Live data from Hacker News

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

972mag.com

221–230 of 1001 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely Palestinians are not going to forget this.

Em, I think you mean any reasonable minded human that walks the planet.

I think he means the cycle of violence will continue.

Which is what I kinda assume Hamas wanted in the first place.

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

#223

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.

[flagged]

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

#224
post #158

> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]” At that point I had to scroll back up to check whether this was just a really twisted April's Fools joke.

What part of this upsets you vs a baseline understanding of reality? There's often a criticism of the US military doctrine that our weapons are great but are often way more expensive than the thing we shoot them at (as exemplified in our engagement with the Houthis in the Red Sea.) If anything, the quote you pulled sounds like its talking about highly precise weaponry, and it seems to me that the way to minimize the…

I'll answer for the previous post. The most disturbing part is stating main criteria is being a male and their models have 10% error rate.

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

#225

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.

[flagged]

There are still millions of Palestinians left to kill

After that there will be the surrounding countries to deal with. Who is going to die to fight these? Americans? After Afghanistan you expect them to come to the rescue forever?

I'm not sure this has been thought through

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

#226

The new political excuse for genocide: wasn't me, the AI did it.

Continuously throw enough plot twists and general stimulation at people and they'll never have the time to consider whether they're living in a simulation.

Interesting, how do we prove we don't live in a simulation or do we care enough to know?

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

#227

> “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 operativ…

Because it's Israel. It's also why no western country has ever really officially condemned Israel no matter what they do. They are on "our side" so it's okay. And those civilians kind of deserved it anyways or something, and we can just trust every single word the IDF says and use them as an actual source to pretend the IDF isn't into mass civilian murder.

The only thing that made this time a bit different is the crazy, almost hard to believe, switch from the Ukrainian conflict and how it was seen and portrayed... To western countries staying completely silent when again, it's our side doing it. Well it wasn't hard to believe but it just made it a lot more blatant.

Israel doesn't really care though since israeli officers routinely go on public tirades that amount to mask-off allusions to genocide ("wipe Gaza" "level the city to the ground" "make it unliveable"), with again 0 consequences at all. Even Russia at least tries to not have Russian military officers just say the quiet part out loud.

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

#228
post #164

Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.

[flagged]

> The other option here is carpet bomb a la Drezden

Right. Because there are always just two options when you're designing a strategy.

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

#229

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…

If one don't want to engage, the hide button isn't too far from the flag button. It's important that people have the option to speak freely and openly about this topic, since so many places shut down any conversation that shows sympathy for Palestinians and/or doesn't paint Israel as unequivocally morally good. This is one of the reasons Israel has been able to get away with this behavior for so long.

Considering what regularly doesn't get flagged on this site related to AI, conflict, etc., this topic seems to fit in.

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

#230

The name of Lavender makes this so surreal to me for some reason. I'm of the opinion that algorithms shouldn't determine who lives and dies, but it's so common even outside of war.

The code names for secret operations can be dead on or funny at times. I remember a few being emoji’s. It’s only a matter of time until USA or other allied countries secrets are released for using AI enhanced information.

How do you think they process millions of call records, intercepted messages, sim swaps, etc?

Post reply on HN