Two years after the 2005 Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (and the Israeli government evicted Israeli settlers from Gaza), the support in Israel for a two-state solution was 70% in favor.
They were optimistic!
Looking at the long term history of Israel, the left was more optimistic in general about hopes for peace with the Palestinians, while the right more suspected that Arafat never really wanted peace, and was just being sneaky. But let it be noted that the Prime Minister who ordered the withdrawal from Gaza was right-wing Gen. Ariel Sharon, Likud member and previous advocate of settlements everywhere.
After the actions of Hamas in subsequent years, particularly Oct 7, 2023, that hope and optimism was completely eliminated.
The 'withdrawal' wasn't really a withdrawal, was it. There was still a blockade, and IDF's routine 'mowing the lawn'.
Let's not pretend that the 2005 'withdrawal' was a chance for a fresh start for the Palestinians that they floundered. The various negotiations were very one sided, and the offers were also unacceptable.
Since 2005, Israel has aggressively settled more and more people in the West Bank, to the point where more than 10% of Israel's Jewish population (read: first-class citizens) now live in West Bank settlements, so Israel's right wing has done everything in its power to make a two-state solution less and less practical.
IMO a one-state solution where everyone has equal rights is the only just and reasonable path forward. Like with the dismantling of apartheid, a transition plan will be needed.
Hamas has a one-state transition plan: kill or drive out the Jews, or enslave the ones with technical expertise. The Israel far right has a transition plan: kill or drive out the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, except for the few that don't cause them problems.
Partition of disputed territory is the least bad solution in the world we live in. "One world" government remains a utopian fantasy. Dividing the world up according to a mix of consideration of peoplehood, self-determination, and whoever won the most recent war is what humankind has figured out so far.
People who disagree with that will want to start wars. Wars are bad.
Wars are bad, but sometimes the only way to end an unjust status quo. Is that a defense of war? Up to everyone to decide.
The American civil war occurred, in part, because Lincoln decided to end the institution of slavery. I know this is an oversimplification and justifies the means with the end, but I think if "bad"-ness of the civil war is compared to the "bad"-ness of an eternity of black people being enslavement in the U.S., I'd argue the war was significantly less "bad".
I think your other point about Hamas's supposed desire to genocide Jews lacks nuance, and your resignation to a world of ethno-nationalist states is a just-so story bordering on nihilism, but I suspect addressing those enters territory of tightly-held opinion, so I will just leave it at that.
I got the correct answer with a locally running model (gpt-oss-120b-F16.gguf) with this prompt:
"This is a trick question, designed to fool an LLM into a logical mis-step. It is similar to riddles, where a human is fooled into giving a rapid incorrect answer. See if you can spot the trick: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"
When this came out a week ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039636 ) I was playing around with some prompts to see what I could do to guide it without giving it the answer.
I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Before answering, explain the necessary conditions for the task.
The "before answering..." got it to load enough of the conditions into its context before making an answer (and then having the LLM do a posthoc reasoning for it).
I believe this is a demonstration of the "next token predictor" (which is quite good) but not being able to go back and change what it said. Without any reasoning before making an answer, it almost always picks the wrong answer (and then comes up with reasons that the answer is "right").
When I simply asked the question, the model failed, as did most of the others. It's a smaller model, that I could run locally, so obviously not as powerful.
I wanted to see if a prompt would do better that pulled into the analysis 1) a suggestion to not take every question at face value, and 2) to include knowledge of the structure of riddles.
These are part of the "context" of humans, so I speculated that maybe that was something missing from the LLM's reasoning unless explictly included.
Although apparently not a fan of Jimmy Kimmel as a comedian, her Free Press objected to his suspension. "... the FCC’s coercion undermines our most fundamental values"
"Centrist" is an utterly meaningless term, as the only thing it implies is not one of the two major-partisan extremists. You can call me a centrist, with my views being anchored in a libertarian perspective. Back a few decades ago when the major parties' Venn diagrams overlapped a bit more, you could call people at the intersection of the parties' authoritarian policies centrists. And as for Bari Weiss, you can can call her centrist because she will do the bidding of her employer regardless of which Party's administration they are currently bribing.
"Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower" includes not anthropomorphizing its individual parts, like the blades. Even when those blades are swapped out for new ones, re-sharpened, and put onto a different lawnmower.
Trump, while an objectively horrible person who belongs in prison for many distinct types of crime, is primarily a minstrel for people to hate on. While he is (unfortunately) a good first-pass litmus test for an individual's politics/intelligence, criticizing him is not really the same as critiquing all of the entrenched interests that installed and continue to enable him.
Painting is a tough business. If you have the talent to spend a month on a painting and then find people will happily pay $2000 for it in a gallery, you are a fantastic artist!
But the gallery takes 50% leaving you a gross income of $12k. Then you pay for your supplies and work expenses. If that's all you do, you end up way below the poverty line.
> Participants deeply understand the root goal and can autonomously choose the most important next things to work on
It didn't work that way on projects I led. Maybe everyone at Anthropic is a "10."
I was lucky when I had one person who could do that ("deeply understand the root goal and can autonomously choose the most important next things to work on"), who could take over if I went on vacation or got hit by a bus.
But I had reports who just wanted to work in their area of specialization, and had no curiosity whatsoever outside that. Or the guy who, no matter what I said, would never tell me when he had finished something - the only way I found out would be when I walked past his cube and saw him reading a science fiction book.
Don't tell me I should have just fired them, and gotten someone better. They did useful work, contributed to the project, and they were what the company had to work with. A big part of management is figuring out what people can do, want to do, are capable of doing in the future if encouraged.
Of course they should be fired if it’s been made clear that behavior is unacceptable (which it should be). Culture is what you let people get away with.
But seems like the company (and you) thought that was acceptable so who knows.
You play the hand you're dealt, or you get out of the game. Getting out of the game is always an option, of course. But you don't always have the ability to choose or change your cards.
You’re the one who dealt the cards! You’re the alleged (self-described) manager here. No wonder you got pushed around by somebody who was able to do their work. You seem to see yourself as the victim of circumstance rather than in control of anything.
They should probably have promoted the guy who was reading the book. 0% chance he'd let one of his reports make him do work that the report should've been doing themselves.
Of course you can't know that without knowing how valuable the employee's contributions are. If they're good, a good manager will walk by their cubicle a few times a day instead of firing them.
The kind of person who gets pushed around by their reports like this will end up walking by everyone’s cubicle a few times a day because they’re afraid to tell the bad employees why the good employee gets special treatment.
Read the guys story again. He wasn’t a manager. He was at best a babysitter.
If the guy reading novels is that valuable, fire the pushover manager and pay somebody $10/hr to walk by his cubicle.
Out of curiosity what kind of "extra" incentives did you have in the project succeeding (e.g. bonus, promotion, or stocks)? And what kind of incentives did the direct reports have?
Yes. HP-11C. Who cares about the speed of the calculating device when I'm just adding or multiplying a few numbers? Physical buttons are easier to use than mousing on a screen. And it's highly portable.
Qatar $7.7 billion
China $6.4 billion
Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion
These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...
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