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xenomor

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Red Crescent Refutes State Department, Says Israel Never Reached Out About Hind Rajab’s Death (theintercept.com)

THE ISRAELI MILITARY never contacted the Palestine Red Crescent Society about Israel’s killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, her family members, and the paramedics sent to save her, a Red Crescent spokesperson told The Intercept, refuting the State Department’s first substantive remarks about the killing that took place...

xenomor ,

I agree with this sentiment, but let’s all not forget to give the US credit for its lies too.

It's wild how many job listings might be fake (www.businessinsider.com)

Resume Builder, which offers résumé templates, surveyed nearly 650 hiring managers in May and found nearly seven in 10 said it was “morally acceptable” to post fake jobs. Hiring managers credited the move with increasing revenue, morale, and how much workers get done....

xenomor ,

This is straight up fraud. I believe that one of the reasons companies do this is to signal business growth to prospects and investors. For public companies, that’s a form of securities fraud. I observed this firsthand when doing a job search a few years ago. I would apply to new job listings as soon as they were published. After not hearing a response I would check in to see if the listing was still active. I would frequently see the exact same listing reappear every six weeks or so. I watched this cycle repeat for more than a year with some companies. Each time the job is re-listed, the clock resets on networks like LinkedIn. It creates the illusion of fresh business activity and growth. One specific company that did this was Snowflake. To clarify, I am directly accusing Snowflake of securities fraud.

xenomor , (edited )

As an American, I’m legit terrified of sustaining some kind of injury or extended illness. The society we have constructed, and that we tolerate, is an absolute abomination. Let me say it again. The United States is an absolute, top to bottom, left to right shit hole. We do not value people, life, or well being in any meaningful or equitable way. This is an economy masquerading as a society.

xenomor ,

I had very modest needs for Windows. It was not my primary computing device, but there was one application that I ran on an older laptop all the time. All the recent drama pushed me to investigate a bit and I learned that the app is also on Linux. I was able to wipe and install Linux Mint easily despite not really knowing much about either OS. There are a lot of guides on youtube about the process that helped make it easy. Laptop is running well so far. I’m also using this as as a test to see if I can replace much of my Apple stuff with Linux as those devices start to age out. Thanks for the little push Microsoft.

xenomor ,

In one form or another, this is basically the rationalization that warmongers always use to justify their own awfulness. As an American, I’ve been listening to my own country deploy this gem my entire life.

xenomor ,

I would like to understand how the size/capability of this proposed facility compares to both CERN and also the never completed Superconducting Supercollider. I will never get over the fact that, as Americans, we could have had a huge lead in this research. We started to build it, then decided to stop.

xenomor ,

This seems to happen every time a technology company grows beyond some threshold of size/market share/revenue. I can’t think of a single exception.

xenomor , (edited )

Reminds me of some of the anticompetitive behaviors that Amazon has long engaged in. Among other practices, they use their privileged position in the marketplace to gain insight into markets, then force sellers out of business by producing the same products at a loss. In this way, third party sellers on Amazon serve the purpose of conducting market research for Amazon.

It’s remarkable that Apple has been able to generally maintain such a cordial relationship with developers for this long. Hopefully change is coming.

Iran signals a major boost in nuclear enrichment at key site (www.washingtonpost.com)

A major expansion underway inside Iran’s most heavily protected nuclear facility could soon triple the site’s production of enriched uranium and give Tehran new options for quickly assembling a nuclear arsenal if it chooses to, according to confidential documents and analysis by weapons experts....

xenomor ,

Given the breaking of the nuclear deal by the US, and the aggression of the US and Israel since 10/7, this is both entirely predictable and strategically logical.

US aircraft carrier counters false Houthi claims with 'Taco Tuesdays' as deployment stretches on - AP (apnews.com)

“I think it’s been about two or three times in the past six months we’ve allegedly been sunk, which we have not been,” Hill told The Associated Press during a recent visit to the carrier. “It is almost comical at this point. They’re attempting to maybe inspire themselves through misinformation, but it doesn’t work...

xenomor ,

The Al Jazeera report that you link to only claims that Houthis launched missile and drone attacks at a US ship. It makes no claim that they seriously damaged or sunk a US ship. Here is a BBC/MSN report that describes similar things. www.bbc.com/news/articles/c800j14y38xo?xtor=AL-72… what exactly are you claiming is false in the Al Jazeera report? Both reports also describe US actions against Houthis targets, which would be a strange thing to do if the Houthis aren’t in fact doing something (even if it is a very ineffective something).

xenomor ,

As penance, I suggest that the church dismantle itself, distribute its wealth, go away and do something actually productive, and don’t come back.

With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system?

Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play....

xenomor ,

Weight is the wrong criteria to use. Why not just have it classed by skill level. Enforce equity in school sports by mandating that a meaningful distribution of skill-based leagues are funded. This seems like a very simple solution to me that would address gender-based inequities in general as well as improve sports overall.

xenomor , (edited )

I literally cannot understand the argument that you’re making. People with different physiological characteristics are not going to have the same skill levels. Nothing you listed argues against my proposal. All the physiological advantages that you listed are fine. Some females may be better than some males at some tasks and vice versa. Why not let them compete against each other. Seems like creating a larger pool of competitive athletes would improve any sport. Carving out leagues that cater to different capability levels would open opportunities for more people. I’m proposing that we have more, better, more competitive and exciting sports. What exactly are you objecting to?

xenomor ,

We already basically do this with things like the differentiation between Varsity and JV. Not sure why this is such an offensive concept to some of you (just kidding, I’m pretty sure I understand exactly why y’all are offended). If competition is what is great about sports, then excluding some competitive participants because of arbitrary physiological characteristics actively diminishes the sport. But perhaps competition isn’t actually what some of you think is great about sports. I suspect that what some of you actually value about sports is to experience a kind of masterbatory high of seeing someone you can identify with, in shallow ways, achieving things that you yourself cannot.

xenomor ,

It’s remarkable how quickly OpenAI has speed run into evilcorp status.

Microsoft in damage-control mode, says it will prioritize security over AI (arstechnica.com)

Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority, President Brad Smith testified to Congress on Thursday, promising that security will be “more important even than the company’s work on artificial intelligence.”...

xenomor ,

My suggestion, based on more than three decades of observing and interacting with this company: don’t believe a fucking thing they say, ever.

xenomor ,

Lebensraum

xenomor ,

JFC, the fact that the article says they’re planning to reach younger voters on tik tok is so perfectly symbolic of everything wrong with their candidate. Biden want to embrace the same stuff with one side of his mouth, that he’s berates as a national security risk with the other side. Just like he is both very concerned with the plight of Palestinians and also very eager to facilitate their extermination. He is a disaster of a candidate, president and human being, and deserves every bit of scrutiny that younger folks are giving him.

Now kids, don’t pay attention to what he’s saying or doing, just engage with our sick sick memes.

xenomor ,

The time has long passed whereby we need to remove Google as the effective governing authority of the internet. As with most things online, a good idea ballooned into a net negative for nearly everyone else. This fact was obvious decades ago. There needs to be actual competition and government need to reassert itself as more than a rubber stamp for business growth.

xenomor ,

If Biden, once again, lets Netanyahu do this without meaningful consequences, then Biden literally is foolish and weak.

xenomor ,

Thumb.

Israel says Gaza war likely to last another seven months as tanks probe Rafah (www.reuters.com)

Israel sent tanks on raids into Rafah on Wednesday and said its war on Hamas in Gaza would likely continue all year, after Washington said the Rafah assault did not amount to a major ground operation that would trigger a change in U.S. policy....

xenomor ,

I’m old enough to remember when 24 hours ago the Biden administration said that a ground assault in Rafah would be crossing its red line. It’s pretty easy to remember because that was about 48 hours after the Biden administration said that just ‘going in’ to Rafah would be crossing its red line.

xenomor ,

Imagine how much SpaceX could learn if they blow up a crewed starship.

  • Musk toadie (probably)
xenomor ,

Imagine having moral standards that you apply consistently, ha ha ha ha!

xenomor ,

I’m old enough to have lived through the advent of the World Wide Web. I was so enthusiastic about the potential of these technologies. It was going to finally democratize information and do away with misinformation and pseudoscience, and promote critical thinking, freedom and democracy. I crafted an entire career around my optimism about this stuff. It’s now obvious in retrospect that none of that happened and we have collectively regressed on all those fronts. I’m not making a causal claim about damage that the internet might have done. I don’t know if this stuff would have happened anyway. But, it certainly didn’t deliver on the promise we were so excited about. IMO it all went wrong when we handed the keys to the whole thing over to commercial entities.

US military says Gaza Strip pier project is completed, aid to soon flow as Israel-Hamas war rages on (apnews.com)

The U.S. military finished installing a floating pier for the Gaza Strip on Thursday, with officials poised to begin ferrying badly needed humanitarian aid into the enclave besieged over seven months of intense fighting in the Israel-Hamas war....

xenomor ,

I hope everyone understands that this entire project is a facade, designed to provide Biden and his administration with a hook on which they can hang claims of deniability without actually meaningfully hampering Israel’s genocide campaign.

How Zionism became a synonym for violence and oppression (www.theguardian.com)

For decades, Joe Biden has proudly declared that he is a Zionist, and he has repeated that claim since Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel. But for the student anti-war protests gripping the US, the words “Zionist” and “Zionism” have become a watchword – pejorative and emblematic of the violent state policies driving...

xenomor , (edited )

“and about just as many view it as a belief in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (72%),”

This, right here, is a big part of the problem. The notion of an ethnostate is antithetical to a democracy. You cannot be both. It’s definitionally impossible. A state practicing some of the mechanics of democracy does not make it a democracy. If the supremacy of one ethnic cohort is a fundamental tenet of your state, there is no amount of ‘liberalism’ or rhetoric that will turn you into a democracy. If you are part of this 72%, I implore you to examine the cognitive dissonance you are practicing. I strongly suspect that many of this 72% have not critically examined the fallacy of people’s claims of Israeli democracy. Of those that have, I suspect that many are intentionally misrepresenting the situation since afterall, actively supporting a violently oppressive ethnostate isn’t a great look.

Edit: spelling

xenomor ,

I would like to understand what the implications of the investigation are. Is it actually possible that some of the criminals in the church leadership will face consequences? In short, are bishops going to jail?

xenomor ,

shocked pikachu face

Blinken Is Sitting on Staff Recommendations to Sanction Israeli Military Units Linked to Killings or Rapes (www.propublica.org)

A special State Department panel recommended months ago that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid after reviewing allegations that they committed serious human rights abuses....

xenomor ,

In a just world, ghouls like Blinken would hang for the material contributions they made to crimes against humanity like those the US and Israel are prosecuting.

xenomor ,

On first read this headline confused me. I read it and wondered why they were claiming Israel had a ceasefire demand.

xenomor ,

At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel announced that they were setting up ‘bathing facilities’ for Palestinian refugees at these ‘humanitarian islands’.

xenomor ,

Oprah is a bullshit artist. She has always been a bullshit artist and she got rich peddling bullshit. Her efficiency promoting pseudoscience throughout her career makes her a blight on society, forever deserving scorn for the people she helped to hurt. We are collectively dumber because of her efforts, and she gets to live her life lavished by luxury and adulation as a result.

Israeli troops ‘fire on people waiting for aid’ as Gaza death tolls hits 30,000 (www.msn.com)

Kamel Abu Nahel, who was being treated for a gunshot wound at Shifa Hospital, said he and others went to the distribution point in the middle of the night because they heard there would be a delivery of food. “We’ve been eating animal feed for two months,” he added....

xenomor ,

Between this and the protest vote in Michigan, we may finally see movement from the Biden administration. I’m hearing that there’s discussion about Joe, perhaps, furrowing his brow the next time he’s at the ice cream shop as a sign of solidarity with his increasingly outraged electorate.

xenomor ,

Someone is reading the text people posted to a public forum on the internet. Oh, the humanity!

xenomor ,

As other have said here, this is obviously an attempt to create a foundation of legitimacy for their own invasion of Taiwan. What I don’t understand about diplomacy at this level is this: Why do they care? What I mean is, everyone in this deliberating body knows what they are doing, and everyone observing it knows as well. Furthermore, as a permanent, veto holding, member of the Security Council, China faces no actual oversight from the UN as a whole. So, why bother with the show?

xenomor ,

I’m pretty sure that ‘ideal form’ here is a pair of regular-ish glasses. That ain’t happening in four generations unless you’re going to be real creative about what a generation is. It certainly isn’t four years away, like the analogies to iPhones and Apple Watches implies. That’s going to require an absolutely wild amount of innovation to achieve. And, even if that happens, such new technology is going to take many further generations to become remotely affordable enough to be priced for anything like mainstream adoption. Pile all that on top of the lingering curiosities about what problems this interface model actually solves, and the cultural shifts that will be required to get people comfortable to accept pervasive face cameras in social settings, and you’ve got a product line that has niche appeal written all over it for at least another decade or two.

Biden warns Netanyahu against Rafah operation without ‘credible’ safety plan (www.theguardian.com)

In a call Sunday with Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden told the Israeli prime minister that Israel should not launch a military operation in Rafah “without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there”....

xenomor ,

Taking the inhuman nature of Biden’s ideology here out of the equation, the guy just looks so cucked and weak in the way he’s managing his own client state.

Is anyone else worried about the apple vision pro?

i wouldn’t normally be concerned since any company releasing a VR product with this price tag is obviously going to fail… but it’s apple and somehow through exquisite branding and sleek design they have managed to create something that resonated with “tech reviewers” and rich folk who can afford it....

xenomor ,

I have so much to say about this, I hardly know where to start. A few brief points:

Yes, this product direction is problematic in many many ways. There is a reason why science fiction has been speculating about these types of devices for decades and nearly always portraying the technology as an escape mechanism for a horrifying dystopian reality.

We’ve experienced several really big technology revolutions in just a few decades (pc, internet, social, mobile). All have brought wonderful improvements to life, but all have had profound, and unanticipated side effects. In all instances, we would have benefited as a society by interrogating consequences more completely at the beginning, rather than just letting market forces alone to drive them into mass adoption.

The good news is that none of this is really new. This appears to be a pretty good implementation of a UI model that consumers have been largely rejecting for over 30 years. There are absolutely very useful, very good uses for these UIs, but these are niche markets overall all.

In many ways, XR (a catch all term for both VR and AR) is a retro futuristic idea. This is a vision of the future as seen 40 years ago. Really innovative human computer interfacing doesn’t look like this anymore. Actually useful innovation involves things like agents, voice ui’s and so on (think Jarvis from the MCU).

The question is, can Apple’s marketing prowess and effectively infinite budget push a largely unpleasant, unneeded, and expensive product into mass adoption? I am hopeful that they can’t. I am hopeful that reality isn’t sci-fi dystopian enough to create a wide market for this. If they can, it may say more about how dystopian our real reality has become. That’s the really worrisome part to me.

xenomor ,

Let me clarify. My complaint about the retro-futuristic nature of XR is not the age of the idea. The problem is that this approach has been speculated about and productized in various ways for decades. Through all of that, it has never amounted to more than niche applications, has been rejected by wider markets repeatedly, and failed to inspire much more imagined usefulness beyond being an escape vehicle from some kind of real-world hellscape. Despite all of that, entities like apple insist on trying again, and again, and again. I am convinced that Tim Cook sees this as the future because of the residue of his childhood musing about the future. I know for a fact that Zuckerberg is motivated by exactly that.

Now let’s compare that to audio UIs. These have also been around for a long time. In that time, they have only become more pervasive, useful and inspirational (see again my reference to Jarvis). Additionally, I’m not just talking about the audio part of that interface. I’m talking about the agents that can act independently, and spontaneously to help humans do what the want to do. We are making tremendous progress on that front, but Apple is (in terms of this product line) mired in the past.

xenomor ,

Just think about it for a moment. Apple made a mask, that when you wear it in your face, projects a 3D animated avatar if you face on the outside. That is so weird, f’ed up and dystopian.

xenomor ,

Given how completely the airline industry disregards customer service and treats its customers like cattle, I don’t know why anyone would expect them to do a proper job of maintaining equipment. Furthermore, given how eager we are to gut regulation and dismantle the administrative state, all of this is going to just keep getting worse and worse.

xenomor ,

As if this all started on October 7. Let’s just not account for all that inconvenient stuff that happened earlier. Got it.

xenomor ,

Unless I see the Biden administration take meaningful action against Israel, I’m not going to believe a goddamn thing they posture about, be it official statements or leaked messaging to the press. They have made it perfectly clear that they are actively and enthusiastically supportive of Israel’s policies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths (www.theguardian.com)

An unlikely charge of intent to commit treason landed Meir Baruchin, a grey-haired, softly spoken history and civics teacher, in the solitary confinement wing of Jerusalem’s notorious “Russian Compound” prison in early November....

xenomor ,

Israel is a fascist ethnostate, built on a meticulously cultivated culture of racism. As an entity, they are entirely undeserving of our support or respect, and their uncritical supporters should be called out for their toxic malevolence at every opportunity. I’m so tired of this.

xenomor ,

You do realize that there’s another way to make them stop doing it, don’t you?. That other way also has the side effect of murdering significantly fewer innocent Palestinians. It would also act to prevent the conflict from spreading regionally.

I realize that retraining Israel would deny us Americans our dead brown people high, but come on, think of all the inflation we could prevent by not killing them.

xenomor ,

Why not, um, just restrain Israel instead? Because we Americans value dead Palestinians more than we fear inflation.

xenomor ,

No, we should act to prevent them from doing this. Instead of bombing (and risking further spread and escalation) why not remove their motivation for doing this? What is their motivation for doing this? Their motivation is to prevent Israel from genociding. Now, if we just prevent Israel from genociding, the boats flow, Palestinians don’t get murdered, people in Yemen don’t get bombed either, and we make escalation less likely. That sounds like a far better outcome to me. The only reason to opt for the more violent path, is that you actually want the violence. If that’s your goal, then you’re the bad guy.

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