”What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old.”
I don’t know if I see a company extracting rent from other people as a win…
Better to just contact NOYB directly, they are responsible for about 50% of all GDPR fines to date. Outside of Norway the DPAs seem mostly useless, especially when it comes to big tech…
They know, they just don’t care. And they have learned if they just ignore problems, then most times they’ll get away with it. Like for example all their responsibilities to stop an ongoing genocide, or to combat apartheid
1) give me more money and i will make you rich
2) don’t look at deepseek
3) I repeat: there is no reason to not keep giving me EXPONENTIALLY more money to boil all of the oceans
Especially since Netanyahu was trying to revive Hamas prior to Hamas's attack, in order to starve off Fatah's Palestinian recognition efforts at the UN, according to the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... )
Turn on Israeli TV and they're showing the IDF raping prisoners in Sde Teiman. Degenerate behavior from the self-described Jewish state. The US taxpayer is paying the bills for all this bloodshed.
“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.“
(* deleted tweet by Netanyahu)
They spent a year bombing an inhabited city into rubble, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Whatever definition of "policy" you're using here isn't particularly useful I don't think.
They have been ethnically cleansed and told to move to "safe zones", then the IDF terrorists bombed the "safe zones". Rinse and repeat for over a year.
If some really weak person kept trying to kill you by punching you in the face would you hold your own punch back to only hurt them the same amount or would you absolutely deck them?
I know you are being downvoted (not by me). This is a good question, if all the context and history is removed, and we are only looking at who killed more.
I am trying to respond in good faith, but it looks like Hamas is accepted across the world as a terrorist organization for specifically targeting civilians. And as much as I loathe the loss of civilian life at the hands of IDF, this is not a conventional war, and Hamas hiding within civilian populations and tunneling under hospitals is on Hamas and not on IDF. Like it happened in history a million times, Hamas could've surrendered against a superior enemy and and returned hostages, to protect its own citizens.
So, that's why Hamas must cease to exist. Not Palestine itself, nor another government in Palestine - just Hamas. They could've stopped it, they didn't.
Let me know when IDF/Likud behave like this unprovoked (Yes, I know what's going on in West bank and its not remotely close to what Hamas did)
> Hamas could've surrendered against a superior enemy and and returned hostages, to protect its own citizens.
And then Israel would keep occupying more and more land, control their water, electricity, treat Palestinian people like sub-humans, occasionally shoot some children in the head, take palestinian hostages/prisoners without legal right (occasionally tortue and rape them).
What has violence solved here? Thousands of people have died, and Palestinians are not treated better. I am no sure what peaceful protests would have done, but "nothing" is still way better than what we have now.
The logic should apply to both, there are no good guys here, just two armies of savages fighting each other and people getting killed, including innocents that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I pointed out Palestine because Israel is in a dominant position, so it is unlikely that they would want to protest, peacefully or not. But it would be nice to see more "peace-and-love" movements like in the 60s that opposed the Vietnam war, among other things.
I think that's a naive and ignorant position considering what has been going on since 1948 (violence from both sides, yes, but effectively an apartheid-state with more and more illegal occupations).
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization by the US, EU, and others. Their stated purpose is to destroy Israel, and their founding charter including language about killing all Jews. They started this war by massacring over a thousand civilians, injuring thousands more, and kidnapping hundreds. They killed people brutally - beheadings with dull tools, rapes, burning people alive. They also continued launching tens of thousands rockets at Israeli civilians for the duration of the war, though it was basically not reported. If Israel did not have the world's best rocket defense, there would be tens of thousands more dead Israeli civilians.
IDF is the military branch of an actual state. Likud is a political party. Neither advocate for indiscriminate killing of civilians (though some Likud politicians might, just like the US or any other nation has crazy politicians).
"Right to exist" is granted either through law or force. Hamas doesn't have law, doesn't exist within a functioning state, and is illegal by the laws of most nations. IDF isn't.
If you actually think there's a moral equivalence between the IDF and Hamas, or that Hamas is somehow the moral group here, you really need to learn more. Stop consuming social media, stop reading things on the internet, go buy some books from a diverse array of sources, both pro-Israel and anti-Israel, and maybe you can gleam the truth out of there. It's not a guarantee, but it's your best shot.
I really think the TikTok age has amplified insanity where we actually have people asking, "Why does a military get to exist but not terrorists?".
For anyone who needs a reminder of how this war started (warning, extremely graphic / not suitable for life): https://www.hamas-massacre.net/
Hamas is not an "Islamist" organisation (I hate that word BTW, as it's an Israeli invention to demonise Muslims).
The article you linked to is pure propaganda - Hamas' charter changed a long, long time ago. OTOH, Israeli politicians literally say genocidal things on a near daily basis - it's a deeply sick society.
> The article you linked to is pure propaganda - Hamas' charter changed a long, long time ago
No, it's not "propaganda". It's factual reporting that happens to be inconvenient to Hamas apologists.
It's also corroborated by the atrocities against innocent civilians that these monsters gleefully filmed themselves committing on October 7th, such as attacking children with grenades.
Islamist is used widely to mean Islamic supremacist. And Hamas absolutely is that. There are non-violent Islamists. Hamas is also jihadist, so they are violent Islamists.
Hamas' charter was changed recently when it was rewritten by a UColumbia grad. They still openly talk about destroying Israel and killing Jews. Learn Arabic, they don't use cover words there.
It wasn't changed "recently", it was 2017! Hamas, unlike many Israelis, are not supremacists; they lived peacefully alongside Christians in Gaza for example, and explicitly state they have no beef with Judaism.
> They still openly talk about destroying Israel and killing Jews
No, they really don't? Meanwhile, Israeli politicians talk daily of committing war crimes and genocide, but somehow that's fine because it's against Arabs?
Sir, 2017 is recent. And it is clear from their actions and speech that their intent has not changed, even if they have whitewashed their written calls for the extermination of Israel.
> they lived peacefully alongside Christians in Gaza
Christians are .13% of Gaza. Come on. If the Christians had any real power, they'd crush them just like they want to crush the Jews. They'd make it totally unworkable just like in Lebanon.
> No, they really don't? Meanwhile, Israeli politicians talk daily of committing war crimes and genocide, but somehow that's fine because it's against Arabs?
The far-right who does so, no that's not ok. But the IDF does not act in such a way.
> The blood of the Palestinian civilians that Hamas waged war from behind is absolutely on Hamas's hands.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Thousands of Palestinians children are dead, and for every single one, Israel could have chosen not to kill them, and the decision to do so is on them.
They had no choice. If you're Natanyahu on October 8, 2023, and the reports of the Hamas massacres on civilians come in, there is almost no leeway for reacting in a way differently than how the Israeli government and the IDF reacted. What I've heard from "pro-Palestine" (= pro Hamas) supporters as alternatives so far was utterly unconvincing, basically variations of the following:
- The "Israel should disband itself" reply: Give in to terrorists' demands, give them their country, and humbly negotiated for a freeing of the hostages without any military response. Hamas remains in charge as military dictatorship of Gaza.
- The military genius reply: I would have sent only special forces to Gaza to go after the Hamas leadership and free all hostages. No civilians would have been harmed and all collateral damage is avoided.
Neither of these are even remotely realistic. What was ordered and how events unfolded was more or less like any other country would have reacted. Two goals: #1 Destroy Hamas, #2 Free the hostages.
The problem right now with the hostage deal is that it leaves Hamas in charge. That's a huge problem.
They had a choice every single time they dropped a bomb! In fact, "the IDF is the most moral army in the world" supporters would like us to believe that very often, they chose not to.
If they want credit for the ones not dropped, they need to take responsibility for the ones they did. Not really that hard!
This is important because "it's all on Hamas's hands" is really just a refusal to engage with the ethical questions at all. Folks could (and clearly would!) say that, whether one child is killed, or a million. It's just a question of when it becomes untenable to brush the question away.
The idea that "this is more or less like any other country would have reacted" is the same trap; this makes Israel no worse or better than any other country, and conveniently means we don't have to ask ourselves about the morality of it all.
> If you're Natanyahu on October 8, 2023, and the reports of the Hamas massacres on civilians come in, there is almost no leeway for reacting in a way differently than how the Israeli government and the IDF reacted.
Any lack of political leeway to react differently is squarely within Israel's ethical score card. I.e. "Israel as an entity is not responsible for its choices because the entities constituent parts forced those choices" is reductive.
> The problem right now with the hostage deal is that it leaves Hamas in charge. That's a huge problem.
That this is the current outcome is maybe an indication that your framework of the three possible options (what Israel did + two strawmen) is lacking.
Israel was and still is fully justified to go to war against Hamas. You're the one who's dodging moral questions. You also fail to present any reasonable argument, only the usual sentiments and hand-waving. That's because you're unable to state any realistic path that the Prime Minister of Israel could have taken other than the one he took. That's exactly my point.
Do you think Palestine has a future under a Hamas government? If you do, you're supporting Hamas. If you don't, you need to come up with a plan to oust Hamas. Sadly, any realistic option would involve high collateral damage because Gaza is a densely populated area and the Al Aqsa brigades were comprised of about 40k prepared fighters with extensive tunnel systems.
I'm tired of hearing terrorist apologists coming up with vague "in between" replies that ultimately fall into one of the categories I've mentioned. If you can't even state how you would have dealt with the October 7 attacks, you should shut up.
At least I don't agree IDF is the most moral army. Armies and morality at wartime is an oxymoron. IDF retaliated with brutal force, and thats the fact. There is no defending IDF, just like there is no defending Hamas. There is no defending any war. In wartime, it is foolish to ask one party to be restrained. War is about military might. It is good for nothing, so everyone must be ultra careful not to trigger one.
Yep. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Hamas could've just surrendered and returned hostages. Before every single Palestinian child lost life, Hamas could've chosen to do that. So its on them
I mean, realistically speaking, the IDF is a powerful force, while Hamas is not. Israel has the ability to completely take over Gaza, but Gaza does not have the ability to take over Israel. So, as macabre as it may be, Hamas' right to exist, technically speaking, is controlled by Israel.
(All of this assuming no outside intervention for 3rd-party nations or groups of nations, of course.)
That's not how dropping 2000lb American bombs from American F-35s by an Israeli flying vampires paid for by American tax dollars onto babies in refugee tents work.
The Nazi demons at Auschwitz also blamed their victims in between zyklon B top-up shifts.
> Well, I would agree the Netherlands and Sweden are rapidly approaching total collapse
LOL? Despite variations, at least the Netherlands is one of the best run countries on this planet. When the Netherlands will collapse, everyone else will have been under water for many years, already.
What is the point of them trying to create this? That something like this would mostly be used to create disinformation and create chaos is easily understood before making something like this.
There are legitimate uses of this tech, such as preserving voices of people losing them such as Stephen Hawking, or making it better for blind/low vision people to follow text and interact with devices. For that latter case having a more natural voice that is also accurate is a good thing.
I use TTS to listen to articles and stories that don't have access to an audiobook narrator. I've used some of the voices based on MBROLA tech, but those can grate after a while.
The more recent voice models are a lot higher quality and emotive (without the jarring pitch transitions of things like Cepstral) so are better to listen to. However, the recent models can clip/skip text, have prolonged silence, have long/warped/garbled words, etc. that make them harder to use longer term.
You're right, of course. Unfortunately, however, we're all just actors in a giant, multi-player, iterated Prisoner's Dilemma here. If I decide not to pursue human-level automated speech generation, or I end up developing it and don't release because it's "too dangerous," someone else will just come in behind me and take all that market share I could have captured.
It's like we're stuck in some movie that came out in 1994[0], or something. Except, in this version, everything is gonna up sooner or later, anyway. Might as well profit from it along the way, right?
At least one good use is for video games where the text of some dialogue is determined when you run the game. For example in a game I work on player chat is local and voiced by tts configured by the player for their character.
On the one hand, I would love this kind of tech to be available for entertainment purposes. An RPG with convincing NPCs that are able to provide a novel experience for every player? Sounds great.
On the other: this is fraught with ethical problems, not to mention an ideal tool for fraud. At worst, it could be used as a weapon for total asymmetrical warfare on concepts like media integrity and an ideal tool for character assassination; disinformation, propaganda, etc.
I would happy welcome a world where this stuff is nerfed across the board, where videogames and porn are just chock full of AI voice-acting artifacts. We'll adjust and accept that as just a part of the experience, as we have with low fidelity media of the past. But my more cynical side tells me that's not what people in power are concerned about.
This is what happens when you have an industry full of people "looking for challenging problems to solve" without an ethical foundation to warn them that just because you can build something doesn't mean you should.
The point is to spawn a new medium, you'll have to imagine harder how positive that could be as people with lots of ideas are not going to give them to you for free.
Perfecting the tech for wide-spread use has trade offs; need for caller id, ease of slandering until trust in voice uniqueness recalibrates, all of which is going to change soon anyway but giving only rich/bad actors the tech at first has its own set of trade offs. Head in the sand is the irresponsible way.
Personally I feel a bit insulted that security can mandate a “tool” like this to “prevent” sql injections. Just because they are clowns doesn’t mean that we are.
Sorry users, the string “a > b” is not allowed any more. But fear not, “å > b” works just fine
As some one who is let’s say “autism adjacent” it really bothers me when people discuss a cure or prevention. I mean I get it, but this is also who I am and I wouldn’t want to be someone else.
I'm on the spectrum (diagnosed), and also like being me (most of the time).
But what about the poor sods who have so much happening all the time that they don't get the chance to learn to speak, or read, and scream in terror continually at the unending sensory deluge they try to live through? If there was a way to prevent that kind of presentation of ASD I think everyone would be better off. I took "prevention" to be about prevention of the life restricting developments of the condition.
On the other hand, if "prevention" is about culling the gene pool, I'm dead set against that.
> On the other hand, if "prevention" is about culling the gene pool, I'm dead set against that.
Well, you can be against it by raising autistic children yourself, it seems you're in a perfect position for that. Why people feel they have the right to demand that from others is beyond me.
The problem is that when you teach society that a certain “kind” of person needs to be culled, that is a stigma about people in that group.
IME such strong feelings don’t don’t stay relegated to your personal choices, they get reflected at a broader policy level.
People say “well it was your choice to have such broken people, we gave you a pill that would make that not possible. Therefore we las a society will not support them (you’ll hear rhetoric along the lines of “why should we spend my hard-earned tax dollars on social programs for autistic people, that’s a you problem, why people demand I pay for their choices is beyond me”)
Of course that’s when the government offers a “compassionate” final solution to the autist problem. Since autistic people can’t seem to stop reproducing despite the “cure”, we should sterilize them. Or we should make it mandatory because otherwise they are a drain. Then of course for the ones who are “too autistic” (I.e. who are nonverbal or who otherwise cannot be productive), we can euthanize them.
No thanks we have been down that road before as a society. It doesn’t end well.
The slippery slope scenario you described didn't happen with the Down syndrome for which there is a reliable screening. There are a few people want to ban that screening and they use exactly the same arguments (also it's eugenics!). We're lucky that at least these people are rightfully viewed as insane.
I am not familiar with the deaf community nor the controversy surrounding curing deafness. If you're asking me if I support firebombing clinics, no. I don't know what incident you're referring to.
I looked up some info and I find the issue to be far more complicated than you've summarized. One thing I note is that 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. They are making a decision about implants for an infant based on a reality they want the infant to experience, but they wouldn't even know any alternative way of living. Why do they get to make the decision for the child? Deaf people live like the rest of us. They face struggles, yet they live full happy rich lives.
Devices like implants don't come without risks and drawbacks. For people used to deaf culture, they have to learn how to integrate into hearing society, which can be frustrating and also lead to ridicule, shame, and embarrassment. The devices can be broken and can be distracting and annoying. I can understand why many would not opt for them, and would advocate against them when there is a ready and willing culture to receive deaf people as they are.
Maybe some people choose these implants and that's what they want. That's fine. No one is stopping them from doing that.
But I don't exactly see why hearing people are deciding that they must "cure" their child's deafness. I read that people are calling it child abuse. See, that's something I can't get behind, and it's an admission that our society is abusive toward people with differences.
That's not a reason to genetically alter people so that they conform to the abusive society, it's a reason to change society so that it doesn't abuse people with differences.
So again, I'm not familiar with this debate, here is some info I looked up:
> But I don't exactly see why hearing people are deciding that they must "cure" their child's deafness.
Because past some age, you can't meaningfully learn to use hearing for communication anymore. You can choose to lose hearing as an adult if you really want to. But only if you were given the opportunity to have it in the first place as a child.
The article seems to be focused on people who are unable to live independently.
>For the majority of people with ASD, the condition is a significant disability, with only 10–20% of children diagnosed before 5 years of age able to live independently as adults.
Its also missing how speacalists with traits and hyperfocus are the driving force behind a ton of research. Then again having a retarded kid is like having a 60 ton weight attached to you for life. Yes, yes, we are not allowed to say this, but thats easily said by those who don't wear the weights.
as someone who’s also autism adjacent and content with it, let’s still recognize that it’s not called spectrum for nothing. Yes, one’s norm of "functioning" can be more dependent on society than you’re own opinion, but I’ve witnessed several individuals on the "lower functioning" end of the spectrum who really didn’t seem like they were content with the way they’re living life. I’m not infallible, but it definitely seemed that way.
At minimum we should center such people in these discussions rather than talk about them with pity or only when using them to advance a rhetorical point. I want to hear from people with the highest support needs on this issue the most.
That’s even worse, of course you are allowed your own feelings. What gives me the creeps is when people start talking about prevention it easily slides into eugenics or other things that deny poeople agency or even their humanity.
There is a similar thing for deaf people. Or how screening for Down’s has changed the reality of raising a child with it.
If there is a way to prevent your child a life of hardship resulting from being deaf or born with down's syndrome, are you genuinely saying you wouldn't do it?
It's one thing to be content with who you are, it's another to deliberately impose hardship on someone when it could be avoided.
It’s one thing to prevent being born with hardship and preventing being born at all. Which is the case with Down’s screening.
But it’s not that I’m against it or wanting to forbid it. It’s that these are very tricky subjects with a lot of very hard moral issues that need careful consideration. In the end I believe it should be about letting people have a choice and to remember that people are human even if they are different. To not take away someone’s agency.
Nobody's forcing you to get a cure. But denying it to others is a really weird idea. Until we can tell apart kids who will develop fun quirks from those who won't be able to live independently, prevention doesn't sound bad either.
I have no problem with discussion about making some issues people face better with medication, although I think autistic people should be centered in those discussion.
However “prevention” talk is a whole separate issue and that one does give me eugenics vibes.
I don’t know if I see a company extracting rent from other people as a win…