‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
…if Reddit can’t get AI to play ball, the company may block Google and Bing’s search crawlers, which means Reddit posts wouldn’t show up in search results.
“Reddit can survive without search,” said the Post’s anonymous source.
Wow. What a gutsy move.
I’ve written about my complicated relationship with Reddit before. In late May, when Reddit was changing the API pricing structure and making it very difficult for apps like Apollo to survive, I threatened to leave the service altogether.
I did not.
u/Spez made the gutsy call in guessing that the service has become too indispensable to its users, and he was correct.
Here, he’s making another correct (at least for me) assumption: that Reddit doesn’t need to be reliant on search.
I don’t use Google, but when I go to my search engine looking for help with something — troubleshooting a smart home issue, a coding problem I can’t solve, local news — the first useful result listed is almost always a Reddit thread.
If Reddit search was more refined, I would go to Reddit directly. As of now, it’s not. I go to my search engine, then Reddit.
Reddit has a real opportunity to own both the content its users have created and the way they arrive at it. Will they rise to the occasion? Improve search and their rather clunky mobile app? Time will tell.
On Elite Campuses, a New Protest Demand: Unwavering Support
Young people now arrive at elite colleges with the assumption that not only will they be seen, heard and meticulously cared for, but also that their own politics will broadly align with those of the institutions they have chosen to attend. They have been given little reason to think otherwise.
With universities run as for-profit business, why are we surprised that students are now insisting “the customer is always right?”
To be clear: the customer is not always right.
Yet we’ve let this attitude persist in the larger economy for at least as long as I’ve been alive. Let’s not act surprised when this attitude follows capitalism everywhere it insists on going. Academia is no exception.
The naivety of some grown adults — in this case, college administrators hell-bent on making ever-more money off their students — is astonishing. If you use people, expect them to use you in return.
How Israeli Civilians Are Using A.I. to Help Identify Victims
Incredible.
I was tempted to use the cliché “AI is an incredible tool,” but then I remembered that while yes, perhaps in its current iteration AI is a tool, it’s also something else.
Intelligence is such a nebulous thing — I rarely hear it called a “tool.” Aspects of intelligence, like critical thinking? Sure, that can be a tool. A piece of the puzzle. A component of the whole.
But AI, or perhaps AGI (artificial general intelligence, loosely defined as when machines are able to think on their own without human intervention), is meant to be a component and a whole. A tool we use…but also a tool that will one day think critically for itself. Without humans.
Remember, while the AI of today is easily explainable with metaphor, the AI of tomorrow is not.
Goliath, Who Aspires To Be David
The fact remains, though - and it is a fact, an objective fact, an empirical fact, no matter how mad it makes people - that Hamas has always been empowered by Israel’s violence and oppression. Forgive the cliché, but each side’s extremists are a gift to each other. I’m sorry if this is hard to accept, but Palestine is a Chinese finger trap; the more forcefully Israel acts, the more tightly the conflict will grip the country. The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require. Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis. And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.
Or, I suppose, they could go through with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as a disturbing number of people are calling for. I doubt the world would stop them; that’s the upside of being Goliath. But such an act would destroy whatever hope there is left for Israel as a democratic state, a symbol of human rights, however tarnished that symbol stands now. And I think that if you love Israel, the idea of Israel, you should fight like hell to stop that from happening. Because afterwards you’ll never be the same again.
A commitment to the principles of democracy, to human rights, is never easy. If we are to have them at all, they must exist for both you and the people that hate you.
This is a depressingly common, entirely predictable, completely relatable thing about human nature: we want, at all times, to feel secure, to preserve the illusion of control (and it is an illusion). Even if this security comes at the expense of others, and especially if those ‘others’ are nebulous and unseen.
This, then, plants the seeds of hatred.
…it’s a profoundly weird (if surprisingly common) rhetorical move to say “I support you for your independence, but you wrote something I disagree with, so I’m not supporting you anymore.” It should go without saying - saying stuff that you don’t agree with is an expression of my independence, and it’s strange to endorse independence in the commission of telling me that you expected me to adhere to your own views. Subscribe or cancel as you will. But are you really out to support independence of thought if you don’t support it when that independence results in an opinion you don’t like?
Israel floods social media to shape opinion around the war
Since Hamas attacked thousands of its citizens last week, the Israeli government has started a sweeping social media campaign in key Western countries to drum up support for its military response against the group. Part of its strategy: pushing dozens of ads containing brutal and emotional imagery of the deadly militant violence in Israel across platforms such as X and YouTube…
What a world we live in.
The Most Detailed Map of the Tetons Ever Made
With a source image over 100,000 pixels wide and using hundreds of gigabytes of data, we’ve created the most detailed relief map of the Teton Range ever made.
I thought to compare the text on the page to the text on my screen. Word for word, they were exactly the same. I was shocked. What happened? Why did a text that read so well in galleys read so shambolically online?
The uniquely powerful insight of the 20th-century discipline of cultural anthropology as formulated by the great French thinker Claude Levi-Straus was that culture is a closed system. A tribal mask hanging on the wall of a hut in Africa or New Guinea has meaning within the culture of the tribe that produced it, which is bound up with their social structures and cosmology. Hang the same mask next to a Picasso in a white-walled room in MOMA, and it becomes a different object, embedded within the cultural system that contains 20th-century Western art. Culturally speaking, the two masks are wildly and indeed irreconcilably different from each other—even if, physically speaking, they are the same mask.
So too with the act of reading. Like every other human activity, reading is a culturally bound activity, whose meaning is determined by its relation to the larger cultural system in which it occurs.
Working in both online and print journalism, this resonates.
The former always feels tinny and thin given its context in the sheer enormity of the internet. Text on a screen is always merely text on a screen. Ephemeral.
Print, though merely ink on a page, holds up.
Using Goatse to Stop App Theft
The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page. I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame.
It has been one of my greatest achievements as a dev: to live-deploy a massive goatse image to at least 8 domains that aren’t mine.
I 🧡 the internet.
Israel and Palestinians Blame Each Other for Blast at Gaza Hospital That Killed Hundreds
The ambiguity of this situation is precisely why moral clarity and consistency is so valuable.
Do I think Hamas would launch a rocket to intentionally bomb a Palestinian hospital so they could blame the Israelis? I do.
Do I think if Hamas unintentionally blew up a hospital with a misfired rocket, they’d blame Israel? I do.
Do I think Israel would intentionally bomb a hospital? I do not.
Do I think Israel might blame Hamas if one of their airstrikes — which have been so aggressive and killed hundreds of civilians just this week, to say nothing of the last decade — had unintentionally hit a hospital? I do.
When you don’t know who to believe, who to trust, the world becomes a very scary place…and fast.
When we know that our time in this body and in this life is finite—when we fully embrace finitude—we don’t waste time. When the scarcity of our time comes into the forefront of our consciousness, we tend not to do the unskillful actions that cause harm. When we “greet and hold death as an advisor on our shoulder all the time,” as Carlos Castaneda said, the way we live our life changes.
We live with more freedom, peace, ease, love, and care because we know there is nothing to hang on to. We are a traveler on this earth. This body is not mine. It’s for rent. This life is for rent.
When we realize this, we live differently, we live more freely. We let go of our clinging, our sense of attachment to me, me, me, mine, mine, mine. It shifts our perspective. We can live with more freedom, generosity, kindness, and forgiveness. There is nothing to take with us. There’s nothing to hang on to. So this practice is liberating, just as the Buddha says, and it has the deathless as its fruit.
Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife
PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.
How Race Categories on U.S. Census Forms Have Evolved
The reality of categorizing people with distinct labels has never been simple.
People with identical lineage may choose different boxes, and the same person may choose different boxes in different years. Former President Barack Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya, for example, marked himself as “Black,” even when checking more than one race was an option.
Historically, some edits to census race boxes reflected changes in policy or public sentiment. As the nation’s laws on slavery shifted, the census began phasing out the counting of enslaved people and instead introduced new terms to define the Black population.
Fascinating.
I’ve long struggled with categorization, both self- and not. It’s no wonder we humans attempt to categorize (it is, after all, the basis for all language), but when we attempt to categorize another person, that’s when it all goes to hell.
Recently, the term ‘LGBTQ’ (or ‘LGBTQIA+,’ if you’re feeling radically inclusive) has come into fashion. I hate it. No, I loathe it. As a gay man, my experience has little in common with that of a trans person or someone who is “questioning.” I’m not questioning anything, so why am I grouped with those folks?
I see the LGBTQ label as insulting, created by a hetero-majority that can’t be bothered remembering the specifics of my lived experience. Instead, we’re all just thrown into this alphabet soup of ‘otherness.’
The Left Must Condemn Mass Murder
Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t. What’s more, cheering (or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn) the murder of children isn’t just morally grotesque but also politically self-defeating.
The West’s apologists for Palestinian war crimes have far less power than its apologists for Israel’s brutal domination of the Palestinian territories and discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. But precisely because left-wing critics of Israeli apartheid lack power, we must not forfeit our moral authority.
Think in analog, capture in digital
To be a frustrating centrist I would say, “why not both?”. Analog is the better choice for thinking and note-taking 90% of the time. But its usefulness ends when all those insights are trapped in notebooks. Gathering dust and requiring overly obtuse ways of organisation like BuJo.
This is where we can supplement with digital methods of storage. We can review what we’ve written and decide if it’s worth capturing. What we’re left with is a digital archive of our pursuits. Whether they’re intellectual, creative or personal. They are kept safe for generations to come to discover. Especially if they’re captured in a universal format like TXT or Markdown. Even more so if they are stored publicly.
We may not know now whether our insights and thoughts are useful. But they may be useful for those that come after us. By leaving them in an easy to access, long lasting, public format we can ensure our contributions to society last longer than us.
I write on a typewriter, then scan the pages with my iPhone camera or portable scanner. They are then keyword-searchable, copy-and-paste-able just like a document created on a computer.
I write on typewriters because they physically slow me down. My thoughts cannot fly out of my mind at the speed of a computer keyboard or dictated voice memo.
This slowness creates space for introspection.
What Does Destroying Gaza Solve?
The jingoism of some Americans isn’t helping. “Level the place,” advised Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. That “place” has more than two million inhabitants, including about one million children, and I shouldn’t have to remind a senator that when you care about some humans but not others, you’ve lost your humanity.
“If you fire missiles at densely populated areas, you will kill children, and that is what the Israeli military has been doing,” Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch told me. War crimes shouldn’t be avenged by more war crimes.
Many Israelis aren’t in the mood to hear this. They have suffered a shattering blow, among the worst massacres of Jews since the Holocaust. The refrain from Israel is an anguished: But what do you expect us to do?
Fair enough. Everyone expects Israel to hit back. The practical question is how far to go: In the bluntest terms, for Israel, how many dead Gazan children are too many?
Nicholas Kristof.
He shouldn’t have to remind a senator that the murder of children, be they our own or not, is unforgivable. But Americans have all largely fallen prey to aggression toward the ‘other,’ no matter who that might be. Left hates Right. Right hates Left. When compassion for others isn’t practiced, like anything else, it becomes harder, less intuitive, more elusive.
Americans have long been a hateful bunch, tempered by strains of remarkable tolerance and an even more remarkable indifference. But if my own experience is anything, the invective that long festered on the Right has taken root in the Left. We are largely a rudderless people, guided only by the fire of the latest outrage enflamed by the gasoline of social media, not by strong moral convictions or, gods forbid, logic and reason.
Something wicked this way comes.
So delete social media. All of it — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, the insipid platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
All of it.
No excuses.
You know better.
You deserve better.
Go outside. Say hello to your neighbors. Buy someone a drink. Go for a walk in the woods.
Do not let this infection spread.
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.
Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war plan. It is one thing to deter Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite another to replace Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent.
Farther down beach, sand gave way to thick slabs of gray clay, slippery. Whole veins of it where waves took away sand covering. Geologists say last glacier pushed in clay (and gravel and dirt), creating Valparaiso Moraine: kind of ridge here at southern edge of lake. Glacier = bulldozer, bulldozing moraine, which then acts as dam or divide. North, the great lake; south, water drains into Kankakee floodplain. M. and I stand at ancient, slippery edge.
AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time
A 21-year-old computer-science student has won a global contest to read the first text inside a carbonized scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which had been unreadable since a volcanic eruption in AD 79 — the same one that buried nearby Pompeii. The breakthrough could open up hundreds of texts from the only intact library to survive from Greco-Roman antiquity.
Luke Farritor, who is at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, developed a machine-learning algorithm that has detected Greek letters on several lines of the rolled-up papyrus, including πορϕυρας (porphyras), meaning ‘purple’. Farritor used subtle, small-scale differences in surface texture to train his neural network and highlight the ink.
Stop Being Shocked—Once and for All
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
The U.S. Is Giving Israel Permission For War Crimes
Tom Dannenbaum, an expert on siege law at Tufts University, affirmed this assessment, describing Israel’s policy as an abnormally clear-cut instance of starving civilians as a means of war, an unambiguous violation of human rights.
Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza also appears to flout international law’s prohibition of the disproportionate killing of civilians. The Israeli Air Force has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on a stretch of land roughly the size of Queens. Its targets have included hospitals and schools. By its own account, Israel has not been firing “warning strikes” to encourage civilians to exit a given building before incinerating it. As of this writing, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israel’s airstrikes have killed more than 1,799 people, including 583 children. According to the ministry, 60 percent of all the injured are women or children.
Five hundred and eighty-three children.
So far.
A live stream seems a little macabre, a little distasteful, a little too ‘normal’ for the circumstances, but I’ve been holding my breath for a week. I have friends in Gaza.
What is the Gaza Strip? Here’s why it’s key in the Israel-Hamas war.
Even though Israel gave up control of the Gaza Strip, it has kept a land, air and sea blockade on Gaza since 2007. The result has been damaging for Palestinians, with the United Nations saying in 2009 that the blockade from both Israel and Egypt had been “devastating livelihoods” and causing gradual “de-development” in Gaza. Israel has argued that the blockade has served to keep control of Gaza’s border, prevent Hamas from getting stronger and protect Israelis from Palestinian rocket attacks.
The blockade has faced criticism by human rights groups and the United Nations, which consider Gaza to still be under Israeli military occupation. The United Nations estimates that the blockade has cost the Palestinian territory’s economy nearly $17 billion over roughly a decade. The International Committee of the Red Cross has gone one step further in recent years to say the blockade violates the Geneva Conventions — a claim that Israeli officials have rejected.
The population in Gaza is extraordinarily young. UNICEF has estimated that there are roughly 1 million children living in the Gaza Strip, meaning that almost half the people in Gaza are children. Almost 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15, according to the CIA.
More than 1.4 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
As ever, I feel I must preface any conversation about Gaza or Palestine, as I have learned to do over the many years I’ve been involved with and interested in the people and places of the region, with a statement: the attacks on Israelis last weekend were unconscionable. I do not condone violence of any kind inflicted on civilian populations. There is never justification for civilian casualties.
I fear that Gaza is going to turn into a mass civilian casualty event in the very near future, as though it hasn’t been one for a very long time. Death has always happened asymmetrically in this region: Israelis kill far more Palestinians than Palestinians kill Israelis. It’s horrifying — and having lived there, having witnessed it first-hand, I promise you the horror is not understated.
Implicitly or not, the Israeli justification has always been the legacy of the Holocaust. “Never again” is Israel’s unofficial mantra. Understandably so, right? The Holocaust was horrific on a scale that’s nearly unimaginable. The generational trauma of the population of Israel (and of Jewish people around the globe) is both understandable (if unrelatable) and deserved.
But the Holocaust has become justification for the preservation of the State of Israel, and consequently for the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian population. Civilians have been indiscriminately killed in Palestine for generations, all in the name of Israeli sovereignty.
Israel is in an impossible position. Many Palestinians want Israel wiped off the map because Israel forced them out of their ancestral homeland, land they had lived on for hundreds or thousands of years. Much of this Palestinian anger has become entangled with some truly wretched antisemitism, yes, but I cannot in good faith say that Palestinians hate Jews for the same reasons the Nazis did. Yes, some Palestinians do, and certainly the government of Iran does, but many Palestinians just want to go home, in the same way so many Native Americans want their ancestral homeland back, a cause toward which I am sympathetic. (Though remember, Native Americans can travel freely off the reservations and throughout the United States, whereas almost all Palestinians are forbidden from traveling into Israel — or from leaving Palestine at all. They are confined, unable to leave.)
But if Israel uses the attack of last weekend to slaughter Palestinians indiscriminately, it will (if it hasn’t already, in the eyes of many) lose the moral high ground. It will lose, if it hasn’t already, the goodwill and support of so many people around the world.
Goodwill cannot be measured. It’s intangible, ineffable. And it is more valuable than the billions of dollars America sends to Israel each year.
Israel must proceed with the utmost caution as it prepares to invade Gaza. If that goodwill is lost, I fear not just for the future of Israel, but for the future of Jewish people everywhere.