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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • We also call it the Russo-Ukrainian war, and not the Russian genocide of Ukraine even though Russia’s genocidal intent is clear as day. Sometimes choice of terminology has less meaning than you want it to have.

    That said yes DW isn’t going to call anything a genocide unless either the ICJ or the German federal government does. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to broadcast inside Germany, they’re a state broadcaster, not a public one, and on top of that federal while broadcasting in Germany is 100% state matter. Their editorial independence is noticeable, but not infinite.



  • the latter included 3,000 portable anti-tank weapons

    Not useful for a genocide, really.

    and 500,000 rounds of ammunition for automatic or semi-automatic firearms

    That was training ammunition. I’m kinda surprised to not see the “artillery rounds” in that list – which weren’t rounds, but propellant charges, and like a couple of handful because they were sent over for testing and development, not to the army but industry.

    Israel has their own lawyers they can defend themselves.

    No they can’t because they’re denying facts. That’s not a defence strategy, that’s digging your own hole.

    As for the rest, I just see a lot of mental gymnastics to justify beating up or defunding people and organizations who go against the political mainstream.

    Acknowledging that Israel is doing all kinds of shit is not “against the mainstream”. Heck, watch DW news for a while it’s full of Israeli war crimes. DW, in case you don’t know, is run directly by the German federal government.



  • Sorry but this is way too apologetic considering how Germany has provided weapons, rhetorical and judicial cover for this ongoing genocide.

    Which weapons. Name them. I suppose sanctioning Kahanites is “rhetorical and judicial cover”?

    defend Israel in the ICJ

    Everyone needs a defence lawyer. Also Germany’s line of arguing is more or less “These are clearly war crimes, but genocide? That requires intent”.

    They are still violently cracking down on pro-Palestine protestors

    There were and are plenty of pro-Palestine protests in Germany. Yes, there’s also police force used – what do you expect, if some people start out a protest by setting trash cans on fire, that the police turns a blind eye because they’re protesting genocide? Doesn’t work like that in Germany. And then certain people with certain interests take those kinds of instances and spin it into “Germany is violently cracking down on the pro-Palestine movement” instead of “Germany doesn’t really have much of a taste for breaches of public order”. We’re not France where burning trash cans are considered sporting.

    and they are still defunding NGOs that are anti-genocide

    And also still funding them. Maybe this whole thing is, you know, a bit more nuanced than you are willing to acknowledge.


  • Basically: The stance of the government is much more nuanced than usually appreciated in Germany, much less the world,

    What she didn’t mention, and that’s also part of the nuance, is that Germany basically dropped all support that can be dropped without leaving the Israeli moderates and the left-wing hung out to dry. And not just now, it only took a couple of days or weeks for much support to drop, after it became clear that the Kahanites are using the opportunity to get the genocide they always wanted. Which is, according to Germany’s reading, against Israel’s self-interest and therefore against Germany’s interest. Fascism in general, just for the record, not just Kahanites.

    It’d also be a hell of a nightmare for the chancellery to try to override bureaucrats in different ministries saying “well no we shouldn’t because there’s a not negligible probability that those weapons would be used in a genocide”: Those bureaucrats are only doing their duty, following the law, analysing things as they’re supposed to. Press would quickly get wind of it and all hell would descend upon the governing coalition. In more ways than one: Press and the people would be talking about topics that the government would rather not have anyone think or talk about loudly, because, well, nuance. You never want nuanced topics to be discussed loudly and heatedly, never ends well.

    Switching countries: The same nuance and need for tact comes into play when it comes to not losing the deep ties into Israeli politics and civil society over knee-jerk moralising. There are a fuckton of Israelis out there protesting the government, don’t want to lose them over not delivering air defence, they need all the support, moral or otherwise, that they can get. The Israeli left already lost enough Hippie Kibbutzim inhabitants in the September attacks (in case you ever wondered why the Israeli government gives less than a shit about the hostages: They’re largely lefties). Artillery shells? Different topic.


  • So you can find things by “that spicy chicken recipe” instead of having to remember what it was actually called, or slog through a gazillion chicken recipes in your history when you realise that “spicy” was nowhere in the name. Basically stemming/thesaurus search on steroids.

    It’s quite likely to be opt-in as I imagine ingesting the sites you’re looking at is a significant computational load. The translators are also opt-in, there’s enough stuff inbuilt to detect languages but not to translate, you have to download those models first. And they’re quite good btw.

    Another thing I could see them offering is stuff like tl;dr bot. It’s probably not for everyone, but I definitely can see that it can be a useful feature for many people.








  • The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

    The reason why those economic limits exist is because we’re reaching the limit of what’s physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn’t fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there’s going to be a wall. Of note currently we’re talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.

    Long story short: Node shrinks aren’t the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven’t been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn’t have engineered FinFETs) but it’s really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don’t really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you’re building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.







  • Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They’re cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that’s, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.

    And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won’t do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.