@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

escarpment

@escarpment@mastodon.online

Anonymous person. I'm here to read and learn. I like to help people. If someone has a question, consents to receiving advice, and I know the answer, I gladly provide that answer.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

oatmeal, to Israel

/ UNRWA donors likely to resume funding soon, Norway says

[…] "I think that a large number of those countries who suspended are (having) second thoughts," Barth Eide told Reuters in an interview, citing the recognition from these nations that "they cannot punish the whole Palestinian society".

[…] "But then, of course, they need an honourable way out, which means they are hoping, I think - without speaking for individual countries - that they will get something from these investigations that suggest that they can say: "well, we needed to suspend, but now we're back'."

https://www.reuters.com/world/unrwa-donors-likely-resume-funding-soon-norway-says-2024-03-06/

@palestine
@israel

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@oatmeal @palestine @israel UNRWA reports that UNRWA is innocent of all wrongdoing. I don't think UNRWA is a reliable source here.

Meanwhile, 100,000 children face starvation in Haiti and few in the west even pretend to care.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@ecpoir @oatmeal @palestine @israel So do you care about Haiti or not? Is the suffering in Haiti worth your time or not? Pretty callous to dismiss the suffering in Haiti as merely whataboutism.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@ecpoir @oatmeal @palestine @israel Do you care about the war crimes of the gangs of Haiti? The threats of genocide from gang leaders in Haiti?

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

It turns out I don't have the JavaScript ecosystem fluency to figure out how to turn this kind of syntax (from the new https://jsr.io/ repository):

import * as mod from "@kwhinnery/yassify";

Into something that works in my browser.

I have tried and failed to use Vite, esbuild and Parcel so far.

Anyone able to share notes (or a Gist) with a recipe that works? I have npm installed.

I want to start by calling the https://jsr.io/@kwhinnery/yassify function from an index.html file!

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@simon I would expect esbuild my_file_that_imports_it.js --bundle --outfile=out.js

And then your index.html file has a script tag whose src points to out.js

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@simon I guess I don't know where deno add puts node_modules. I think esbuild expects a node_modules directory.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@simon Ah I see, the package doesn't even have package.json, just jsr.json. Seems like this new approach would defy expectations for most tools.

escarpment, to random
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

My world on this platform keeps shrinking and becoming more siloed as I continue to get blocked for expressing dissenting opinions.

rml, (edited ) to Israel

Only 34% of 🇺🇸 oppose a ceasefire, and the vast majority of the country supports it, including over 50% of all Jews. Yet the continues to spread the malicious lie that says supporting a ceasefire is antisemitic. Because ADL has never been about fighting , which can be demonstrated by the way they claim the Sonnenrad — the notorious Black Sun of white supremacist movements — isn't actually racist on their website, in order to protect the US government's alliances with various white supremacists movements who proudly display the Sonnenrad.

Heads up, if you try to argue the Black Sun is not a white supremacist symbol in my comments, I will block. This is an antifascist zone of discourse.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@rml I am Jewish. I support a conditional ceasefire, conditional on Hamas releasing its hostages and ceasing operations, Hezbollah stopping its attacks on the north of Israel, proxy militias in Syria ceasing fire, and Houthis ceasing fire.

I don't support an unconditional unilateral ceasefire where Israel ceases fire and Israel's enemies reload for more attacks.

stux, to random
@stux@mstdn.social avatar

It went so fast from 'how to create a site in <CODE>' to 'how to ask AI to create a site in <CODE>' on the internet the past year or so

I guess one could do it that way and save a ton of time but when it comes to updates, bug fixes or very specific changes I'm not sure that's a handy way to go :blobcatgiggle:

AI /could be/ a handy tool for explaining code for example but even with that it's the question if it's accurate at all

Even with all AI tools out there I still chose to learn myself 🤷❤️

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@stux But once you know, it saves a ton of time and feels like magic. "Generate a 7 X 7 css grid in React.js"- saves a bunch of boilerplate.

ryanhoulihan, to random
@ryanhoulihan@mastodon.social avatar

Why is the aid that I get conditional but the aid that Israel gets isn’t?

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@ryanhoulihan The aid Israel and Palestinians receive from the United States is conditional. Israel has not violated any of the conditions of US military support. UNRWA has violated those conditions by employing several people who perpetrated the October 7 attack.

escarpment, to random
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

Black holes

I had the thought recently that if nothing can escape a black hole, and they just get denser and denser, then that's pretty final- nothing ever changes beyond that. That matter is permanently stuck. Complete stasis.

But, apparently not so. Hawking radiation emits from black holes extremely slowly, and it is theorized that black holes eventually evaporate and vanish. So the universe continues changing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

brewsterkahle, to random
@brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org avatar

new paper on AI: "New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text"

Quanta mag writes a layman version of a new paper. Seems important. (I think I get it). How LLM's can be 'creative' (novel) and 'understand' (generalize) and demonstrate its true in GPT-4, and better than GPT-3.5.

"Far from being 'stochastic parrots,' the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-theory-suggests-chatbots-can-understand-text-20240122/

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@brewsterkahle This has been my hunch all along. The "stochastic parrots" people are going to look very silly, like the people who tried to "prove" that flight was impossible shortly before the Wright brothers' first flights.

serge, to random
@serge@babka.social avatar

There are times when I think that antisemitism on the Fediverse is going down, but really it's just that our local moderation is going well.

Nonetheless, unless instances' moderators actually take an active stand against it, the result is that it's up to victims of hate speech to be constantly on guard.

I for one am sick of seeing:

Nazi/Holocaust Inversion
Blood Libel Accusations
Harassment of Jews Talking About Antisemitism
Deicide
Word Swapping (ie "Zionists" or "Israelis" used instead of Jews")
Accusations of Weaponized Antisemitism

On the Fediverse.

If you say you're against antisemitism, then take action, clean up your own instance and start taking other instances who allow this kind of hate speech on your instance seriously.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@serge It sometimes feels like antisemitism is going down because I open my mouth and intervene whenever I see it. I immediately get blocked by the person and followed by someone sympathetic to my viewpoint. So the antisemitic person gets to continue being antisemitic behind my back with their antisemitic friends, while I gain a person who is not an antisemite. No net change in the world, just a change in my slice of it.

lauren, (edited ) to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

I'd be fine with the U.S. ceasing all military funding to Israel unless it officially adopts as policy and moves toward implementing a 2-state solution. It would be nice as a bonus to require that Netanyahu and his gang of racist religious wacko thugs be shackled in basement cells for the rest of their lives, but you can't always get what you want.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@lauren I would oppose that policy. I am no fan of Netanyahu- he held a rally where people yelled "Death to Rabin" shortly before Rabin was assassinated. But Netanyahu is not a religious wacko or a thug. He is just a shrewd politician and Israel gravitates toward the right whenever they are violently attacked. The Israeli left has failed to convince anyone that peace is possible.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@lauren A loss of American support for Israel might be a death sentence to many Jews.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@lauren The Zionist project of Ben-Gurion, Meir, and others was largely secular. It has been a slow transformation to accepting religion back into Israeli society. It's a tension at the heart of Israel: their values drive them to be secular but their identity drives them to be religious. The religious were initially anti-Zionist because they thought it was unholy to return to Israel before the messiah.

It's true that Netanyahu has made bedfellows with the religious.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@lauren I am an atheist and tend to agree. But, counterargument: attempting to squash people's innate urge to be religious is also a recipe for disaster. That is why the United States settled on freedom of religion, not prohibition of religion. It's certainly a bit sad to the enlightened among us, but for many people, religion is important and that seems to be a fact of human nature.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@lauren Yes, I don't dispute that. Part of Zionism was a reaction to that behavior: spending all day studying the Talmud makes you very vulnerable to attack. That's why Zionists wanted to create a "new Jew" who worked the land and served in the army. They were mortified by the Jews who, in their view, stood idly by as the Kishinev pogrom went on. Realistically though, perhaps evolution favors the highly reproductive religious over the antinatalist atheists.

escarpment, to random
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

Perhaps moral anti-realism can shed light on some of the trends and issues in modern parenting. There is some hand-wringing among parents about labeling things good or bad. Parents don't want their children to think of themselves as bad.

A moral anti-realist might say, people are objectively neither good nor bad. People have subjective opinions and set goals based on those opinions. For example, it's subjective whether coloring inside the lines is better than coloring outside the lines.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

Once you have made a subjective appraisal, such as that you prefer when colors fit neatly inside the lines, you can then judge objectively whether the result matches your subjective appraisal. But the subjective appraisal can always change. One day, you might prefer colors inside the lines; another day, you might prefer them outside the lines. There is no objective value of colors being inside the lines.

KFuentesGeorge, to KindActions

You can donate to the UNRWA and also support GFM and mutual aid requests for individual Palestinian families like this one: https://gofund.me/a34664ca

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@alda @KFuentesGeorge And weird how little the troll farm paid me to post about Israel prior to October 7.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@alda @KFuentesGeorge Yeah, continue to make light of the mentally ill in order to hurt someone on the internet whom you disagree with. The mentally ill did nothing to you. Why are you using them as collateral damage in your attack on me. Just say, "I hate you" to me and be done with it.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@alda @jamesmarshall @KFuentesGeorge I don't think you are a fraud, but you exaggerated your authority on the subject matter to try to lecture me about how the UNRWA is not corrupt.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@jamesmarshall @alda @KFuentesGeorge I didn't make an argument from authority. I made an argument from evidence. I didn't say "I am a UNRWA insider and here's what I know." I said "here is the evidence for the claim that UNRWA is corrupt." And you can follow the bread crumbs from UN Watch to Al-Jazeera to the report on bias in their educational materials, albeit by an Israeli non-profit.

escarpment,
@escarpment@mastodon.online avatar

@alda @jamesmarshall @KFuentesGeorge I'm happy to have a civil conversation. No one is stopping you from sharing your insights. Please, by all means, share your insights.

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