To be fair, my understanding of delegates is that they are basically a political “cookie” that the party hands out as a reward to certain people. Their job is just to cast the official elector votes for the presidential election, and their hands are usually tied into voting to reflect the popular state vote tallies (ignoring Trump’s recent fake electors scheme, of course). So their duties are really symbolic more than anything.

Accepting this position does insert himself into politics, though. No one can say “leave Baron out of it” after this

Jewish Federation Los Angeles meanwhile blamed the university’s chancellor for allowing “an environment to be created over many months that has made students feel unsafe”.

The group demanded that the encampment be cleared and that UCLA meet leaders of the Jewish community.

Fucking hell, this is such a callous response. In any other situation, the group representing the side that just had masked vigilantes attack peaceful demonstrators would make amends. “These people don’t represent our movement. We disavow them and what they stand for.” And so on.

I see they’re taking a page from Israel’s book: refuse to apologize, defend unprovoked violence, and blame the victims on top of everything else.

Less than half of that plastic litter had discernible branding that could be traced back to the company that produced the packaging; the rest could not be accounted for or taken responsibility for.

The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just six companies.

This seems to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course the biggest companies with the most easily identifiable packaging are going to be the ones identified in this study. The majority of the plastic, however, is not, and it’s difficult to tell who produced it.

The article addresses this as well, mentioning that this is the reason we need traceability, so we can get the true metrics on who is creating and thus responsible for the bulk of plastic waste.

The big players like Coke and others are obviously very much responsible for a big part of the problem. I just didn’t see people mentioning this part of the study in the comments, so I wanted to bring it up.

Even the title of this article asserts that this latest “tragedy” is part of a larger systemic problem than just the incident itself.

“There seems to be a consistent pattern of utterly reckless behavior,” said Cobb-Smith, who helped investigate the Doctors Without Borders shelling.

The whole point of this is the lack of accountability for Israel’s repeated “mistakes,” which they have no intention of correcting. The indiscriminate violence is a feature for Israel, not a bug.

To try and excuse or deflect from Israel’s current missile strikes by bringing up the US’s own missile strikes is an odd choice here. Like, the same people who are calling for Israel to stop its indiscriminate bombardment are largely the same people who were calling for the same when the US was doing it.

The idea is that generative AI will enable Samsung products to get a better understanding of how consumers use the products – for example, an oven recognizing what is being cooked in it or a fridge recognizing what ingredients are inside. This could allow appliances to understand users’ needs and respond accordingly.

“Understand users’ needs” being a euphemism for “spy on users’ habits and sell that info to advertisers.”

We’ve gone full circle: from having a manual for your new appliance, to having a LLM confidently make up some incorrect info about how to use your new appliance.

The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”

There’s a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app’s browser is much worse than measuring a true or false “did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted.”

Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.

But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.

TikTok has always been on the extreme end of tracking and surveilling its users. For example, research found that the app had the ability to record all keystrokes made by users in the in-app browser (i.e. keylogging). This kind of tracking is way beyond what other social media companies do and borders on malware.That’s one reason why the US, Canada, and others banned the use of TikTok on government devices.

A former TikTok employee also alleges in a sworn statement that TikTok stores its user data in China, that the CCP has full access to this data, and that the CCP used this data to spy on protestors in Hong Kong.

So their tracking goes way beyond what other companies do, and China uses that data for expressly political goals rather than simply selling ads to users.

When people claim that leaks “get people killed,” they’re referring to when undercover agents are identified while they’re in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.

The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.

You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that’s really tenuous. It also assumes that the CIA isn’t constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.

That’s a common misconception that’s been passed around the Internet so long that it’s become common knowledge. There’s a great (now deleted, but archived) writeup showing that the Wachowskis always intended humans to be batteries. The actual source of the “processors” idea came from a Neil Gaiman short story written to promote the movie at its release