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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Even if you're not skilled enough to stop the FSB from misusing your services, it's worth putting in the effort to stop the next Jim Jones from doing so.

And learning to stop a Jim Jones, even knowing that you need to, may help you stop you from being named by the UN as complicit in a genocide, the way the UN explicitly named Facebook as having played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide: https://web.archive.org/web/20220217165239/https://www.reute...

Of course, if you want to prevent even the most capable of intelligence agencies from spinning up their own local LLMs at all, then at a minimum you can't ever publish the model weights themselves — a solution which itself is the cause of around 50% of the criticisms people around here make of OpenAI.

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Honestly, who cares what the fuck the UN thinks at this point? They've lost all credibility. Hell, they just held a moment of silence for the Butcher of Tehran, an individual that, as a head of state, has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and the USA, the genocide of Jews. Not just words, but actions, too. Likely behind the Oct 7th attacks against Israel as well, that literally triggered the current war in Gaza.

So, the UN should take a hard long look in the mirror before it accuses anyone else of being complicit in genocide.

They just held a moment of silence for the Butcher of Tehran

I agree that the optics of that event don't look great. But the fact is, the ceremony was officially conducted in the name of "All passengers of the downed helicopter and their families". Because of that phrasing, the UNSC members who went along with it probably felt they had to do so as a matter of protocol.

Again - not something I would go along with, if I were in the room. But it also wasn't the personalized tribute to Raisi and no one else that you're making it out to be.

Meanwhile, Israel's primary airport is named after the architect of the 1948 expulsions, the Qibya massacre and countless other atrocities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Gurion_Airport

The point isn't whataboutism, but rather: "Credibility starts at home".

I mean, come on. Yes, Ben-Gurion, by modern standards (incl. the standards of his time), not a great moral leader. But neither was Thomas Jefferson! What you've left out of that summary of who Ben-Gurion was: he founded Israel.

But more generally, you just haven't rebutted the parent comment. It would be weird for anyone to suggest Israel has human rights moral authority at this point (or at least any more so than any other major world power). But all the parent commenter said is that the UN doesn't have any either, which seems like a pretty easy argument to defend.

(As always, just nerding out).

> But all the parent commenter said is that the UN doesn't have any either, which seems like a pretty easy argument to defend.

Do you need to defend the UN to make my (even earlier) comment about the UN criticising Facebook?

I think my point still works even if the UN can only catch really egregious cases, those performed by those not of strategic political importance to one of the permanent members of the SC; and likewise also remains valid in the face of the organisation having a functional requirement to honour dead leaders who can at least pretend to have not been secret masterminds to the degree that Iran isn't officially at war with Israel despite the open acrimony.

No idea. I was just making a nerd point.

I maintain that the UN actually does have some credibility (despite having also the same order of flaws as any humongous organization).

If Israel disagrees, then it is welcome to withdraw its membership at any time.

Part of the point of the UN is that it never makes sense to withdraw your membership, even if you're at odds with the whole body. It's a useful forum, even if it's absolutely preposterous as a governing authority.

At any rate, scoffing at UN decisions is hardly an Israeli idiosyncrasy. It would be weirder if a country of Israel's scale showed it reverence.

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