Get up, come on get down with the sickness

Yeah, for my own sanity I limit how deep I dive into some of this. I don’t think you need to dive super deep though to say the standard for bombing civilian infrastructure is higher than bombing military installations and what Israel has bombed are civilian sreas.

I get that Hamas is coopting a lot of civic locations like schools and hospitals, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to raze cities.

We support Israel is more ways than just military assistance, but even there paying for the Iron Dome just frees up money to spend elsewhere. It’s not like the only effect of our money is building this defensive capacity, it’s all the things enabled by Israel having gotten this infrastructure subsidized.

Some of it, yes. Along with training. Either way, the only skin in the game I have regarding what Hamas does is as a human being who condemns terrorism against Israelis and the oppression of Gazans, but I’m not materially supporting it.

With Israel my money is directly funding their weapons systems. I think it’s reasonable to demand that they not violate the Geneva convention and if they are going to bomb hospitals and refugee camps they at least have reliable evidence gathered beforehand that doing so will achieve military objectives of an appropriate magnitude that warrants it.

In my experience, people I interact with personally aren’t citing Hamas propaganda as if it were fact, they give it the appropriate level of skepticism. They don’t do that with IDF press releases or propaganda from the Israeli government so it is worth pointing out that all governments and affiliated news outlets put out biased reporting during war time.

Also, as a US taxpayer, my money is funding bombs being dropped on Gaza, they didn’t fund Hamas’ improvised rockets. Those were cobbled together using material stolen from the people of Gaza. As a result, I expect honest accountability of how those weapons are used.

There was never a mask

This is literally what the UN secretary general was referring to when he said the Hamas attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum. I don’t think the attacks were justified or even effective but it wasn’t some random act, the growth of Hamas comes from Israeli government backed oppression of Palestinians which itself comes after failed peace talks so on and so forth until the birth of civilization (though you could argue until the late 1940s).

They go after it mainly to appease external forces like other countries objecting to it, but people who are convicted often get very light sentences.

Why wait a year?

A government using war to revoke civil liberties and oppress their citizens? Color me surprised.

They don’t process words as unified tokens for something like an LLM, but they do process them as multi-letter encoding, like byte-pair encoding or more advanced techniques.

I think that’s good advice for social situations, but if you truly believe there is genocide occurring, or exploitation, then there is nothing wrong with supporting one side over the other.

If you are comfortable with your understanding of the situation and arguing for whichever side you choose to support instead of just refusing to hear anything to the contrary then support whoever you want.

Just know this isn’t like a sports team where there’s only superficial differences. It’s also ok to say I’m not informed enough to take one side or the other, or maybe only lean one way. You can point to unethical behavior on both sides, but I think it’s not unreasonable for people to hold one side more at blame than the other. Look into the history of the region and the ongoing discussion.

I feel like the high from reaching a difficult objective wears off too quickly for me to really feel worth starting the next challenge.

I like factory or management games, even ones where it is expected you will fail, like Dwarf Fortress, because it’s not about winning or getting a high score. It’s about going in with an idea and setting it through to fruition. I like seeing things I spent a bunch of time on as a large concrete thing I can go back and look at again, and actually have it provide meaningful value in a direct way instead of just incrementing some number in the engine somewhere.

I still play some roguelites that are like that, but there is something nice about sandbox games where progress isn’t directly quantifiable.

Probably people who just didn’t want it on their feed and didn’t know how to block the channel.

There’s a sense of completion that isn’t there in a tabletop. When I play BG3 I’m constantly thinking about alternate paths and what-ifs.

When I’m playing in person its more thinking about your character and the story you’re playing in person.

Cloud saved banjo kazooie runs. The future is now.

I feel like tempeh in the right marinade would work well.

I mean, Chicago Pizza is a pretty low bar. Laughs in New Yorker

Oh thank god, a pizza hut! I’m saved after days of wandering lost in the Giza gift shop. What do you mean I must make a purchase to get a glass for water?