> the group we're talking about does not have the power to enforce rules
What are you talking about? You can most certainly get kicked off BM, you can get criminally charged, etc.
7,831 karma · joined August 3, 2009
What are you talking about? You can most certainly get kicked off BM, you can get criminally charged, etc.
The same can be said for any conflict in which one side has overwhelming capacity and does not choose to engage on it for various reasons. But yes, diplomacy and public pressure actually matter a lot, as evidenced by the fact that Israel spends billions of dollars in state propaganda and funding political campaigns in the West to continue to receive military aid and avoiding sanctions.
You are saying that Israel has shown itself to not be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions yet it engaged for decades in political and diplomatic action to be where it is today; it was not looked at that favorably by Western powers even a few decades backs. And it understands that apartheid South Africa was not on anyone's radar for decades until it was. AIPAC and other lobbying agencies fund hundreds of political campaigns in the US in order for this to happen.
So yeah, if in five years' time the Democratic Socialists end up overtaking establishment DNC Zionists and get their share of power such that they allow BDS to work and stop military aid then Israel is going to have a much more difficult time, as evidenced by their desire to have the US engage Iran without them participating directly because they are not actually as powerful militarily as they project themselves to be.
> Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
That works until it doesn't, much like how China did not dominate on renewable energies until it did, or how proprietary Unix dominated the server market until Linux appeared. It takes remarkably little time to turn a country into a pariah state. For the past two decades Germany theorized that economic connections to Russia would prevent them from doing anything stupid regarding Ukraine.
And Israel does not just have to care about external issues. Economic sanctions hit economies hard, and even a recession is enough to turn the tables against candidates during election years, so given that certain political parties are the ones who hold the cards at any time, they are not keen to lose elections.
Also Israel depends very much on its network of high-tech companies, companies that are extremely sensitive to any sort of sanctions regime or any loss of trust such that no amount of lobby money suffices to get profitable military or high-tech contracts.
And once Israel is politically and militarily isolated it becomes a much easier target against rivals in the Middle East, so being politically associated with the West is very much a matter of survival. In this sense they have all the time in the world to perform their campaign of ethnic cleansing to restore Eretz Israel.
None of what I'm saying is speculation, this is very much what political analysts in Israel say and have been saying for decades. The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
That's not an argument.
> Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
Who made that argument? They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it, although some sure do have murderous beliefs but that's besides the point.
> Then why is it taking so long?
Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them. When they go too fast Western governments get public pressure, when it's slow nothing of importance happens.
Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing what exactly are you pretending to defend?
> There is no evidence right now the displacement is permanent.
All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
> Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms is where things stand now.
They used to say they would withdraw when the hostages were returned. The goalposts were moved, as is typical.
> But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
At this point there are literally hundreds of accounts of IDF members who were given told quite explicitly that it was an open field for killing with no consequences.
I agree with this, but the reality is that it's only the result of models empowering devs, and power in good hands amplifies positive results while power in mediocre hands amplifies technical debt.
It's a good time to choose wisely who you work with.
Hindsight is 20/20. He was suggesting free markets as the counter to entrenches aristocrats. It took centuries for our modern understanding of monopolies and rentier capitalism to develop.
But this has always been the gap between effective software engineering and garbage. When humans write software we put a large amount of effort in having best practices, hiring seniors with a track record, and enforcing process that empirically shows good results in reliability.
This is the same in AI. You need to have thorough code reviews by humans and agents, do a lot of manual QA, understand the tradeoffs when codebases grow, keep good documentation, keep bad comments out or anything that wastes the agents' context windows, etc.
The reality is that most people who produce mediocre code are mediocre users of AI, except that now they're empowered to produce crap 10 times faster and are too ignorant to distinguish between productivity and accelerated crap production.
This is one of those things we value in theory in engineering but not in practice. Reducing code as an artifact might mean coming up with clever ways or compressing data, like making code that generalizes and abstracts. This is fine if you're experienced and clever. But a lot of organizations don't have that many clever or experienced engineers and those tools cause more harm in the hands of those people. Hence compromises must be reached and verbosity is valued because it is explicit.
I used to believe otherwise but then I worked in larger orgs with a lot of mediocre people who still provided value but needed to be given the means to add value.
By far the biggest problem 90% of developers have with AI is that they should be turning off comments, as it's clear that the training data they have is no good for developing a theory of mind for an engineer who has to read them.
I've turned them off and add them myself at review time and am quite happy.
This is referred to in the need for E2E testing and E2E testing not being a substitute.
Code review is definitely the biggest challenge of AI-driven development IMO. I still have not found good processes that work in my org, but for my personal work I independently reached the author's conclusions a while ago and am very satisfied with the results.
It sounds inflammatory but nowadays the ability to that is quite a valuable skill.
Doesn't matter. You have to start somewhere and this is a good start.
Another win for the US.
What I mean is that these things decant into technical decisions and even with all the AI in the world running a DB schema migration does not become any more trivial.
The issue is that doesn’t necessarily mean that customers will pay more, as most of the features of software are not actually core.
But that's boring and you can't build a YouTube audience around it.