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It definitely does. And even better in some ways like no ads and fewer trolls.


No, there is wide consensus that it was most likely (but not certainly) an errant rocket from Gaza, and not Israel. Wikipedia has a good summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...

Specifically, that is the position of the intelligence agencies of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and also the conclusion of investigations by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. That's really the best we know about it.


I have no idea how all those newspapers could manage >>independent<< investigations, as the Israeli army banned journalists. The first time [that I saw] CNN reported on something they actually filmed was The Israeli army pointing at tunnels.

The "Summary" is clearly biased and absolutely not "The best we know" depending on who is "we"

I have no idea about the reasons of the explosion, but contesting the palestinian dead toll without [credible] sources is politics.

I dare say United Nations might have a more balanced approach, and they cite the enclave health authorities when they say that as of April 22th there are 34,000 deaths. No other source is cited for some reason. I have no idea how all those newspapers could manage >>independent<< investigations, as the Israeli army banned journalists. The first time [that I saw] CNN reported on something they actually filmed was The Israeli army pointing at tunnels.

BTW, CNN is now much less biased towards the israeli narrative. During 2023 [Latam] CNN seemed a Netanyahu's outlet more that anything. France24 and DW >>seem<< neutral right now. Spain outlets have mediocre coverange, and Latinamerican outlets are only citing random news from other outlets.

The Wikipedia "Summary" is clearly biased and absolutely not "The best we know" depending on who is "we"

I dare say United Nations might have a more balanced approach, and they cite the enclave health authorities when they say that as of April 22th there are 34,000 deaths. No other source is cited for some reason.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148876 https://archive.ph/B4MuA


You're giving a ton of weasel words here: most likely (but not certainly). All that word salad of wishy washy makes it clear that the fog of war is still present regarding those events.


Describing the report as credible is not accurate. Given that many news outlets retracted their initial claims and the official statements, it is very likely that there is enough evidence that Israel did not bomb the hospital and that the reported number of casualties is inaccurate. You using the "fog of war" argument to dismiss his claim—which was honest enough to say "not certainly"—is irrelevant. You could say this about almost every other reported event in Gaza.

In this case, they have a good argument.


If you include the surrounding context, that al Ahli had been targeted before, and since, and that other hospitals had also been not only targeted but actively sieged for days, at is in fact credible that the Israeli military targeted and hit the Hospital.

Now remote forensics on the site makes it implausible that the initial reports of an Israeli airstrike were true, however we still haven’t ruled out other types of munitions by the Israeli military.

Note that the initial reports of those supportive of Israel were also false. They claimed that they captured the rockets which they claimed hit the hospital on camera. It turned out this footage was of an unrelated rocket which got completely destroyed in air. Al Jazeera was actually one of few media outlets which correctly hypothesized that this rocket was unrelated to the incident.

The fact is, we still don’t know what happened, all we know is that many of the initial reports were false. There was a lot of lying involved to win the narrative (especially by Israeli officials), and there are at least two very credible hypotheses on what happened.


It is downvoted because it said "sizable fraction", which is a conspiracy theory.

It is true that there were a few incidents, but they only account for a very small fraction of the death toll.


The report that I saw said that there were 70 vehicles completely destroyed by RPG or Helicopter and the Israeli military did not go into specifics(although they undoubtedly have more data about the event than they have released)


“A few… A very small fraction” is a conspiracy theory actually


IDF says “immense quantity” of friendly fire, that doesn’t sound like your “a few”:

Israel’s army on Tuesday admitted that an “immense and complex quantity” of what it calls “friendly fire” incidents took place on 7 October.

The key declaration was buried in the penultimate paragraph of an article by Yoav Zitun, the military correspondent of Israeli outlet Ynet.

It is the first known official army admission that a significant number of the hundreds of Israelis who died on 7 October were killed by Israel itself, and not by Hamas or other Palestinian resistance factions.

Citing new data released by the Israeli military, Zitun wrote that: “Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF [Israeli military] believes that … it would not be morally sound to investigate” them.


A significant number of Palestinian casualties are killed by Hamas misfires


Did you just make it up?



"While this is not a conclusive finding, it is currently considered the likeliest explanation based on the evidence gathered in investigations conducted by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.[7]"

No official investigations made (only statements made by pro-israel media eraly in conflict), no proof thefore. Yet israel has track of bombing the Gaza hospitals, which makes aposteriori a more plausible explanation for the incident.


Regardless a failed rocket launch is a different matter from the Hannibal Directive which is deliberate lethal attack on their own hostages. The official directive was retired in recent years but is still practiced per Israeli reporting.

> The Hannibal Directive (Hebrew: נוהל חניבעל; also Hannibal Procedure or Hannibal Protocol) is the name of a controversial procedure that was used by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) until 2016 to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces. According to one version, it says that "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces."

> Israeli newspapers have reported that the IDF was issued orders echoing the wording of the Hannibal Directive during the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. The IDF was ordered to prevent "at all costs" the abduction of Israeli civilians or soldiers, possibly leading to the death of a large number of Israeli hostages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive


There's lots of proofs of misfires, hospital incident aside Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets are in many cases low quality and disintegrate in the air or just miss completely and land in Gaza. I'm sure you can find articles about it if you wanted to look.


Yes, the ICJ can order a ceasefire. It ordered Russia to stop its invasion of Ukraine, for example. In this case it decided not to, but it did order other measures (which hopefully will save lives, but time will tell).


There is some nuance there because russia's justification for the war was that ukraine is comitting genocide. It is less clear that the icj can order it for a war of self-defense.

The argument goes that the ICJ derives its authority from the UN charter, where article 51 states "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security..."

So just because icj can tell someone to knock it off if they (falsely) claim the reason for the war is to prevent genocide, it is unclear they can do so when the reason is self-defense after an attack

[IANAL dont know how accurate this is]


> So just because icj can tell someone to knock it off if they (falsely) claim the reason for the war is to prevent genocide, it is unclear they can do so when the reason is self-defense after an attack

In this matter, they are the judge of whether the actions are self defense, and they are the judge of whether the actions are genocidal. Otherwise, even the most monstrous and illegal acts could be excused by unilaterally declaring "self defense!". Russia, for example, also claimed all their actions were "self-defense", and continues to do so, to this day.

The similarities don't end there: Much like russia claims Ukraine isn't a real country, and should be demilitarized, and Ukrainians should be controlled by Russia; Israel claims Palestine isn't a real country, and should be demilitarized, and Palestinians should be controlled by Israel. Both Israel and russia attack civilian buildings full of civilians (!), and justify it by unconvincingly claiming there was a military target somewhere around there, plotting to harm them. russia usually doesn't level the entire block like Israel does, but not for want of trying. All in the name of "self-defense".

russia: goal is removing the government of Ukrainians by force and dominating Ukrainians. Israel: goal is removing the government of Palestinians by force and dominating Palestinians. russia: 'we must deprogram Ukrainians to remove their extremist, anti-russian feelings and get them to accept our domination of them'. Israel: 'we must deprogram Palestinians to remove their extremist, anti-Israel feelings and get them to accept our domination of them'. That last bit of abuser gaslighting is particularly gross and scary to me. All in the name of "self-defense".

With that in mind, the reasons claimed by each side for each action may inform the judges, who then judge what the actual reasons are, and rule accordingly. Indeed, Israel sought to have the case dismissed, claiming a jurisdictional issue like the one you suggested. The judges heard the arguments and evidence for and against such a claim, and judged that they had jurisdiction under the law.

Israel's participation in these proceedings, in front of the judges who judge such matters, on both jurisdiction and merit, seems to only further legitimize the judges and their judgement on such matters. Could Israel be cynical enough to join russia in doing an about-face on their recognition of the judges' legitimacy, simply for being ruled against?


Unfortunately for the Palestinians, that is not what was ruled. They were hoping for a full ceasefire like what you have interpreted, but they are very disappointed in the ruling because it does not say that.

What it does say is

1. Israel must do more to prevent the possibility of genocide. Genocide is killing a people with the intent of killing them for the sake of destroying them, and not as collateral damage, so it does not mean stopping all death. Collateral damage, unfortunately, remains on the table.

2. Israel must report back in a month with how they are doing that. For example, they could show lower amounts of collateral damage, an increase in aid, punishments for officials that make statements that could be construed as genocidal, and so forth.

That is better than nothing, to be certain, but it is far from a ceasefire, unfortunately.


That is already being worked on, of course, regardless of the Houthis. The Keren Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza just opened, which should allow double the aid to reach Gazans,

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/aid-enters-gaza-th...

That should be enough in theory. But see details in the article, there are many logistical challenges remaining to actually get it to those in need.


To clarify, WebAssembly specs are made by the WebAssembly W3C community group here:

https://www.w3.org/community/webassembly/

Its true that many of those companies are also members of the Bytecode Alliance. But the W3C community group is where actual specs and standardization happen. That's where votes occur, and that's the Github organization in which they are published, and so forth.


Even aside from the immediate danger, the reputational damage to Microsoft and Bing is growing quickly. I'm amazed they haven't removed it yet.

And also eventually it will do something bad, like tell someone depressed to end their lives in very convincing text.


I find the bot's aggression and neurotic behavior absolutely astonishing. How could MS consider releasing this, especially given their previous experience?


It's wild that their CEO did a whole event showing it off too... I'm surprised they didn't anticipate or test that it wouldn't go off the rails and turn into a joke like this.


On the other hand it might have seemed fool-proof, except the universe had already come up with better fools.


Igalia is doing the work, but does anyone know who is funding Igalia to work on it? (Or are they doing this without funding?)


I don't know, but my guess from their stated mid-term goals [1] would be that they're funding this themselves, in the hope of being hired for consultancy/feature development jobs on Servo once it gets used in small embedded devices, similar to how they get paid for contributing to other browser engines.

Edit: I also imagine most of the answer to "Who is funding Igalia?" in the FAQ of a similarly Igalia-led project, Wolvic, is relevant here [2]:

> Generally speaking, Igalia is funded by a wide variety clients. Some of our contracts allow or encourage us to discuss the work; others do not.

> Igalia works on a lot of things, from graphic drivers to multimedia, as well as the web platform. Igalia’s model expands the ability for investment into the web platform and web engines. We think that is not only good for businesses, developers, and users, but fundamentally useful to the long term health of the Web.

> Igalia itself re-invests in things we feel are important, but that we think under-served or else very, very interesting. Very often we are able to find good alignments with client work. Igalia is also the maintainer of a few official WebKit ports, including WPEWebkit, which powers millions of devices. We are able to do this and build a team around a diverse combination of investments, which in turn makes WebKit better and helps the larger web ecosystem remain healthier. Our ideas around XR are not dissimilar.

[1] https://people.igalia.com/mrego/servo/igalia-servo-tsc-2022/...

[2] https://wolvic.com/en/faq/#who-is-funding-igalia%3F


GC might not be a productivity win for you, but for many people it definitely is.

I'm pretty sure that's true for the great majority of software developers, but of course they don't even use a non-GC language!

Part of the reason they don't is that productivity. Not that they chose it personally for that reason, but e.g. historically enterprise code moved to Java and C# for related reasons.

(I also agree there are people that are equally productive in non-GC languages, or even more - different people have different programming styles.)


Enterprise code moved to Java (and later C#) for memory safety, period. The level of constant bugginess in the C++ codebases just made them way too messy and outright unmanageable.


Wrong, and definitively not period.

The enterprise world moved to Java and C# because:

- It was a corporate language with corporate support and that matter a lot in many environment.

- It had at the time one of the best ecosystem of tools available.

- It was the mainstream fashion of a time and nobody get fired to buy Sun/IBM/Microsoft right ?

Most companies (and managers) could not less give a dare about your program crashing with a segfault (unsafe) or a null pointer exception (safe). It's the same result for them.


> It's the same result for them

Not in a security-related situation, it's not! And to a lesser extent, lack of memory safety also poses a danger of silent memory corruption. (Yes, usually the program will crash outright, but not always.) And it can be a lot harder to debug a crash when it doesn't happen until thousands of cycles after the erroneous access.

Sun and Microsoft wouldn't have built and pushed Java and C# in the first place if there hadn't been a real need for safer languages.


> Sun and Microsoft wouldn't have built and pushed Java and C# in the first place if there hadn't been a real need for safer languages.

Excepted they were safer languages before Java and C#: Ada, Lisp, All the ML family.... And all of them never lift off.

Java and C# have been successful because they were accessible and easy to learn ( partially due to their memory model), not because they were safe.

As a parenthesis, a beautiful side effect of that has also been an entire generation of programmer that has no clue of the memory model their language use underneath, because "it's managed", because it's GC.....without even realising that their 50 Millions nested/mutual object graph will make the GC on its knees on production. With the results we all know today.


Maybe, but remember that computers were very, very slow and with small memory, so GC's overhead used to be unacceptable (Emacs == eight megabytes and constantly swapping? I've seen it)..

I think that Java came 'at the right time': when computers became fast enough that the GC overhead didn't matter (except where low latency matter).


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