zaina

researcher at heart 📚, #butfirstcoffee ☕️

[Jadaliyya @jadaliyya]

Creating Chaos to Distract from Gaza

"That's not targeting Hezbollah. That is targeting civilian infrastructure and the ability of Lebanese people to live in their own land. So this is what's happening across the board. And all the while right now, what's being underreported is Gaza, which is in part what the strategy of Israel is. Create more chaos and more wars. And they'll forget about the fact that the genocide is not over. There is a genocide ongoing in Gaza, but there is barely any coverage of Gaza anymore." -Assal Rad

MEDIA WARS episode 3 - Featuring Assal Rad @AssalRad, Ali Hashem @AliHashem, Jehad Abusalim @JehadAbusalim, Nahid Siamdoust @nahid8, Mona Kareem, Mouin Rabbani @mouinrabbani, and Bassam Haddad @4Bassam

🔗Watch the full episode here: https://t.co/ouk8tU9IDB

[Nadim Kobeissi @kaepora]

Today, for the third time in my mother's life and for the second in my own life, we lost a home due to it being bombed by the Israeli army.

This home was in a building constructed by my uncle, the Lebanese historian Ahmad Beydoun, after my family was able to return to our ancestral hometown, Bint Jbeil, in the year 2000 when Israel ended its decades-long occupation there, during which they destroyed my mother's childhood home. In 2006, they would destroy both her and my home in Beirut, rendering us both temporarily homeless.

Uncle Ahmad's building was a costly joint effort financed by himself as well as my mother and his other siblings. Each owned an apartment in the building, which also housed medical practices, a baby toys shop (owned and run by my cousin Jamal) and a branch for Bank Audi.

Upon hearing this news, Uncle Ahmad wrote: "in our hearts, this is the least of our losses." We can all only be thankful that our family is unharmed: when I told this story to a distant cousin, she replied that her friend had lost both her mother and father in Israel's bombing of Beirut two days ago, which killed more than 300 civilians in the space of ten minutes.

For reasons that are difficult to understand, the Israeli army posted a video of their crime, which I share here.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨SHOCKING: Apple just proved that AI models cannot do math. Not advanced math. Grade school math. The kind a 10-year-old solves.

And the way they proved it is devastating.

Apple researchers took the most popular math benchmark in AI — GSM8K, a set of grade-school math problems — and made one change. They swapped the numbers. Same problem. Same logic. Same steps. Different numbers.

Every model's performance dropped. Every single one. 25 state-of-the-art models tested.

But that wasn't the real experiment.

The real experiment broke everything.

They added one sentence to a math problem. One sentence that is completely irrelevant to the answer. It has nothing to do with the math. A human would read it and ignore it instantly.

Here's the actual example from the paper:

"Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?"

The correct answer is 190. The size of the kiwis has nothing to do with the count.

A 10-year-old would ignore "five of them were a bit smaller" because it's obviously irrelevant. It doesn't change how many kiwis there are.

But o1-mini, OpenAI's reasoning model, subtracted 5. It got 185.

Llama did the same thing. Subtracted 5. Got 185.

They didn't reason through the problem. They saw the number 5, saw a sentence that sounded like it mattered, and blindly turned it into a subtraction.

The models do not understand what subtraction means. They see a pattern that looks like subtraction and apply it. That is all.

Apple tested this across all models. They call the dataset "GSM-NoOp" — as in, the added clause is a no-operation. It does nothing. It changes nothing.

The results are catastrophic.

Phi-3-mini dropped over 65%. More than half of its "math ability" vanished from one irrelevant sentence.

GPT-4o dropped from 94.9% to 63.1%.

o1-mini dropped from 94.5% to 66.0%.

o1-preview, OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model at the time, dropped from 92.7% to 77.4%.

Even giving the models 8 examples of the exact same question beforehand, with the correct solution shown each time, barely helped. The models still fell for the irrelevant clause.

This means it's not a prompting problem. It's not a context problem. It's structural.

The Apple researchers also found that models convert words into math operations without understanding what those words mean. They see the word "discount" and multiply. They see a number near the word "smaller" and subtract. Regardless of whether it makes any sense.

The paper's exact words: "current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

And: "LLMs likely perform a form of probabilistic pattern-matching and searching to find closest seen data during training without proper understanding of concepts."

They also tested what happens when you increase the number of steps in a problem. Performance didn't just decrease. The rate of decrease accelerated. Adding two extra clauses to a problem dropped Gemma2-9b from 84.4% to 41.8%. Phi-3.5-mini from 87.6% to 44.8%. The more thinking required, the more the models collapse.

A real reasoner would slow down and work through it. These models don't slow down. They pattern-match. And when the pattern becomes complex enough, they crash.

This paper was published at ICLR 2025, one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world.

You are using AI to help you make financial decisions. To check legal documents. To solve problems at work. To help your children with homework. And Apple just proved that the AI is not thinking about any of it. It is pattern matching. And the moment something unexpected shows up in your question, it breaks. It does not tell you it broke. It just quietly gives you the wrong answer with full confidence.

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

Why is there no one in the U.S. government stepping up to stop this insanity?

The president of the US is openly threatening genocide against a country of 90 million people, saying “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

No mass resignations and the opposition party is absent. What sick death cult.

Unbelievably and shockingly dangerous.

[zaina @zanzon96]

@oihamza Should’ve seen ur picture before my trip ! Such a cool shot !

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Tragic news continues to arrive in these days from the Middle East, especially from Gaza. I express my profound sadness regarding last Thursday’s attack by the Israeli army on the Catholic Parish of the Holy Family in Gaza City, which as you know killed three Christians and gravely wounded others. I pray for the victims, Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad, Najwa Ibrahim Latif Abu Daoud, and I am particularly close to their families and to all the parishioners.

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

‘Killed seeking aid.’
When did the world just sit back and let an increasingly rogue government do this to a civilian population, day after day?

[Sally 🇵🇸🔻 @SallyZakaria14]

انتهت حلول الارض ، كنت معارضة فكرة الرابط لكن المجاعة لها رأي آخر
انشروا الرابط اذا سمحتم🙏
#GazaStarving
https://t.co/PHkvrW07r4

[Ala Hamdan • الاء حمدان @AlaHamdann]

أصدقائي في #غزة..
يتابعني على الانستجرام أكثر من مليون متابع.. أبحث عن طريقة من خلال منصتي لعلّها تسند إخوتنا في غزة:

أنا لا آخذ مالاً ❌ ولا أنشر روابط لي ❌ ولا أعمل كوسيط لنقل أي مال ❌ ⬅️ إلا عبر روابط جهاتٍ مرخّصة من قبل الدّولة (الأردن والكويت كمثال). ولكن يمكنني من خلال منصتي النشر عنكم وروابطكم أنتم:

✅ ارسلوا لي (الخاص أو في التعليقات) رابط التبرعات الخاص بكم.
✅ مع اسمكم الثنائي من حساب حقيقي بالاسم والصورة وليس وهميّ لضمان وصول الحقّ لكم دون أن يستغله جهلة من خارج غزة.

سنقوم وأصدقائي من أصحاب الحسابات الواسعة بنشرها.. لعلّ وعسى نجمع ولو كيس طحين واحد لكل رابط.. ولا حول ولا قوّة إلا بالله. الله يفرجها عنكم وما تحتاجوا مساعدتنا الخايبة والله

[zaina @zanzon96]

@taimurabdaal If he practiced any other religion, no one would be making such assumptions

[Rep. Steven Horsford @RepHorsford]

Let’s break down what happened in America today. At 9:37 a.m., Trump told his followers to buy stocks.

🧵👇🏾

[मालिनी @maliniranga]

Make no mistake about it. The Democrats laid the groundwork for the repression on university campuses we see today. Like the Old McCarthyism, the New McCarthyism has its roots in anti-Left ideology embraced by white elites across the political spectrum. This is a great article giving that historical context. https://t.co/SYC4RlsZen

[zaina @zanzon96]

@dissectpodcast Twenty one pilots albums 🙌🏽

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

I saw people protesting at my local Tesla service center today. Right on ✊🏾

I’m convinced that unelected co-president Elon Musk is turning the U.S. government into a version of how he runs Tesla—and that should terrify everyone. Hear me out.

When I first got my Tesla, I loved it. They delivered it straight to my home during peak COVID lockdown. Anytime I had a question, I could easily reach a sales rep or advisor. Sometimes, we’d even stop by the Tesla store just to check out the cars—always a friendly experience, no issues at all.
🧵

[zaina @zanzon96]

@dissectpodcast The weeknd !!

[angry buni 🤬 @theangriestbuni]

So my question is “why do certain men have such a hard time hearing these facts and why has it always been deemed not important enough?”

Do men hate women?

[angry buni 🤬 @theangriestbuni]

I don’t hate men. I love men.

But the truth is most personal feminism is born from the ashes of women who were denied life at the hands of men and the failures of their government.

[Jasmine El-Gamal @jasmineelgamal]

I am disgusted with everyone who has allowed the destruction of Gaza and Lebanon, going so far as to call it “victory” and a chance at a “new Middle East.” How dare you. How dare you rejoice in the death and pain of others as if they were bots in a video game? Shame. 7/

[Mary Lou McDonald @MaryLouMcDonald]

🇮🇪 I am very proud of our peacekeepers serving with the UN in Lebanon.

They define Irish courage, honour and compassion. They bravely face real danger to keep people safe.

Their duty is to peace and humanity. They do not take orders from Israel’s war machine.

We send our solidarity to our peacekeepers and their families.

[Existential Comics (find me on bluesky) @existentialcoms]

Yes, Middle Eastern politics are very complicated.

However, they do become much simpler if you take it as a premise that children of all races are equally valuable.