brianpeiris

Related: Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks saw this coming: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/why-irobots-founder-wont-go-within-10-feet-of-todays-walking-robots/

Archive link (missing graphs): https://archive.is/mY9sv

National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.

"These terms included affirming the statement that we 'do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'" Crary noted. "This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole."

The Trump administration recently published "America's AI Action Plan". One of the first policy actions from the document is to eliminate references to misinformation, diversity, equity, inclusion, and climate change from the NIST's AI Risk Framework.

Lacking any sense of irony, the very next point states LLM developers should ensure their systems are "objective and free from top-down ideological bias".

Par for the course for Trump and his cronies, but the world should know what kind of AI the US wants to build.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/43916323

Gaza’s water “comes from wells with salt water unfit for consumption. They have water treatment plants, Israel should hit those plants. When the entire world says we have gone insane and this is a humanitarian disaster — we will say, it’s not an end, it’s a means.” That was the opinion of Giora Eiland, adviser to the defense minister and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, writing in Yedioth Ahronoth on October 9, 2023.⁠[1]

Already by November, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that “around 70% of the population in Gaza is drinking salinised and contaminated water.”⁠[2] By July 2024, Oxfam reported that “people in Gaza have had only 4.74 litres of water per person per day” since the start of Israel’s offensive,[3] well below the World Health Organization’s minimum needed for survival in a humanitarian emergency.⁠[4]

Israel's control over life’s most essential resource did not arise overnight. After occupying Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, it quickly established a system to extract water for its own use while restricting Palestinian access. For decades, this policy forced the indigenous population into dependence and precarity, while Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories — illegal under international law⁠[5] — enjoyed “privileged access to water.”⁠[6]

Read the rest of the piece on SourcedPress. Every fact-checking thread is public, and every source document is provided.

https://sourced.press/a/water-and-occupation

Gaza’s water “comes from wells with salt water unfit for consumption. They have water treatment plants, Israel should hit those plants. When the entire world says we have gone insane and this is a humanitarian disaster — we will say, it’s not an end, it’s a means.” That was the opinion of Giora Eiland, adviser to the defense minister and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, writing in Yedioth Ahronoth on October 9, 2023.⁠[1]

Already by November, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that “around 70% of the population in Gaza is drinking salinised and contaminated water.”⁠[2] By July 2024, Oxfam reported that “people in Gaza have had only 4.74 litres of water per person per day” since the start of Israel’s offensive,[3] well below the World Health Organization’s minimum needed for survival in a humanitarian emergency.⁠[4]

Israel's control over life’s most essential resource did not arise overnight. After occupying Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, it quickly established a system to extract water for its own use while restricting Palestinian access. For decades, this policy forced the indigenous population into dependence and precarity, while Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories — illegal under international law⁠[5] — enjoyed “privileged access to water.”⁠[6]

Read the rest of the piece on SourcedPress. Every fact-checking thread is public, and every source document is provided.

https://sourced.press/a/water-and-occupation