And I want a unicorn for Christmas.

Look, right now I don’t even have a good reason to hope that Israel will be stopped before they finish their genocide. But step 1 is to get a permanent ceasefire in place. Whatever fantasies we might have beyond that is a moot point. But recognizing both parties as sovereign would go some way towards facilitating the terms and enforcement of that ceasefire.

If you’ve got a plan to achieve that and doesn’t involve genociding israel, shoot for it. But I don’t think “unrecognizing” Israel is a particularly productive step towards that.

In this context? Someone who is currently on the good side of the current apartheid system in Israel/Palestine.

Don’t play dumb with me, you know full well what I meant. If you have a point, make it.

So no Israel, just Palestine? That would leave Israelis a majority population in Palestine. Do you expect Israelis to magically not outvote the Palestinians, or are you proposing an autocracy or an apartheid system stripping Israelis of their voting rights?

I would also strongly suggest you do some reading on the factors leading up to the Rwandan genocide. A “just” peace isn’t enough; after generations of life under apartheid, there are no easy or quick paths to lasting peace. I won’t commit the hubris of pretending I have a definitive solution, and I think it’s important to underline that as outsiders to the conflict, the best we can do is offer to safeguard peace. That’s what the Two-State Solution was meant to do, that’s what arms sanctions are meant to do, that’s what the threat of economic retaliation would be meant to do (granted each with their own significant shortcomings). Denying the practical existence of either Israel or Palestine is antithetical to building a path towards lasting peace and a meaningful international effort towards safeguarding said peace.

For a practical example, assuming a peace treaty ever gets signed, sending UN Blue Helmets would be diplomatically easier if all parties involved recognized Palestine and Israel as sovereign states. Even if that all seems like a moot point right now what when neither Israel nor most Western nations are actually looking forward to peace.

So there are two interpretations I could make of your comment, one of which is more charitable than the other.

1. You are using the Chinese and Israeli playbook of weaponizing statehood recognition as a value judgement. That is profoundly problematic, both on a practical and a philosophical level. De-humanization should not be a tool we have to use on our enemies. Our moral high ground should speak for itself.
2. Your are dog-whistling for the genocide and/or deportation of all Israelis. In which case our conversation is done here.

To be clear, Israel is committing genocide and every single member of its government and of the IDF should be tried at The Hague. But laws and international order exist for a reason, and trying to circumvent them like this is a very bad look that Israel has been rightfully criticized for for decades.

The first part applies to… Most of the world outside of Europe?

The second part applies, to lesser degrees, to a large part of the world. Such as the USA.

What even is this argument. Israel’s not a state? Well fucking great, so following that logic which state should we hold responsible for Israel’s crimes then?

Europe’s colonial past is a whole-ass subject but amongst all the potential ways to try to make up for it, “stop formally recognizing former colonies because we fucked it up too badly” is one of the worst takes I’ve heard.

I’m not American so I won’t involve myself in the organization of your protests.

But from experience when shit hits the fan at even a third of that magnitude, you’re supposed to be flooding the streets every Saturday. Don’t set up 15 committees for a bimonthly thing that people will forget about. Make it unforgettable because it’s next Saturday, every week.

1. More protesting, yesterday. The “no kings” protest would have been half-decent if they were a start, but as a one-off thing it is more than pathetic.
2. Political organization parallel to the neutered DNC to push the envelope beyond mildly worded letters and twitter clapbacks.
3. When the feds come to perform violent unconstitutional acts in your neighborhood, there is a proper response other than “shut the blinds and cower in fear”. Unfortunately the moderators of this instance will delete my message if I propose it.

Americans: “Best we can do is one large-ish peaceful protest a couple months ago. Ah well, we tried everything, and we’re all out of ideas.”

Thousands of kids died for Americans’ right to bear arms and yet when the Gestapo jumps out of an unmarked van to kidnap their neighbor the most the average American can manage is to duck and film a TikTok. Absolute disgrace of a country.

“American ideals”? All bark, no bite. You’ll spend billions making horny patriotic Hollywood movies about how Great and Free you are, but a couple masked bitch-ass Nazi shows up to round up the brown people and the whole neighborhood is suddenly like pwease don’t huwt me mistaw officaw, wight this way, also pwease fuck my wife.

Your country disgusts me. Not so much because 30 % of y’all are actual Nazis. But because virtually everyone else is a complete coward about it.

What do you mean what was the plan?

This is the new CEO, spinning into “stripping Intel off for parts” mode.

The previous CEOs (Brian Krzanich, Bob Swan, and Pat Gelsinger) meanwhile made more money than you or I will ever make on maximizing short-term profits by refusing to invest into competitive levels of R&D.

That has always been the plan. If you want to figure out why Intel paid 3 CEOs millions to shoot itself in the foot, then one has to start investigating the board of directors since 2013-ish. They’re either inside traders, incompetent, or both.

Intel, Boeing, and the Big Three are emblematic of the ultimate decline of American capitalism post-2008. They inherited empires and had virtually unlimited state welfare and still fucked it up because halfway decent corporate governance is apparently a bigger challenge for these big companies than building airplanes the size of buildings or mass-printing circuits with sub-micrometer resolution.

Doesn’t HP end up a literal magic cop at the end of the series? The whole caste system is also upheld throughout, at no point is revealing the wizarding world to muggles even considered an option despite the fact that little kids are dying from cancer all over Britain/the world that could be magically healed in an afternoon. The whole SPEW thing is just profoundly racist and always has been. “Cho Chang” – nuff said. The whole point of Hogwarts is that it’s a boarding school, which proudly inherits all its real-world British characteristics which are intrinsically linked to the more problematic parts of the British class system.

Rowling has always been a bigot and I will die on this hill. Any progressive messaging that people read into harry potter is at best performative (for instance yes she explicitly denounces “blood purity” pretty early on, but that’s super performative considering her entire worldbuilding is built on the premise that some people are just inherently magical and others are inherently not invited to the party. “Blood purity contests” are only bad when wizards to it to other wizards.).

I don’t think she’s a good enough writer to have done most of the racist/classist/misogynist messaging intentionally, but nonetheless her reactionary poorly thought-out world view transpires through every bit of her writing.

EDIT: Trying to expand on my own thoughts here. I’ve always despised HP as a franchise so to try to be fair to HP let’s contrast and compare with the piece of shit author who did make a book I like, Ender’s Game. I pirated it a couple years back, and I won’t pretend it’s not obvious at times that he’s a homophobe and a religious nutcase with some obvious cognitive dissonance with some of his (at least at the time) progressive views. I guess the good thing about that particular IP is that there’s no new stuff coming out besides one awful movie, so everyone can agree Orson Scott Card can get fucked and move on with their lives. But it’s important to acknowledge that his religious zealousness did impact his writing and to take a step back even if we decide to still appreciate his work.
The problem is that HP fans are in a much tougher situation because the writing just isn’t good so if you drop the flimsy pretense that 2000s Rowling was a champion of liberal ideals, then you really don’t have much left besides a profoundly flawed worldbuilding with shitty characters who only work to uphold the wizarding status quo. Yeah I’d get pretty mad too if I had spend my teenage years obsessing over that heap of trash.

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

If god didn’t want my buttcheeks poopy, then why did he make them hairy?

As a European software developer I would love to see that.

Unfortunately I’m afraid those most likely to cry foul aren’t Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.

The damn dean could have invited Kanye to do a standup routine that is just roman salutes and this would still have been an extremely gross violation of every democratic principle that would have gotten any other president impeached.

However in Trump’s America it’s just a Thursday and the so-called opposition is just nodding along and dutifully complying with every unconstitutional order. At this point Trump could sign an executive order for every registered democrat to literally dig their own grave and I think a majority would actually do it.