skinkestek

> When was the "looking the other way" happening?

Maybe you didn't.

Just point me to a few points in the past where you have been trying to get attention to how hamas have been attacking Israel in the past 20 years.

> There was never any intention whatsoever from the Israeli side to live in peace with its neighbors. I'm not sure it's incumbent upon the existing residents of an area to welcome someone who quite clearly intends to take all of your land.

Israel has traded land for peace every time they got a chance. Just ask Egypt.

You can also check with Syria who got offered the Golan heights back but refused because there was one clause: Syria would have to agree to a peace deal.

> A Jewish state in part of Palestine is not an end, but a beginning... We shall bring into the state all the Jews it is possible to bring... then we shall expand to the whole country... We will break through the borders imposed on us...

That was his opinion. Reading that quote and not checking what actually happened and also reading that quote without reading all the much worse quotes by Palestinian Arab (and other Arab) leaders is almost disingenious.

> Note that he refers to this being a state created in Palestine.

I don't dispute Palestine existing.

That would be as stupid as denying Scandinavia.

What I would like to point out though is that calling Palestinian Arabs "Palestinians" while calling Israelis "Jews" would be equally stupid to calling Swedes Scandinavians and Norwegians just Norwegians and argue that since Norway was once ruled by Sweden we don't really exist and must be expelled because "Scandinavia for Scandinavians".

If you look you will find that until 1948 Palestinians meant everyone living in Palestine and until the 60ies and 70ies Palestinian Arabs often refused being called Palestinians as they saw themselves as south Syrians, Jordanians or just Arabs.

Look closer at anything people present as proof of Palestine existing as a country and you find some very interesting details :

Palestinian stamps have Hebrew (~ Israeli) text. Same goes for Palestinian coins.

Palestinian passports has a field telling if it is a Druze, a Jew, a Muslim etc.

Palestinian Airlines? Owned and operated by Jews.

List goes on.

> Both sides are sufficiently horrible and indefensible to be simply horrible and indefensible.

One side celebrates murder and death, has death penalty, throws gays from rooftops, no womens rights.

The other is a modern democracy where everyone has the same rights (ok, Israeli Arabs ("Israeli Palestinians") and Ultra Orthodox Jews both have the same extra right to only serve in the IDF if they want.)

One side has systematically ethnically cleansed the other sides (no known Jews in Gaza, Christian population in Bethlehem down by 66%) while the other side has a large Arab minority well represented at every level of the legal system and in the parliament.

But sure, both sides are equally bad, right?

Well, now we have let it happen again, the facists of Gaza has attacked israel for 20 years while we looked the other way and finally, after their old provocations (or should I just write terrorist attacks?) stopped working (after Iron Dome and better border controls) they did the the unspeakable things in 2023.

So the question is now: will we let it continue?

Tell me you know nothing about the war in Ukraine without telling me?

Please look up Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Soledar, Toretsk, Vugledar and Volnovakha. Those are just from Donetsk oblast.

And if you go beyond just the buildings it gets a lot uglier.

The ideal situation would be something like after WW2:

- large international combined army occupies the entirety of Gaza

- every hamas official gets arrested

- trials in Hague (or somewhere else) where we separate between who was just party members, who tried to reduce the evil and who were the masterminds behind the worst parts of it. Some go free, some get a few years and some get life without parole

- international military administration until they are ready for normal elections. In Germany that took 9 years

- lots and lots and lots of campaigns to make them understand that they are not the victims (Germans also thought they were the victims until 1945 and beyond and it took effort to fix that)

- keep a close eye on them for the next 50 - 60 years

Will it happen?

Of course not. But it would be the absolute best outcome for civilians on Gaza.

Why won't it happen? Because half of the world think that the Gazans are the victims because more Gazans have died than Israelis lately. Imagine if we taught WW2 that way: "Germans were mostly innocent victims, over 350 000 absolutely innocent Germans died vs under 10 000 US civilians, wHiCh mEaNs WW2 wAs a aCsHuAlLy a gEn0cIdE aGa1nSt tHe GeRmAn pEoPlE".

Either it has been updated since you read it or I have no idea why you think it is AI generated after reading half of it.

Same could be said about Windows vs Linux back in the day, but as another person already pointed out it doesn't make sense when the owner is one of the ones you are trying to protect yourself against.

Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?

Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)

Can you use the online versions? They are starting to become usable now.

That is what we are supposed to do at work.

I only have 5 kids, and I am also not nearly as productive as Gauss but to a certain degree, it feels to me like responsibility kind of tries to force me to be more effective.

Because it’s just a bad idea.

Most of the world doesn’t need that whole setup because:

- Our cultural baseline around firearms is completely different. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic have plenty of guns at home - and historically, a lot of them were actual assault rifles, not “looks-spicy” semiautos.

- We treat guns like weapons. They live in safes, not nightstands, and kids get taught safety early, the same way you’d teach them not to put a fork in a power supply.

Joking here since it would be impractical, but I guess you can bury it under my house. I'd not be bothered at all to live on top of a modern nuclear waste deposit like Finlands.

Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.

It very much happens today, it is just extremely much darker.

> Telephone number? There used to be phone books. And I still instinctively think they should be public.

I used to think the same. Around here I feel until a few years ago most people I knew with secret phones were people I would prefer to have fewer interactions with: people who frequently got into trouble, tried to scam others etc.

These days I’m more in the camp of layered security. Whatever I can do to make it harder for an attacker, the better.

> I have used https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ a couple of times to search for people's addresses and it really works.

Tangential:

Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access fastpeoplesearch.com

(Safari on a stock iPhone, mobile broadband from the biggest and most well known telecom company in my country, ipv6 address.)

For EU citizens, GDPR requires that if you ask for it, a human has to review your case. (Article 22 "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.")

I guess a lawyer can argue against this, but I'd say that losing access to a lifetime if mails is absolutely up there with "legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."

And from my own experience building software for government services, I can tell you this: In my experience in those systems it is not acceptable to just have a list where someone clicks “deny” all day. Or allow for that matter. We tried with a system were the rule is that the citizen gets <think they apply for> whenever all relevant demands are met. Legal was very clear: No automated decisions either way unless the relevant laws or regulations explicitly allow it, every case has to be reviewed independently — even when the outcome seems completely obvious to anyone who knows the field.

No, but it wouldn't be surprising if they might be somewhat correlated?

I can recognize my wife easily now, but the first few months as we dated I was always scared that I wouldn't see her because I don't know what she looks like, I just recognize her and everyone else when I see them.

To the degree I have any day to day mental imagery it only works as a very very brief "overlay" when my eyes are open and I only see certain pictures:

a passport image of my Mom that I have in a photo book

a picture of my wife before we married that is my phone background and that I therefore have seen many times

the wedding photo of my parents from the hallway as a kid (even though I meet them a few times a year and often see other pictures of them)

And these images are faint, overlayed on other images and disappear in milliseconds.

My guess is you are affected. You remind me of myself before I realised just how big the difference really is.

People who see images don’t just imagine them or "know apples are red" - they actually see them. I think a couple of comments in this discussion described it as controlled hallucinations. Not scary, rather something useful they can summon on demand.

You can deny it all you want, but there are people who once had a rich, vivid imagination, lost it, and can describe what changed.

I’m a weird edge case myself - I sometimes experience it briefly, right before falling asleep or just after waking up.

The way I understood it was the apple on a table test:

I was asked to close my eyes and think about an apple.

if you do it now, close your eyes for about 10 - 20 seconds and think very hard about an apple on a table.

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then immediately after opening your eyes tell me what color the apple was.

For me and many others it is an absurd question. We only thought about the thing apple on the thing table, absolutely no visual representation.

For some of my siblings they saw the apple and could of course tell me the color and also the color of the table.

I'm a bit tired of people trying to explain it away.

I'm affected by it, and I know it isn't like you describe because I have experienced and sometimes still experience seeing actual images with my eyes closed but most of the time it is absolutely impossible.

There's also IIRC the fact that the reason someone started researching this topic was because a person who had very clear visual imagery with closed eyes lost it after surgery and his description got this thing started.

> If children are completely free from accountability, adults will form them into an army and convince them to commit crimes on their behalf, leading to an intolerable situation. This may already be a standard way of doing business in some parts of the world.

This is an ongoing problem in Norway now and I think it has been in Sweden for some time.

If you want to read more, search for the foxtrot network.

> But the irony is that when a non-European entity were to do something like this, e.g. nationalize their oil or mining etc. industry or a firm, the whole hell would brake loose.

Russia has nationalised a number of Western companies since 2022, even McDonalds.

Nothing happened.

Given the choice between massive, "complete" documentation with no examples and decent but incomplete docs with good examples, I’ll pick the second every time.

Why? Because if you don’t explain how to actually use something, all the fine-grained details are pointless.

Classic example: try looking up the Java docs around 2003–2005 to figure out how to display an image in a Swing application. Endless pages about Graphics2D and Image and double buffering and what not but not a single mention of the real solution:

Just put it in a JLabel.

As others have mentioned, good points.

But we must stop somewhere, else we end up like the people arguing that the most democratic country in the middle east is somehow the apartheid one.

It only works if one looks away from the fact that there are so many more things that need to be declared terrorism first.

And it directly misleads people.

Stop spreading Russian lies.

Donbas looked nicer after years of alleged Ukrainian bombing than any Ukrainian town looked after a week of Russian "liberation".

> So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently?

When did Ukrainians terror bomb Russia for decades on end?

When did Ukrainian authorities pay people to kill Russian civilians?

When did Ukrainians cross the border to massacre Russians, rape and take hundreds of hostages and take bragging videos of it to share on WhatsApp and Telegram?

Gazans have done all this and those who do it have - until recently - been universally seen as heroes in Gaza although that is finally changing. Gazas official position is still that October 7th was a fantastic day but simultaneously just a small taste of what is to come.

Even those that acknowledge that 07th of October was a mistake seems to be more concerned about what it means for them than the fact that they killed over thousand innocent civilians, documented their own extreme sexual violence and bragged openly about it and took hundreds of hostages.

It absolutely wasn't.

Chechnya had a very popular president and was a stable country.

It is what it is.

I used to really want to learn Russian language. I thought of it as an investment in my career as I expected to work a lot more with Russians and Russian companies because I assumed Russia like the Baltics and Poland would become part of Europe.

I have also had some really nice and smart colleagues from Russia over the years.

Then came 2014 and 2022 and now sadly I think Russians will go through what Germans experienced from 1946 and the next few decades.

Hopefully you'll not go through what Germans suffered in 1945.

If you are working against the regime we are still friends.

And I look forward to visit Russia again in a decade or two.

But remember (and everyone should remember this): a people is responsible for the government they choose. Those who cheer when their militaries are successfully attacking peaceful neighbors and taking civilians including kids as hostages and talk about erasing their neighbors can't expect much sympathy when the war returns home.

I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).

My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.

Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.

The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:

- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.

- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)

- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)

The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.

Common themes:

- Communication is 2 way

- Both teams are friendly and competent

- Customer care about results and leave programming to us

- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.

Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!

Some examples:

- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates

- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall

- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid

- "release" after "release" but no actual customer

- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages

Returning the hostages.

Admit that 07th of October 2023 wasn't their greatest idea ever (their official position is that it is, but also just a taste of what is to come.)

Good points.

You will probably also like to know that the plans for a modern Israel started long before WW2 and Holocaust, and originally not because of persecution of Jews by Europeans in Europe but because of persecution of Jews by Arabs in the middle East.

For me it was because I dabbled in Russian before, but recent events have led me to avoid anything that could be seen as supporting Russia in any way, including culturally.

I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.

less than 60 000 people were killed in the Blitz against London.

By your logic most of what happened in 1944 and 1945 when 350 000 to 500 000 German civilians died were probably injustice.

But in the real world we need to deal with the people who again and again attack their neighbors in vicious ways.

And we need to finish it.