between iron and silver

The crowd boos. I begin to walk off in shame, when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room.

You have to remind yourself you can't do that thing anymore.

You have to place limits on yourself.

You have to adjust your goals, your timeline, your expectations of everything.

It's disheartening to have to be the person who holds yourself back. But you have to in order to function.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

All forms of knowledge creation and meaning-making are shaped and crafted by power relations and the justification for those relations. A common way to shape knowledge and meaning is to reframe the denial of atrocity by those in power as a "debate." This tactic creates a rhetorical "Schrödinger's cat" in which the atrocity is simultaneously happening and not happening, according to who you ask. It turns the material reality of the situation into a hypothetical thought experiment that the audience is invited to debate forever, with any conclusion being cast as "biased."

For a well-known example, oil lobbyists tried to suppress the scientific consensus on climate change for decades, and a significant amount of media aided in this by shaping all reporting on climate crisis into a "controversy." Reporting construed economically motivated denial as another "point of view," and positioned their own journalism as being "neutral" and "objective" in presenting "both sides."

In response, the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales locked the page and made this statement: “At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested. This is a violation of [Wikipedia Neutral Point of View] that requires immediate correction." See how the tool of neutrality works to facilitate genocide denial? He reduces evidence and global consensus to a "claim" that is "contested." He insists that anyone speaking plainly about the facts of genocide in Gaza "requires immediate correction."

What are Gazans to do with this? What does it mean when your own life is called a "violation of neutrality" and if anyone listens to you they can no longer be trusted as "unbiased"?

Fadel's life is not an abstract hypothetical to be debated. He is a son, a brother, a student, a community member, and a friend. He is generous and thoughtful and a good listener. He struggles with chronic pain from his injuries and dizziness and fatigue from his disability.

He needs surgery after surviving the bombing of his home. He needs funds to afford his monthly medication as soon as possible.

Donations also help his family to afford the wildly fluctuating cost of food and clean water. His family endured extreme hunger for much of this year due to blockades. Donations were sustaining some recovery from malnutrition for a little while, but the previous deletion of his GoFundMe set him very far back.

He's had to restart funding from scratch, and his family has been without clean water and enough calories for days now.

Your donations make a real, tangible difference in his life. You have the ability to share food, water, medicine, and care with him.

You’re allowed to care even though lots of things are going bad. Some things can’t be fixed or saved. But it’s okay to hold onto hope for something good to happen tomorrow. Good things are always going to pop up like flowers in war zones.

“The world is not on fire, there are just lots of fires.” Don’t lose hope that some fires can be put out. So much is still easy. Build a safe zone within the flames, and persist putting them out. Accepting we are in a bad place does not equal rolling over to let it get worse. No matter how bad things will get, you can still put out flames in different spaces.

You can give yourself the freedom of acknowledging life right now is in a state of unrest and we don’t know when the chapter will close, while also being happy we are here with other people and things that make it worth it. Because it is worth it. All hard things are worth it.

No like PLEASE end this oh my goodness 🤦🏻‍♀️ what a colossal waste of money it’s so clear the US have no intention of delivering any of this…they have absolutely no respect for the deal…

Australia has already committed hundreds of billions of dollars over the lifetime of AUKUS. The delivery of the schedule is unreasonably long, with the first Aus built submarines not expected till 2040.

The plan depends heavily on the US submarine industrial base increasing production, which has recurrently struggled to meet the existing targets. Meanwhile, Australia is paying substantial amounts upfront while much of the capability remains years or decades away.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.