I'll give the writer this -- they conveyed a lot of information in just one short first sentence. I read a bit farther, but it didn't tell me anything I couldn't already guess from that sentence.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
1. Ukraine’s media restrictions are virtually non-existent when compared to those enforced by the Israelis in Gaza, including the intentional bombing of media offices. Keep in mind that Hamas has repeatedly called upon Israel to allow foreign press and NGOs to visit and see what’s happening on the ground.
2. The Ukraine war is a conventional war between sovereign nations with standing militaries with equivalent capabilities (air force, anti-air defenses, armored vehicles, bomb shelters, etc). The Gaza genocide is an onslaught by a sovereign nation with a well equipped military against a militant group in a dense urban area. Leveling entire city blocks when fighting against an opponent that has no air force or anti-air capabilities is not only unimpressive, but also breaks the principle of proportionality.
2. You're making a bunch of separate accusations without connecting them to the topic at hand, which was press restrictions.
Let me reiterate: Ukraine is a sovereign nation with a sovereign military that has the ability to enforce restrictions within its own territory.
To bring your bad analogy more in line with reality on the ground, imagine if Ukraine was still part of/occupied by the USSR/Russia, and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory during a Ukrainian insurgency. However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
> The only major difference is that Ukraine is >1000x larger, and has safe areas far from any fighting where such press restrictions aren't needed.
But Israel never allowed press into the strip, even during “ceasefire” periods - like right now! This implies that Israel is not somehow paternalistically concerned for press safety; it simply wants a media blackout.
So no, this “major difference” is irrelevant when comparing restrictions between the two conflicts.
> and Russia enforced press restrictions across all of Ukrainian territory
Your analogy isn't very different from reality. Russia does enforce press restrictions near military assets, including in occupied parts of Ukraine.
> However, in this theoretical USSR, Ukrainians did not get Soviet citizenship, and were under a total blockade.
That would seem very unfair, if Russia did it just because they're mean and not because this hypothetical Ukraine had launched tens of thousands of rockets at them. But I'm not sure what it has to do with press restrictions.
> even during “ceasefire” periods
The ceasefire was pretty much dead once Hamas attacked IDF soldiers in Rafah. Now it's just a lower-intensity conflict. Still not a great idea to have random journalists waltzing around and tweeting photos of military assets.
> it simply wants a media blackout
This is a funny explanation because there are millions of cameras in Gaza anyway, and this is the second most covered conflict (by metrics like article count) in all of human history. Not much of a "blackout" at all.
On one side, two sovereign nations setting press restrictions in areas they control. Standard stuff.
On the other side, a genocidal state blockading a tiny strip of land for 20 years waging a campaign that has killed & maimed so many children that we have lost count unilaterally enforcing a total international media blackout. Also standard stuff.
Silly me, how could I even argue about this? It’s just so damn obvious! Sometimes, arguing with random anons on HN pays off :)
Hamas casualties make up only a portion of palestinian casualties; palestinian casualties make up only a portion of excess deaths; excess deaths make up only a portion of total deaths.
It’s not clear that Hamas limits their counts to excess deaths. Even if they intended to, a lot of it is based on a web form, with not much validation besides basic checks that the person exists etc.
As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats. Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
>the casualty count that Hamas claims
The Gaza Health Ministry's count is widely regarded as an underestimate, but mostly by people who don't refer to it with a dogwhistling caveat.
50,000 births by july of 2024 (starting with october 7th 2023) [2]
you can sum and extrapolate the numbers. you can probably find more numbers about births
[1] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
[2] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/women-self-inducing-lab...
You mean Hamas’ estimate? Why do you think Hamas would underestimate their death toll?
And yes, it has.
Scare quotes don’t mean that it’s not true.
Not sure what about this is contrarian.
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.
Not only there is not a good argument for considering 1948 war a genocide on Palestinians but there is a much stronger argument Arabs have tried to genocide Jews (especially to those who think who think there was a genocide in Gaza because of starvation as a weapon of war + intent):
1. In 1948 Arab forces besieged Jerusalem and they were starting to run out of food.
2. Azzam Pasha, General Secretary of the Arab League, famously threatened "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre", Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army said that "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish.". Hell, several have even extended the threats to not just the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, but to Jews of the Arab world as a whole, such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said("if a satisfactory solution of the Palestine case was not reached, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries.") or the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal("the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state." ). As Matiel Mughannam, head of the Arab Women's Organization in Palestine put it in an interview with Nadia Lourie in January 1948, "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders.... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the `holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred. " (See Benny Morris' 1948 for sources on all of these)
It truly does though. Any significant pile of it stinks of exploitation and death.
More plainly on my part, though I'm worried sounds like berating when the comments are viewed consecutively: what does that have to do with the article we are discussing?
Compared to when? How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants). The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm.
But to those living and remembering that era - it was the norm that they (we) compare with, so it is the reference that matters.
Mostly all of them! There have been periods where inequality dropped, but mostly it's been rising since at least the 1300s. I'm on mobile and can't link research, but there are a few papers that investigate this.
> As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants).
And yet it was less unequal than now, an era where we've managed to use technology to concentrate wealth at an unprecedented scale. No longer is the richest person you know the king who collects your taxes next door, now it's a SV trillionaire on the other side of the world.
That is what has changed.
Is 'Zionism' the expansion of Israel into other territories?
Is 'Zionism' the belief that Israel and the majority of the world's Jews shouldn't be exterminated?
I thought it meant the first, lately I think people are meaning the second.
It consists mainly of christians. If you assemble ten random zionists most or all of them will be christians, not jews.
If you want to learn more you could do worse than follow Zachary Foster's lectures for the Rutgers Center:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zachary+foster+...
The podcast The Empire Never Ended has recently finished a rather good series on Meir Kahane, one of the most important influences on contemporary zionism:
Yes. And one side of the coin supports and justifies colonialism, apartheid and even genocide; the other side fights against it.
Unfortunately they added a limit to the number of collaborators per account and we had to stop using it.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
Yes, it would be dishonorable to be mercenary, but being a tribalist is merely the default position. We’re all so at some scale.
Like the other comment here: I just have much better outcomes with the same prompts with other tools. That is all I meant to say.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Unfortunate.
Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?
And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?
engineering: implementing an 8088 emulator
science: discovering a way to make an 8088 emulator using quantum computing
Software engineering is systems and measurement.
Capacity planning, growth rates, algorithmic complexity (typically not to the point of designing new fundamental algorithms), durability, DR, eventual consistency, race conditions, schema design, systems architecture, instrumentation, statistics, sampling, more measurement, tech debt maintenance and pragmatism, online migrations, designing for five nines uptime ...
Programming is turning requirements into code with or without respect to these higher level criteria. The implementation detail.
"Engineering would be programming, but well" fits :)
The problem is, when there are no trainee and junior positions (and, increasingly, intermediate) being filled any more... there is no way for people to rise to senior levels. And that is going to screw up many industries hard.
Now there’s one or two guys out there with a total station and/or drone. You’ve gone from 10 techs/junior positions per surveyor to 1. The average surveyor is something like 60 years old and has no successor lined up.
- i mean yes u cannot make money out of teenagers but damn replit's Vibe coding tool is fucking good. Better than Lovable or Bolt any day.
just to give u a perspective from a 20year old kid from a 3rd world county
I don't get all these vibe coding tools when Claude is better than any of them
No need to think about how/where to deploy, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), etc. Just vibe and deploy.
(He did end up moving off the platform once he had enough validation)
replit has made it like, even a 11 year old can make something out of thin air and acutally publish it to get a link to share
Let's try Elon Musk then: "He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
This is the way, right?
I guess it means almost as little as "fascist" then.
I do wonder how sustainable it is as a business though. I expect Replit is sending the majority of that money to the big AI labs through API costs
As soon as anything becomes serious you're going to try and take it off Replit and use something like Claude Code and AWS etc
They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.
> "she was murdered by ICE"
They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.
Pretty solid basis for direct action.
If they provided this level of support for Russia, they'd be a new Belarus.
The mental effort a lot of people has made to pretend they aren't entirely powerless and irrelevant for stopping Israel's crimes is deeply impressive. The reality is that there's nothing the UK can do to stop Israel as long as the US is supporting them (short of going to war with both the US and Israel), but this reality is at odds with the desire to do something, so people invent and inflate leverage where there isn't any. Moreover, most of the time the very same people oppose creating more leverage for the future, as your added qualifier of "post-colonial" implies. It's depressing.
How is direct action on Palestine impacting Ukraine support? (We are also not intervening in Ukraine)
Not direct intervention; but we fly sorties, provide intelligence, ship military equipment, build systems for... None of which we provide Israel for their current war.
It's just odd to me that Israel draws so much Ire when the UK deals with all sorts. There are many worse things happening that doesn't get a second of airtime.
Multiple sources linked on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_Gaza_wa...
Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.
Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.
It's not terrorism.
You mean the group that sneaked in and damaged a bunch of UK Military’s planes on a military base? Was this the action that put them into the terrorist category?
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
feels like sophistry
the article connects the two, so they are not orthonogonal either:
> But even as things got noisy in public, Masad met eerie silence professionally. “My calendar was suddenly empty, because I was talking about Palestine,” he said. “Replit was not a hot company anymore. We did a layoff. And at the same time, a lot of my friends were no longer my friends. I was no longer invited to parties.”
> Potential partnerships dried up. Masad became a frequent topic in pro-Israel tech groupchats, a source said, where some investors accused him of being antisemitic.
> A Replit investor who requested anonymity to speak candidly told me Masad’s public persona has been “really challenging,” and he’s had to defend the founder in investor circles. I asked if Masad had lost business because of his views. “I’m sure the answer is yes,” the investor said.
primitivesuave•18h ago
https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
bitbasher•13h ago
siltcakes•11h ago