doggo

Israel Announces Ethnic Cleansing and Permanent Occupation of Gaza

DOn 5 May, Israel's security cabinet unanimously approved a new plan to escalate operations in Gaza, including the "conquest" of the territory and the promotion of the "voluntary migration" of its population into Egypt's Sinai Desert.

Let's call this what it is: the annexation of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of its citizens-all while we approach ten weeks of Israel blocking food and water to the population.

The approved plan includes several core elements: the military occupation of the Gaza Strip, full territorial control, and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians to southern Gaza, nearer to the Rafah border crossing into Sinai.

Ethnic cleansing has never been incidental to Israel's project it has been a core objective from the very start. The creation of the state itself was rooted in this goal, and decades later, its policies remain consistent in advancing it.

This is the collapse of international law. Palestine has laid bare a global system that not only permits genocide-but protects it, funds it, and cloaks it in the language of human rights.

if AI is going to be a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?

what does it mean when people say that AI will "get better"? what does that look like and how would it even be achieved? the article makes a point to debunk talking points about how all tech is misunderstood at first by pointing out that the tech it gets compared to the most, the internet and smartphones, were both created over the course of decades with roadmaps and clear goals. AI does not have this.

the american power grid straight up cannot handle the load required to run AI because it has not been meaningfully developed in decades. how are they going to overcome this hurdle (they aren't)?

people who are losing their jobs to this tech aren't being "replaced". they're just getting a taste of how little their managers care about their craft and how little they think of their consumer base. ai is not capable of replacing humans and there's no indication they ever will because...

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

On 23 October last year (2024) the New York Times published an interview with former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji who worked on organising and gathering data for OpenAI until 2022 when he begun thinking about the morality of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that what OpenAI is doing blatantly violates copyright law and decided to leave the company altogether in August 2024.

After he came out with this accusation he was set to appear in court to testify against OpenAI’s data-gathering practices, something which had the potential of being a complete disaster for the company and the generative AI industry as a whole.

That was until 26 November, just days before he was due to appear in court, when he suddenly and mysteriously was found dead inside his own apartment. Investigators concluded that the death was self-inflicted, something which his family has disputed.

There was also “sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like someone hit him in the bathroom based on blood spots”, and his apartment showed signs of having been ransacked for evidence: “The pin drive is missing. His computer was messed up.”.

Overall it feels pretty clear-cut what happened, that is to say that OpenAI had him killed because he was a legitimate threat to their business, indicating that they are fully aware that the way they’re gathering data is completely illegal.

Sources:

Alys Davies, 14.12.2024, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment. BBC News

Barney Davis, 16.1.2025, Suchir Balaji’s family demand outside investigation into OpenAI whistleblower’s death. The Independent

And there actually was an investigation, but it concluded that it was suicide: https://apnews.com/article/boeing-whistleblower-suicide-9fe771a97c5745b9c53f24c04141e474

It is possible that it was suicide (which doesn't make Boeing look any better, obviously), but I wouldn't be surprised if the "surveillance footage" was doctored in some way, especially since another Boeing whistleblower, Joshua Dean, also died after he testified: https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/05/07/boeing-whistleblower-deaths/

That being said, the deaths motivated even more whistleblowers to come forward against Boeing: https://fortune.com/2024/05/09/more-boeing-whistleblowers-emerge-law-firm/

Of course it is.