slashdev

I’m wondering exactly the same thing. How do people fall for the propaganda of Hamas, but here we are…

We both know people would burn graphite pellets. That’s what we do with wood pellets today.

Huh, video proof that they do: https://nypost.com/2024/10/10/world-news/hamas-steals-humani...

Again how widespread that was is lost to the fog of war. I don't trust what anyone is saying about the subject, including Israel right now.

Btw, as we speak Israel just announced they will be resuming airdrops of aid into Gaza, with Israel taking the first shift and foreign organizations being permitted to take over after Sunday. This is not the actions of an entity intent to commit genocide.

I am interested, thanks for sharing!

Genocide is extremely vague. It requires intentionally killing members of a group just because they're members of a group. It makes no requirement about how many need to be killed - but obviously that matters too. Oct 7th had both intent and the actions - killing Israeli's of all ages just because they were Jews - but it wasn't a genocide because it was mercifully limited in scope. So scale must matter.

I would argue it's like porn, you know it when you see it. Rwanda, Armenia, Bosnia, the Holocaust.

Censoring information in war, which every country does, is not proof of genocide.

Israel is the only country that I am aware of in all of history actually providing food and other essentials to the enemy side during a war. That's not the actions of an entity intent on committing genocide. Without intent, it's not a genocide.

You can say they're being cavalier with human life in Gaza, which happens to an extent in every war, but even then the numbers show they're at least acting with some restraint. Again, that rules out genocide.

Words mean things, you can't just call a war a genocide because it's violent.

You can connect them with other equipment to do that, if that’s your goal. Not very effective though

That’s what I’m using as the benchmark, but I was thinking more like bio engineering to create an organism that gets closer to solar panel efficiency.

Would be potentially very useful for timber or biomass production. I doubt people would trust eating it.

Evolution has had billions of years to improve on photosynthesis, but there still seems to be a lot left in the table.

Could we engineer a more efficient photosynthesis?

There are a million sources saying the same thing on X, but how about the latimes? https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-07-25/israel...

There are videos of Hamas stealing Gaza aid. How widespread that is tough to tell through the fog of war.

There's more to that story: https://x.com/HilzFuld/status/1948097196055810061

> Do we have to literally wait for these people to starve to death before admitting that maybe this rings of ethnic cleansing, just a little?

I don't mean to sound callous, but that would make it a genocide. Until it happens, it is not. The current truth of the matter is shrouded by the fog of war.

Maybe a couple months from now there has been mass starvation in Gaza and I'm on your side. But I don't think Israel is either stupid or evil enough to let that happen.

There is a number. If the casualties were above 200,000 it would certainly make the case for a genocide much stronger. That's a high civilian to combatant casualty ratio. Hamas has an estimated 30-40K fighters. Numbers like that would mean a 10:1 civilian to combatant ratio which is high for a modern war. Higher than WWII[1], Vietnam, Iraq[2], etc. I'd at least have to admit Israel is prosecuting the war in a very cavalier way in regards to the lives of civilians.

The Iraq war, for example, had a roughly 3:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.[2]

If we take the Gazan Health Ministry numbers of 60k casualties of which Israel claims about 23K were Hamas fighters (neither number can be trusted at face value, but it gives us a starting point) then we see a ratio of 2:1. Which is pretty normal for war. Given how densely populated and urban Gaza is, how Hamas uses civilians as human shields, it's actually miraculously low. Not downplaying how horrible it is that so many people have died, but it could be much worse.

You could say the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry is understating the numbers, but it'd be hard to make a case for more than 80K[3]. You could say Israel has over stated how many Hamas fighters it has killed, but independant intelligence assessments estimate about 15K. If you take the absolute worst case estimate, it's 5:1, which is about the same as Myanamr, worse than Iraq, but better than Chechnya.

There's no way to twist that into a case for genocide. It doesn't fit. Lets look at what civilian to combatant ratio looks like in genocides:

Rwandan Genocide - 80 : 1

Armenian Genocide - 1000 : 1

Bosnian Genocide - 50 : 1

Yazidi Genocide by ISIS - 1000 : 1

Holocaust - 1000 : 1

It's clearly a war, not a genocide.

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

- [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02009-8

I knew you were all talk and no substance. It took me 10 minutes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44695878

Did you read the article? Instead of making ad-hominen attacks, can you counter the arguments within?

> The first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?

If it's a genocide, it's the most ineptly executed genocide ever. From the same entity that humiliated and defanged both Hezbollah and Iran in days.

It really doesn't fit. It does look like a war though. Yes wars are horrible, and lots of bad things happen in wars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44695878

Depends what country you're in. In most of Canada grocery stores do not sell liquor.

But at any rate, they're going to ask for ID when you buy it. Children can't access it.

This is a little crude still, but the fact that this is even possible is mind blowing. This has the potential, if progress continues, to break the vendor-locked nightmare that is GPU software and open up the space to real competition between hardware vendors.

Imagine a world where machine learning models are written in Rust and can run on both Nvidia and AMD.

To get max performance you likely have to break the abstraction and write some vendor-specific code for each, but that's an optimization problem. You still have a portable kernel that runs cross platform.

Here’s a New York Times opinion piece (penned literally one week later) that comes the opposite conclusion. Unsurprisingly people disagree about this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/opinion/no-israel-is-not-...

You and I disagree on everything, let’s leave it at that. Further discussion would not be fruitful.

That’s a cheap cop out to not do the work. Multiply the numbers by two to account for your alleged undercounting. Estimate how many of those are combatants and how many civilians. Compare to other urban guerrilla warfare. I’ll respect you if you at least try the exercise.

You claim my opinion doesn’t matter, but you want others to care about your opinion. You see the problem with that right?

You can repeat it as much as you want. It’s not a genocide. Obviously not all wars are fought in the trenches. This one has the enemy hiding under hospitals and schools using the populace as human shields. They desire more civilian casualties, because that helps them win the PR war. Convincing people like you who aren’t so good at logical reasoning.

Use the health ministry numbers, let’s pretend they’re accurate. Compare that with wars versus genocides and tell me which this resembles more closely.

It’s an easy exercise. I’ve done it. It’s a war.

Prove it with numbers.

There are plenty of criticisms one can make about how Israel is behaving in this conflict. But that’s a far cry from a genocide.

Prove it with numbers, not feelings.

Israel is making mistakes, and doing things they shouldn’t, no doubt. But they’re not committing genocide.

I read the entire article and was unconvinced. For a genocide expert, he really didn’t lay out the argument well. And I think that’s because, at the end of the day, you can’t. The numbers don’t support it.

It would be very easy to change my entire opinion and convert me to your side - but I only respond to logical arguments made with factual data.

Air Canada is a terribly run airline. I avoid them whenever possible. They lost my luggage once and it took a year of badgering them to get them to pay up for it.

It is good that it doesn't give you an option. I don't want some app on my phone telling me its database is corrupt, I want it to always load back to the last good state and I'll handle any missing data myself.

The checksums are not going to fail unless there was disk corruption or a partial write.

In the former, thank your lucky stars it was in the WAL file and you just lose some data but have a functioning database still.

In the latter, you didn't fsync, so it couldn't have been that important. If you care about not losing data, you need to fsync on every transaction commit. If you don't care enough to do that, why do you care about checksums, it's missing the point.

How would this work differently? As soon as you encounter a checksum failure, you can't trust anything from that point on. If the checksum were just per-page and didn't build on the previous page's checksum, you can't just apply pages from the WAL that were valid, skipping the ones which were not. The database at the end of that process would be corrupt.

If you stop at the first failure, the database is restored to the last good state. That's the best outcome that can be achieved under the circumstances. Some data could be lost, but there wasn't anything sensible you could do with it anyway.

How on earth is that less cruel? Have you seen how birds eat each other?

Yes, it helps a lot overcome that initial momentum. I also find it helps at the end of the day when I’m tired. I can just tell it to do the work a little bit at a time and review/fix the output. Takes less out of me.

My commit messages have always been crap, so this doesn’t bother me much. I squash it all at the end anyway.

Still sometimes I forget to commit between tasks or it goes wild fixing compiler errors I didn’t want to address.

It’s mostly nonsense

https://youtu.be/Q6FknMOlU_w?si=8eyTIE-HeEulHNZO