“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.

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.

I’ve had a couple of issues like this:

• Wireless mouse has a flaky connection. Turns out the issue was the USB port it was plugged into (probably RF interference as other devices worked fine on that port)

• We had a couple of radio receivers in a server rack. The scale of the project had shrunk over the years, so what used to fill up 2 racks now only half filled them (mostly because of upgraded components becoming faster and smaller over the years). Another project needed needed some rackspace, so we reracked everything into a single rack. When we were done, we found that one of our receivers couldn’t get a signal, and another would lose it regularly. Checked over all of our connections and the antennas, but everything seemed normal. Turns out something in the other project was blasting out RF interference.

• We would occasionally need to manually move data on/off a server using a USB2.0 hard drive. This worked fine for years, until one day we had a server that would randomly disconnect from the drive a few seconds into the transfer. Tried different ports, same issue. The drive itself worked with all the others, so we decided the issue must be with the server. We swapped it out for a brand new one with plans to send the old one back for warranty repairs. Except the new one has the exact same issue. Both servers came from a newish batch from the OEM. Turns out that the earlier versions had a hardware “bug” where the USB ports would source more than the 500ma allowed by the spec. Since they fixed that, our drive would trigger the current limit during sustained use and temporarily depower the port. Solution: get a USB Y cable and power provider power from a wall block

• I had a mouse that would double click (or more) when you pushed the button. This was pretty obviously a hardware issue, but I figured I could just tell the computer to ignore double clicks that happened “too fast” and avoid needing a new mouse. In theory that should have worked, but the input stack on Linux turned out to be a giant web that I couldn’t figure out, so I ended up opening the mouse and soldering on a random capacitor I had lieing around.

• We had a laptop with a dead monitor that would mysteriously work at times. It turns out that most of the time, it was sitting on another laptop (of the same type). Those laptops had a magnet latch to hold them shut. It turns out that said magnet also was used as part of a “laptop closed” sensor that would disable the monitor, and the bottom laptop would trigger the sensor in the top one.

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

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.

The Gaza Ministry of Health systematically undercounts the dead. First, they only attemp to count direct casualties, which excludes preventable deaths from malnutrition, disease, loss of shelter, etc. Second, their capacity to find the dead is significantly reduced due to the war. This isn’t unique to this situation. For almost any disaster, casualty estimates continue to go up after the disaster itself is over, and there are resources to spend looking for dead bodies.

Congress does not have the constitutional authority to declare a prior Congresses laws invalid. For a bunch of internal stuff like the fillubuster rules, or remote voting, the current Congress can do whatever it wants without presidential review. However once a law is passed through the constitutional process, the constitution does not have a separate process for repealing it. This means that Congress would need to go through the same constitutional process to repeal it, which includes the possibility of a presidential veto.

Having said that, the Supreme Court does have the constitutional authority to declare a law invalid[0], and the President has no veto authority over that. Further, the current Supreme Court has invented out of nothingness two bedrock pillars of constitutional analysis:

1. The Major Questions Doctrine, which states that questions of major political or economic significance may not be delegated by Congress to the executive branch.

2. The Non-Delegation Doctrine, which states that Congress may not delegate it’s lawmaking authority to other entities.

Since the Supreme Court is an unbiased arbiter of the law, I’m confident that they will apply these principles consistently and determine that Congress’s initial delegation if tarrif authority was unconditional. /s

[0] This is not actually explicit in the Constitution. But has been how it is interpreted since Marbury v Madison in 1803.

Normally, I would respond to this type of argument by explaining how the two party system is structural. But in this case, you are complaining about one of the only politicians that is not part of a political party.

Zionism is an ethnonationalist Ideology that says that Israel should exist as a Jewish state. Like all ethnonationalist movements, Zionism also has a strong component of territorial expansionism.

Israel’s founding was absolutely a Zionist project. And Zionism has been a large part of Israeli politics since then. However, there is another school of thought that goes “I don’t care how we got here, but it is 2025, and the state of Israel is a thing that exists, and I support the right of that entity and it’s citizens”.

This is a bit muddled in today’s climate, because the current Israeli leadership has been thoroughly captured by ultra Zionist. As in, Netenyahu’s government is only holding on to power by forming a coalition with far right fringe parties that until a few years ago were a third rail in Israeli politics. Back in 2007, their c now current Minister of National Security, Ben Gvir, was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization.

However, as with every country, people can have a different view towards the country as a whole, and it’s current political state.

The us also has a $14,600 standard deduction that effectively adds a 0% bracket and increases the lower thresholds by that amount (people in the higher thresholds would probably itemize, decreasing their effective tax even further).

The IRS does index the tax brackets for inflation.

Also, that table does not include state taxes.

This isn’t progress. It is actively incentiving having compensation be tips in the tax code.

Moral of the story: get nukes (see also, North Korea)