Who else? The people actually holding the hostages, perhaps.
Because you surely mistakenly implied here that All Gazans categorically are responsible for the hostage-taking and "deserve" to be killed as a consequence of that.
Your use of language betrays your feelings. You are disgusting.
Why would anyone in Palestine, including Gaza, care about helping the people who have occupied them since 1948, with the help of the Brits and funding of the US?
No, it's just been so isolated that only Israel can control who and what goes in and out, to the point NGOs have described it for decades as the world's biggest open air concentration camp. I don't condone the horrible things Hamas did (that were actually proven and not later disproven hasbara, like the rapes), but I'm also not arrogant enough to tell an occupied people how they should be resisting their occupiers, especially when the target is a military outpost (which is essentially what the kibbutz was) mere miles from Gaza and being used as a base largely by standing members of the IDF and their families (i.e. the occupying force). Desperate people take desperate measures, who knew? The Irgun and Haganah probably should have thought about that before they violently persuaded the British into giving them a "homeland" that already had a people - including Jews and Christians - living in relative peace on it for almost a thousand years.
So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then.
Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.
On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.
It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.
Ads back then were pretty unobjectionable because they were like, a GIF or JPG on a page. It wasn't even until like 1998-1999 or something where they really started being JavaScript-driven from ad delivery shit like DoubleClick and so on. Suddenly I'm reminded of one of the early perpetrators of pop-up ads, X10 Technology[0] which was egregious enough to result in an early internet music artist, Kompressor, releasing a song about it, "We Must Destroy X-10"[1]
I don't know, I rarely see ads these days. I surf the internet with adblock exclusive and just try to skip over things like sponsored links or youtubers advertising in their video.
They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web advertising size standards are derivative of these initial placements.
What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…
I had ads on one of my sites in the later 90's that drew a fair amount of traffic... it technically was enough to pay for the hosting, but in the end it wasn't making enough money for it to be real income. I removed it just because I wanted to give a better experience.
That's exactly right. They were REALLY chill in the early days: "The only code that we require to be on all of your html pages is a reference back to GeoCities. This can be a reference to the main Neighborhood page that you reside in, or to the GeoCities Home Page. Please see the FTP Procedures Page for the preferred source code." from https://web.archive.org/web/19961220170537/http://www.geocit...
The other rules are actually pretty cool, too. Zero commercial use allowed. This probably singlehandedly ensured the most diverse and interesting content.
And in order to find those neighbors in my neighborhood, we started web rings...
Sites I liked were added to mine. My friends added me to theirs. Next thing you know we have curated journeys through web design - graphics - music - literature - art - trade skills - DIY - and well... let's just say they like four channels.
Yes, I had some pages on geocities around 1996/97 and to the best of my memory they had no ads. I must have stopped using the site entirely by the point they got added.
The problem is that it is essentially impossible for a journalist to exist in the western world and not have heard of the criticism about how cops' actions get reported.
The term 'past exonerative tense' is dated to 1991.'"Mistakes were made" was popularized by Nixon.
To continue pulling this nonsense is wilful ignorance on the journalists' part, and effectively equivalent to bad faith.
> No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
That is correct, yet at the same time: Society as a whole refuses to give these people even the kindness of a roof over their head.
They need better care, yes. But if people won't even agree that these people shouldn't freeze to death in winter (or overheat in summer), talk of funding better care is off the table.
Christ, Fox News had one of their guys outright suggest they be euthanized. The bar for discourse on homelessness is in hell right now.
> The homelessness response system added 60,143 shelter beds in 2024, but with over 600,000 people entering homelessness for the first time each year, this is deeply inadequate.
> In 61 percent of states and territories, growth in demand outpaced growth in available beds, meaning that they had less capacity to shelter people in 2024 than in 2023.
> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war.
Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.
In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.
You're forgetting the most important one. Having a bunch of your money tied up in an illiquid asset that is subject to all manner of government micromanagement gives you a huge incentive to see to it that the government doesn't get progressively more shitty toward you than it already is.
Yep, saying it's an age thing is missing that every homeowner is directly financially incentivized to ensure prices go up. I literally get physical printed mail (against my
will) every other week telling me about the health of my neighborhood where higher home sale prices means better. Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
> Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
No.
Being a homeowner doesn't grant one political influence. Being old grants one political influence.
It's the correlation of age and homeownership that means homeowners have the political influence the push through policy that drives up real estate prices.
Non-homeowners have political incentives all the same. If only just to oppose those very homeowners' policies. What they lack is the political influence to make it happen.
There are some implementation concerns, but the real answer is that it is an ideological choice.
The AI companies believe that these kinds of grammar mistakes will be solved by improving the models. To build out tools for grammar constrained inference like this is to suggest, on some level, that GPT-N+1 won't magically solve the problem.
The deeper level is that it's not just simple grammar constraints. Constraining to JSON is a nice party trick, but it opens the door to further ideas. How about constraining to a programming language's grammar? Those are well defined, you just swap the JSON grammar file for the Java grammar file, job done.
We can go further: Why not use a language server to constrain not only the grammar but also the content? What variables and functions are in-scope is known, constraining a variable reference or function call to one of their names can be done with the same techique as grammar constraints. ("monitor-guided decoding", figured out back in 2023)
Entire classes of hallucination problems can be eliminated this way. The marketing writes itself; "Our AI is literally incapable of making the errors humans make!"
What many AI developers, firms, and especially their leaders find grating about this is the implication. That AI is fallible and has to be constrained.
Another such inconvenience is that while these techniques improve grammar they highlight semantic problems. The code is correct & compiles, it just does the wrong thing.
One pattern that I've seen develop (in PydanticAI and elsewhere) is to constrain the output but include an escape hatch. If an error happens, that lets it bail out and report the problem rather than be forced to proceed down a doomed path.
You don't need a new model. The trick of the technique is that you only change how tokens are sampled; Zero out the probability of every token that would be illegal under the grammar or other constraints.
All you need for that is an inference API that gives you the full output vector, which is trivial for any model you run on your own hardware.
It's not expensive per-se; A single element-wise multiplication of the output vector.
The real "expense" is that you need to prepare masks for every element of your grammar as they are expensive to recompute as needed; LLM tokens do not cleanly map onto elements of your grammar. (Consider JSON: LLM tokens often combine various special characters such as curly braces, colons, and quotes.)
This isn't that hard to compute, it's just more work to implement.
When you say "AI cannot do my job, [insert whatever reason you find compelling]"
Execs only hear "I am trying to protect my job from automation".
The executives have convinced themselves that the AI productivity benefits are real, and generally refuse to listen to any argument to the contrary. Especially from their own employees.
This impedes their ability to evaluate productivity data; If a worker fails to show productivity, it can't be that AI is bad, because that'd mean the executives are wrong about something. It must be that the employee is sabotaging our AI efforts.
Because you surely mistakenly implied here that All Gazans categorically are responsible for the hostage-taking and "deserve" to be killed as a consequence of that.
Your use of language betrays your feelings. You are disgusting.