Well Israel has defined "combatant" as "male between 14 and 55", and the Western world more or less shrugged and moved on without missing a beat. I'm not optimistic.
Hamas itself parades in uniforms but fights in civilian clothing. Somehow the anti-Israeli crowd can't form a complete argument without resorting to lies.
Your "skeptic stackexchange" "source" supports what I said. The "legal age" thing only applies in statistics/analysis. It is not the definition of combatant for targeting purposes. As an analysis it is a legitimate tool given Hamas doesn't identify whether casualties are combatants or not.
the downvotes and the flagging are another tactic where the anti-Israelis do not engage with the facts.
EDIT: The west bank incident is also completely irrelevant. Yes, Israel has special units that will operate as civilians, and those would be unlawful combatants as well in a war. But Israeli soldiers as a rule wear uniforms and Palestinians do not - ever. Your comment would be reasonable if the entire IDF fought in civilian clothing, then you'd be welcome to point that out. But in the war in Gaza the IDF soldiers wear uniform and fight according to international laws and the Hamas/PIJ etc. Palestinian "soldiers" do not wear uniform and do not respect any aspect of international law. These are the facts.
EDIT2: Re: the seizure of smuggled military equipment in 2018. You can't seriously suggest that Israel should equip Hamas with "thousands of items of military clothing, including boots, coats and combat vests, all in camouflage colors.". This is not serious.
EDIT3: to expand on why your sources support my claim. The questions asks: "Is it true that the instructions given to the IDF soldiers in Gaza are to consider "anybody who could be a combatant" as such and shoot them?"
Your answer refers to Israel's claims that it has killed "9000 Hamas Operatives". These are obviously not the same thing. The answer gives no support to the claim that soldiers in Gaza consider anyone who "could be a combatant" (military age male) a combatant and shoot them. This claim is absolutely false and easily falsifiable. There are a lot of videos of the IDF interacting with Palestinians in Gaza where males of military age are not shot at (e.g. who were asked to evacuate from the north to the south) and are not "shooting anybody who could be a combatant". That said the Hamas tactics of being "civilian" do endanger their civilians in situations that could be ambiguous.
> Hamas itself parades in uniforms but fights in civilian clothing… But Israeli soldiers as a rule wear uniforms and Palestinians do not - ever.
Not even in parades?
> The west bank incident is also completely irrelevant.
How convenient.
> the IDF soldiers wear uniform and fight according to international laws
They are widely and credibly accused of not fighting according to international laws.
> You can't seriously suggest that Israel should equip Hamas with "thousands of items of military clothing, including boots, coats and combat vests, all in camouflage colors."
What military doesn't have boots, coats, and combat vests in its uniform?
You can't claim you get to treat them as illegal combatants because they don't have uniforms when you are embargoing the uniforms, lol.
> That said the Hamas tactics of being "civilian" do endanger their civilians in situations that could be ambiguous.
IDF HQ is right by a shopping mall. Fair to target?
Is there a way that we can actually take this discussion beyond propaganda?
I served in the IDF (a long time ago). I talked with soldiers who fought with Gaza. I'm not making stuff up based on what I saw on social media. The IDF does not just go around shooting every military aged male in Gaza. Are there scenarios where a military aged male in civilian clothing can get shot at in certain places - absolutely. Those are not the same thing and that's an important distinction. If your tactic is for people to drop in and out of being a civilian, like go to a weapon cache in civilian clothes, grab an RPG, fire it at the enemy, then drop it and become a civilian again, then those tactics have consequences. Especially in areas where civilians were ordered to evacuate.
So the original statement is false. Is there nuance when it comes to civilians operating around the front lines in areas under evacuation in a war. Totally. Those are very different things.
IDF HQ is not "right by a shopping mall". The Kiryah in Tel Aviv is clearly delineated from the civilian area. The UK and France as random examples also have their military HQs in civilian areas. But yes, the Kiryah is in Tel Aviv and not far from civilian areas. It is a very large army base that's distinct from the surrounding civilian areas. I've been there.
Targeting the Kiryah is absolutely legal. If the Hamas had similar delineation between the military and the civilian then there'd be something to talk about.
> They are widely and credibly accused of not fighting according to international laws.
Widely yes. Credibly no. Most accusations have nothing to do with actual laws and actual facts on the ground. That's not to say there haven't been incidents that are questionable but as a rule (and what the rules and the law says) soldiers are supposed to conduct themselves, and broadly do, by those laws. When you have 100's of thousands of soldiers fighting this sort of war in a dense civilian area you're going to see incidents and all western militaries do (like the original topic, the US hitting the Iranian school).
You really got me there with the parades. Yes, they do wear uniforms in parades. So they got them. No Israel is not required to equip its enemy with military gear. They can saw uniforms or wear blue shirts or whatever. But they do have uniforms.
> The IDF does not just go around shooting every military aged male in Gaza.
The NAZA movie begs to tell a different story. Hasbara mission begs every Israeli to stay silent. Even in a conversation on Israeli TV, complaining about Ben Gvir saying the quiet part out loud, the same lady says “Sure I feel bad about children dying but they are going to grow up to be terrorists”.
Shining the light on Hamas wont make Israel look better. Mud slinging hamas wont make IDF better. You having served in the IDF makes you a war criminal.
You hooked up a chatbot to a harness that does API calls to myriad services. That's what you did. "Claude by himself" did not "do" anything. Just like they did not "break out of containment" and hacked companies.
It's amazing how people neglect this basic fact. Free markets already often don't work in practice. But they don't even work in theory if both parties do not have at the very least the same information in order to base their decisions. These sort of scam tactics (like dynamic pricing) are simply fraud, much like hiding problems in a car or a house you sell.
That's ridiculous. We have managed without electricity or antibiotics for 100,000 years too. Are you keen on reading by candlelight or dying of preventable infections?
Instant messaging and calling is extremely valuable. Algorithmic social media is extremely noxious. Unfortunately, they both live on the same device.
A more apt comparison is would you be OK reading by candle light sometimes for a few hours? I would be, it’s perfectly fine to read for a few hours by a bright candle.
I would prefer to give up algorithmic social media for 24h/day (massive negative impact) than to give up calls and texts with my friends and family for a few hours (no negative impact).
Comparing smartphones to antibiotics is somewhat ironic given that smartphone addiction is a disease, not a cure to one. There is no law of the universe that says that technology cannot create ills where previously there were none. I assure you that you are allowed to turn your phone off for hours, days, weeks, forever if you so choose, and your life may be better for it.
Did you read why I wrote? It appears you completely ignored it and are just talking past me... Yes I goddamn know "technology can create ills where previously there were none", that's why I called algorithmic social media a catastrophe.... Swear to god
> Instant messaging and calling is extremely valuable.
They, and I, are disagreeing with you. Instant messaging and calling are nice-to-have at best, and a huge burden at worst. They teach an extreme codependency that has little benefit, and causes a lot of anxiety.
They're convenient when somebody needs to go to the hospital, needs to get picked up, you can't find somebody in a museum, you're at the store and somebody at home might need something.
You are rarely using it for this. You're mostly wittering on and on about nonsense and not giving each other any room. When others go silent or don't answer quickly enough you get nervous about what they think about you, or if they are in danger. When others are interrogating you about things that make you uncomfortable, you feel like you have to answer now or you're making a statement with your silence.
Most of the useful stuff could be moved to a house phone (which doesn't exist anymore) and a payphone (which doesn't exist anymore.) For the people farther away, writing a letter was better. You don't need to be on the back of somebody 1000 miles away. There are too many of them, and companies and governments slip in. It's not healthy and it's not safe.
Please don't project on me. Doomsrolling irrelevant junk and polluting one's mind might possibly be what the majority of smartphone use is for. Hence my distinguishing that from "calling and texting".
I can text my wife when I leave home telling her to meet in the park. I can call for help in an emergency. I can talk to my family, back in my home country, whenever I want and wherever I am. My grandparents emigrated when "seeing your family" meant a month's journey by sea, so I'm quite sensitive to this. It's a miracle we take for granted.
An empty loop, under some non-obvious conditions, on some compiler flags but not others, silently transforms into a system call. In a systems programming language.
Destructors run predictably at list, and are pervasive everywhere. You know that when you exit a scope, be that a function or whatever it may, the destructors of variables in that scope are called. That is clear and consistent. The transformation mentioned above is not.
Understanding the code requires understanding the destructors of the objects you're using. Since they are invisibly inserted, they are a source difficulty in entirely understanding the code.
I do wonder if any of the language servers that insert implied type annotations would ever also show things like destructor calls in a similar manner. It seems like it would be quite useful.
Since AFAIK I'm still the only person to write a correct C++ (C++98) compiler from preprocessor to object file, I know all about destructors.
Here's a fun one for your amusement:
foo(a, b, c);
The parameters are pass by value. a, b and c are objects that have destructors. Have a look at the code generated for that.
It is nice that the compiler does the dirty work for you, but the various paths with exceptions and recovery with invisible code may not be well tested.
> The navier-stokes shows us what mathematical problem can be solved when $10m worth of compute is thrown at something.
That's the thing, it very much does NOT show us that. What happened was mathematicians at openAI learned of an imminent development on this problem, and the insight that it entailed, then they were able to prompt a system in the correct direction and spend 20 million dollars to write down the final steps.
Which is rather precisely the point that the article is making!
> If you knew AI could be affordable enough in 3-5 years so that even the most underfunded researchers could use it to solve cancer
As the saying goes, if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a truck.
>What happened was mathematicians at openAI learned of an imminent development on this problem, and the insight that it entailed, then they were able to prompt a system in the correct direction and spend 20 million dollars to write down the final steps.
No it wasn't. They didn't know 'what direction' to take, and the solution they posted was not in fact the direction the authors took, so evidently you don't know what you're talking about. And they say LLMs hallucinate.
How in god's name—irrespective of how valid this is, and its very valid—is this even remotely germane to the issue of AI in mathematics? Rattling off incidents and making the case that there is discrimination and sexists in mathematics (yeah no shit), how is this related to the issue of AI that was raised in the letter? Are the complaints raised in that letter any less valid because the mathematicians who signed them make part of a community which has reproachable behaviour, both past and present? I really don't get it.
In any human group there will always be issues on how we treat each other dependent on time/context/culture. But while not condoning it, this issue is orthogonal to that of misaligned AI.
The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
The above is true for "misaligned AI" in all the Sciences. It is time the Scientific Community got together and sued the hell out of the AI companies.
You do with leading edge research problem approaches; particularly if you plan to throw millions of dollars worth of resources to brute-force a solution which a normal researcher (who has actually done part of the hard work over a long period of time) cannot afford.
It is called common decency/etiquette, having ethics/morals and not plagiarising/stealing others work.
I understand it. I just consider it a bullshit take that has nothing to do with the reality of mathematics.
There's never been such a consideration that one should not work on a problem that someone else is working on or has worked on. Nor do I think it's something that should be true. Mathematics exists and is supported to benefit society, not to pamper mathematicians.
> There's never been such a consideration that one should not work on a problem that someone else is working on or has worked on.
That is not what i meant at all. This is your erroneous take.
In any scientific community when people work on the same problems, if they are aware of the others work, they usually cooperate/share their findings especially if the problem is a long-standing nobel-prize/fields-medal worthy one. If one builds their approach based on others then there definitely is a citation/reference acknowledging others contributions.
This is the ethical accepted practice since the dawn of the scientific age because "standing on the shoulders of giants" and building from there is how science advances.
The letter claims that AI is destroying the mathematics community as is now. The blog asks whether the mathematics community as is now is worth saving.
It's a clumsily made point, but I think the gist is that the letter asks AI to align to a certain ideal vision of the field of math, that the math community itself is not well aligned to. I don't think the article makes this point well, though, just by listing these incidents. Don't get me wrong - each incident is important and worthy of attention in its own right, but I find the overall argument to be pretty weak and strongly reeking of whataboutism.
> mathematicians (as a community, even though there were outliers) didn't care - not even the slightest - about the impact of LLMs and generative AI, other type of AI and machine learning until it started impacting them. So I have no sympathy for their community at all. They brought all this AI dystopia on us
Wait wait wait. The research mathematicians brought this AI dystopia on us. Not the techbros, not Silicon Valley, not the global financial system and its tentacles, not surveillance capitalism... No, it was the postdocs working on ultrafilters for C(2,3) epimorphisms on symplectic manifolds. That's certainly a take.
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