Praying That The Now Dead Shooter Was A White Never Trumper Guy For Everyone Else's Sake.

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Axios

Israel tells U.S. it will retaliate against Palestinian Authority if ICC issues arrest warrants

U.S. and Israeli officials say those actions could lead to the PA's collapse.

Axios

Senators meet with ICC over concerns about possible Israel arrest warrants

Israeli officials said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Republican and Democratic senators to press the ICC prosecutor not to move fo

Democracy Now!

Biden Administration Claims ICC Can’t Prosecute Israel for War Crimes

The Biden administration is claiming the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction to charge Israeli officials for war crimes. This c

https://www.reuters.com/world/icc-prosecutor-calls-end-intimidation-staff-statement-says-2024-05-03/

my "we fired a former moderator who was openly transphobic and taking bribes" aside is raising a lot of questions answered by my "we fired a former moderator who was openly transphobic and taking bribes" aside

How exactly do you advance AI ethically? Considering how much of the data sets that these tools use was sourced, wouldnt you have to start from scratch?

a: i don't agree with the assertion that "using someone else's images to train an ai" is inherently unethical - ai art is demonstrably "less copy-paste-y" for lack of a better word than collage, and nobody would argue that collage is illegal or ethically shady. i mean some people might but i don't think they're correct.

b: several people have done this alraedy - see, mitsua diffusion, et al.

c: this whole argument is a red herring. it is not long-term relevant adobe firefly is already built exclusively off images they have legal rights to. the dataset question is irrelevant to ethical ai use, because companies already have huge vaults full of media they can train on and do so effectively.

you can cheer all you want that the artist-job-eating-machine made by adobe or disney is ethically sourced, thank god! but it'll still eat everyone's jobs. that's what you need to be caring about.

the solution here obviously is unionization, fighting for increased labor rights for people who stand to be affected by ai (as the writer's guild demonstrated! they did it exactly right!), and fighting for UBI so that we can eventually decouple the act of creation from the act of survival at a fundamental level (so i can stop getting these sorts of dms).

if you're interested in actually advancing ai as a field and not devils advocating me you can also participate in the FOSS (free-and-open-source) ecosystem so that adobe and disney and openai can't develop a monopoly on black-box proprietary technology, and we can have a future where anyone can create any images they want, on their computer, for free, anywhere, instead of behind a paywall they can't control.

fun fact related to that last bit: remember when getty images sued stable diffusion and everybody cheered? yeah anyway they're releasing their own ai generator now. crazy how literally no large company has your interests in mind.

cheers

Yay! Yippie!

bbc.com

ICJ rules it will not halt German arms to Israel

Nicaragua accused Germany of breaching the UN genocide convention by sending military hardware to Israel.

A final ruling could take years. Today's decision was over emergency measures to be implemented swiftly.

In 2023 some 30% of Israel's military equipment purchases came from Germany, totalling $326.5m (£257m) last year - a tenfold increase on 2022.

30 Apr 24

re: holodomor reblog i think the generic term 'genocide denial' is deeply pernicious because 'holocaust denial' is so heinous and an obvious declaration of genocidal intent precisely because the holocaust and its scale and intentionality is so well-documented at literally every possible level. the evidence is incontrovertible, and so the only possible way a denial of that can be interpreted is as a declaration that jewish suffering and death is fundamentally invalid, doesn't count, is even desirable. denying the holocaust is a statement of genocidal intent.

& so even if you do believe that e.g. the ukrainian famine or china's oppression of the uyghur people constitute a genocide, treating people (who often, you will find, agree on you on the majority of the established on-the-ground-facts) who don't think either of those things constitutes a 'genocide' as somehow equivalent to holocaust deniers is, like, tremendously and irresponsibly downplaying the magnitude of holocaust denial. & this is going to remain the case until people can come to understand genocide as a specific type of action rather than the extra special bad word for when a crime against humanity is Like, Really Bad This Time

I would never "cop" a feel. ACAB