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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’ve even seen news stories that indicate the IDF is clearing and trucking out/burying rubble so it cannot be reused or recycled if rebuilding ever occurs.
    Because of the concrete blockade, there used to be a decent trade in Gaza to recycle concrete to build new things. (I don’t know how they do it. Maybe they just use it as aggregate?) I imagine the metals could be repurposed (some), or more likely, sold as scrap and those funds used to buy new materials.


  • That’s sort of whack that they’d issue that diagnosis on the grounds that she was a deep sleeper and had sleepwalked once or twice in her teens.

    It boggles the mind that the first and seemingly only time she woke up wondering “did I have sex?” the experts just jumped to it being sexsomnia.

    Personal confession: I experience it. Not diagnosed, but by the time I was 19, I knew. Since then it’s a part of the conversation I have with anyone I share a bed with. (And the folks I share a bed with also confirm that it happens. Lots of “Were you awake when…?” questions. Fortunately, no misunderstandings or upset feelings.)

    I know everyone is different, but I feel she is the best judge of herself. It’s already established that the experts were wrong and CPS reacted inappropriately, but… ugh. You fucking know. Your partners tell you about it. You usually wake up during or just after.
    I can’t imagine her loss or despair at being told people who never met her know her better than herself and thus she is going to be denied justice. Much less the rage that they let the man walk free on such a flimsy reasoning.






  • Mind you, the complaint from Israel is not that Adidas is engaging in the revival effort/advertising campaign. Their specific complaint was that Adidas picked Bella Hadid as the face of it.

    Bella Hadid, who has not publicly said anything negative about Israel. Whose only “offenses” are that she’s half Palestinian, and that she’s shared messages on social media that condemn all murder, (which explicitly includes condemning the murder of Israelis in that statement).
    Sure, she supports the right to a homeland by Palestinians, but that’s not explicitly a dig at Israel. It seems like she’s taken great pains to not condemn an eminently condemnable country that has personally wronged her family, and now, her personally.

    It seems like Israel is throwing their weight around to harm her career and erase the achievements of yet another Palestinian. Much harm to her, for no harm mitigation to themselves.


  • I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.

    Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
    You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.

    Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.

    Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?





  • So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.

    But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.

    I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
    By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.

    Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
    But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.



  • Oh, man. I remember coming into awareness of his movie a bit late, and while I think I watched it, I don’t think I paid attention to it. But catching bits and pieces of Super-Size Me prompted me to watch both Food, Inc, and Fast Food Nation within about a two-week span of each other, and since I saw those videos (early 2009), I’ve not eaten a burger from a fast food place, since.

    Heck, my wife decided not to eat beef a few years ago, and it was really easy to just write it off, since I’d already been removing dubious meat sources from my life. (Or trying to, anyway.)

    Not singularly life changing for me, but definitely added some weight behind decisions.


  • Or… one is bad and the other one is way worse.

    The thing that always amuses me about this is that Iran was a burgeoning liberal democracy until the CIA and MI6 toppled it in 1953, installing a previously overthrown autocrat (overthrown by said forces of democracy), who ruled until 1979, when he was overthrown by religious hard liners, who really only had mass support because the autocrat was too authoritarian.

    And the reason the U.S. and Britain overthrew their democracy? They nationalized their oil industry to give profits back to their people, which entailed taking over refineries and wells ‘owned’ by British Petroleum.
    The U.S. created their own boogeyman in the area because they wanted to give a corporation near-free access to Iran’s oil. Which in turn lead to the oil crisis and instability in the region.
    The U.S. has really got to stop trying to put out fires while covered in crude oil.



  • How did you know?!? I have to admit, my beliefs were really hard to come by. I almost didn’t have them!

    I read Exodus when I was 13 and I believed it. A few years later, a history teacher challenged me to write a research paper over Israel for my IB history class, so in spring of 2002, I had to work so hard to find anti-Israel propaganda. I didn’t really find any in news media, but I went to the school library, and those people are absolute radicals!
    They had books from the 1960’s that discussed Jewish settlers forming militias and attacking “moslem” civilians and burning their family farms. It totally blew my mind that Ben Gurion coordinated terror attacks on British officials in the region, so Britain would withdraw and let the Zionists massacre Palestinians - which they did within weeks of Britain formally withdrawing from Palestine in 1948.
    Finding all those anti-Israel accounts of things they actually did was a lot of work!

    I got an A on that paper, though.

    Where and how did you learn what you know?


  • Don’t lie to us, and stop lying to yourself.

    For over 100 years zionists have been terrorizing and committing genocide there. They killed or pushed out the Muslims, they disenfranchised the Christians until they left. They’re currently clamping down on Jewish people who don’t believe in Zionism.

    They have always pushed. Every treaty, every agreement. Every legal attempt to stop the violence has been ignored, or discarded under paper thin or faulty pretenses. Terror is often the last resort of a people who have no other options. (Unless western nations give you billions of dollar in weapons and force other nations to recognize your presence, then you can call it statecraft!)

    For zionists and for Israel, the goal has always been to paint the land red with non-believer blood and to destroy every bit of culture that isn’t ‘theirs.’
    That’s why they bomb mosques and universities. That’s why they bomb infrastructure. That’s why the West Bank has been split into tiny enclaves. They’re choking the life out of the land so they can plant the seeds of their hollow society on barren soil.


  • I’m not saying I wouldn’t have mixed feelings about it, but I don’t think I’d have reservations about a politician that put on a luchador mask or dressed up like an 80’s wrestler and said the right things in absolutely batshit ways during press junkets and campaign appearances. And then, obviously, did those things in non-batshit ways while on the clock.

    Saturday night: “I’m gonna slap Netanyahu like a bitch!”
    Monday morning: “I’ve introduced legislation to suspend all military aid and arms sales to Israel immediately. Resumption of aid and/or arms sales is contingent upon the outcome of the ICJ war crimes investigation.”