The article you link from NPR seems to mostly cite the Haaretz article. The only possible corroboration are the claims from Adil Husain, but I am hesitant to take his words as corroboration.
The Haaretz article states it is unclear how many died from IDF fire vs the Abu Shabab group. Husain was not at the aid site and so can't state how they were wounded.
If the soldiers truly fired on those who were only running away, not advancing, this should be investigated and charged as a war crime. However, at this point the evidence is not clear aside from a handful of anonymous sources from a single press release.
At the end of the day, the outputs simply reflect the inputs. Initially I was of the "if it looks, walks like duck" view when it comes to LLMs and thinking. But as time progressed and I did more research it became increasingly obvious that the current LLMs, even with chain-of-thought, do not think or at least think remotely close to how a human does.
Advancement of LLM ability seems to be logarithmic rather than the exponential trend AI doomers fear. Advancement won't continue without a paradigm shift and even then I am not sure we will ever reach ASI.
Even if the technology improves and the economics of scale reduces the cost, I still don't buy the narrative that swarms of tiny kamikaze drones will radically change warfare.
Aside from radio jamming, I have not seen an actual defense against a strong EMP.
To defend against an EMP wiping out your drone swarm, you would have to invest in shielding etc which would remove them from the class of small cheap drones.
Idk if anyone can speak about this, but to me this doesn't seem like a problem that these types of drones can overcome.
Usually the initial attack (From Ukrainian perspective) is stopped by regular military weapons like AT, Artillery, Mines and drones are used to mop up the battlefield - Burn out abandoned vehicles and hunt scattered soldiers
As someone who grew up during the heyday of common core, I can attest to this. Standardization is not a bad thing, but the pace and complexity were dumbed down. We were taught arithmatic with block visualisations and "bundles" far too long as if it took great effort to understand the abstraction of arabic numerals. I constantly felt like my desire and aptitude to learn outpaced the learning materials supplied and I have never considered myself "gifted" with math.
I think many will be surprised by the amount children can learn if you actually test the limit of their capabilities.
I feel the limiting factor when it comes to learning increasingly difficult concepts is not intelligence but effort. Often teachers and parents may mistake the attention-span deficits of kids for a sign that the material is too hard, when the ability is there and only needs to be distilled with discipline.
The PlasticList tests seem to have accounted for matrix effects / contamination.
They used several various reactions (w acetonitrile, PSA, MgSO4, C18) to selectively dissolve / isolate the plastic compounds. This is also assisted by certain techniques (sonication, GC-MS/MS). They also added isotopically-labeled control plastic samples. That should enable them measure matrix affects and adjust for them in the non-control sample.
It is the isotopic labels that give me the most assurance.
While the ziploc bags had pthalates, I agree that it is probably not enough to impact the results, especially considering the lab used acetonitrile on the bags to test them. There's also the hand soap. These would probably cause a difference of + 80 at most.
Overall, I'd say the tests were the best we can get with current techniques / technology.
To fully assess the health impact of ingested plastics, we have to establish the underlying mechanism (e.g. bioaccumulation + endocrine activity) as well as the pattern of health consequences in real-world data.
The first part is easier and I believe has been demonstrated (especially regarding endocrine activity) fairly well.
The latter is notoriously difficult; it is probably better approached with animal studies as human association studies are too unreliable and would take too long to tease out effects.
Dosage is also an important factor and often makes poison-in-principle not poison-in-practice, though low-dosages over a long period of time may still have an effect that is not immediately noticeable. Bioaccumulation is also related to this.
The study you list is specific to analysis of human blood, whereas the original was done on human brain tissue. The original study cites other papers that have demonstrated the accumulation of plastics in other organ tissues using different techniques so I wouldn't discount plastics research because of the potential flaws of one method. Plus the fact that in the original study, the level of plastics increased by 50% between those who died in 2016 vs 2024 and increased further in those with dementia suggests that there is a real relationship here and something to be concerned about.
There are many other studies that establish a negative health relationship here. I don't think we should discount them.
The last event states Ireland "returns to rugby glory" suggesting it had won the grand slam before, but also there was a decent amount of time since the last win (return suggests a hiatus). This would exclude the original 1948 win.
As someone who does not buy into the ai doom, I'd like to understand your position better.
Do you believe doom will come about from a malevolant asi or an asi that cannot understand human thinking and thus unintentionally causes disaster from operating on a different plane of intelligence?
This tool might be useful for quick one-off referencing, but I feel that most will probably be better off using a proper citation manager like the open-source Zotero.
There's a plugin that can do this. It is a little rough around the edges but can extract references from the pdf and search semantic scholar / crossref with decent reliability.
The Haaretz article states it is unclear how many died from IDF fire vs the Abu Shabab group. Husain was not at the aid site and so can't state how they were wounded.
It is also the case that doctors without borders is far from a non-partisan group and has harbored terrorists in the past (e.g. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-slain-gazan-named-as-docto...)
If the soldiers truly fired on those who were only running away, not advancing, this should be investigated and charged as a war crime. However, at this point the evidence is not clear aside from a handful of anonymous sources from a single press release.