Is this the fourth time in the past week that Israel has gunned down starving Palestinians?

Edit: Yes, the article confirms that this is indeed the fourth time in the past week that Israel has gunned down starving Palestinians at an aid point. Fucking ghouls. Hard to even keep track.

I saw a video last night of a father holding the severed torso of his maybe six year old daughter. She was cut in half by an Israeli bomb. How even 20% of Europe can still support this slaughter is beyond me.

I don’t hate all uses of AI and use it quite a bit (particularly for translation and coding). But I absolutely do hate the low-effort, garbled memes it generates, and the endless sea of garbage websites with inaccurate AI-generated text that make it hard to find real information anymore.

That’s the slop, and you can easily hate the slop without hating everything about AI.

Silly in this case, though. That looks like a real cat, and doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of slop.

Bastion is a 6/10 beat-em-up with 10/10 art, music, and voice acting. I enjoyed that game a lot (and still listen to the soundtrack on road trips), but boy does the atmosphere carry the weight of an otherwise average game.

Pretty forgivable since it was their first effort. Hades feels nice and crisp while keeping all the other points strong, too.

The U.S. doesn’t even talk big on Ukraine anymore. Proposing a joke of a “peace plan” where Russia gets their land and we get their minerals. Insulting Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. The Ukrainians kept us in the dark on this one so Trump wouldn’t do any stupid shit like when he blabbed to Putin and got all our informants killed. Trusting the U.S. to do anything constructive on Ukraine would be a fool’s errand.

That’s great to hear! I was actually living in Somerville when I did that Japan trip. The extension of the bike path and really that whole rails-to-trails project were wonderful for the community. We need more projects like that - glad to hear the cape is getting some.

The project actually still hasn’t started due to ongoing litigation and budget constraints. It did get redesigned with more bike infrastructure and pedestrian bridges to cross the freeway, but local bike and pro-transit groups still oppose the project.

One of the main arguments is that the state’s proposal is not consistent with the city’s regional plan, which says that the interstate can only be expanded if congestion pricing is also implemented to discourage additional traffic.

At this point, the state is planning to fix up some bridges while the rest of the legal fight plays out. Expansion probably won’t start until 2028 in any case… at which point this song will be an “oldie.”

I don’t disagree with your assessment of the terms, but again, it goes back to financial literacy. Most people are not budgeting their expenditures, and they think, “I can afford $20 a month,” and then “I can afford $40 a month,” over and over until they end up with hundreds of dollars in loan payments, even at favorable interest terms. When those payments are built up because people can’t pay their grocery bill, that’s all the worse. Relying on July’s income to pay for May’s groceries, and you’re not even living paycheck to paycheck. You’re living on a paycheck two months away.

Should people be more financially literate? Yes. Should they exercise more personal responsibility in budgeting and approach to debt? Of course. But in reality, most people just don’t have the knowledge base to evaluate financial decisions the way that you and I probably do.

There’s also a psychological factor. Taking out a personal loan at the bank is an entire process, with agreement documents and trips down to the branch. There is more time to evaluate and second-guess your decision. But now you can take on debt with one click of a button on a check-out page. Lowering that barrier makes it all the easier for people who already struggle with financial literacy to act on impulse and incur more debt.

It’s something that everyone should be cautious about, including people who better evaluate their financial decisions, because eventually it can affect us too. Car repo rates are at their highest levels in 15 years. Delinquency on consumer loans has been steadily increasing since 2021. When inability to pay debts reaches a critical level, you get a financial collapse like we had in '08. So I think it is worth considering, even if the terms of an individual loan are favorable, whether making it so easy for people to take on debt is healthy or sustainable in the context of the broader economy.

I’ve read about people increasingly using these services not for leisure expenditures like delivery and concerts, but for basic needs like groceries. Salon said 25% of users are in this camp, and meanwhile 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

Yes, you’re right that there’s an element of personal responsibility in taking on debt. But the fact of the matter is that most people are pretty low in financial literacy, and also that declining real wages increasingly put people in a situation of using debt to pay for basic needs.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager this woman spends a lot of time scrolling through right-wing posts on Facebook about the “invasion” of Britain. A Brexit type, if you will.

That’s just speculation in this specific case, but the amount of fear-mongering right-wing content on social media is absolutely a contributor to this kind of worldview more broadly.

There was a guy who took his guitar before the Portland City Council and sang a song about induced demand. If you build more lanes, more drivers will come and fill them.

https://youtu.be/ujvG6vbpSPc

I once had the pleasure of cycling the Shimanami Kaido in Japan, a bike route that connects the islands of Honshu and Shikoku, hopping between all these minor islands on the way over suspension bridges carrying the main highway.

The bike lane is protected the whole time. In one case, the bike route is actually below the deck of the bridge, and you’re on a fenced-in catwalk hundreds of feet over the channel between the islands. Views for miles over Osaka bay.

Honestly, when I look back at my life, it’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever done. If only the U.S. invested in bike infrastructure like that.

Opinion section of the newspaper, as in position pieces written by guests rather than reporting by news desk staff.

However, it is also a fact that Israel is committing war crimes up to and including genocide.

“Recommended by the UN” is the exact same fucking thing as “created by the west.” Who do you think holds and has historically held power at the UN besides all the same colonial powers of the west? An absurd lie to claim this distinction is a difference.

Nothing in this comment is racist. Israel colonized (and continues to incrementally colonize more of) Palestine. It is also committing genocide, according to a wide range of scholars on genocide. Therefore, it is a genocidal colony.

But while there is nothing racist in that statement, you are by contrast a despicable racist. Apologetics defending the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of children - slaughtering indigenous peoples in their homeland based on ethnic background - is as racist as it gets. Your defense of white supremacy is unforgivable.

87% decline in Tesla sales in Quebec, on the heels of similar news across Europe and Asia. Let the good times roll.

You’d think North Korea would applaud the U.S. for continuing to bankrupt itself with a long series of expensive military follies.

Unstable, yes. Equilibrium… no.

She sometimes maintains coherence for several responses, but at a certain point, the output devolves into rants about how environmentalists caused the California wildfires.

These conversations consume a lot of energy and provide very limited benefit. We’re beginning to wonder if the trade-offs are worth it.

In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and “irreversible defects” in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.”

A remarkably similar thing happened to my aunt who can’t get off Facebook. We try feeding her accurate data, but she’s become poisoned with her own projection of reality.

You mean… exactly what they’re already doing and will definitely continue to do?

Yes.