About half the inhabitants of Gaza are under 18 years old, so 1/3 of the dead being children corresponds to a ratio of two civilians killed for every combatant. This is not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties.

I don’t understand why browsers support this “functionality”.

Shhh, you’re ruining my fun.

Who is more pitiable? Him or the woman who dated him?

Removed by mod

I understand that that’s the intent. The problem is the methodology, which is as I said just multiplication by five. Calling it a gold standard implies that there’s actually some sophisticated analysis going on, and there isn’t.

The “gold standard in the field” is apparently to multiply the Hamas numbers by five. I’m not kidding. That’s where the 186,000 number comes from. This is low-effort bullshit.

Edit: Also this article is just wrong about what the 335,500 number is claimed to be. It is what you get if you extrapolate the 186,000 number to the end of the year, not to September.

My naming convention for C++ is that custom types are capitalized and instances aren’t. So I might write User user;.

I don’t understand why the father would just confess like that, but I suppose I shouldn’t expect good judgement from him.

According to this article:

The NEL was an offshoot of an ongoing digital lending project called the Open Library, in which the Internet Archive scans physical copies of library books and lets people check out the digital copies as though they’re regular reading material instead of ebooks. The Open Library lent the books to one person at a time—but the NEL removed this ratio rule, instead letting large numbers of people borrow each scanned book at once.

It sounds like what you’re describing is what they were doing before they did the thing for which they got sued.

As for AI, I think that in general using a copyrighted work to train an AI is a transformative use and therefore that it is permitted by law. Specific instances in which an AI outputs copyrighted text without any transformative modifications may still be copyright infringement They may also be fair use, in the way that copying a short excerpt from a longer document is fair use. I’m not a lawyer.

Anyway, if the courts rule against the AI companies, the enforcement of such a ruling would be disastrous for the ability for American companies to compete with international rivals who will still freely use the training data that American companies would no longer have access to. A law would be (or at least should be) passed to prevent that, although the tech companies might end up paying some nominal fee.

This is the obviously correct decision, and no other decision was realistically possible. The only difference between what the Internet Archive was doing and what any other piracy webpage does is that the Internet Archive was claiming to do it for a good cause. What were they thinking?

What makes you an actual libertarian?

That’s actually a very low price for an anti-air missile. For comparison, the Stinger shoulder-fired missile costs more than twice as much. A Patriot missile costs four million dollars (but is much more capable). Presumably minimizing cost was a high priority when this missile was designed. Nonetheless, the cost asymmetry is one reason why degrading the ability of Hamas and Hezbollah to fire missiles at Israel is important.

I don’t have anything to suggest on Lemmy. There’s so little activity that I participate in every community where I see an interesting post, except for those communities which are specifically for people with some particular set of beliefs which I don’t share.

If you’re looking beyond Lemmy, there are are the comment sections of the SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen blog and the blogs it links to as well as some associated forums and subreddits. You’ll find plenty of liberal libertarians and the comments tend to be polite and high-effort, but keep in mind that a dedication to free speech means that people with opinions that can’t be discussed elsewhere participate too. It’s a bit much for me sometimes.

I acknowledge that almost all people (including me) couldn’t survive on their own. Even those that could survive (let’s say that their bunkers have robust long-term life-support systems) still couldn’t live completely alone for many years without going crazy.

I don’t reject relationships with other people, but I think they should be between independent individuals who associate with each other only because they both want to. (Violating this principle is sometimes necessary but always undesirable.) You appear to think otherwise, and I suppose that’s a fundamental value difference that can’t be resolved through debate. I do want to point out that if I were in charge, my rules wouldn’t prevent you from voluntarily living life your way. I suspect that your rules wouldn’t leave me the analogous option.

Edit: I suppose that I do feel like I have some obligations to my family members despite being related to them through no choice of my own. Is that how collectivists feel (to a lesser extent) about everyone else?

The preppers are different because they want to be left completely alone. They don’t see any acceptable role for government in their lives. I don’t think they’re being realistic. Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes.

The techno-libertarians are much more engaged with society and do see a role for government, even if that role is small and (at least according to some of them) bizarre by conventional standards. I’m not going to deny that the bunker-building types are involved in the movement. I often don’t agree with the weirder people involved, but I like that techno-libertarians are willing to hear people out and judge their ideas rationally rather than shunning them for being weird.

(I think I might have a bunker built if I was rich enough. The expected utility of it is higher than that of, say, a second yacht. Human guards are a dead end. Probably the best thing that can be done if civilization totally collapses and you manage to get inside is blowing up the entrance so that anyone who wants to get to you has to move a thousand tons of rock first. You probably won’t ever get to leave, but it’s better than what would happen if you did.)

Yeah, and while vegan imitation meat is delicious (so much so that even my meat-eating friends will happily eat it with me) vegan imitation cheese ranges from mediocre to terrible. And then it costs several times as much as real cheese too!

Almost no one pays attention to the big-L Libertarian party. Ron and Rand Paul got some attention on the national level but they weren’t even members of the party (while in office) and the party itself has never been politically relevant.

I think these days the word is associated more with Silicon Valley techno-libertarians (a group I identify with). These guys favor the free market over government regulation (which isn’t really relevant to Reddit) but they’re also very sympathetic to free-as-in-speech open-source software.

It was probably just full of garbage (which is also “limp” and attracts flies) and the idea of some cop having to cut it open and go through it because you called it in is sort of funny.

With that said, I have wondered about similar things. One time I saw a guy I thought might be dead but I waited a few minutes, he moved a little, and I figured he was probably just very drunk so I left. Another time I did go tell an NYC cop that there was a guy lying on the ground in the middle of a busy street, and the cop didn’t seem to care. Maybe I should have called 911 instead but I didn’t want to be officially associated with the situation.

Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren’t. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.