Announcing the Tech for Palestine Incubator
updates.techforpalestine.org
updates.techforpalestine.org
Guess which side was deemed the baddies because they lashed out?
Arrest > Trial > Jail. You can arrest someone on suspicion of a crime and then you go to trial which is ostensibly the fact finding segment of things.
You can just not trust my word, I'm just someone online.
The comment you replying to is not denying that it happened.
What if the weaponization accusation is just an embellishment added to suit a political narrative? Establishing its truth does require evidence, separately from the evidence of the violence itself.
That's even if we happened to find the narrative morally prevailing.
Regardless of their initial intentions, I find it difficult to argue that these acts haven't served as a tool of war.
One must also acknowledge these acts were not isolated. I do not have concrete proof, maybe there is some out there, but the fact of the matter is that scale and their psychological effects are undeniable.
The material benefit as such resides in the fact that (1) they can potentially save users a great deal of time (a very large portion of search engine queries are straight-up questions, which the articles in the result set sometimes answer, but usually only partially, and it still requires a good chunk of time to plough through them just to get that answer) and (2) high-potency propaganda of any kind (not specific to the hasbara project, though it seems to provide a shining example of such) promotes anxiety, paranoia, and increased susceptibility to psychosis. In fact to some extent that is its very purpose.
So anything that helps abate the pernicious blight of (2) is potentially quite helpful, both materially and spiritually.
Also, people are going to be using AI chatbots for this kind of research anyway. Rather than hoping the larger players will do the right thing here (or at least avoid doing the wrong thing), it seems quite prudent for independent organizations to pick up the task on their own, and start creating their own bots for these purposes.
And “saving users time while searching” is more likely to be accomplished by improving your query->result pipeline and not by improving a tangentially associated technology
Also, I didn't specifically say these bots would save users time "while searching", i.e. while using a regular search engine. Though I didn't dig too deeply into the T4P proposal (so I don't know what they're proposing), my own guess is that people would seek out these bots as an alternative to general-purpose search engines -- for example as a sidebar on their favorite news sites.
I think you're overthinking it. This is like saying LLMs will never be useful because they hallucinate. That's a known issue, and yet of course they have been proven to be often quite useful nonetheless.
What it comes down to is, how often do they hallucinate, what's the negative impact when they do (both of which can be measured) and very importantly: for whatever their measured performance is, how does it compare to the next best alternative that users have?
It's not like they're trying to build a model to design a nuclear reactor in one go. It's just a Q+A bot, whose performance can be easily measured by benchmarking it against the top 30 questions or so in a given subject area (probably accounting for 95 percent of all inputs). And the current alternative users have (search engines) is pretty darn mediocre.
BTW I'm actually not much of a fan of LLMs or chatbots, so I have nothing to "sell" you here. But this is my rough take, based on my generally quite skeptical attitude toward this technology.
Which does seem to suggest that, at the very least, it's an idea worth exploring.
The problem is not how often but how bad just one single error can be. My point was on controversial topic, where a single error can deal serious damage. Yes it must be error-free like for a nuclear reactor. Just imagine a Q&A chatbot answering questions on the subject of Israel and Palestine or something else really touchy, do you really think you can afford any error/hallucination ?
[0] : https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746 [1] : https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817
My point was on controversial topic, where a single error can deal serious damage.
Okay, but so can a single garbage article on a search engine result. I guess one shouldn't build search engines then (unless they can be held to the same standards as nuclear reactors), because do you think we can afford even single bad result? Just imagine what will happen, etc.
Edit: To anyone that sees this comment, please vouch for the post as someone has flagged it again.
Here are some other places where I've posted about this in the context of this topic. If you or anyone take a look at those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527 (Dec 2023)
(* we tend not to favor posts that announce organizations, because while the organization may be important and its work may be interesting, the announcement posts themselves tend not to be interesting, so they end up fueling generic rather than specific discussion.)
It's also worthy of note that this system is ripe for abuse, because the visibility of the post is asymmetric. It gets killed as soon as it gets flagged, so no new users see it and hence hard for someone to vouch. There's also the obvious problem of ganging on a post to flag/vouch for it, which again seems like it can be easily abused by small groups.
Congratulations on the launch!
So I'd expect an US-based incubator or startup with an explicit pro-palestine agenda to be at risk of getting into legal hot water very quickly if they don't commit themselves to purely civilian and nonviolent projects.
All the projects that are currently listed on the page fulfill that condition, but I don't see how that incubator's stance towards projects with a military significance or "dual use" potential would be.
1) Already exists - No Thanks. "No Thanks" is the name of the app. No Thanks explicitly conveyed it's alignment with the BDS movement in it's description on the play store, Boycat is very generic and I fear it could be used in the opposite direction as well (although probably to less effect).
2) Good luck finding a sufficiently large source of training data that isn't biased against Palestine
3) This one's just straight up "Hey let's underpay some Palestinians and call it charity"
4) Not a bad idea inherently but centralizing protest organization has some very obvious drawbacks.
5) Is the groundwork for 2. "It provides references" - ok but we know AI hallucinates...
6) Uses AI generated images in advertising instead of using genuine protest photos. Is it because they've never been to a Pro-Palestine protest? The signs in the photo seem to be protesting police violence and while I'm all about intersectionality this seems like a rebrand (cashgrab) of an app/idea originally targeting the BLM protests and they were just too lazy/cheap to keep it on message
Edit: I’m just now realizing how dogshit of an idea it is to have any kind of AI talk about Palestine when there are live Palestinian’s and even Israeli Jewish Scholars who could debunk the whole topic in 20 questions. Even a well trained AI pales in comparison to Ilan Pappé
Edit edit: be skeptical of anyone using AI to solve fascism. The tide finally seems to be shifting on Palestine because we can all see firsthand accounts on our phones