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I agree with the point but it would've been nicer if it wasn't written by an AI

Good thing he references large-scale surveys then.

Ahh I see. I misunderstood what you meant with global prosperity.

I understood it as "everyone being prosperous". You mean a few individual becoming insanely prosperous at the expense of everyone else. Then you're completely right.

Unions have definitely succeeded in redistributing prosperity though (e.g. negotiating for higher wages) and also reducing exploitation (e.g. fairer working conditions).

Or it could be that the Reuters article just came out a few hours ago

Pro-tip (observe what the UK does closely): Don't call it a genocide and then you don't need to do anything about it.

Ok, first: The author sits on the board of HonestReporting and writes for NGO Monitor, UN Watch, and the Henry Jackson Society. These are pro-Israel media-monitoring and advocacy organisations.

It paints Hamas's Ministry of Health as a propaganda machine incapable of an honest number (sure) while Israeli military estimates (the 25,000 combatant figure, al-Ahli) are accepted at face value -- seriously? The IDF has been proven to lie numerous times.

Also, the article still relies on the MoH's numbers when it's convenient to the point it's trying to make.

The Gaza Mortality Survey, published in The Lancet Global Health in early 2026, run by Michael Spagat who's a war-mortality specialist (Kosovo, Iraq), with a long record of debunking inflated war-death claims, estimated 75,200 violent deaths between Oct 7, 2023 and Jan 5, 2025, which is around 25,000 more than the official Gaza Ministry of Health figure for that period.

The Lancet survey found that women, children, and older people comprised 56.2% of violent deaths. An OHCHR analysis separately found that 70% of those killed in residential buildings were women and children.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

Let's see, what else: A ratio of 1.5 civilians per combatant means roughly 40% of all deaths are fighters. If 56% of the dead are women, children, and elderly, then every adult male death would have to be a combatant to reach 40% — which is obviously false.

The Washington Institute concluded that the available data cannot yield a civilian-combatant ratio because the MoH doesn't classify combatant status. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/gaza-fat...

The combatants numbers: The 25k combatants figure is an estimate from IDF statements while it dismisses the 8.9k figure (militants the IDF actually identified) as absurd. "Let's make up a number and call the only real documented count" -- and whether it itself is real or not is debatable.

Then lies about natural deaths: Yes, there were about 6.3k deaths in Gaza before the genocide started, however it cherry-picks this subtraction while ignoring the corresponding addition. the same surveys that quantify baseline deathhs also find thousands of excess non-violent deaths caused by genocide. The lancet survey has 8.5k excess deaths. The 3.3k confirmed deaths the article cites are below the 6k baseline. Natural deaths are undercounted. Not inflating it.

Hamas kiling Gazans: Sure, but thousands? It's overblowing numbers for the al-Ahli hospital case and then extrapolating a bunch of bs as a result.

There is a genocide going on. We've seen the footage. We have the testimony about the horrors from both IDF soldiers and Palestinians. Why are we disputing numbers like holocaust deniers?

The excuse will be that these are just casualties of war and we'll shrug it off and move on, whereas the imaginary beheaded babies from October 7 are unforgivable and excuse any action on Israel's behalf.

Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions. Use any legal means to stop funding this genocide and make Israel's leadership accountable. We all love our comfy white collar jobs and would rather not rock the boat, but not doing the little we can do (e.g. stop using Israeli suppliers and services) makes us supporters.

Problem is that requires moderators, that get paid, with money.

Space elevators are actually a possible idea being considered by scientists. The hard part is making a strong enough cable. And finding enough elevator music...

Most engineers would bring up a lot more issues than just finding a strong cable. Also, most attempts with e.g. carbon nanotubes have been abandoned ages ago https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093356-carbon-nanotube....

- We don't have a good ascent mechanism other than rockets - and then we might just use rockets without building an elevator. - We don't have a good (and safe) descent mechanism. - Maintenance? Protection from space debris? Protection from oscillations? Ground-protection if the elevator collapses?

This is dyson-sphere level of fiction. We can do back-of-the-napkin calcualtions on how things would work, but the practicalities make it completely impossible or impractical.

Well, I'd like my writing and my code to be something I can share with other people freely, but not let it be part of a data set some company uses in their for-profit product.

Of course, a crawler can also mock user agents and fetch data in patterns that emulate real users and there'd be no way to tell - but maybe we could supply real-seeming data (at least to the crawlers we can identify) and that'll be good enough?

I've been thinking it'd be nice there was a way to just block AI bots completely and allow indexing, but I'm guessing [that's impossible](https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...).

Are there any solutions out there that render jumbled content to crawlers? Maybe it's enough that your content shows up on google searches based on keywords, even if the preview text is jumbled.

Is there any way to simulate (maybe even interactively) things like focus and zoom? It would be cool to have some way to shift lenses (or lens groups) along the optical axis and visualize how light rays get projected onto the image plane.

I don't have any evidence for it, but I feel that watching someone (or something) perform a task has less pedagogical value that performing that task oneself.

Same for attention, it's easier let your mind wander if you're e.g. taking the back seat while you're pair programming.

AI tools also don't really "reason", do they? Even if you use a reasoning model, they perform the most statistically likely steps with the context and instructions that they're provided, so you lose that "deliberateness" that enables you to best understand the problem that you're solving.

The last thing an engineer should do before sending out a PR is to review it themselves. A PR is a work product with their name on it, and is a reflection of their ability.

Right, but your understanding of a PR that you're reviewing is different when you review your own work vs. when you review someone else's, right? For me personally, I have to expend more effort reviewing someone else's work.

If you can see how all of this adds up, I hope you understand how this leads to AI being more of a handicap than a tool.

A few of our mid-level engineers started sending in PRs with worse than usual code in the last few months. It all compiles, but:

- There's a bunch of missing edge cases and requirements (details that don't end up on tickets but have been discussed)

- Sometimes we see completely useless codepaths. If statements and function calls that don't lead anywhere, or don't need to be called.

- We follow a few very specific patterns for code safety reasons and suddenly it looka like those are being completely disregarded.

- Our integration tests started being super flaky.

After several one-on-ones with them, we realized they were using some AI tool. No clue which one.

I know that these tools are going to get better, but I fear that junior/mid-level developers are going to handicap their development if they use them like they do now.

Code quality also suffers. I'm also afraid that in the short to medium term codebases are going to get _a lot worse_ introducing some very expensive tech debt.

On the bright side, I know now that I don't want to work at Gumroad. I already spend a huge amount time reviewing PRs. I don't want to waste even more because someone didn't prompt an AI accurately enough. What a waste of time and resources.