13 year olds can get groomed and addicted to gambling, be they at home, school, or a bus stop. But God forbid you install an app outside the approved™ app store®, citizen. What a world.
Condemning the 7/Oct attacks as an unacceptable act of terrorism is "being a mouthpiece of Hamas"!!! Fucking _disgusting_, and many stronger words I'm trying my best to contain.
We're reaching levels of wretchedness that I've never thought possible. Truly no shame anymore.
This is her statement essentially saying Israel bombed a hospital that we now know as close to a fact as we can, that they did not and that in fact it was a palestinian rocket that fell on the hospital.
But lets say we can't know that for a fact.
She was still parroting Hamas's line without any ability to validate the statement.
This statement amongst many demonstrates that UN "Experts" have zero credibility in the statements they make.
yes, it's bad to bomb hospitals, but before you go all gotcha, war is bad in general, that doesn't mean war is always wrong or evil and what occurs in war is always evil or wrong. If the enemy is using a hospital as cover to fire at you, it's bad that one has to perform attacks that put it at risk, but its not evil.
We know for as close to a fact that we can get that gazan hospitals were used as cover. (bbc, nytimes et al reported from under hospitals in places that Hamas used for shelter and stored weapons and equipment)
But what is especially evil, is accusing people wrongly when you knowingly accuse them when you know you have no ability to validate your accusation. Which is clearly the case with the accusations launched against Israel in regards to the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion.
But to many people it doesn't matter, to paraphrase the word they made about on the Colbert Report, it's all about "truthiness", one doesn't really care if this thing is true or not, the fact that it feels true and fits with one's general perception of what's true or not and good or not, is all that matters.
I even might go a step further, those who accuse someone knowingly that they don't know the truth, bare moral culpability for bad thing the person they accuse does is the future.
It's human nature for someone accused of bad things falsely to simply not care in the future. "I tried my best to do right, but they falsely accused me, I am simply not going to put as much effort into doing right in the future, as it doesn't matter".
Personally, I disagree with that sentiment, and is very much part of my internal criticism at somethings that have occurred, but I also think its a very human reaction and therefore while it doesn't excuse those who do wrong because they simply don't care anymore and doesn't reduce their blame, it also places moral culpability on those who made the knowingly false accusations. Much like if I would falsely tell someone that "So and So killed your kid" knowing that it would make them go crazy and take revenge.
Life is complicated, and human reactions to the complications of life are complicated. But when an outsider inserts themselves into a complicated situation and presents lies about it in the name of "doing good", they might very much be evil.
Or to put it a bit differently, if one believes that that Bush Administration members were evil for spreading lies that led to the Iraq Invasion, why is Francesa Albanese and her cohort fundamentally different. Why are their lies better and more justified?
If the best case you can make for your position is a retracted statement from over two years ago, consider that perhaps your position is not as strong as you think.
Anyway
> On Friday 13 October, Israel ordered hospitals and the population of northern Gaza to evacuate to southern Gaza. Because of insufficient beds in the southern Gaza Strip and no means of transporting patients, such as newborns in incubators or patients on ventilators, the evacuation orders were widely regarded as impossible to comply with.
> The Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem stated the hospital had received at least three evacuation warnings from the Israeli military on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
After repeated warnings of imminent Israeli shelling, the immediate explanation for an explosion killing half a thousand people if obviously Israeli shelling. After a more thorough investigation, new facts come to light.
But regardless, all of this is moot! In what conceivable way are extra-judicial reprisals for opinions or public speeches an acceptable state of affairs in a democracy? This is what is being discussed, not the particulars of Albanese's reports.
I'm responding to "being a mouthpiece of Hamas" that you reject. This is one case out of many where she parroted their line completely without any critical thinking. Hence, why I think its a fair statement.
With all that said, I doubt (be happy to be proven wrong) you complained at all when europe and the US "extra-judicially" sanctioned Israelis (I personally don't care that they got sanctioned). Heck, I'd hazard to say that you would welcome "extra-judicial" sanctions on many Israelis. You believe its a "genocide", so if the only available tool to stop the "genocide" is extra-judicial sanctions, would you really say "no, we can't do that!". I don't believe you would.
Or what about all the russian oligarchs that have been sanctioned. did that bother you to say anything? Again, doesn't bother me that they got sanctioned, but if you want to die on the "extra-judicial" hill, I believe you are going to get buried by all the bodies of all the sanctions you ignored that you tacitly supported.
as an aside your "obvious" explanation, was obviously not true in retrospect, so why was it so obvious that one had to make a statement that one in retrospect obviously did not have the information to make. to me its just as obvious that she doesn't care about the truth.
Irrelevant. I'd prefer laws and the courts to decide punishment for transgressions, rather than the arbitrary whims of a quasi-fascist. I'm old fashioned, I know.
The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.
I was exactly the same! But then StarCraft 2 came out, I went out of my way to purchase the retail box, it had nothing more than a slip of paper with a CD key inside, I grudgingly went to download it and Blizzard demanded a bunch of PII from me. I regret the purchase.
Not making that mistake twice. I imagine this is one of the reasons that Steam is so successful. No surprises and near zero friction. Why risk going elsewhere as a consumer?
Steam requires the same bullshit. It's just that you only do it once, and it remembers your PII for your future purchases. In this way, centralised marketplaces have lower friction.
Did Steam change something? I first opened the account to claim a game via license code. It only required a working email at the time.
Later I chose to provide my credit card for convenience. As far as I know I could have instead used gift cards or prepaid cards.
Regardless, there's also an issue of trust. I might choose to provide PII to a large central marketplace that has a good reputation but providing it to each individual producer seems highly questionable.
When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.
> I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.
Really? When we were pirating games off each other as teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to pay for.
> It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations with a distinct personality.
You can buy a kid’s tiger electronics style toy that plays 20 questions.
It’s not like this LLM is bastion of glorious efficiency, it’s just stripped down to fit on the hardware.
Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application.
Including Jira in the conversation doesn’t even make logical sense. It’s not a desktop application that consumes memory. Jira has such a wide scope that the word “Jira” doesn’t even describe a single product.
My Pentium 3 in 2005 could do chat and video calls and play chess and send silly emotes. There is no conceivable user-facing reason why in 20 years the same functionality takes 30× as many resources, only developer-facing reasons. But those are not valid reasons for a professional. If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly.
> If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly.
By itself, I would agree.
However, in this metaphor, concrete got 15x cheaper in the same timeframe. Not enough to fully compensate for the difference, but enough that a whole generation are now used to much larger edifices.
So it means you could save your client 93% of their money in concrete, but you choose to make it 2× more expensive! That only makes my metaphor stronger ahaha.
You could save 93% of the money in concrete, at the cost of ???* in the more-expensive-than-ever time of the engineer themselves who now dominates the sticker price.
(At this point the analogy breaks down because who pays for the software being slower is the users' time, not the taxes paid by a government buying a bridge from a civil engineer…)
* I don't actually buy the argument that the last decade or so of layers of "abstraction" save us developers any time at all, rather I think they're now several layers deep of nested inner platforms that each make things more complicated, but that's a separate entire thread, and blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html
The word processors of 30 years ago often had limits like “50k chapters” and required “master documents” for anything larger. Lotus 123 had much fewer columns or rows than modern excel.
Not an excuse, of course, but the older tools are not usable anymore if you have modern expectations.
I have great doubts that you were doing simultaneous screen sharing from multiple participants with group annotation plus HD video in your group calls, all while supporting chatting that allowed you to upload and view multiple animated gifs, videos, rich formatted text, reactions, slash command and application automation integrations, all simultaneously on your Pentium 3.
I would be interested to know the name of the program that did all
that within the same app during that time period.
For some reason Slack gets criticism for being “bloated” when it basically does anything you could possibly imagine and is essentially a business communication application platform. Nobody can actually name a specific application that does everything Slack does with better efficiency.
You're grasping at anything to justify the unjustifiable. Not only did I do most (not all, obviously) of those things in my Pentium 3, including video and voice chat, screenshare, and silly animated gifs and rich text formatting, but also: that's beside the point. Let's compare like with like then; how much memory does it take to have a group chat with a few people and do a voice/video in MSN messenger or the original Skype, and how much does Slack or Teams take? What about UI stutter? Load time? There's absolutely no justification for a worse user experience in a 2025 computer that would be a borderline supercomputer in 2005.
> Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application.
The 4th Gen iPod touch had 256 meg of RAM and also did those things, with video calling via FaceTime (and probably others, but I don't care). Well, except "cross platform", what with it being the platform.
Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12.
Remember that Slack does simultaneous multiple participants screen sharing plus annotations plus HD video feeds from all participants plus the entirety of the rest of the app continues to function as if you weren’t on a call at all simultaneously.
It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software.
Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what specs you think Slack should run on and link me to an example program that has 100% feature parity that stays within those specs?
Showing me a black and white <10FPS group video call with no other accompanying software running simultaneously in the 90s is pointless.
Showing me that someone thought of a protocol is pointless. Just look at the history of HDTV. We wouldn’t really describe HDTV as being available to consumers despite it existing in the early 1990s.
I’d also like you to show me a laptop SKU sold in the last 10 years that is incapable of running Slack. If Slack is so inefficient you should be able to find me a computer that struggles with it.
Finally, I’ll remind you that Slack for mobile is a different application that isn’t running in the same way as the desktop app and uses fewer resources. The latest version of it will run on very old phone hardware, going all the way back to the iPhone 8 (2GB RAM), and that’s assuming you even need the latest version for it to function.
The problem with that kind of feature/benefit based thinking is that it won't correlate with code or computational footprints well. That's like justifying price of cars with seatback materials. That's not where the costs are.
Modern chat apps like Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. are extremely resource intense solely by being skinned Chrome showing overbloated HTMLs. That's it. Most of the "actual" engineering of it is outsourced and externalized to Google, NVIDIA/Intel/AMD, Microsoft/Apple, etc.
If these applications only hogged memory when under stress (outgoing screencap plus video, multiple streams incoming, display to 3+ monitors) you might have a point. But that's not the case so you don't.
Meanwhile I can play back multiple 1080 videos on different monitors, run a high speed curl download, saturate my gigabit LAN with a bulk transfer, and run a brrfs scrub in the background all most likely without breaking 2 GB of RAM usage. MPV, VLC, and ffmpeg are all remarkably lightweight.
The only daily application I run that consumes a noticable quantity of resources is my web browser.
So is it the "business logic" or is it the multiple HD streams that are supposed to account for the resource consumption? You've changed your story. But do please explain how the "business logic" to handle the chat box, UI, and whatever else is supposed to justify the status quo.
People making excuses for poorly designed software is what's tiring.
> app ecosystem of Slack is largely responsible for its success.
Is that true? Slack was one of the first private chats that was not painful to use, circa 2015. I personally hate the integrations and wish they'd just fix the bugs in their core product.
> Unless somehow these are compromised at the time of download, I will never have to worry about them again.
But this is exactly what rust does x) `cargo add some_crate` adds a line `crate_name = "1.2.3"` to your project config, downloading and pinning the dependency to that exact version. It will not change unless you specifically change it.
well, not quite. It'll go into the lockfile and you won't get a new version if you just build again, but if you add or remove a dependency that version may shift around a bit as a part of dependency resolution.
Any time you pull any code, be it `cargo add` or `apt install` or copy-pasting it in your own code, you become vulnerable to any issues present in that code. I'm unsure what your point is.
The claim is just that `cargo add crate` is functionally identical to downloading a C++ header and keeping it in the same version, since in both cases the dependency will be pinned to that fixed version.
Honestly, it boils down to capitalism / market pressure. Quality journalism is expensive, compared to the return in the form of the price people are willing to pay for that quality journalism. Clickbait is so profitable, it's like a powerful magnet pulling all news institutions, be they TV channels, newspapers, or whatever, towards that model.
LLMs can produce a literal terabyte of slop for cheaper than a month's wage for a journalist. I'm not hopeful.
reply