God damn this is bleak.

Mitch says the first signs of a deepening reliance on AI came when the company’s CEO was found to be rewriting parts of their app so that it would be easier for AI models to understand and help with. “Then”, Mitch says, “I had a meeting with the CEO where he told me he noticed I wasn’t using the Chat GPT account the company had given me. I wasn’t really aware the company was tracking that”.

“Anyway, he told me that I would need to start using Chat GPT to speed up my development process. Furthermore, he said I should start using Claude, another AI tool, to just wholesale create new features for the app. He walked me through setting up the accounts and had me write one with Claude while I was on call with him. I’m still not entirely sure why he did that, but I think it may have been him trying to convince himself that it would work.”

Mitch describes this increasing reliance on AI to be not just “incredibly boring”, but ultimately pointless. “Sure, it was faster, but it had a completely different development rhythm”, they say. “In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it”.

“One thing to note is that just the thought of using AI to generate code was so demotivating that I think it would counteract any of the speed gains that the tool would provide, and on top of that would produce worse code than I didn’t understand. And that’s not even mentioning the ethical concerns of a tool built on plagiarism.”

Genocide is actually very clearly defined under international law. To quote directly from the source:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Any single one of these criteria individually is enough to meet the definition of genocide. Every single one of these has already occurred and is ongoing, and it is only through pure delusion, media control, and wishful ignorance that anyone can claim otherwise.

There is virtually no dissent among actual scholars and experts in the field of international law, Israel is unequivocally perpetrating genocide. They have simply not been held to account for their actions yet, due primarily to complicity from allies and collaborators who do not want to be criminalized for their actions as well. People are also not their rulers, and they have been watching those running their governments provide diplomatic, strategic, and political cover for some of the worst atrocities in human history.

Make no mistake though, justice will come for Israel, and hopefully every state and individual actor who has supported and covered for it as well.

For people like yourself, I hope you understand that at some point in the future you’re going to have to live in a world that sees you for exactly what you are. Israel will be remembered as exactly what it is, and you will know you were one of its defenders.

When you hear stories of traumatized, maimed, orphaned children, of mothers forced to endure c sections without anesthesia, of the weeping friends and family of journalists, medical workers, educators, caretakers, and innocents of all walks of life as they and their loved ones were targeted and massacred by an inhuman genocidal apartheid state, you will have to reckon with the fact that you stood on the side of the perpetrators.

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The 22,600 figure is most likely a severe underestimate of the people murdered by occupation forces in Gaza (and elsewhere, because they’ve been murdering people in the West Bank and Lebanon as well). I shared this in another comment but The Lancet published this which determined there was no evidence that the Gaza Ministry of Health is inflating these statistics, if anything they are being under reported.

As for how many are “actual civilians” the way that is being reported currently heavily favors the narrative of the occupation because the assumption is simply that all males over the age of 13 are combatants, and even using this absurd framing around 61% of those killed are women and children. The occupation forces have proportionately killed more journalists and UN aid workers than in any other conflict in recent history.

History will judge Israel and its supporters harshly.

Israeli soldiers have repeatedly been found using human shields and forcing civilians to risk their lives performing military tasks.

The Lancet is generally regarded as one of the most reputable and trustworthy medical journals. An assessment of the figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health published in the Lancet found that there was no evidence of inflated mortality statistics, and even went beyond that to say that it is considerably more likely that the Gaza Ministry of Health is under reporting the casualties providing the most conservative figures.

If MoH mortality figures were substantially inflated, the MoH mortality rates would be expected to be higher than the UNRWA mortality rates. Instead, the MoH mortality rates are lower than the rates reported for UNRWA staff (5·3 deaths per 1000 vs 7·8 deaths per 1000, as of Nov 10, 2023). Hypothetically, if MoH mortality data were inflated from, for example, an underlying value of 2–4 deaths per 1000, it would imply that UNRWA staff mortality risk is 2·0–3·9 times higher than that of the public. This scenario is unlikely as many UNRWA staff deaths occurred at home or in areas with high civilian populations, such as in schools or shelters.

Mortality reporting is difficult to conduct in ongoing conflicts. Initial news reports might be imprecise, and subsequent verified reports might undercount deaths that are not recorded by hospitals or morgues, such as persons buried under rubble (appendix pp 1–2). However, difficulties obtaining accurate mortality figures should not be interpreted as intentionally misreported data.

Although valid mortality counts are important, the situation in Gaza is severe, with high levels of civilian harm and extremely restricted access to aid. Efforts to dispute mortality reporting should not distract from the humanitarian imperative to save civilian lives by ensuring appropriate medical supplies, food, water, and fuel are provided immediately.

Here’s a link to the source of this quote.

There are a lot of terrible people doing terrible things to humanity and the planet, and I’ll be damned if I let those fucking ghouls outlive me.