Saleh

@ Saleh @feddit.org

Posts

334
Comments

4694
Joined

2 yr. ago

6mo ago

After a torrid 100 days, Germany’s Friedrich Merz is mocked as a ‘dead man walking’. He must fight back
Jump
Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago
For all the issues the others have already detailed, i'd like to look at two underlying issues (which come together with the wealth disparity):
The demographic shift of an ageing population requires fundamental reforms to social security, public infrastructure, taxation, housing, education, immigration... But instead of addressing the issue, which is known for more than 30 years, the can is kept being kicked down the road.
The German economy has moved from being innovation leader in many fields to being outshined by competitors as the economic structure is ageing alongside the population. Instead of letting younger people get a chance to develop, the wealth, political and economic power remains fast in the hands of the Boomers.

6mo ago

IGF statement on the killing of journalist Anas Al-Sharif:

The Arabic that the IDF alleges, reads Anas Al-Sharif. There is no Jamal. They even "translated" the numbers. yet they couldn't bother to write the name correctly...

This is yet another disgustingly brazen fake.

6mo ago

Russia allegedly teamed up with a Libyan warlord to trigger a fresh migrant crisis in the European Union

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

So you think it is hilarious to arm the same warlord as Russia and then Russia using that warlord to turn on you?

Truly hilarious. No lesson to be learnt from that....

6mo ago

Russia allegedly teamed up with a Libyan warlord to trigger a fresh migrant crisis in the European Union

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

Russia was collaborating with Haftar alongside France for years. Russia then using Haftar, once the hostility towards western Europe escalated, was predictable because it is run by Putin.

6mo ago

Blamed for Steam games ban, Mastercard encourages censorship during Riot Games VCT livestreams

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

This also goes to an entire new level. Before it was "only" censoring digital products and events. Now it is directly censoring media outlets.

This screams for an antitrust lawsuit, if a company has this kind of power.

6mo ago

UK, Italy, Austria and Germany stop short of condemning Israel over latest Gaza occupation plan - Euractiv

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

"Could be a violation of international law"

The ICJ already ruled that the occupation of Gaza, the Westbank and East Jerusalem is a violation of international law and anyone who directly or indirectly supports these through military, economic or diplomatic support is a culprit.

Nonwithstanding the Genocide case, it is already established that Israel is acting against international law. There is no doubt about it, even if you go towards the "only once the ICJ/ICC ruled on something, it is fact" line.

6mo ago

Russia 'perfecting' China's sabotage tactics against the West, EU Intelligence report warns

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

I am fairly confident that these occur already.

While western countries have an interest to emphasize the threat by such actions and attribute them to Russia in order to gain more support from the population, Russia has an interest to downplay such actions that hit Russia, in order to not loose support from the population, who should believe the war to only happen outside their borders.

However the attackers always have an interest in not taking responsibility for the attacks, unless its the Ukrainians pulling off some spectacular attack like the destruction of Russian strategic bombers deep inside Russia.

There also is a native resistance base inside Russia and Belarus that is most likely receiving outside support. For instance there was a wave of sabotage in Belarus and Russia against train infrastructure used to supply the Russian invasion army.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_war_in_Belarus_(2022%E2%80%93present)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_war_in_Russia_(2022%E2%80%93present)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYPOL

6mo ago

YSK: Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

But they aren't tied to any public information that relates back to you, unless you voluntarily make this information public yourself. You have the exact same "privacy (maybe even physical security)" risk, like when you use reddit. Just that with reddit you have to trust reddit to use the platform, while in the Fediverse you only have to choose one instance to trust.

6mo ago

Police arrest 474 at Palestine Action ban protest

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

The UK recently designate Palestine Action, a group using tactics of non violent direct actions as a "terrorist group". Palestine action activists broke into weapons factories, spraying around paint and damaging machinery used to manufacture weapons destined to Israel. They also blocked roads leading to factories or climbed on the roofs of offices of such companies.

About a month back two activists managed to break into a royal air force base and damage two transport planes used by Britain for weapon shipments to Israel.

The UK has been increasingly using "terrorism" charges to attack non violent protests. Now people are openly defying the designation of Palestine Action as a "terrorist group" by the British parliament, as it is absurd and only intended to attack civil rights, in particular the right to freedom of opinion, the right to protest, the right to privacy and the right to due process.

As any authoritarian government does, rather than reviewing this absurd decision, the British government instead decides to suppress the justified opposition to this farce.

Aside from the increasing authoritarianism, the British government has been deeply complicit in Israeli war crimes. Britain has been conducting spy-flights for Israel multiple times a day, providing intel to Israel where to bomb. Another current outrage is that the British government refuses to inform the public whether their planes recorded Israeli attacks on British citizens who worked as humanitarian helpers and were murdered by Israel. There is strong reason to believe the Britain is complicit in many war crimes and that some acts of the British government have helped the murder of their own citizens.

6mo ago

Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 6mo ago

The recognition of the pattern is done by the machine learning. That is the core concept of machine learning.

For the interpretation you need to use your domain knowledge. Machine learning together with knowledge in the domain analyzed can be a very powerful combination.

Another example in research i have heard about recently, is detection of brain tumors before they occur. MRIs are analyzed of people who later developed brain tumors to see if patterns can be detected in the people who developed the tumors that are absent in the people who didn't develop tumors. This knowledge of a correlation between certain patterns and later tumor development could help specialists to further their understanding of how tumors develop as they can analyze these specific patterns.

What we see with ChatGPT and other LLMs is kind of doing the opposite by detaching the algorithm from any specific knowledge. Subsequently the algorithm can make predictions on anything and they are worth nothing.

7mo ago

YSK: Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

That is not true. Most votes irl are in fact public to the audience. Did you ever participate in a democratically organized group? Local council votes are usually done by raising hands. Votes in HOA meetings are usually done by raising hands. Your sports club deciding on a new executive and treasurer? Guess what. Raising hands.

7mo ago

YSK: Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

The only one tying your votes to your IP-address or the E-Mail you registered with, is your home instance. This is identical to reddit. If you don't trust your home instance with your IP-address, use a VPN and/or switch to a different instance.

You are making up an issue for lemmy, which you are willing to accept with reddit.

7mo ago

YSK: Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

Which only has rather limited information derivable from it. The most "identifying" would be to vote regularly on a community dedicated to your local area.

If you don't trust your instance with knowing your IP-address, then the issue is not going to be solved by "anonymous voting". Because your instance has to know if you voted on something or not, so votes cannot be done multiple times. This is unavoidable and equal to the situation when using reddit. Except that you can choose a different instance if you distrust the current instance.

OP either did not think through what he is claiming or he is driven by an agenda.

7mo ago

Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

I agree with you on almost everything.

It’s like the opposite of classic ML, relatively tiny special purpose models trained for something critical, out of desperation, because it just can’t be done well conventionally.

Here i disagree. ML is using high dimensional statistics. There exist many problems, which are by their nature problems of high dimensional statistics.

If you have for an example an engineering problem, it can make sense to use an ML approach, to find patterns in the relationship between input conditions and output results. Based on this patterns you have an idea, where you need to focus in the physical theory for understanding and optimizing it.

Another example for "generative AI" i have seen is creating models of hearts. So by feeding it the MRI scans of hundreds of real hearts, millions of models for probable heart shapes can be created and the interaction with medical equipment can be studied on them. This isn't a "desperate" approach. It is a smart approach.

7mo ago

Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge after 15 years: Only 9 of the 256 billionaires actually followed through on giving away half their wealth

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

It is a bit more complicated than that.

First of all the social security system in Germany should not be tax funded. It is a mandatory insurance which should finance its activities through the insurance rate collected on income. However with demographic shifts and the like it is notoriously unstable, in particular the pension fund. So what happens is the social securities being cross financed from tax money.

Like with climate change, we are talking about the issue since more than 30 years, the problematic effects are becoming ever more apparent, but no government is willing to address the fundamental issues, instead kicking the can down the road, until the system will collapse.

Then another issue is that the government activities are far from sufficient and it is en vogue to attack social security further. Especially in the last years we saw an unprecedented rise in people relying on food banks as unemployment checks and the equivalent for refugees, who are prohibited from working, are insufficient. But rather than adjust the payments to reflect the rising costs of living, we see a distraction debate about people "refusing to work" which make up only a tiny minority of people receiving benefits, but the goal is to abolish unemployment insurance.

Then another issue is that nonprofits are often used by rich families to circumvent inheritance tax. This year there will be an unexpected windfall of 4 billion Euros to the inheritance tax, as a rich family failed to set up their construct in time. Furthermore "nonprofits" by industrialists are often used for lobbying for more capitalism. In particularly infamous is the "Stiftung Familienunternehmen" (family run businesses trust). You would think this represents your local bakery run in the fourth generation. Instead it is run by "family businesses" such as Henkel (washing ingredients, chemicals) whose owners are billionaires.

Finally, Germany has the whole range of non profits which follow purposes that genuinely follow causes that benefit humanity and the environment and they also receive billions in donations in Germany every year. Overall the donations to nonprofits in Germany amounted to 12.5 billion € last year, or about 150 € on average. This includes a wide range of purposes. For instance sports clubs are usually nonprofits and donations to them are usually tax deductible. So it might be the father of one of the kids in the football club donating a new set of jerseys.

7mo ago

Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge after 15 years: Only 9 of the 256 billionaires actually followed through on giving away half their wealth

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

Which then needs someone in the real economy to make goods and services to back up the value of that money.

They are basically printing UOM instead of IOU vouchers.

7mo ago

Jewish leader slams Germany's suspension of arms exports to Israel | dpa international

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

Note that the central council is government funded. It also runs a "newspaper" called Jüdische Allgemeine which regularly spreads disinformation like denying starvation in Gaza, denying Israeli war crimes and in its opinion pieces sometimes advocating for the committment of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Germany is probably the only developed country that is paying for propaganda by a foreign government against its own interests, in particular the interest to uphold a rules based international order that Germany helped building.

7mo ago

Iran threatens planned Trump corridor envisaged by Azerbaijan-Armenia peace deal

Jump

Saleh @feddit.org 7mo ago

The proposed Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) would run across southern Armenia, giving Azerbaijan a direct route to its exclave of Nakhchivan and in turn to Turkey.The U.S. would have exclusive development rights to the corridor, which the White House said would facilitate greater exports of energy and other resources.

This corridor will not become a passage owned by Trump, but rather a graveyard for Trump's mercenaries," Velayati said.Iran's foreign ministry earlier welcomed the agreement "as an important step toward lasting regional peace", but warned against any foreign intervention near its borders that could "undermine the region's security and lasting stability".Analysts and insiders say that Iran, under mounting US pressure over its disputed nuclear programme and the aftermath of a 12-day war with Israel in June, lacks the military power to block the corridor.

FFS Trump really has to put his name on everything and his diplomacy always must contain something something USA...

On the one hand i hope for Armenia and Azerbaijan to move to a lasting peace, although the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan is getting rewarded this way.

On the other hand i hope the whole "US exclusive development" is blowing right back in the face of Trump. Instead of US companies developing, it should be local companies. Preferrably Armenian and Azerbaijani working together.