“Following the pre-emptive strike by the State of Israel against Iran, a missile and UAV (drone) attack against the State of Israel and its civilian population is expected in the immediate time frame,” Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.

Amazing how Israel was able to figure out when the unprovoked Iranian attack was going to occur that they managed to get their preemptive strike done in the nick of time.

/s

LLMs (at least in their current form) are proper neural networks.

This is where TPMs, measured boot, and remote attestation come in.

You can run whatever kernel you want, but if it is not an approved kernel, you wouldn’t be able to attest to running an approved kernel; allowing whatever DRM scheme the developer put in to active.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.

As with all open problems in computer science, we solved these back in the 80s.

Most of October 7 was a crime, even without the hostages. Taking the hostages was itself a crime, and continuing to hold them continues to be a crime.

The question of what Hamas “should” do is more complicated. Clearly following international law is not a priority for them, so that justification goes out the window.

In terms of actually advancing their interests, I don’t see much benefit to them. Their biggest asset in Israeli domestic politics are the hostages. The political pressure in Israel to free them is real, and the decision makers all know that a deal is the only way to meet that. Further, a not insignificant portion of the population oppose the war in it’s current form specifically because of the hostages. The only wins Hamas has gotten has been through hostage negotiations.

In exchange for giving all of that up, Hamas gets a slight benefit in the PR war. It is a very hard sell to say that is a good trade.

If you want Hamas to free the hostages, you need to get to a point where “Hamas should free the hostages” is true from the perspective of Hamas. Then, you can work on convincing them it is true. The good news is that Hamas is very amenable to the idea that releasing hostages is in their interest. That is the entire reason you take hostages: to get some benefit by releasing them.

It’s hard to say. With or without hostages, October 7 was extremely traumatic; and came in the context of a population already primed to be suspicious of Palestinians. In particular, the West Bank ethnic cleansing was already well underway with the tacit support of the general population; as although for most people that support was more about apathy than proactive support. Looking at how the US lost its shit for decades after 9/11, it is clear that hostages are not necessary for that to happen. Israel has also to deal with follow up attacks, which has a way of keeping trauma fresh.

Regarding the role of the hostages in this case, the first thing to acknowledge is that the actual response by Israel has not prioritized the hostages. Critical members of Israel’s current governing coalition have threatened to leave over prior attempts at a hostage deal. This has lead a serious rift developing between the current government and many of the hostage families.

However, from a propaganda side, the hostages have been a major assesset to the current government (both internationally and domestically). Most people are simply not that engaged in politics. We have heard repeatedly from Israeli military leadership that there are no achievat military goals left in Gaza. However, it is hard for that message to break through when the other side can point to the hostages and say “freeing those people is our goal”. Nevermind the fact that everyone paying attention knows that military action is not an effective tool of hostage release [0] and almost all of the freed hostages have been freed as a result of diplomacy.

[0] It can be useful for leverage in negotiations; but Israel is well past the point needed for that.

I was talking about perception, not legality.

I’m Jewish. The taboo around the swastika does not negatively effect me. If the local Indian restaraunt were to redecorate and adorn their walls with swasitkas, I would stop going there. If I saw someone I didn’t know whereing a swasitka necklace, I would avoid them.

I do, however, have enough empathy to recognize that this situation must suck for Hindus, Jains, or any other group for which that symbol has significance.

I also have the capacity to imagine a world where the same exact thing happens to the star of David. One where I cannot go outside whereing it on a necklace. One where we need to censor any artwork or buildings that might be viewed by the general public, lest they misinterpret the symbol. One where Jewish establishments are avoided or vandalized because people see the Star of David and interpret it as a declaration of support for Israel. Or, worse, as a declaration of hate for Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, or whatever other group the state of Israel gets into a fight with.

This is not some crazy hypothetical. The star of David is the iconic aspect of the Isreali flag; just like the swastika is the iconic aspect of the Nazi flag. There is a massive and media savy coalition devoted conflating Judism and Israel. A coalition that includes both pro-Israel members, and anti-Semitic members. In this very thread, just 3 posted my parent, we have someone openly admitting to doing this. I have a friend still in collage who has stopped wearing anything with the star of David on it. He has not taken down the Mezuzah from his dorm room door. He has not stopped wearing a kippah. The only symbol of Judism that has been causing him issues is the one plastered on the Israeli flag.

Not to detract from anything you said, but the swastika is also a religious symbol. The fact today, some 80 years after the Holocaust, it is still viewed visourally as a Nazi symbol does not bode well for us.

I think this is a case of “things can always get worse”.

He isn’t saying that Israel committed war crimes under his leadership; just that it is doing so now. With the subtext of what is going on now is far worse than what happened back then. Which, as far as I can tell, is accurate.

I keep bringing this up to show how far Israel has slid. Back in 2007, Israel convicted a man for supporting a terrorist organization. In 2022, that man was appointed as the Minister of National Security; and he is a lynchpin holding together Israel’s current governing coalition.

His political party, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) is the successor of the Kach party, which was barred from public office in 1994 under Israeli anti-terrorism laws.

Prior to the 2018-2022 political crisis, the far right parties like Otzma Yehudit were a political third rail and essentially left out of governing coalitions in favor of relatively moderate parties.

I’ve used it a fair amount for memory mapped IO where the hardware defined bitfields. It is also useful when you have a data format with bitfields. I’d say it is also useful when your data does not respect byte boundaries, but the only time I’ve run into that involved the bit order being “backwards”, which means that I still had to bittwidle things back together.

From a performance perspective, a cache line is only 64 bytes. Space in registers, low level memory caches, and memory throughout are all limited as well.

You lost me at return oriented programming. Getting something working out of that is way more difficult than doing it out of vib coding. (Way more impressive though)

What evidence is there that murder is effective in these circumstances?

And put some guidelines in the road to assist with self driving. Maybe make them out of metal for improved durability. Then swap out the rubber-wheeled tires for some more efficient and less poluting conical metal wheels since we don’t need to worry about them running on asphalt anymore.

Oooh. And as long as we have multiple carriages connected, we can add a walkway between them. Then instead of all of them being for passengers, they can subsidize the cost by having a car dedicated to selling snacks, or other items. You can literally buy your morning coffee from the road!

A bit more context for that quote:

calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.

The “one state” in the one-state solution is Israel, which currently views itself as an occupying power, and has Jewish Supremacy enshrined in her basic law (essentially constitution). Jews are not the group that is at risk in this scenario.

Interested to see how this plays out.

Prohibiting Holocaust denial is relatively easy, because we have the benefit of it being history, and we have an ample historical record and a clear consensus among historians. Plus, no one can credibly claim that the legislatures were not thinking of the Holocaust when they wrote the law.

However, how are they planning on applying the law to contemporary international crimes? People make accusations of them all the time. And the other side always denied them. And the actual facts are generally obscured by a massive fog of war that can take years to see through, if ever.

There is also plenty of history where the answer is less clear. Do we really want courts involved in determining if the 15th century conquest of the Canary Islands counts as a genocide. Or if some unnamed mass grave an archeologists unearths was caused by an invading army killing all of a city’s adult males, or simply a burial site for fallen soldiers?

What about the book of Esther. Taken literally, it ends with what is arguably a genocide committed by the Jews against the Persians. However, outside of some Israeli hardliners reinterpreting that ending for contemporary political purposes, it is widely understood that that ending is a literary device, not a literal telling of events. Did my Hebrew school teachers violate this law when they told me we didn’t actually kill 75,000 Persians? [0].

What about the ongoing genocide against white Afrikaners going on in South Africa today? Am I violating the law when I say that genocide is not real, and just something the rightwing in the US invented for domestic political purposes. If the US has such a law, could Trump use it to jail his political opponents who criticized his recent stunt of accepting 60 Afrikaner refugees?

Do we defer to an international body like the ICC or ICJ? In that case, you have just outlawed disagreeing with those bodies.

The UN has repeatedly found it to be a massive human rights violation. Does disagreeing with those findings violate this new law?

[0] As an aside, secular historians generally consider all of Esther to be fiction.

According to the bill, denial of the Holocaust or other serious international crimes, such as those defined under the statutes of the International Criminal Court, would be punishable by a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years.

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/26868-finland-moves-to-ban-holocaust-denial-under-new-criminal-law.html

I still burn DVDs. Ever since USB storage was deemed “not secure”, they are the easiest way to get data into and out of sensitive networks.

The left had a Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan.

4% is widely used as a safe withdrawal rate. It’s based on modelling with historical data of market returns and achieving a near 100% probability of not drawing down your principle over the long term.

I think the image assumes that the viewer is familiar with merge sort, which is something you will learn in basically every undegraduate CS program, then never use.

To answer your first question, it helps to have something to compare it against. I think the most obvious way of sorting a list would be “insertion sort”, where you look through the unsorted list, find the smallest element, put that in the sorted list, then repeat for the second smallest element. If the list has N elements, this requires you to loop through it N times. Since every loop involves looking at N elements, this means you end up taking N * N time to sort the list.

With merge sort, the critical observation is that if you have 2 sublists that are sorted you know the smallest element is at the start of one of the two input lists, so you can skip the inner loop where you would search for the smallest element. The means that each layer in merge sort takes only about N operations. However, each layer halves the number of lists, so you only need about log_2(N) layers, so the entire sort can be done in around N * log(N) time.

Since NlogN is smaller then N^2, this makes merge sort theoretically better.