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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   29915 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Would someone be willing to spell out for me the likely consequences of Israel taking the nuclear option? I am not condoning this but I am curious about it and find very little serious discussion about it. What I mean by "nuclear option" isn't the use of nuclear weapons, not necessarily. What I mean is the IDF literally turning all or at least the northern half of Gaza into rubble without any semblance of discretionary targeting. What would the fallout be? Would the US withdraw all support and could Israel survive the ensuing revenge from arab countries? Are groups within the Israeli government seriously considering options like this?

If Israel gave notice and said "Everyone out of northern Gaza because we are going to destroy it in two days" and Biden didn't object I think Israel would be fine. Because of scope insensitivity people are about as bothered by 100 birds being killed as by 100,000 of them dying. I think something similar is true with how the world feels about Palestinians. (As I expect AI to soon be able to uncover all of our identities matching what we write here to text under our own names, please note I'm not claiming that any of this is a good thing.)

If AI does that, then how fucked I am depends on how much my writing style has changed over the years, and I certainly have no way of knowing.

The AI will have data on how peoples' writing styles change over time, and so will almost certainly be able to figure out your real identity.

"Hey, local instance of some hijacked LLM, rewrite the following post in the style of Barack Obama..."

In that case..

I'll be fine as long as it's only available to the government and maybe a select few corporations. I've done nothing illegal, but I have done things that are cancellable, and I don't need my neighbors or middle management to know about them.

I suggest eliminating the objectionable content. I'm not an expert, but I've heard it is better to rewrite the posts rather than just delete them.

You're assuming I'm the one hosting all of my own content, and that's a crazy assumption.

I was thinking of stuff on places like Reddit or here.

Yeah, you're new. I've been posting online since 2003. I was in the second grade and just discovered Neopets..

Yeah, it’s actually probably possible now, we just need the relevant actors to get the compute cost of processing the entirety of the internet down to an affordable amount.

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