Another reminder that there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unaccounted for, presumed dead, under rubble in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is an open-air extermination camp and Israel is attempting to kill those remaining via starvation, disease, airstrikes, and/or lack of care.
Drop Site News was scheduled to host a panel discussion at SXSW London on June 3. We have informed the organizers we will not be moving forward with the event following SXSW’s refusal to condemn the British Home Office’s state censorship of our colleagues Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, who were also scheduled to speak at SXSW. The banning of our colleagues is part of an intensifying campaign by the UK government to stifle criticism of Israel and criminalize pro-Palestine activism at a time when the genocide in Gaza is continuing.
The Pope is making exactly our point. LLMs “may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand.”
This is the core epistemic fault line.
Most AI evaluation is still based on one assumption: if a system statistically approximates human behaviour, then it is close to human intelligence.
But approximation is not intelligence.
Simulation is not understanding.
LLMs can produce the right answer without knowing why it is right. They can simulate empathy without feeling. They can imitate judgment without responsibility. They can generate coherent explanations without having a world to which those explanations are accountable.
Stop confusing behavioural similarity with cognitive equivalence.
Human understanding is embodied, affective, relational, motivational, and normative. It is not just the production of plausible text.
*
Full paper in the first reply
"It's not ethnic cleansing! Israel is generously asking civilians to leave their homes before Israel razes those homes to the ground so the civilians can never return and Israel can (according to its interior minister, less than 2 weeks ago) annex and settle their land"
I am guilty.
Guilty of loving the Cuban people.
Guilty of believing Cuban children deserve medicine instead of sanctions.
Guilty of believing that trying to save lives should not be treated like a crime.
There's something fascinating about how (believing in) being the centre of the world ultimately leads you to becoming provincial, self-obsessed, lose touch and ultimately, becoming periphery.
Can you imagine the terror and horror Israel inflicts on Palestinian children, women, and men in detention centers when the cameras are away?
This is Israeli terrorism.
The EU has no Middle East strategy because *checks notes* there's too much going on in the Middle East. You can't make this up. This is the EU foreign policy chief. In 2026.
Israel has committed every war crime there is to commit.
It has slaughtered, raped and tortured Palestinians.
But now because they subjected Westerners to a TINY fraction of that on camera:
Israeli politicians and cheerleaders are panicking.
Nauseating!
Israel, if everyone is lying, open Gaza.
If the ICC, the UN, international human rights organisations, Israeli rights groups, journalists, doctors, humanitarian workers, aid agencies, witnesses, and survivors are all lying, then open Gaza.
Let independent investigators, forensic experts, journalists, and UN monitors in.
A state confident in the truth does not fear investigation. A state afraid of the truth blocks access.
Open Gaza.
Hey @jewishinsider — Jewish filmmaker behind @pistachiowars here — willing to do an extensive interview with you to explain how the @Wonderful company is 1000% benefiting from the brutal war on Iran. And why the Resnicks have been funneling money to extremist pro-war groups like @WashInstitute for years: it fits their personal politics *and* it's good for business.
https://t.co/MshO6FZAdT