saw against ISIS.

Statistics on civilian casualties here

Seems like there are a number of issues with this.

1. Not defining “reliability challenge” in a meaningful way. (How many of these are problems that are expensive or time-consuming to repair? How expensive and how time-consuming? Are these problems that prevent the car from driving safely, or are they inconveniences that can be put off?)

2. Not controlling for manufacturer. (Toyota has long-been regarded as a reliable manufacturer, but they make 2 plug-in hybrids and 1 EV, all of which are new this year. Meanwhile, they offer about a dozen different traditional hybrids. I can believe that the Tesla Model 3 is less reliable than the Toyota Camry, but is a full-electric Hyundai Ioniq less reliable than a Hyundai Sonata?)

3. Including plug-in hybrids and full electric vehicles as one category. (Plug-in hybrids combine the old breakable parts such as transmissions with the new breakable parts such as lithium batteries. This is the trade-off that buyers make to get the efficiency of an electric vehicle at short ranges and the convenience of an ICE at long ranges.)

He disputed several details of that article and added context that The New Yorker was aware of but chose to omit.

E.g. the article makes it sound like he fabricated the prom story, but all he changed was the day that he heard about it. The article also says that he invited the woman to his show and embarrassed her; however, he did not invite her and she enjoyed the show.

Subtract the “defense” costs that are paid for by other means in most of the world (healthcare, education, medical research), adjust the rest for purchasing power parity, and get back to me on that.

“Your hands don’t look right!”

• AI models in 2023

Jack Smith lured Trump into committing crimes 3+ years ago, in what legal experts are calling “1D checkers.”

The idea has definitely come up that there’s an association between the “globalist” pejorative and anti-Semitism (globalism -> conspiracy that secretly controls the world -> Jewish conspiracy), but it’s not as cut and dry as I thought.

Relevant Wikipedia entry about new anti-Semitism

Nintendo’s exclusives are where the Switch really shines. Unfortunately, they’re expensive. I’ll echo the DekuDeals recommendation for finding sales.

Other Nintendo titles that are worthwhile, aside from the obvious Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and depending on your tastes:

• Super Mario Odyssey
• Mario Kart 8
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
• Animal Crossing New Horizons
• Splatoon 3 (2 is good too, but 3 is an improvement and more active)
• Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze
• Pikmin (the whole series)
• Metroid Dread
• Metroid Prime Remastered
• Fire Emblem Three Houses
• Pokemon Legends Arceus

There are also tons of great indie games that play well on Switch (especially handheld):

• Hades
• Dead Cells
• Hollow Knight
• Slay the Spire
• Into the Breach
• Shovel Knight

Firstly, the term “globalists” is an anti-Semitic dogwhistle. Beyond that usage, it’s meaningless.

Secondly, YouTube is riddled with disinformation. This is primarily due to the algorithm which drives receptive users to extremist videos (and skeptical users who might refute those videos away from them). It’s also because it’s a lot more difficult to fact-check spoken language than written language.

To my knowledge, Reddit is owned by private companies and investors. Blackrock and Vanguard have no ownership stake, or a very small and very indirect ownership stake.

For what it’s worth, a significant percentage of every (reasonably liquid) public company on Earth is owned by Vanguard and Blackrock, because those companies manage trillions of dollars in assets (many of which are middle-class people’s retirement investments). They aren’t a conspiracy. They’re asset managers, and mostly passive managers at that.

Into the Breach’s soundtrack is also outstanding, by the same composer for the same developer.

I’m extrinsically motivated, but my definition of “extrinsic” is pretty loose. I’ll do things that aren’t necessary to beat the game (I don’t even need the game to be “beatable”). As long as I’m finishing something and getting a reward for it, I’m content.

I’m having a great time doing side content in Tears of the Kingdom: completing as many shrines and side quests as I can, hoarding materials for armor upgrades, etc. Those are optional objectives that you can truly complete. However, I don’t spend much time experimenting with Ultrahand.

Similarly in Minecraft, I liked accumulating resources in survival mode, but I bounced off of creative mode.

EDIT: apparently my Lemmy app went haywire and posted this about 8 times. Very sorry.

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Also, how you know it read the book, and not a summary of it, of which there are loads on the internet?

In the case of ChatGPT, it’s hard to tell. OpenAI won’t even reveal what their training dataset was.

Researchers have done some tests to tease this out, and they’re pretty confident that it has read quite a few books and memorized them verbatim. See one of my favorite papers in a while, Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4.

AIs are trained for the equivalent of thousands of human lifetimes (if not more). There’s no precedent for anything like this.

There are a few reasons why music models haven’t exploded the way that large-language models and generative image models have. Maybe the strength of the copyright-holders is part of it, but I think that the technical issues are a bigger obstacle right now.

• Generative models are extremely data-inefficient. The Internet is loaded with text and images, but there isn’t as much music.

• Language and vision are the two problems that machine learning researchers have been obsessed with for decades. They built up “good” datasets for these problems and “good” benchmarks for models. They also did a lot of work on figuring out how to encode these types of data to make them easier for machine learning models. (I’m particularly thinking of all of the research done on word embeddings, which are still pivotal to large language models.)

Even still, there are fairly impressive models for generative music.