Unsurprisingly, defenders of dictatorships always have to resort to whataboutism to defend the indefensible.

As per usual, this whataboutism is lazy and inaccurate as well.

Agreed. This is a superficial history lesson masquerading as an article. While nothing lasts forever and Steam has its issues, the examples being cited are not supporting the not outrageous prediction that Steam might get worse in the future. It's just not very insightful.

Anyone who, unlike the author, actually had to deal with early versions of Steam can attest to the fact that in most ways, the platform has dramatically improved.

Because that's where the audience is. Peertube is deader than the lemmyverse. You are essentially making the silly "but yet you choose to live in society" argument.

What is sexy in style here? They are wearing loose, long-sleeved robes up to the neck. Makeup and hair are just following current trends.

Consider keeping school the one place in a child's life where they aren't bombarded with AI-generated content.

Saving you a click:

In a statement, the Secret Service said “there was no protective interest associated with this event,” meaning the crash was accidental and the driver did not know Mr. Biden was at the event.

In other words, this isn't a political event and I really don't think it should be posted here.

I don't know about you, but I started to notice that not everything that was printed on paper was truthful when I was around ten or eleven years old.

This nonsense reminds me of how many phones in the olden days had a dedicated Internet/WAP button on them from the phone companies that primarily existed so that people would be charged for accidentally pressing it.

With this new iteration of the same idea (they could have easily chosen a spot where it would never get hit accidentally, but didn't), I suspect that Microsoft banks on people accidentally pressing the button in the hopes that at least some will be converted to using their dubious "AI" assistant more than once. Like the author of the article, I have my doubts this will happen. On laptop keyboards in particular, it'll be pressed when people are actually trying to hit the left arrow key and cause more annoyance and confusion than anything else. I can already imagine IT departments disabling these on all new devices just to save them the extra headache.

Yeah, no. Your point is whataboutism in order to deflect from an obvious failure. It's the old hypernormalization approach that dictatorships and their defenders love to use. "If everything's bad, then the countless problems of this autocracy can't be that bad, right?"

The cruelty is the point - UK edition.

An alt-right LLM (large language model). Think of it as a crappy Nazi alternative to the text part of GPT-4 (there's also a separate text-to-image component). It's probably just a reskinned existing language model that had Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries and Stormfront added to its training data.

He was inspired by Stalinist practices, but as shown by this example and many others, far-left and far-right autocrats are very similar in this regard.

Don't be overdramatic. It's a good game, certainly above average. Just because it's not the game you expected it to be doesn't make it terrible. This reminds me of the ridiculous hyperbole surrounding Cyberpunk 2077, that it was a terrible game, even "one of the worst games of all times", because it wasn't the second coming of Christ either, just a good RPG with teething issues.

What a dishonest and empty comment. I feel second hand embarrassment and shame for you. You know that that the US isn't exactly the same, yet you chose to lie, just to defend a genocidal autocratic regime using the last line of defense any sycophants for dictatorships are using: Hypernormalization. After all, if everyone and everything is equally awful, your favorite oppressive machine maybe isn't so bad. I've seen this exact line of reasoning, if one can call it that, used by defenders of Russia, Iran, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Hamas, Saudi Arabia, etc.

I have one question for you: Why are you doing this? Are you a paid troll for the Internet Research Agency, fighting on the virtual front lines of the new Cold War so that you aren't sent to the real front lines of the hot part of it, so that you aren't end up as the main attraction of some Ukrainian drone bombing video, dying slowly to the sound of some questionable music? Are you perhaps a delusional Western Tankie who is still reflexively applauding to everything Moscow is doing, despite the fact that the "evil West" you've been indoctrinated (or indoctrinated yourself) to hate is now far more left than the currently extremely far-right Russia? Or perhaps you are much further to the right and simp for Russia precisely because it aligns itself so well with your belief system, e.g. in regards to its oppression of ethnic and sexual minorities, its violent imperialistic politics, the macho strongman aesthetics the insecure leader is cultivating.

Which of these is it?

I wouldn't be surprised if, in just a few years time, pre-AI-era content of all kinds, not just games, ends up becoming cherished by people, to the point that entire fandoms and subcultures develop around preserving and promoting it.

That is one clumsy attempt at whataboutism.

Sorry for the below rant, but this simplistic meme really rubbed me the wrong way. Feel free to ignore it if this unasked for, unedited and overlong stream of consciousness if you don't care about this conflict as much as I do.

One problem I've observed with people accusing Israel of war crimes in this conflict is that they are using a term with clear defined meanings for things that aren't. It's purely driven by emotions, not knowledge of international law. They shout "Geneva Conventions!" as if it was a magic spell (and have of course never read them before). They see or hear about dead civilians, which, as terrible as they are, aren't automatically the result of war crimes. They use the term to describe things that most definitely aren't, like (just recently) arresting POWs or stopping the delivery of free electricity and water to the enemy. The latter in particular (even though it's far from the only similarity) reminds me of how Russia tried and failed to create international outrage when Ukraine stopped delivering water to occupied Crimea. Nobody had an issue with that, but for some reason, with Gaza, there are new standards that only apply to this conflict and no other conflict before. It's baffling.

Just to list a few things, no it's not a war crime to attack hospitals, if they are being used for military purposes. Same with schools, kindergartens, residential buildings, etc. The Geneva Conventions explicitly permit this in order to discourage the use of human shields, which they define as a war crime, because if one side does this all the time - and Hamas have openly celebrated the use of human shields - then this might motivate the enemy to assume that behind every group of civilians, there might be fighters. When North Korean soldiers fired at US soldiers out of crowds of refugees during the Korean War, this led to US soldiers driving refugees away with their guns and even killing a number of them, fearing to be ambushed. Fighters not wearing uniforms puts every fighting age male in the combat area at a risk - and guess what, Hamas only wears uniforms during parades, not in combat. Hamas have used human shields successfully to prevent Israel from performing attacks on weapons depots, rocket launch sites, command centers, etc. They were under the impression that they could attack from these positions, from behind civilians with impunity. If the other side doesn't attack, that's a win, the terrorists get to live for another day and can continue what they are doing. If Israel does attack and civilians die, this particular cell might lose a few fighters and equipment, but they can use the innocent civilians they put into the crossfire for propaganda against Israel, both domestically in order to recruit new fighters and internationally to put pressure on Israel. What should Israel do in this situation? Just eat the rockets? The Iron Dome is far from perfect and every alert means people only have seconds to interrupt whatever they are doing and rush to shelter. That's no way to live. Meanwhile, in Gaza, there are no civilian bomb shelters, not even air raid sirens. Gaza is the only place since WW2 that attacked an enemy they know have air power, but provides no shelters nor warnings for civilians. Kind of odd, if you think about it.

You would assume that young left-leaning people in particular would side with the side that was attacked first in this conflict, the side that is the only democracy in the Middle East, the side that has equal rights and protections for women and LGBTQ+ people, the side that is a hub for cutting-edge research and has more startups than almost every other place in the world. All because of a shallow and simply wrong colonizer narrative or even a racial narrative (even though you wouldn't be able to differentiate most Israelis and Palestinians based on their skin color and other physical features). There is a lot of frustrating naivete here. What annoys me by far the most is that they only talk about things Israel shouldn't do, but don't offer any viable alternatives. How should you react to the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust? Is there even a correct way or only a large number of terrible options that some unlucky people have to pick the least worst option out, only to get berated by it from people who will never be in such a situation?

Israel can not not react to such an attack without force. Making concessions would tell terrorists that their tactics work and motivate them and others to try it again and again. That's what they did every single time in the past. When Israel pulled all of their settlers out of Gaza - by force, I might add - Hamas immediately thanked them by launching attacks. The blockade, the border fence that so many people call a grave injustice was the direct result of weekly stabbings, shootings and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians - and it worked, until Israel became complacent, thinking that further economic incentives and aid, that providing work to tens of thousands of Palestinians, free services and resources had placated Hamas and that they were happy with the power that they have over the strip, the billions of foreign aid they could siphon off for their own benefit.

Don't get me wrong, calling the current Israeli government under Netanyahu bastards would be putting it mildly. I have all sorts of issues with this right-wing administration. I detest the settlers in the West Bank with a passion and if it were up to me, they would be evicted in an instant. Their continued presence is the most grave issue I have with the modern Israeli state. There are others, like a discriminatory justice system, the continued democratic backsliding and even such aspects as the nation's poor energy policy, but the settlers are by far the gravest issues. Even in times of relative calm, they continuously inflame the conflict and during wartime in particular, they feel emboldened.

Continued below.

It could be regulated into oblivion, to the point that any commercial use of it (and even non-commercial publication of AI generated material) becomes a massive legal liability, despite the fact that AI tools like Stable Diffusion can not be taken away. It's not entirely unlikely that some countries will try to do this in the future, especially places with strong privacy and IP laws as well as equally strong laws protecting workers. Germany and France come to mind, which together could push the EU to come down hard on large AI services in particular. This could make the recently adopted EU AI Act look harmless by comparison.

Got any more baseless conspiracy theories for us? The only party in this conflict that wants another war is China.

The only thing that's threatened by US military bases are their imperial ambitions in the region. There's a reason why even Vietnam is seeking US protection. You know that the US isn't going to attack China first.

It's marked as an editorial. What do you think an editorial is?

It's not that low everywhere. In Germany, it's 9.79%, for example.

My rule would be simple: The only ships allowed to land are those crewed by a captain who can pronounce this accent-free. Every one else gets acquainted with the business end of the Planetenverteidigungskanone.

I'm not usually one to defend Facebook, but it might have something to do with (and is possibly being done to counteract) this massive state-sponsored disinformation campaign:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-information-war.html

In case of paywall:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231201152318/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-information-war.html

I suspect you would be even more pissed if you hadn't received any prior warning. This is the least terrible option.

Whataboutism and lies are all that defenders of autocratic hellholes like China have to offer. It's getting tiring.

Because most employees can't just install random software on their machines and because compatibility between Libre Office and Microsoft Office is nowhere near perfect. You don't want to send your boss a file that ends up looking mangled on their screen.

So many Indie developers are making the mistake of thinking they'll be the next [insert currently successful one-man dev here] and banking their careers and life savings on it. 99.999% of them are not.

You are free to invent a better system. So far, nobody has.

This is a direct consequence of two things: Hamas not wearing uniforms in combat and their tendency to use suicide bombers. They are told to undress themselves before processing - they don't stay that way.

How would any of the people criticizing this deal with a large group of fighting age men in a war zone?

Why are you shocked? It's one of his core policies:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-biden-administration-has-reached-conservation-records-in-2023/

China is stumbling towards an invasion the same way they stumbled their way into and through COVID. The consequences of this dangerous ineptness will be similar for the world.

Explains a lot.

The Russian lie is that the support of Ukraine and existing American social issues are meaningfully related, that if the former wouldn't exist, the latter could be solved. You're dangerously close to repeating this lie.

Nope, these mass death events are a regular occurrence due to the Saudi government's incompetence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_during_the_Hajj

Yeah, about that:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/apples-hypocritical-defense-data-privacy/581680/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/23/apple-user-data-law-enforcement-falling-short

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/05/apple_apps_privacy_study/

The correct choice would have been a custom ROM for an Android smartphone, without any Google apps and services.

I meant, the "no ads" thing was only feasible in the very beginning, when they were solely funded by venture capital.

Easier said than done if you are not independently wealthy and can bring your own capital with you.

The entire thing is horrible, but this is the worst part:

Fawzia says that a few months later, “they asked our family to kill us”. The authorities argued it would stop the shame they were bringing on the family. “They said, ‘We will help your son do it,’ but my family refused,” she says. “

And then what? For how long is this war supposed to last?

Hamas needs to be defeated, the remaining living hostages liberated - and this requires boots on the ground. The sooner Hamas are out of the picture as a major threat to both Israelis and Palestinians, the sooner the war will be over. This is the best hope Palestinian civilians have. Once the organization has been dismantled to the point that nothing more than tiny, relatively easy to deal with splinter cells remain, international aid can pour into the strip without being disrupted by the fighting, without terrorists stealing it, without the whims of the current far-right government in Israel (whose days are numbered) limiting it. Then rebuilding can begin and the international community can start work on a sustainable post-war order - which needs to involve substantial changes to Palestinians society, governance, education and media (no more UN-funded schools teaching kids to murder Jews, for example) - that paves the way towards a two-state solution. A two-state solution has been pushed into the far future by the October 7 massacres, but the process can't even begin for as long as Hamas are still in a position of power.