Very careful. I never use anything from them directly. I just use them to give me a starting point on what to look for.
For example, if the AI tells me that some company is know for their low latency database, I’ll look around for primary sources on the latency of the database compared to other vendors. I’ll also look for evidence to the contrary.
I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.
"Tell me about "
“What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?”
“Who are their biggest competitors?”
“What’s the worst/best thing about them?”
Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.
When “they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia” it wasn’t in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.
That’s still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.
The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.
If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.
the fact that most of them went back to Gaza
They did? I hadn’t read that. Do you know where I can learn more about that?
I don’t think you finished reading my comment in the first place but I’ll expand on it.
Terrorists/freedom fighters/insurgents (whatever you want to call them) regularly have their operations in civilian buildings; the IRA did it, the country formerly known as the 13 colonies did it, Boxers did it, ETA did it… It’s just standard MO because they have no choice.
They may move to tactics like that eventually but for now it’s artillery and airstrikes. Netanyahu threatened to bomb Gaza to rubble and it looks like he’s carrying that out.
I don’t see anything targeted about the current retaliation; what we’re hearing and seeing now is most consistent with a scorched earth policy.
The current estimates are between 100 and 150 hostages. A single armed person can transport several unarmed hostages. They’ll be tied up and consist mostly of people who don’t put up much resistance (since those people tend to get killed rather than taken hostage).
Even if we’re generous and assume one guard per hostage, that’s at most 150 terrorists that made it back to Gaza.
I haven’t been able to find new numbers today. A bunch of articles restating the number of Israelis killed by Hamas and a few talking about estimates for numbers killed in Gaza but I haven’t found updated info on how many of the Hamas terrorists died in Israel.
Didn’t the IDF already kill the 1,500 or so terrorists who did this?
What reason do we have to believe that the thousands of people who are currently getting bombed had anything to do with this at all, beyond having the misfortune of living in Gaza?
The reports I’ve read claim that around 1,000 Hamas terrorist entered Israel. The IDF claims to have recovered the bodies of about 1,500 terrorists inside Israel. Given that this is an active conflict, it’s not surprising that the numbers don’t line up but they’re of the same order of magnitude.
Since Hamas has hostages it’s clear that at least some of those terrorists made it back to Gaza. It’s also clear that the IDF has, by now, killed the vast majority of the terrorists who carried out these acts.
So who is currently being targeted by IDF ordinance?
This is a claim regularly made by the IDF. It seems fairly likely and I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary.
I’m not sure how different that is from deliberately putting civilian settlements in a hotly contested buffer zone though.
I could see that as fair as long as everyone agrees that a small symbol on their neck is an appropriate expression of their religion.
If I were to think of a Muslim country that officially embraces secularism in government what would that look like? What if they said that everyone can wear a discreet head covering. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Daoists, Jains, etc are also allowed to wear small headscarves appropriate to their religion.
The problem is that headscarves just aren’t generally meaningful to those other religions.
I’m even more suspicious of the intent of the French law since they apparently went out of their way to create an exemption for non-Muslim head scarves. The law seems to be constructed and interpreted as, “If we can tell that its related to Islam, it’s out.” The case where a girl was sent home for wearing a skirt that was too long really just looks like they want to make Muslims (and Muslim girls, in particular) more uncomfortable.
I want to be very careful around judging the intentions of people who live 5000 miles away and speak a language I don’t understand. There’s a lot of room to misunderstand people’s intentions.
But from what I can see, it’s looking like there’s an intentional bias.
I read up on it a bit more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools
It seems like regulations on religious attire are selectively applied. Small crosses and stars of David, some variations of Sikh turbans, Fatima’s hands are acceptable and the final decision is left up to school headmasters.
It also sounds like the legislators who created it specifically intended to target Muslim headdress.
It’s one thing to keep religion out of education. It seems that they’re disproportionately concerned about suprsesssing Islam in their schools.
Do they ban other forms of religious expression? Crosses/crucifixes? Yarmulke/kippah?
Or is it just Islamic symbols?
That’s unfortunate but not terribly surprising.
Humans will build a bar as soon as there are more than two people that want to drink but you typically need much larger populations before you get a sober community at all. You usually only get dedicated sober spaces when those communities get big enough.
Fortunately, as many others on this thread have pointed out, there are many sober options beyond dedicated sober spaces.
It’s been documented already. I guess the next question is if there’s any reason to think it’s stopped.
Update: I guess not. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/us-spying-allies.html
Yeah. We mostly think of grammatical number as a simple choice of singular vs plural but that’s not what we do in real life.
We generally have multiple labels that describe the concept of progressively expanding circles of what’s included when we think of ourselves.
There’s the very narrow sense of I/me/myself. We have various expansions around us/all’y’all. Jamaicans have the phrase “I and I” which focuses on the individual but explicitly calls out the connection with others.
It isn’t even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.
Source I am from Austria. :)