Live data from Hacker News

'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

972mag.com

181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

#181
>While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,”

So overfitting or hallucinations as a feature. Scary.

Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

#182

> “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

> It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home.

Okay, how is this not a war crime?

There are ~2M civilians who live in Gaza, and many of them don't have access to food, water, medicine, or safe shelter. Some of those unfortunates live above, or below, Hamas operatives and their families.

"Oh, sorry, lol." "It was unintentional, lmao, seriously." "Our doctrine states that we can kill X civilians for every hostile operative, so don't worry about it."

The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine -- where Ukrainian and Russian villagers can move away from the front, either towards Russia or westwards into Galicia -- and where nobody's flattening major population centers. In Gaza, anybody can evidently be killed at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. The Israeli "strategy" makes the Ukrainians and Russians look like paragons of restraint and civility.

Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

#184

Upsetting how quickly the other thread was flagged and downranked.

As someone who sees both sides of this, and as someone who didn't understand this for some time, it's important to understand that one reason a story is likely to get flagged is because users think it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion . It doesn't mean it's a bad story, or even unworthy of discussion, but many types of stories seem to, pretty predictably, lead to a cesspool of comments where it's cle…

There is a system in place for flagging specific comments by users.

Admins can, and do, prune entire branches of comments off of posts.

These two methods would take a bit more work than just banishing the topic entirely, but with topics like the first time that "AI" kill lists are publicized, maybe exceptions should be made.

Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

#186
Israel's evil keeps taking me by surprise. I guess when people go down the path of dehumanization there are truly no limits to what they are ready to do.

But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel. And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.

Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

#187

Upsetting how quickly the other thread was flagged and downranked.

As someone who sees both sides of this, and as someone who didn't understand this for some time, it's important to understand that one reason a story is likely to get flagged is because users think it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion . It doesn't mean it's a bad story, or even unworthy of discussion, but many types of stories seem to, pretty predictably, lead to a cesspool of comments where it's cle…

Successful flagging doesn't (just) disable comments, it disables discovery/access.

For a high quality piece of tech-related investigative journalism like this, flagging is simply censorship.

Post reply on HN