niyyou

I am often baffled by this reasoning: A attacks B. A colonizes, kills, occupies, humiliates, etc. B. B swears to destroy A. All of a sudden, it becomes legitimate for A to commit all those crimes cause "hypothetically", B would do worse if they could.

Incredible gaslighting.

"Hamas WANTS to eradicate Israel".

Israel DOES eradicate the Palestinians.

And yet, it's fact, just look at the numbers world-wide :(.

the number one cause of child mortality today is Israel.

It’s just proportional to the horrors it commits. Don’t blame the judge for your own crimes.

I really do. (personal note: I never know if I should engage with these trolls, given them more visibility, or simply ignore them, risking seeing their propaganda spread)

You forgot, the West Bank, under apartheid, extreme settler violence, constant and massive home expropriation, is also khamas, although no khamas ever walked on it.

The number of israel trolls who want to discredit the UN here is telling. As it was said, the first victim of war is truth.

Good that you mention it, yes Israel rapes, kills, robs, as you say. https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell

Exactly.

Furthermore, it is inherintly colonial as a former colonizer (the brits) gave the land away to new colonizers. Worth noting that Balfour was an antisemite who wanted the Jews out of his country, hence the declaration and the first wave if immigration before 48. Back then, many Palestinians got expelled from their homes, sometimes from the very jewish people they willingly hosted. All under the protection of the british army.

I politely disagree with almost every combination of the words you just used :). 1. hackers could be interested in news other than tech, that’s the very identity of hacking: understanding things in this case, the world politics and conflicts. 2. even then, there are _always_ non-tech entries on HackerNews, de facto. 3. it’s not 4000 old issue (misleading oversimplification). In essence, it’s a century-old colonial project that is entirely inline with the 19th and 20th century European colonialism, with a supremacist idealogy at its core (ethnostate).

I used to think that it’s beneficial to separate tech from politics but I’m convinced now that it’s a delusional stance. Politics is in tech whether we like it or not, CEOs have their political agenda and ideologies and often talk about them openly, their products directly impact people’s lives, some change the entire society. In the case of the Gaza genocide, Lavender and Gospel systems are the direct enabelers of such scale of devastation. I think it’s far from being off-topic. In a nutshell, no politics is itself a political opinion (that happens to favor the dominant party).

How come every time the Israeli crimes are featured in HN, the corresponding article is flagged?

I’m absolutely baffled by Germans at this point. I’ve been taking to many Germans in the beginning of the genocide and the major feedback I got was « given what we did to the Jews… we can’t criticize Israel ». Now almost two years after, countless of massive crimes and violated international laws later, I really can’t fathom how people are not outside shouting to their government to stop supporting this evil state (which has nothing to do with Judaism as many courageous Jews are currently pointing out). This is deep corruption at the state level and, likely, deep racism at the population level. Dehumanizing the Palestinians is the main explanation for the silent majority in Germany, and not without irony: yesterday they dehumanized the Jews, and instead of learning a general lesson, they keep dehumanizing other semites in the name of their past crimes.

Feels like the most valuable skill to have as a programmer in times of Claude Code is that of carefully reading spec documentation and having an acute sense of critical thinking when reviewing code.

Sounds like a direct quote from some religious ISIS fanatic.

It is refreshing to see that the Israeli terrorism is showing up more often on HN. It is absolutely fallacious to claim that tech has nothing to do with politics. Everything does. Especially in times where the crimes are enable and scaled thanks to tech. Israel is de facto the most horrible state humanity has produced, it's based on violence, racism, and terrorism. 90% of humanity is sick of it today but for some reasons, global leaders seem complicit. Things have to change from the ground up and us, as a community or set of communities have our share in it. To paraphrase Desmond Tutu, if you don't take sides in a conflict between an elephant and an ant, you are de facto taking the side of the elephant.

Of course. Here is a corrected version of your text that fixes the grammar and typos while keeping the colloquial tone:

I'd like to offer a less skeptical view on this, contrary to what I've read here so far. LLMs that act (a.k.a. agents) bring a whole lot of new security and privacy issues. If we were already heading toward a privacy dystopia (with trackers, centralized services, etc.), agents could take that to a whole new level.

That's why I can only cheer when I see a different path where agents are run locally (by the way, Hugging Face has already published a couple of spaces demonstrating that). As a plus, because they're small, their environmental footprint will also be smaller (although, admittedly, I can also see the Jevons Paradox possibly happening here too).

> I hope that, to whatever extent this is happening, it's not widespread, and anyone committing war crimes is very visibly and publicly tried in court.

Sorry but you’re either dishonest or totally delusional. Tens of thousands of children murdered, nobody even thinks of putting a stop on this, and you say « it’s not widespread ». What?

There has been so so many atrocities, even before Oct 7th committed by both the Israeli army and armed settlers in the West Bank. There is never, NEVER, anyone being held accountable. Snipers shoot kids on the beach? All good. Torture and rape in your prisons? Fine.

Dude, you should fix your society. You are simply heading towards your own destruction, morally, on the side of public sympathy, and merely as people capable of living with other people peacefully.

edit: minor typo.

Sourced articles like these are good and further proof that Israel is a psychopathic state and society. But what's odd is to depict is as "surprising" or even shocking when the same state has been carpet bombing civilian, including women and children for 16 months straight, causing what is estimated at 300 000 deaths, committing every single atrocity or infringement to the international law possible, including targeting medics, journalists, using starvation as a weapon of war, bragging on it on social media, having politicians incite to eradicate the remaining part of the Gaza population, and I could go on and on with nameless atrocities. So just to put things in perspective, this article depicts a horrible incident, but it is entirely in line with the rest of the Israeli policy, and unfortunately pales in comparison with the ongoing large-scale massacre.

It's not even some "forgotten AI technique" (sigh...). It's been a hot topic for the last 5 years. Used a lot with Variational Auto-encoders, etc. Such a bad journalism.

Behind this rhetorically articulated question, there is a simplistic view of content generation and consumption. First off, if you use LLMs, you are _constantly_ reading stuff nobody else bothered to answer you. So, it's not about who speaks, it's about the what. Then, what you deem as written by nobody turns out (not without irony) an average of so many (possibly) good writings and thoughts, gleaned from various corners of the web. In this regard, I particularly like--and want to shout out--the author's clarity on the work's attribution. It's not his. It is Claude's, hence, everybody's (in a sense). Finally, as a mere form of compressed human written productions, LLMs don't have agency over what they generate. So the prompting, the idea, as well as some editorial decisions are still attributed to the person behind this, hence making it unique in its own way. Instead of seeing as a piece that he didn't bother write, I see it as piece he chose to edit summoning the ghosts of every writer who ever put something on internet, which again, he correctly credits (to the limits of knowing what exact data Claude uses... which is another story).

Hey, I really enjoyed reading your post. It's straight to the point, the list is very rich and well illustrated with examples. I have been coding in python for the last 20 years and I nowadays rarely like reading these posts as much as I did for yours. Kudos.

As Sara Hooker discussed in her paper https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00061-1..., bias goes way beyond data.

Many thanks! For the record, there is another useful tool in the same vein, that packs a repo to be given to an LLM https://github.com/yamadashy/repomix.

Hi Simon, just read your blog post, thanks for the wrap-up. Just curious, what did you use to make Gemini look at all of your codebase, Aider, something else?

Again. This. is. not. Open-source. At best, open-weights. Clickbait 100%.

On the contrary, ArXiv is for pre-prints, i.e. not (yet) peer-reviewed. Off the top of the my head, it was initially used by physicists who often have huge collaborations and long reviewing time. Then the ML community invaded the space later on. This does not mean a peer-reviewed paper cannot go there of course.

In any serious discipline, ranging from philosophy to mathematics, precision is a requirement. Here, "woke" is everything but precise. It's an umbrella term that the right uses with bad faith to discard any form of social struggle or claim for a more egalitarian society, then part of the left took ownership of the term (reverse stigma).

Then a quoted aberrations IMO,

> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.

These statements are typically what fuels some people's outrage. Who is PG to decide what is the right scale? In the US for example, too many black people lost their lives because of a systemic racism, at the scale of society (police, job, housing, ...). Is this not scaled enough? To me, it shows an incredible level of disconnection between the social class PG belongs to and the actual problems in society.