You might be. Or at least I feel like Gemini is actually dumber than a house of bricks - I have multiple examples, just from last week, where following its advice would have lead to damage to equipment and could have hurt someone. That's just trying to work on an electronics project and askin Gemini for advice based on pictures and schematics - it just confidently states stuff that is 100000% bullshit, and I'm so glad that I have at least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would have easily hurt myself.
It's somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me every week, but it just doesn't follow instructions and keeps repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now, like it's some kind of giant joke that all these companies are playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that don't seem that intelligent.
I also use claude at work, and for C++ programming it behaves like someone who read a C++ book once and knows all the keywords, but has never actually written anything in C++ - the code it produces is barely usable, and only in very very small portions.
Edit: I just remembered another one that made me incredibly angry. I've been reading the Neuromancer on and off, and I got back into it, but to remind myself of the plot I asked Gemini to summarise the plot only up to chapter 14, and I specifically included the instruction that it should double check it's not spoiling anything from the rest of the book. Lo and behold, it just printed out the summary of the ending and how the characters actions up to chapter 14 relate to it. And that was in the "Pro" setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real life person did that I'd stop being friends with them, but somehow I'm paying money for this. Maybe I'm the clown here.
Germany is just part of EU - as many other people pointed out, there is no requirement from the EU to implement it this way. Same as California or New York making extremely Draconian laws around 3D printing doesn't represent all of US.
Well, it's being reported as a surge in interest, whether that is followed by increased sales or not will be seen in the next month or two once these cars are delivered. But anecdotally, second hand EVs which were flooding car lots everywhere have substantially thinned out. There are still some, but a lot less than a month ago.
Also lol, you're funny implying that ICE cars aren't overpriced tablets on wheels either. It's all cars nowadays. And UK's cheapest car right now happens to be a pretty decent EV anyway, a Dacia Spring.
> There are a lot of casualties on both sides of conflicts around the world. It is a bit suspicious when certain communities want to focus almost exclusively on one side of one conflict, while also leaving out any context about the terrorists that started the conflict and fight in civilian clothing.
You make it sound like both sides experienced the same amount of casualties, blockades and massive displacement from their homes during the conflict
They somehow manage to find uniforms when they do parades. In any case, the principle of distinction merely requires combatants to wear distinguishing marks. Hypothetically if they ran out of uniforms, they could use something as simple as colored armbands.
It's a basic tenet of IHL which is essential for the protection of civilians in a war zone. If the pro-Palestinian community was genuinely focused on the well-being of Gazans, they would have extremely concerned about this particular war crime, and would have urgently tried to get Hamas to stop from disguising as civilians.
So the 20 thousand children killed in Gaza should have been wearing what kind of uniform to avoid behind killed? Just so I understand correctly.
>>would have urgently tried to get Hamas to stop from disguising as civilians.
So if the international community somehow pressured Hamas to wear uniforms, IDF would kill fewer children? Or they would stop their policy on waiting until a suspected Hamas combatant returns home and then blowing them up along with their family?
I just feel like that's such a dishonest, morally bankrupt take. For every single Israeli killed in the October attack, Israel has killed 20 children. But hey, Hamas militants don't wear uniforms sometimes, damn I wish the world would talk more about this war crime too.
I'm just trying to think of when my own country was under German occupation and 2 millions of our citizens were killed by Nazis - if internet was around back then I'm sure someone would have said that it's really suspicious no one talks about how our resistance forces don't walk around the streets in their uniforms or you know "at least wear an armband". If only anyone really cared about our well being surely someone should have pointed it out, maybe UK could have sent some strongly worded letters to the underground leaders to just wear uniforms when outside, then(and only then) talking about the genocide would finally be fine.
Civilians don't have to wear distinguishing marks, combatants do if they care about the laws of war and protecting the civilian population.
Just blaming Israel for all civilian harm, when it's Hamas that started the war and disguises as civilians, isn't going to help. If you care about limiting civilian harm, you should be focused on ensuring Gaza has a government that doesn't keep starting wars, or at least put on uniforms before they attack Israel. Maybe even letting civilians shelter in bunkers, rather than reserving them for terrorist use only.
Can you name a single conflict in a comparable urban setting, against terrorists that dressed as civilians, that definitely had a better civilian casualty ratio? Or are you just holding Israel to an impossible standard that no military in the real world is capable of?
> For every single Israeli killed in the October attack, Israel has killed 20 children.
It doesn't make any sense to try to judge morality based on casualty ratios. By this logic, the Nazis were the good guys in WWII, and Israel would be the good guys if they'd just turn off all their pesky air defenses.
>>Or are you just holding Israel to an impossible standard that no military in the real world is capable of?
I'm sure I can name a few militaries in the world that would manage to not shoot at a marked ambulance and kill the medics inside. And a few others that actually manage to successfully prosecute their soldiers raping and torturing captured enemies, not have the prosecutors let them free as heroes of the nation.
>>Just blaming Israel for all civilian harm, when it's Hamas that started the war and disguises as civilians, isn't going to help
And why is that? I think if we continue sanctioning Israel as much as we can that will help. If we keep putting pressure on Israel to let journalists in, that will help.
>>By this logic
I don't know what logic that is. The ratio alone doesn't make you good or bad.
Well, when are you planning to name them? If Israel is so evil, it must be very easy to name a few militaries that are much better at fighting terrorists, who dress as civilians and hide among them, without much collateral damage.
> actually manage to successfully prosecute
There are countries that never let off suspected criminals due to insufficient evidence?
Also if we're just bringing up random stories to paint one side in a bad light, what happened to the Gazans who paraded their rape victims around the streets? They didn't seem at all worried about being arrested.
> if we continue sanctioning Israel as much as we can that will help
Sanctions can't convince a nuclear state to ignore the attacks against it and give up on its own defense. If we want Israel to stop fighting messy wars, the focus should be on its neighbors who keep attacking it.
Is there a reason why you cut off the second part of that first sentence when you quoted it? Or was it again because you wanted to argue against a point in your head instead of the one I actually made? Because I'm sure even you can name militaries that generally don't shoot at ambulances, or if they do the people responsible tend to go on trial and be prosecuted.
>>There are countries that never let off suspected criminals due to insufficient evidence?
Funny how Israel always finds insufficient evidence against all of its soldiers.But maybe that just doesn't bother you.
>>what happened to the Gazans who paraded their rape victims around the streets?
Oh wait, it's Gazans now? not Hamas? Or are they one and the same for you?
>>Sanctions can't convince a nuclear state to ignore the attacks against it and give up on its own defense
Of course they can't, and no one advocates anything of that sort. We do want Israel to stop killing Palestinian civialians in the numbers that they do. We want food and medical supplies to be restored. No one says Israel shouldn't defend itself - but this has crossed the line of defence long time ago. Maybe it hasn't for you, but that's your morality that you have to live with.
>> the focus should be on its neighbors who keep attacking it.
You do realize that both of these things can happen, right. We should be criticizing Israel for how it's leading this war, and we should focus on it's neighbours to stop the terrorists inside them. Do you feel Israel is being unfairly treated in this case?
It seems like you're unable to name any military that broadly deals with terrorists in a cleaner manner, so you've resorted to cherry picking specific alleged incidents that are more specific to Israel.
This is like saying that the US is the most evil country, because it's the only one that bombed the girls' school in Minab. Or Ukraine is the most evil country, because they're the only ones accused of who executed Russian POWs (in recent memory).
> Oh wait, it's Gazans now? not Hamas? Or are they one and the same for you?
I'm sure you know that Hamas fighters were not the only ones committing atrocities on Oct 7. The Gazans who were parading their rape victims didn't hold signs saying "I'm with Hamas", "I'm with PIJ", "I'm just a random Gazan", etc. Why should we make assumptions about their affiliation?
> We do want Israel to stop killing Palestinian civialians in the numbers that they do.
If you can't name any real-world military capable of dealing with terrorists disguised as civilians with less collateral damage, than just blaming Israel for the collateral damage is rather unproductive.
> You do realize that both of these things can happen, right.
That's a nice sentiment, but in reality those who are ostensibly pro-Palestinian are way more focused on trying to harm Israel than on actually helping Palestinians. Where were the protests for getting Hamas to put on uniforms? For getting other countries to accept war refugees? For pressuring Hamas to step down, ceding power to a government that will stop starting wars? There were none.
Israeli civilian death ratios are actually terrible, worse than Bosnia, Syria, or even WWII (including the Holocaust!). I assume it’s because Israel wants to kill as many civilians as possible, while still claiming the faintest hope of plausible deniability.
Frost is using quite a long chain of creative assumptions to claim that fighting age male casualties (almost half of all casualties) were mostly civilian. His conclusions are contracted by Hamas' own admissions. Earlier in the war they acknowledged losing 6,000 fighters, when the claimed total was ~29k.
If we believe Hamas, and conservatively assume that everyone other than Hamas fighters were civilians, that's still a CCR around 3.85:1. If we believe Israel it's around 1.5:1.
> worse than Bosnia, Syria, or even WWII
As I said elsewhere in the thread, CCR comparisons need to be apples-to-apples. Gaza is tiny, civilians have nowhere to evacuate to (no state accepted significant numbers of war refugees), and Hamas disguises as civilians. Your examples are not comparable.
> By this logic, the Nazis were the good guys in WWII, and Israel would be the good guys if they'd just turn off all their pesky air defenses.
Can you elaborate on this? I thought that the Nazis were pretty obviously the "bad guys" due to committing genocide and mass casualties (combatant and civilian) while trying to expand their borders.
> It doesn't make any sense to try to judge morality based on casualty ratios.
Really, even the ratio of civilian casualties, or ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties? Those seem pretty relevant to morality in my book, but I might be misunderstanding.
I think we're mostly in agreement? I agree civilian casualty ratios can be meaningful signals about morality, provided that we account for context (e.g. whether civilians are trapped in a warzone or able to evacuate) and are careful to draw apples-to-apples comparisons.
But the parent wasn't really comparing these ratios; it was closer to a "total deaths on either side" sort of comparison. Usually the implied message is that in a conflict between two sides, the side that killed more must be less moral. That dubious logic would suggest e.g.
- The Nazis were morally superior to Western Allies, since the Western Allies killed more Germans than the reverse.
- The Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War, since Iraq suffered several orders of magnitude more casualties.
- Israel is bad partly because it goes to extreme lengths to protect its people (Iron Dome, bomb shelters everywhere, etc.). Letting more of its people get killed would "even out the scales" and suddenly make Israel's military operations more moral.
>>Usually the implied message is that in a conflict between two sides, the side that killed more must be less moral.
And you decided that this is an argument I'm making and decided to argue against that, instead of what I'm actually saying - which sure, would lead to the nonsensical logical conclusions that you wrote.
What makes Israel a state worthy of condemnation is the fact that they target civilians on purpose. That they shoot at medics, deny food supplies, shoot rockets at refugee camps, hospitals, schools, they shoot at little kids playing around, they torture their prisoners, they use AI to guess which person needs to be eliminated and they blow them up with their families to maximise casualties - and all of the above happens without any oversight or consequence for any people involved. The 20k children dead is a consequence of all of these decisions, the number itself isn't what makes Israel bad - it's how they got to it, through a culmination of decades of decisions on how they see Palestinians - as subhuman scum needs to die. There is no effort to protect civilian life, and IDF saying otherwise is just lying.
But I feel like you're keen to say that Israel is "defending" itself and Gaza is a narrow urban zone, so of course it can't be done any other way.
Let me maybe ask you this, just to satisfy my own curiosity more than anything - if Israel decided to kill everyone in Gaza, based on the assumption that since Hamas doesn't wear uniforms anyone can be a militant so this is justified, would you just go "yeah that's fair"? Or would you just make some argument about how no army in the world would do better.
> And you decided that this is an argument I'm making and decided to argue against that
Then what was the point of your numeric comparison? If you agree it's a very poor signal about morality, why bring it up?
> What makes Israel a state worthy of condemnation [...]
It seems like you're just listing every random accusation you've heard that paints Israel in a bad light. Should we try this game with another country, like say Palestine?
> the assumption that since Hamas doesn't wear uniforms anyone can be a militant so this is justified
>>It seems like you're just listing every random accusation you've heard that paints Israel in a bad light
I really don't understand your train of thought. Are you saying these things didn't happen? Or they did happen but Palestine also is doing despicable things so they don't matter? Or they do matter but they aren't worth being upset about? Or it's worth being upset about them, but they shouldn't be discussed?
>>No I certainly don't think that.
Well what did you bring it up as the first point then? I said - hey I'm bothered by the fact that Israel killed 20k children in this conflict, and then you said hey I wish someone was talking more about the fact that hamas doesn't wear uniforms when fighting. Like, what is the conclusion here? That Israel is killing civilians because anyone can be a militant(since hamas militants don't wear uniforms), or.......what is the alternative?
>> If you agree it's a very poor signal about morality, why bring it up?
I don't agree with that - I just said it's a consequence of every other choice that Israel made up to this point.
I just don't see the point of engaging with a big laundry list of random accusations against Israel. Some are likely true. Urban wars aren't rainbows and butterflies, and no military is perfect. Ukraine has had a bunch of incidents with soldiers abusing and even executing POWs, should we sanction them too? US recently obliterated a girls' school, should we sanction ourselves for our mistake?
> what is the conclusion here?
Maybe something like "Israel's neighbors should probably stop attacking it", "Hamas should put on uniforms", or "countries that supposedly care about Gazans' well-being should accept war refugees"?
If your takeaway is that it's all Israel's fault, but you can't name any other military that does a better job of dealing with terrorists who embed themselves among civilians, that seems like the wrong takeaway.
That number is absolutely staggering, and the fact that at least 20,000 of these are children is literally making me sick every time I think about it.
To Israelis who think this is justified because your country was attacked - for every person killed in the initial attacks, your military has killed 20 children(and many more adults). And that's the ones that were outright killed, and not "just" had their limbs torn off and given lifelong disabilities. How is that proportionate, fair or in any way justifiable?
I'm not looking to defend Israel's actions or to take a political stance here, but just wanted to ask about the proportionality/fairness argument - to the best of my knowledge, a proportionality between casualties on the two sides is not an expectation of any rules of war, and I don't recall ever seeing it applied to other conflicts.
> to the best of my knowledge, a proportionality between casualties on the two sides is not an expectation of any rules of war
If you were talking about combatants, you'd be correct. The main point about Gaza is that the majority of those who are killed are civilians[1]. And most civilized countries recognize[2] that civilians should be spared during armed conflicts.
That is correct, but every war should have an end at some point. To maybe ask this in a different way - how many more palestinian children have to die for the Israeli government to say "ok yeah we're done now". What is that number going to be? 20k? 100k? Every single one of them? Their stated objective is to eliminate th Hamas militants, but on the path to that goal the truly astounding civilian cost cannot justify the end, can it? Or if someone thinks it can, I'd ask - really? Surely there is a number between 0 and "every single person in Gaza" that would cause even the most hardened supporter of Israel to stop for a second?
(although maybe not, given that there are Israeli politicians saying everyone above the age of 5 in gaza should be cut down, so maybe I'm too optimistic).
It kinda doesn't have a body count limit. After October 7, practically all Israelis (even ones who are deeply opposed to the current government, the settlers, etc) said "This will not happen again, ever. And if that means sterilizing the Gaza Strip of all life, so be it."
I heard that from many people, including a 90 year old nun. (I could not have imagined what Sister Claire-Edith would look like furious.) They simply couldn't imagine any course of action that would allow that to occur again.
That didn't mean that exterminating Gaza was inevitable. They would have accepted a complete and unconditional surrender of its leadership, along with freeing all of the hostages, and allowing an outside force to establish a new government.
I'm not saying that's fair; I'm trying to explain what the parameters were.
It's clear (now more than ever) that the current government would have faced a quandary if that had happened. They wanted the war, more or less as it was carried out. But had Hamas surrendered, a lot of Israelis would have said "that's enough", and it would be much harder to continue in the face of public opposition.
That never happened, so it continued. Eventually they did get fatigued, with time more than body count. Hostages were exchanged and Israel started to prep for the Iran war. (Iran played a significant part in funding that October 7 attack, though it's indirect enough that a lot of Israelis do not support this war.)
The question I have is - what now then? Because the war is still going on. What event is the Israeli state waiting for now, exactly? Whatever remains of Hamas leadership to say "we give up"? Would that even suffice? Because right now it looks like Israel will just continue killing people in Gaza until they get bored or run out of munitions, or have something else to do(like the war with Iran and other neighbours - which doesn't formally end the hostilities in Gaza anyway, just might ignore them for a bit). If that's the "plan" then yeah, it will continue until everyone there is dead, moved out, or.....I don't know if there is a 3rd option. And at that point it's just a systematic eradication of the entire population, which is precisely what genocide is.
The war in Gaza is over. There are still deaths, but they're the "ordinary" deaths of two countries who hate each other. Hamas is back to chucking rockets over the wall; Israel is back to disproportionate responses.
At that pace, it can continue indefinitely. They are replacing people and ammunition faster than they're killing/using them.
The war in Iran is supposed to end that, or at least shift it. Without Iranian support, Gaza could collapse.
What happens after that, I cannot even begin to guess. Maybe the Palestinian Authority from the West Bank takes over. They've got an OK-ish relationship with Israel, though Israel keeps testing that relationship with more and more settlements by religious fanatics.
It's at least as likely that Netanyahu loses the election in October, at which point he may be prosecuted. Nobody in Israel is exactly in favor of the Palestinians, but there are at least some who aren't going to actively antagonize them. That will depend on their relationship with the US, which may change in November.
Proportionate casualties is not a requirement, but targeting civilians is a war crime. The IDF has repeatedly and actively targeted civilians, even when no military targets are present in the area. They have not prosecuted the soldiers and commanders that have carried out those crimes.
This makes the entire regime culpable, and given that it is a democracy, the electorate shares a part in that culpability.
Notice that the entire polity of Palestinians is being held fully culpable for the actions of... Its unelected leadership.
... Also, using a war to displace an occupied civilian population is a genocide.
You either agree or disagree with the idea of genocide. And if you disagree with idea of genocide, then this is becoming closer to video games as more drones are deployed which is my thesis. But if you agree with the idea of genocide, then yes, wars can be won by total elimination (or major reduction) in the other people's population and loss of life.
So do you think genocide is acceptable in war or not?
Well, because they reject the idea of making a war a physical video games of drones, therefore, they would be advocating keeping the current system?
My point was that we are better off with abstracting away the war, so if you downvote that idea, then you want to keep the current system, and to win a war in the current system you need total surrender, which comes at a huge cost of life.
No, I downvoted your idea that somehow we "don't allow" genocide and yet Israel killed over 20k children in Gaza and literally nothing happened to anyone as a result - the downvote is on the blatantly untrue assumption that doesn't seem to relate to the real world at all.
I still don't understand why you think this implies that I support genocide, when the exact opposite is true?
You didn't understand my point. I said in the future (not now) the world might trend to having wars similar to those of playing video games. And I said this might be better because we just give politicians another medium for conflict resolution.
But you downvoted the idea, so you either don't like it or didn't understand. I assumed you understood it, but it seems you didn't
But that is what is happening now. Drones vs anti-drones, what happens when robots comes online? robots vs robots..and people/AI at the command centre managing war from a UI that looks like star craft.
>>We (as humans) are getting more strict about losing people's life. We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable.
I downvoted because I don't find this quoted sentence true, realistic or even remotely plausible. I will repeat for the 4th time now that I don't understand why you seem to think that downvoting you means supporting genocide - you seem to be very fixated on that idea.
>>But you downvoted the idea
I did not - I thought I made it clear in my last comment.
Regardless of whether or not anyone does or doesn't understand your point or position, you're being very obtuse about this.
There are many other possible scenarios that could play out, and disagreeing with the idea that "wars will turn into video games" doesn't mean someone is in favor of genocide.
That is how children argue; please hold yourself to a higher standard.
Also, if you put obviously incorrect information in the same comment (which you absolutely did), you should expect to be downvoted.
I'm sure I watched a documentary that said it basically wasn't feasible to launch the other shuttle. All checks and preparations would have to be done in absolute record time, with no mistakes and under timelines never attempted before. But even if they tried, you have the obvious question of - we know the core issue isn't solved and we're about to launch the second shuttle with the exact same design into orbit, if it suffers the same problem then what? But afaik the second one while important wasn't as much of a blocker as the first one. It just wasn't possible in time - it's not like the first shuttle could stay in orbit indefinitely too.
And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.
I'm not surprised more people don't know about the X-37, but it's in effect the distillation of the Shuttle program to a very effective vehicle: Crewless, reusable, cheap, and effective.
Bureaucratic requirements and institutional jockeying largely ballooned the Shuttle into something it was never supposed to be.
>> your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal.
You know that safety for pedestrians is also a very tightly regulated car safety category, right? Obviously, there's not much that can be done if you get hit by a car going 70mph, but the fact that most people should survive a 30mph impact with a modern car is mostly thanks to regulations requiring crumple zones specifically designed to protect pedestrians in a collision. And yeah, there are huge trade offs - I imagine people would generally prefer a car that doesn't need incredibly expensive repairs after a minor collision because everything at the front just crumpled, but then they would be guaranteed to cut off legs of any person hit - it's a trade off.
Not in the US. Specific pedestrian safety features are not included in cars sold there due to lack of regulation.
FMVSS was planning a regulation modelled after ECE R127, then the administration changed and no progress since...
It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars.
Or mandate in car cameras that record the driver to a blackbox to determine if the driver’s negligence caused others to be damaged. Also a cheap implementation that would immediately make drivers be more attentive.
>>It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars.
Only partialy agree. As in - yes I agree in principle, but I don't agree it would be trivial.
My sister had insurance with a black box policy, where everything she did in the car was recorded. And on her drive to work, she would always get a threatening email saying "we've recorded you going 70mph in a 20mph zone, if this continues we will cancel your policy". We had to ring them up and demand the GPS trace, and guess what - at one point she was going on the motorway above a 20mph road, but the system probably just did "what is the speed limit at X/Y coordinates" and was getting 20mph for the nearest road. We've had to do this several times when she had the policy.
My own Volvo XC60 frequently tells me I'm going over the speed limit as it thinks the road I'm on has a 50mph limit when in fact it's 70, and in another place it thinks it's 30 when in fact it's also 70.
Not to mention that the speeds entered on Google Maps are often just wrong and take forever to update. And it's funny when people like Harry Metcalf say that every new car he tests insists that his own private drive has a 20mph limit when obviously there is none. Imagine if you couldn't turn that off!
So yeah, very easy to implement(and it's a great idea!) but in practice it's one of these "looks easy on paper, but in reality it's super hard to do reliably".
You might be. Or at least I feel like Gemini is actually dumber than a house of bricks - I have multiple examples, just from last week, where following its advice would have lead to damage to equipment and could have hurt someone. That's just trying to work on an electronics project and askin Gemini for advice based on pictures and schematics - it just confidently states stuff that is 100000% bullshit, and I'm so glad that I have at least a basic understanding of how this stuff works or I would have easily hurt myself.
It's somewhat decent at putting together meal plans for me every week, but it just doesn't follow instructions and keeps repeating itself. It hardly feels worth any money right now, like it's some kind of giant joke that all these companies are playing on us, spending billions of these talking boxes that don't seem that intelligent.
I also use claude at work, and for C++ programming it behaves like someone who read a C++ book once and knows all the keywords, but has never actually written anything in C++ - the code it produces is barely usable, and only in very very small portions.
Edit: I just remembered another one that made me incredibly angry. I've been reading the Neuromancer on and off, and I got back into it, but to remind myself of the plot I asked Gemini to summarise the plot only up to chapter 14, and I specifically included the instruction that it should double check it's not spoiling anything from the rest of the book. Lo and behold, it just printed out the summary of the ending and how the characters actions up to chapter 14 relate to it. And that was in the "Pro" setting too. Absolute travesty. If a real life person did that I'd stop being friends with them, but somehow I'm paying money for this. Maybe I'm the clown here.
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