There are many issues raised with the report, including it omits the invasion by the government of Gaza, Hamas, on 7 October 2023 entirely, and it omits that the Israeli army is fighting the army of Gaza, the Qasam brigades, who had 40,000 salaried fighters (pre-war), have fired thousands of missiles, developed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels specifically for urban warfare, and subverted public and private infrastructure for urban warfare. For such a serious allegation, it is important to consider and address all aspects and not simply omit them.
I would like to add, I don't think this topic is appropriate for Hacker News.
Is it actually relevant? It's not about why israel fights but about how they fight. The report is not about the conflict at large but about how exactly israel is handling day to day operations.
Brett McGurk would push back against the complaints, invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration, as the U.S. attempted to drive ISIS from northern Iraq: We flattened the city. There’s nothing left. What standard are you holding these Israelis to?
It was an argument bolstered by a classified cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Israel in late fall. American officials had embedded in IDF operating centers, reviewing its procedures for ordering air strikes. The cable concluded that the Israeli standards for protecting civilians and calculating the risks of bombardment were not so different from those used by the U.S. military.
When State Department officials chastised them over the mounting civilian deaths, Israeli officials liked to make the very same point. Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, brought up his own education at an American war college. He recalled asking a U.S. general how many civilian deaths would be acceptable in pursuit of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The general replied, I don’t even understand the question. As Halevi now explained to the U.S. diplomats, Everything we do, we learned at your colleges.
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in other words Israel using same approach as NATO armies. And if any of NATO armies will be in same situation, the outcome will be same.
Took me a while to figure out but this is the most literal whataboutism message I've had to read in a while.
It's not relevant what other countries did, why israel fights, where they got their weapon or training or ideas. It's only about how israel handles day to day operations.
I'd be happy to read reports about wether the US commited a genocide. And I don't want to read comparison with other countries in such reports.
>It's not relevant what other countries did, why israel fights, where they got their weapon or training or ideas. It's only about how israel handles day to day operations.
and according to US diplomates israel handles day to day operations in same way as any western army will handle it, as it uses same procedures and protocols.
Author here. While researching this topic I came across this article https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/compressed-tries/ by GeeksForGeeks (compressed trie is another name for radix tree). Currently it is one of the top results on Google for this topic. Generally I've found GeeksForGeeks to be a good resource, but this article is especially poor. The code is bizarre and makes no sense:
- It defines properties like 'bitNumber', 'leftChild' and 'rightChild' which have nothing to do with this type of tree.
- The search function search(k) calls an overloaded version of itself search(root, k) that is (1) illegal in these languages and (2) not defined.
- The insert function does not account for all scenarios.
And more.
I'm fairly convinced this was written with the assistance of a LLM. That would be a logical explanation to all those illogical choices.
The pictures come straight from Wikipedia. From the picture for North Korea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea): Territory controlled by North Korea shown in dark green; territory claimed but not controlled shown in light green.
For anyone wondering how they got the approximation sqrt(2)=1+24/60+51/60^2+10/60^3.
It's based on the simple idea that:
Z = (a + b)^2 = (a^2 + (2a+b)*b)
=> (2a+b)* b < Z-a^2
Given an initial estimate "a", we need to find the largest "b" such that the term on the left is less than the term on the right. Therefore our estimate will always be slightly less than the actual answer and we can repeat the process to get slightly closer.
For the first iteration, Z=2 and a=1. We choose b=x/60:
Base 60 was the number system for the Sumarians/Babylonians.
> Sexagesimal, also known as base 60 or sexagenary, is a numeral system with sixty as its base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified form—for measuring time, angles, and geographic coordinates.
https://liorsinai.github.io/ long detailed posts on mathematics, machine learning and algorithms. Most of the code is in Julia but older posts also feature Python, C# and C++. I recently did posts on Transformers and Diffusion Denoising Probabilistic models.
The most popular post is a Sudoku solver in Python.
Author here. I have noticed similar behaviour. As part of this exercise I tried to train a model to generate Pokemon based on This Pokemon Does Not Exist by HuggingFace. However my models only converged to nosiy smudges after 50 iterations and so I excluded it from the posts (I do mention my experiments at the end of part 2).
My first assumption was that the mdoel I was training was too small: 13 million parameters as opposed to the 1.3 billion in ruDALL-E (not sure how much of this is only the diffusion model). So that's a 100x smaller. I want to experiment with upscaling it.
Reading this I'm wondering if there's more I need to do. For example, training a conditioned model - "cheat" by given it in the index of the Pokemon during training but then you sample without an index - or make the model predict the standard deviation (beta tilde). Or as you say, work with loss functions.
I went to a university in South Africa which had the opposite problem, grade deflation. The engineering school was masochistic in its obsession with lowering grades and failing students. Despite working extremely hard I went from 90%s to 60%s. But I was considered lucky because most students failed (and by most I mean +90% of the class) and repeated years. I did not. The lecturers repeatedly blamed the students but if even A students are failing I think it's not the students fault, it's the school's.
My university teamed up with an American University, Embray-Riddle, to offer a joint masters. Embray-Riddle required a minimum average grade of 80%; my university came back to them and said no one in the last 10 years qualified for the masters. Eventually they lowered the requirements just so they could have students.
Later I did my masters in the Netherlands. The university made me do extra courses to compensate for my low grades. But I ended up doing reasonably well with an 8/10 average and was the top student in a few subjects.
Grade inflation sounds bad but I can positively say that grade deflation is worse. It badly demotivates students and robs them of years of their life as they repeat courses.
> My university teamed up with an American University, Embray-Riddle, to offer a joint masters. Embray-Riddle required a minimum average grade of 80%; my university came back to them and said no one in the last 10 years qualified for the masters. Eventually they lowered the requirements just so they could have students.
They just shows the US university has no idea how universities based on the UK system work. At Trinity College Dublin the standard was that 70%+ was a first class honours, the highest rank of degree awarded. Getting 80% would be like getting a started first at Oxford. Most years no one gets one in any partial particular faculty.
It's almost as if universities should devise a decent curriculum with the proper goals for the program, then design courses to properly teach those, and then design tests to measure to what degree a student actually meets the curriculum's goal. But hey, who am I kidding?
I went from a grade-inflating US university to a semester in Spain where 50% was passing, passing was the goal, and the grades reflected that.
It was all fine until a computer networking course with a policy of not returning tests or test grades until the midterm, when we discovered that no one was doing better than 29%, and median was probably 20%. The whole section pretty much freaked out, and for a week no learning happened until the professor finally implied that, due to his poor English skills, only near-verbatim reproductions of the book's answer key were awarded any credit.
Ugh that's terrible. The College I went to the professors seemed to have the attitude of this program is hard and our students need all the help we can give them. I think half the students dropped out.
Grade inflation always seems weird to me since they stamped it out in my program 40 years ago by enforcing grading on a curve and not allowing students to drop out and retake classes after the first two days. Grading on a curve was real. I once got a B with a score of 13/50.
A professor can make a test as hard or easy as he wants. So just because you got 100% right means nothing at all in and of itself. And that you got everything right is a really hard tell your test wasn't hard enough. Which also perhaps means the class isn't either.
The problem not stated with grade inflation is it's a good indication that the classes are being targeted towards the lower 1/3 of the class. Which means really you're wasting the upper 2/3rds of the classes time.
I'm a mechanical engineer and I can give a similar perspective. I'm now in software engineering and I'm doing well. My other classmates who moved into consulting or finance are doing even better. Those who stayed in engineering have struggled. I live in a developing country: too poor to manufacture anything high-tech, too rich with strong labour laws to manufacture anything low-tech. My friends who stayed in engineering are "installation engineers" or "sales engineers" or "stand-by engineers" since the products they use/sell/watch over are designed elsewhere. Those who are in design firms have suffered layoffs and company bankruptcies.
My friends in engineering are passionate about what they do which is why they stick with it. I like the intellectual challenge I get from software engineering and the people I work with. I'm glad I get paid well for it too. I don't think I would get the same level of stimulation in an "engineering" firm here and certainly not the same salary.
I would like to add, I don't think this topic is appropriate for Hacker News.