If you make any edits that contradict the physical evidence, you’ve outed yourself.

We’re talking about people that contradict both themselves and physical reality on a daily basis without their supporters batting an eye.

Export to jpeg. Compress.

Can decent edits still be reliably detected?

Great, it seems like we agree on the major points here! I’m not denying any of the major issues of the Afghan war, nor any of the glaring problems with how the whole “nation building” attempt went about. I’m very well aware of the history of the Afghan war, and have seen several of the documentaries you refer to that point out that it was largely known that the Afghan army would likely desert once the coalition left.

I’m not saying we don’t care.

That is quite literally what you said in your first comment, and is literally the only thing I’ve disagreed with you on so far (“the world simply doesn’t care”). If you didn’t mean that, then I don’t see anything I disagree with you on.

Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best.

This is literally the point I’ve been trying to make, but it seems like you keep misinterpreting me as saying the whole invasion was a misunderstood humanitarian operation. I’m not saying that.

It differs per community.

Good point, I’ll moderate myself and just state that I’ve never experienced it being a hard requirement in my field.

No it’s not. I have both published in a variety of scientific journals, reviewed for a couple journals, and turned down reviews for a couple journals.

No journal checks your “review history” before allowing you to publish. However, if you consistently turn down reviews from a journal, the editor is likely going to get annoyed and you will probably have a harder time publishing in that journal in the future.

Yep. At that point, why even bother taking the review? You’re not forced to do reviews. Never taking any is likely to negatively impact your career, but still… just decline the review if you’re going to use a LLM for it anyway. Have some dignity.

I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here?

My point is that, while flimsy and flawed, there was in fact an education system and a humanitarian system in place that was propped up by coalition forces. This system did fall apart, leaving no system at all when the forces left. And yes, a bunch of Afghanis have every right to feel betrayed. I never said otherwise.

It’s not like Afghanistan is the only place where schools, hospitals and infrastructure has been financed by western countries. By and large, we spend a lot of money on these things because a significant portion of the population sees it as the right thing to do. Because we care, and want to help people.

What became very clear in Afghanistan was that you can’t force a population to be a liberal democracy. They have to be willing to fight for it themselves. The Afghan army (on paper) had several hundred thousand men, loads of heavy equipment, and several years to train and prepare for coalition forces leaving. There was a government structure in place. These things instantly folded when the coalition left because, clearly, enough people preferred Taliban to what the outsiders had forced upon them.

I guess I’m saying it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. If you stay, you’re an oppressive occupier. If you leave, you’re a traitor that permits a humanitarian crisis to occur.

The OP here asked “why doesn’t anybody do anything about NK”, and my answer is that we (seem to) have learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights on a country. Chalking it up to “we don’t care” is reductionist.

It didn’t go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.

It seems like you didn’t observe the thousands of people swarming the airport in Kabul trying to get out with the last planes. It also seems like you haven’t picked up on the people crying about how people are being brutally punished for getting an education or listening to music now.

I’m not denying that shit was really bad while coalition forces were there, but acting like it didn’t get worse for a lot of people when the left is just closing your eyes.

Regardless, it’s ludicrous to claim that western countries “aren’t doing anything because they don’t care”. It’s not like we’ve spent truckloads of money and thousands of lives over 20 years of trying to get a functioning system in place while preventing a humanitarian crisis because we “didn’t care”. People saw it as immoral to just turn our backs on Afghanistan and let them solve their own problems. The result was largely that we learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights onto someone else, as proven by the almost complete absence of people willing to fight for just that once the coalition left.

“The west” isn’t really a cohesive unit regarding Israel/Iran. You have some western countries supporting a genocide and committing blatant violations of international law, while others condemn them for it and try to pressure them to stop.

Sadly, one rogue state can cause a lot of damage, and countries typically have a very high bar for using military force against their closest allies in defence of a third party.

It’s not that people “don’t care”. We’ve tried intervening with force in e.g. Afghanistan, where the oppressive regime was forcibly removed, and military power was used to ensure that elections were held and the results were respected.

We have observed, several times, that everything goes to shit when we leave. Not only that, but people generally don’t seem like it when outsiders take over and tell them how to run their country, who should be allowed an education, and that <insert group> cannot be oppressed. So a side effect of the armed intervention is that a lot more people hate you now.

Western countries “aren’t doing anything” because we’ve both learned from experience that military intervention doesn’t really work, and been repeatedly told by the rest of the world to mind our own business.

The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.

Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.

What do you mean?

You can pay someone to vote a specific way, but with the current system, there doesn’t exist a way for you to verify that they actually voted how you told them to.

The problem with any kind of system like this is that if you can verify your own vote, then someone else could always force you to show them that verification.

Relevant XKCD

No matter who threatens you, they can’t see what’s on the paper ballot you put in a box. There’s people at the polling station that ensure that.

If there’s any way of tracking your vote, someone could threaten you, force you to vote a certain way, then force you to show the verification afterwards.

The safest way to ensure everyone gets a fair vote is paper ballots in a box.

I know the US uses a lot of mail-in voting, and that you generally deem it to be secure. I also understand that the US is a far less densely populated country than my own, which makes mail-in voting more necessary. However, we don’t have that in my country, and the reason I’m glad for it is exactly this: There’s no truly effective way to prevent anyone from forcing someone else to mail in a specific vote.

You don’t need to pretend education was perfect before in order to realise that it’s getting worse and try to reverse the trend.

You also don’t need to pretend it was perfect before in order to see that the proliferation of LLM’s is harming education.

That’s because they’re full of shit. If you have the equipment to properly treat water, it will be drinkable pretty much no matter what it’s been through.

Obviously, you shouldn’t be drinking unsterilised water that’s full of shit.

In all honesty, I love both rakfisk and lutefisk. They are fantastic and wildly underrated food. I will die on this hill.

Oh, and sursild, sennepssild, and all that other good sild stuff. That’s also awesome.

The swedes can keep the surströmning to themselves though. That shit is not fit for human consumption.

culturally appropriate

tasty

Screams in northern Scandinavian

People ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore doesn’t explain that the relative share of Mac and Linux has increased for the past 15 years though. Unless for some reason Windows users are more likely to ditch their PC because they don’t need it than Mac or Linux users.