Honor will always look unreasonable in a world where reason has been defined by the people who benefit from unreasonable things.
Reasonable: drone strikes on wedding parties because someone on the guest list may have had connections to someone of interest.
Unreasonable: saying this is a war crime.
Reasonable: sixty-four years of embargo on a small island nation.
Unreasonable: saying this is collective punishment.
Reasonable: a defense budget larger than the next six countries combined while veterans sleep in the street.
Unreasonable: saying this is a political choice, not an inevitability.
Reasonable: funding and arming a government that is credibly documented to be committing atrocities.
Unreasonable: saying that makes you complicit in the atrocities.
The definitions of reasonable and unreasonable in this world are not philosophical.
They are political.
They were written by people with interests.
They are defended by people who have, consciously or not, accepted that their comfort depends on those definitions holding.
The person who refuses them is not failing to reason.
She is reasoning from different premises.
The premise that the dead matter equally regardless of passport.
The premise that documented suffering requires a documented response.
The premise that what is legal and what is right are not always the same.
These are not complicated premises.
A child understands them.
The work of empire is teaching adults to forget what children know.
In general, this leads to a question:
Should there be a large scale project to convert all the old crufty papers from academic literature into working code (via coding agents)?
Yes, the LLMs already know these papers. But burning a few tokens to distill this knowledge into working, vetted, debugged code has some advantages beyond just being able to chat about the paper at a high level.
The world is finally moving after seeing the cowardice & the violence of the Zionist regime against our non-violent solidarity humanitarian mission. But the key problem is that this level of unacceptable violence is still nothing compared to what they do to Palestinians every day
There is growing interest in having AI systems work with humans rather than replacing them. The research questions are, to be honest, harder in the former case! One challenge is how do end users modulate their trust in the answers provided by LLMs? 1/
A new pre-print by @biswas_2707 and @PalodVardh12428 proposes a framework for evaluating trust--deserved and false--engendered by LLMs.
Premise: LLMs will increasingly be used in cases where the end user doesn't have the capacity to verify the result. How do we empower users to develop appropriate trust in the answers?
Traditionally, we trust the answers we can't verify based on prior guarantees--be they FAA certifications of planes or wisdom of crowds page rank certification of Google pages.
These don't quite work for broad and shallow LLMs, which are (in)famous for their jagged intelligence--being correct on Math Olympiad problems one minute while failing on simple teasers that depend on unarticulated commonsense (viz. @conitzer's substack 😋).
This paper first shows that most obvious ideas of augmenting the LLM answers with additional information--including (1) using "thinking traces" of LLMs (2) summaries of thinking traces (3) post-facto explanations--all significantly increase the false trust in end users.
It then shows that the idea of differential explanations--asking LLMs to provide explanations both supporting and opposing their answers--do a better job of modulating the end user trust. (This idea is not unlike having noisy reviewers of your #AI conference papers write both arguments in favor of, and in opposition to acceptance of your paper--with the AC then using that information to calibrate their final decision).
Our mission is legal and obligatory under international law.
Our mission is non-negotiable, according to basic principles of humanity.
Our mission is happening, right now.
And no one can pretend not to know what’s at stake.
The only legal, and moral, choice is to protect our humanitarian Flotilla and end israel’s illegal siege on Gaza, or else to openly shred international law in broad daylight. We know we have the law, humanity, and the global majority on our side, and we are prepared to take our fight from the sea to the courts until we see justice.
No matter how far our fleet gets, we will not stop here.
Let's talk about the word "complex."
The "complex situation in Gaza."
The "complex history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
The "deeply complex geopolitical dynamics."
The situation is not complex.
The situation is: a military force with overwhelming technological superiority is killing a large number of civilians in a territory from which those civilians cannot escape.
They have been doing this for decades at varying intensities.
The people in the territory had their land taken, their movement controlled, their economy strangled, their political choices vetoed by external powers.
That is not complex.
That is a description of power applied to people who have no comparable power to apply back.
The reason they call it "complex" is not because it is.
The reason is that clarity produces a demand.
Clarity produces: then something must be done.
Complexity produces: well, it's very difficult to know what to do.
"Complex" is the word that stands between comprehension and responsibility.
It is a load-bearing word in the architecture of inaction.
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Optimization: A Bootcamp for Machine Learning, Inverse Problems, and Control
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Like a good neighbor, Israel helped remodel Gaza from what it was above to what it is now below. Netanyahu says they’re just doing God’s work. Probably shouldn’t question that.
Today, more than 2,500 Palestinians ran in Gaza as part of the 10th Palestine International Marathon sponsored by Egypt and held simultaneously in Bethlehem and the Strip for the first time.
Words are not enough. The world must act now.
We call on governments, elected representatives, artists, journalists, lawyers, trade unions, and people of conscience everywhere to take action.
Free Saif Abukeshek, Thiago Ávila, Marwan Barghouti, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, and all Palestinian political prisoners!
Free them all.
The slavery apologists said: but we fed them. Housed them. Gave them religion. Brought them from savagery into contact with civilization.
The colonial apologists said: but we built railways. Hospitals. Legal systems. Brought order to chaos. Raised the standard of living. Gave them modernity.
The contemporary apologists say: but we give aid. Promote democracy. Protect human rights. Stabilize fragile states. The world would be more violent without our presence.
The structure is identical across five hundred years.
The framing is always:
We gave. We brought. We raised. We provided.
The passive voice is always assigned to the other person.
They received. They were brought. They were raised. They were provided for.
Never:
They had. They built. They governed. They decided.
They were capable, before and without you, of existing as full human beings with the right to determine their own conditions.
That sentence.
That is the sentence that colonial ideology, in all its iterations, cannot say.
Because once you say it, once you actually believe it, not as a liberal sentiment but as a foundational reality, the entire justification structure collapses.
And all that's left is what it always was.
Taking.
Just taking.
From people who had every right to what you took.
@elonmusk Grok says (😁):
This reasoning is fallacious for several reasons:
1 - Guilt by Association / Association Fallacy.
2 - Reductio ad Hitlerum.
3 - Hasty Generalization.
It does not matter whether the Freedom Flotilla reaches our shores or not. What matters is that you tried, and that means a lot to me and to all of us.
In my imagination, I embrace each and every one of you. No matter how much they try to stop us, I will keep waiting for you here — you will always find me on the shore.
I wish freedom for all of you. You know, you are already the truly free ones. Those who imprison you are the real prisoners, because they are barbaric and unjust, and their brutality has now been exposed to the whole world.
Tonight, the world is witnessing the export of the Israeli military’s doctrine of engineered abandonment. In a violent raid in international waters, Israeli naval forces have intercepted, boarded, and systematically disabled various boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla.
After smashing engines and destroying navigation arrays, the military retreated—intentionally leaving hundreds of civilians stranded on powerless, broken vessels directly in the path of a massive approaching storm. Furthermore, communications with multiple vessels have been jammed, severing their ability to coordinate or signal for help.
While flotilla participants face a calculated death trap at sea, the people of Gaza remain the primary targets of a relentless, years-long campaign of starvation and slaughter. The logic being deployed tonight is identical: the Israeli state creates the conditions for death, sabotages the means of survival, and then waits for "nature" or "circumstance" to finish the job.
Rise up; when the alternative is accepting an upside-down world where destruction flows freely but life-saving aid is blocked, we are left with two choices: to accept or to rise.
Shut it all down.