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Zaktor

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U.S. Missiles Strike Targets in Yemen Linked to the Houthi Militia (www.nytimes.com)

The United States and five of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for the past three months....

Zaktor ,

For the Biden administration, the decision to finally strike back at the Houthis was three months in coming.

Weird framing from the NYT on this. Like this particular response was inevitable and Biden was slow to respond (“finally”). Nothing about this was inevitable, nor were the prior attacks necessarily demanding response from the United States.

Zaktor ,

For the Biden administration, the decision to finally strike back at the Houthis was three months in coming.

Weird framing from the NYT on this with “finally”. Like this was inevitable and Biden was objectively slow to respond. Nothing about this was inevitable, nor were the prior attacks necessarily demanding response from the United States. We can be word police. Or we can not.

Zaktor ,

Iraq may have had a civilian casualty ratio of up to 77%. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Ira…

A Pentagon leak for 2004-2009 put the number at 66,000 civilians out of 109,000 total fatalities. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Civ…

Zaktor ,

The Democrats (except for Biden) aren’t being hypocritical here. They objected to both Trump and Biden.

Zaktor ,

They’re a rebel faction that controls most of the country, including the capital. It’s different, but they’re a lot closer to a government than something like Hezbollah.

Zaktor ,

The Wikipedia source on the first link doesn’t say what the citation claims it does, if you follow it.

I followed the link to the report and it’s not clear whether the 39k number is total combatant casualties, but you can just calculate from the civilian deaths where the estimate is at least 112k-122k civilian casualties out of 174k total, which is ~70%. You’re acting like that 7% difference is a big gotcha.

And I don’t know why you’re acting like the US being responsible for 80% of casualties in Iraq is a wild idea. We massively overpowered the limited Iraqi capabilities. They had much fewer combatants and didn’t even have the ability to drop bombs. The CCR isn’t about a particular side though, since you’ll always get into muddy questions of who was responsible for a particular death. It certainly wasn’t the case that we were mostly just killing terrorists.

Zaktor ,

Massively overpower means you have the means and weaponry to cause significantly more collateral damage. This fantasy that the US has surgical precision with its strikes is just wishful thinking. The Pentagon document leak has specific examples of classifying civilians as enemy combatants and widespread abuse. You’re motivated enough to follow sources and question casualty claims on minutiae and then just claim it was all someone else without even a passing inclination to support your statement with data.

Zaktor ,

Having done something before should make it easier for you to find sources this time to support your minimizations. And to be clear 50-50 is TERRIBLE and means any more serious operation we initiate is likely to kill a lot of innocent people. We’re not Israel, we only kill one innocent person for every enemy fighter, is not the reassuring statement you think it is.

The idea of “Power is big boom” is horribly antiquated WW2 style thinking.

You have a fantasy where precision guided bombs dropped from 10,000 feet punch cleanly through buildings to destroy terrorist heads and terrorist heads alone with no collateral damage to nearby people or buildings. Power is also having the ability to just shoot up a car because it might be getting too close to your check point, knowing that your overriding priority is maintaining control and protecting your allies and you’ll never suffer consequences for being a little overeager and making an oopsie.

Zaktor ,

Your math is wrong because if you’re not looking at overall civilian casualty rate then you need to remove the allied combatants from the denominator. The Pentagon leaks have a break down that has both civilian casualty numbers and enemy forces. 66,081 civilians were killed compared to 23,984 enemy forces. If the US killed 36% of all the civilians they’d be at 1-1. Which is roughly the rate the Iraq Body Count attributes to them.

Zaktor ,

If they were willing to sign a repeal of it, nothing stopped them from simply not using it. The AUMF didn’t make them start wars.

Zaktor ,

I am looking at the overall civilian casualty rate for deaths by violence.

Then it’s the original numbers you’ve been falling all over yourself to deny. You’re trying to pick apart these statistics to divide blame, but that’s an entirely different statistic, and that one very much cares who is dying. We don’t get an extra buffer on civilian deaths because one of our allies died as well.

When deciding to start a war, the overall CCR rate is the appropriate statistic. It doesn’t matter to the civilians which side kills them, just that they’re dead because we started a war. And Israel being extremely bad doesn’t make war by less bad actors no big deal. You’ve been minimizing the cost of war throughout this, picking at a percentage here or there based on some unsupported faith in the restraint of the US war machine.

This all started from you claiming “Our civilian casualty ratios were far from Israel’s currently claimed 50-50 (as opposed to what it actually probably is, ie 80%+ civilians).” CCRs are general measures for combats as a whole, but if you wanted to calculate a civilians killed divided by enemy killed, the US ratio in Iraq was right at that 50-50 ratio you thought was far beyond what the US would ever do.

Zaktor ,

They even managed to use the passive voice when the person the cop killed was himself. Bravo media, truly exceptional.

Zaktor ,

Yeah, this was an unprofessional fuckup from a position that should have zero fuckups, but it’s not multi-day national news. I’m surprised he’s not being fired, but if the president thinks this was a one time thing that won’t happen again, that’s fine.

Zaktor ,

Real incontrovertible and inexcusable plagiarism too. Way more than Gay was accused of. Just straight up copying Wikipedia.

Social media companies made $11 billion in US ad revenue from minors, Harvard study finds (apnews.com)

The researchers say the findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth...

Zaktor ,

Why would ad revenue from children be a problem? Kids have been advertised to forever. The problem, if there is one, is whether they act appropriately to handle their underaged users, not that they show them ads. Fuck the corps, but “think of the children” often gets us stuff whose primary impact isn’t protecting children, like KOSA.

Trump claims he’s never read Mein Kampf as he repeats anti-immigrant rhetoric (www.independent.co.uk)

Donald Trump has now denied ever having read Adolf Hitler’s 1925 memoir-manifesto Mein Kampf as he faces a firestorm over his recent run of anti-immigrant comments, which have been likened to the Nazi leader’s infamous “blood and soil” rhetoric....

Zaktor ,

Sounds like he’s thinks the problem is plagiarism rather than similarity of content.

Zaktor ,

Yup, this line probably wasn’t just stumbled upon randomly in his rotting brain, it was fed to him from one of his white nationalist speech goons. And it’s possible they too didn’t get it straight from Hitler but just read it on a neo-Nazi thought piece and found it compelling. Most white nationalists aren’t studying the foundational texts, but they all seem to know the same words.

Zaktor ,

The Nazis at first didn’t really care whether the Jews were expelled or murdered, they just wanted them eliminated from Germany. Some combination of expelling Jews and encouraging Jewish emigration was the initial plan.

Zaktor ,

Netanyahu barely won the last election and is being prosecuted for corruption. Leading up to the attack he had months of protests against his government. Lots of Israelis agree he’s horrible and shouldn’t be running the country.

Zaktor ,

It’s all Nazi shit man, stop trying to pretend there’s a not-so-bad form that’s essential context.

Zaktor ,

Sure it is nice getting 3 day weekends but I am not cut out for 10h days. I just cannot be productive that long.

There’s a strong argument that people also can’t be productive for 5x8h days. Cases of the Mondays, Friday afternoons, just staring at the wall. I think a fundamental aspect of the standard workweek is a lot of employees are sometimes just at work without actually being productive. That’s why some studies find no reduction in productivity when people go 4x8.

Zaktor ,

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators.

Are deleted and resolved posts still visible to moderators? This seems like a tool for abusive accounts to dodge moderation by deleting their posts before they’re up long enough to get moderated. Reddit had a similar issue with bad actors being able to delete/edit their previously removed posts to hide the content from moderators reviewing the account to see if their activity patterns were worthy of a full ban.

Zaktor ,

What would independent verification mean on this? Who would qualify as independent that could reach the scene and evaluate it? At some point you can’t just decide that since the invading and allegedly responsible power doesn’t allow international investigations then no potential crime can ever be responsibly reported.

Zaktor ,

What statement? I think that it hasn’t been independently verified is essential, because it’s true, but the person I responded to wanted the entire story to not be published.

Zaktor ,

Threads isn’t going to federate with Lemmy. It’s not the same sort of communication and the crossovers are ugly and confusing. Mastodon is where the real federation/defederation decisions will take place.

Zaktor ,

All your stuff is already public on the internet without any special access being granted. If they want the convenience of receiving ActivityPub packets and metadata, they can just stand up a honeypot instance and some fake accounts. The Fediverse isn’t built for privacy.

Zaktor ,

Sure, if they clone Reddit then I definitely could see it, though I think Lemmy communities are a much bigger risk for them to open up to since they’re so moderation dependent. At least with Mastodon what you see is all based on your follows. Reddit loves to abdicate on responsibility by just leaving it all to the mods, but I don’t think Meta can get away with that, and especially when they don’t directly control the mods.

Zaktor ,

Copyright is a law. Everything is copyrighted, with or without the little ©. Licensing is a peer-to-peer contract. Unless you can prove the other side is aware of and agreed to a contract, it doesn’t bind them.

Notably, licensing often is needed because general copyright exists. The license grants them the right to copy your full text or whatever, and if they didn’t agree to it, then they had no right to copy it. There are exceptions for excerpts and search indexing and the like, but they can’t (legally) just take all your posts because you put them online.

That all said, big companies have already been doing mass copyright violations for AI, so copyright or licenses don’t necessarily mean anything unless you can force them to comply. There are lawsuits on AI scraping now. Because the end result is either making up some reason that copyright doesn’t ban copying if you do enough of it or making LLMs effectively illegal and putting some massive corporations on the hook for mass violations against basically everyone online, I wouldn’t personally bet the courts ruling against the corporations.

Zaktor ,

Turkish Muslims probably aren’t reading Newsweek. This isn’t a newsworthy event in America, but it’s being reported for consumption by a western audience.

Zaktor ,

Netanyahu himself has allowed money to go to Hamas because he doesn’t want the more moderate Palestinian Authority to unify the Palestinians.

jpost.com/…/Netanyahu-Money-to-Hamas-part-of-stra…

ajsadauskas , (edited ) to technology
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Are agile scrums an outdated idea?

Here's a video on YouTube making the case for why agile was an innovative methodology when it was first introduced 20 years ago.

However, he argues these days, daily scrums are a waste of time, and many organisations would be better off automating their reporting processes, giving teams more autonomy, and letting people get on with their work:

https://youtu.be/KJ5u_Kui1sU?si=M_VLET7v0wCP4gHq

A few of my thoughts.

First, it's worth noting that many organisations that claim to be "agile" aren't, and many that claim to use agile processes don't.

Just as a refresher, here's the key values and principles from the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/

  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  4. Responding to change over following a plan
  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
  • Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  • Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  • Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
  • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Your workplace isn't agile if your team is micromanaged from above; if you have a kanban board filled with planning, documentation, and reporting tasks; if your organisation is driven by processes and procedures; if you don't have autonomous cross-functional teams.

Yet in many "agile" organisations, I've noticed that the basic principles of agile are ignored, and what you have is micromanagement through scrums and kanban boards.

And especially outside software development teams, agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword. (I once met a manager at a conference who talked up how agile his business was, and didn't believe me when I said agile was originally a software development methodology — one he revealed he wasn't following the principles of.)

@technology

Zaktor ,

I’ll preface this to say I’ve only done real standup meetings on a project a long time ago, and maybe it wasn’t done the right way (No True Agile), but I didn’t really see the point.

In my opinion a 10 minute meeting with more than 3 people is probably worthless. What information is being exchanged in that time that shouldn’t just be an email? Are people not sure who can help with their issue or not going to bring up things that need more attention if not forced to speak? Does the entire team really need to hear these minute summaries of the small things people accomplished in the last 8 work-hours? And couldn’t this just be done with the team lead talking to each person and coordinating or calling meetings when members need to talk?

So these super short meetings succeed at not wasting a lot of money on process, but IMO it’s because they’re a short waste rather than because they’re an efficient use of time.

Zaktor ,

That kind of meeting would be better as an email.

Zaktor ,

The issue is this only has value if your scrum is large enough people might be accidentally conflicting with someone they wouldn’t just be coordinating with normally. And the larger the team the worst the cost of a standup meeting and the less value is provided. A multi team scrum sounds horrible.

Zaktor ,

This sounds great. “Hey, I’m trying to figure out this bug in this area, anyone have any ideas”. The main benefit of meetings is forced acknowledgement of “messages”, but reading email or other communication mediums should just be part of being a responsible professional.

Zaktor ,

a dev wasting a day on a useless project because they missed an email

This all makes sense to me, though I do think this “missed an email” issue really is a problem of unprofessionalism that needs to be resolved. I get that some people just don’t like it, but your job includes reading emails, at least from your immediate team members. Alternately, if it was missed because the sender is prone to sending manifestos to the entire team with an important query embedded in paragraph 4, they need to do better. It shouldn’t be that email is an unreliable form of communication.

Zaktor ,

Gathering for a meeting and sitting through everyone’s turns is way longer than typing an email. “I have a problem with X” shouldn’t be a long email, and if the description is a longer conversation you’re burning too much time for the uninvolved people in a large group meeting. In both situations the back and forth discussion should occur directly in a follow-up, not in the group communication medium.

It’s almost never the right choice to prioritize the speaker’s time efficiency over the listeners’. Any speed in speaking vs. typing is completely overshadowed by making 5-10 people listen to them vs. a quick skim of an email and then moving on when it’s not something you know about.

Zaktor ,

LOL, I very much could not care less random internet person. I’m quite comfortable in my career and you sound obnoxious.

Zaktor ,

The problem isn’t the speed of communication, it’s requiring everyone else to witness communication that doesn’t apply to them. I’ve never been on a team where 8+ people are all potentially involved in the same issue. If it takes someone 5 minutes to write an email or 1 minute to talk it out, it’s still a bad idea to have 8 people listen so their communication will be faster. And generally a back and forth, which is where direct communication really shines over email, shouldn’t be a full-team situation.

And yeah, email can be a distraction, but that means you need to handle email better (filter your team’s email to priority and churn through the bullshit flooding your inbox later). It’s just as much a flow killer to get people up and out for a meeting that may be short, but is largely worthless. I know when a meeting isn’t worth my time. Short is better than long, but it’s still a disruption beyond skimming an email and recognizing “not my thing”.

In the end, what really strikes me as a problem is the frequency of these meetings. You shouldn’t need to be synchronizing your team every day. Leading up to a release, sure, every day matters and things can change in an instant, but for a regular way to manage a software team? You shouldn’t have daily pivots needing realignment. The ritual isn’t to make the devs comfortable by structuring their day, they’re not children and they can make their own structure, it’s instilling a feeling of perpetual crunch.

Zaktor ,

So it’s not the scrum that’s handling the issues it’s the leaders. They could just as easily walk around to everyone and ask if they have any issue. Like most meetings, the scrum is efficient for the manager, not for the devs.

Zaktor ,

So some total bullshit.

Zaktor ,

All three countries are ruled by military juntas after relatively recent coups. The mutual defense treaty was in response to threats by other West Africans nations to invade to reestablish civilian rule in Niger.

Harris says US will ‘under no circumstances’ permit forced relocation of Palestinians (www.cnn.com)

Vice President Kamala Harris said in a meeting Saturday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that Washington will not allow for the forced relocation of Palestinians or any redrawing of the current border of the Gaza Strip....

Zaktor ,

I don’t think Israel minds the borders of Gaza remaining as is, just as long as there aren’t any Palestinians living there. They’ll “voluntarily” relocate, for humanitarian reasons, since most of the infrastructure, houses, and hospitals happened to fall down.

Zaktor ,

In a statement on X, the AJC wrote…

Taking to a platform run by an actual public antisemite to criticize the Pope for decrying mass civilian deaths really says something about where their moral attention is focused.

Zaktor ,

Why do I feel like it’s going to be revealed that he had blown the whistle on a coworker of police brutality or something? A cop simply getting fired for blatant unprofessionalism seems so unlikely.

Zaktor ,

However, the implication of saying ‘Get Fucked Germany’ is that Germany is going after invalid targets.

The implication is that leftists vilifying Israel are not valid targets. Antisemitism is illegal in Germany, criticism of Israel is not. None of us know whether leftists were targeted, or whether said leftists were being antisemitic, but the quote lumps them in with unambiguous bad guys.

If the people described in the article are from a leftist movement, you should be offended by that, not defending them because they’re leftist.

WHY WOULD ANYONE ASSUME THEY’RE LEFTISTS? Nothing about those statements were left-coded or about Israel. This is bothsides bullshit to conflate legit criticism of a nation currently committing war crimes and mass murder (y’know villainous stuff) in with “extreme right-wing circles” (actual Nazis, definitely doing antisemtism) and “Islamist fanatics” (also definitely doing antisemitism).

This is the person responsible for that quote, expressing support for bannings of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and Palestine-associated clothing while implying criticism of Israel is a justified reason to ban an event. They want criticism of Israel (or support for Palestinians) to be seen as equivalent to antisemitism.

Cities such as Hamburg have blocked pro-Palestinian rallies, while Berlin’s education senator authorized schools to forbid the keffiyeh scarf and the phrase “Free Palestine.”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has called these bans a “justified” measure against “anti-Israel, aggressive and antisemitic” threats.

Zaktor ,

There’s some pretty questionable comment removals here. What exactly triggered Rule 4 in that comment by /u/[email protected], anonymous mod?

Zaktor ,

I don’t know how to link a specific item in the modlog, and I assume reposting removed content is inherently rulebreaking. Someone was objecting to the quote lumping in leftists criticizing Israel with far right antisemites and Islamist fanatics. The only remotely, squint really hard, maybe it could be construed as in the vaguest vicinity of Rule 4 was saying “fuck Germany” in response, which just isn’t racism or prejudice. So other than that, it sure appears to be a mod removing a post because they don’t like the argument being made.

Zaktor ,

This is more of a general comment than a direct response to what you said, so don’t take it as an accusation. A lot of people - and a hell of a lot of people I’ve seen on here - have reacted to the indefensible position that criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic by swinging to an equally indefensible position that you cannot be antisemitic as long as you’re being critical of Israel.

The guy making this quote is very much trying to do the indefensible thing. While you can absolutely be antisemitic in criticism of Israel, that is at most a tiny sliver of anti-Israeli speech on the left (not a Nazi pretending) and yet there is a concerted effort to try to use that to silence criticism by Israel whole cloth (including active government acts). This isn’t a good faith advocate mistakenly blurring lines. He’s very much trying to tar opposition to Israel (his birth country according to Wiki) or support for their enemy as hate speech. We don’t need to pretend this is happening in a void, absent of ongoing campaigns to silence anti-Israel criticism or without the context of the speaker’s own words trying to conflate a support for Israeli’s victims as criticism with Jewish people.

I don’t think it’s naïve to make the assumption that these are all good arrests for actual hate speech (for one I expect there are many more than 17 public antisemitic statements), German municipal governments have banned pro-Palestinian events, so it’s not really like you can be 100% sure the German government would never blur lines as the quoted speaker wants.

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