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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The first migrations of jews had already occured at this time, mainly refugees from Russia fleeing pogroms against jews under the Tsarist regime.

    This had been enabled by the abolishment of the old Dhimmi system in the 1850s which had reigned for more than a millenium. The Dhimmi system marked Christians and Jews as “protected” second class citizens. Unlike most non-muslims, they were allowed to keep their faith (rather than be subjected to a choice between conversion or being killed), but were forced into ghettos, required to mark their clothes, levied extra taxes and forbidden from building or maintaining churches or synagogues.

    The abolishment of the system of Dhimmi discrimination combined with refugee migration and imports of antisemitic literature from Europe all contributed to rising tensions up until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, particularly with harsh treatments of jews and deportations during WW1.

    The english encourage the Arab revolt with promises of independence with certain caveats. These are lost in translation and will be important later.

    The French and English make the Sykes-Pikot agreement, which will further complicate things.

    At this point (1917) the OETA takes control, the Balfour declaration is made in close conjunction.

    *Interesting side note. The 1912 Ottoman census puts the Arab population of the empire at 13 million, and the jewish at 400k, important to consider is that these people are not all in the Vilayet of Beirut (which modern day Israel/Palestine was part of at the time). The OETA performed a census of what amounts to modern day Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan and western Syria, finding 2365k muslims, 588k christians, 110k jews and 40k “others”.

    1920 becomes a mess. The Arab king (Faisal) refuses to sign the treaty of Versailles due to the previously mentioned caveats that were lost in translation. The GSC along with Faisal declares the kingdom of Syria, claiming large parts of modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel/Palestine and the Franco-Syrian war breaks out.

    A few days prior to this image, Arab militias, hunting french soldiers end up in a clash with a jewish village where several people are killed. March 7th, the independence declaration is made, and this demonstration was on march 8th (similar ones were held in several other cities in the mandate).

    Roughly a month later, the first documented occurence of serious civil violence under British rule occurs, a riot where several people are killed and hundreds injured.


  • Now that devices are starting to have built in features with AI automatically combing through all information on them, the idea of this sort of stuff being logged in the first place is concerning.

    For instance, should someone prompting an AI to describe them beating up and torturing their boss be flagged for “potentially violent tendencies”? Who decides the “limit” where “privacy” no longer applies and stuff should be flagged, logged and sent off to authorities?

    As I see it, the real issue is people being hurt, not text or fictive materials, however sickening they might be.

    If the resources invested in spying on people and making databases were instead directed towards funding robust and publicly available psychiatric care I expect that’d be more efficient.





  • The court’s order for an injunction applies only to the sections relating to defining and reporting data on content violation categories. Social media companies will still be under the remainder of AB 587’s requirements, which include semi-annually creating publicly viewable reports to California on the current terms of service, how automated systems enforce the terms of service, how companies respond to user-reported violations, and what actions the companies take against violators.

    Seems like the higher courts ruling is sensible overall.









  • I agree that it would be better if people used votes as a marker of quality, but strongly disagree on moderation action based on voting.

    Personally, there’s three scenarios when I use downvotes w/o commenting:

    • Someone has already voiced the reason

    • I don’t have time/energy to comment

    • The target is a censored echo-chamber that will ban anyone who disagrees (can’t vote/show disapproval if you’re banned) - example would be .ml communities having moments about how stalinist USSR did nothing wrong.

    Anyway, once a post from a community rises sufficiently to pop up on all, it becomes a part of the larger discussion, and voting will shift towards the opinions of the larger fediverse. This is also usually when communities get discovered by more people. If a community doesn’t want the engagement of the wider user-base, a closed blog may be more suitable as a forum, or alternatively have an instance w/o downvoting.

    When browsing all or new I do so both to break out of my bubble and to vote on content (usually stuff I find interesting).






  • That’s because it’s supposed to be. I was on Reddit for a decade until their management shit the bed, and these kinds of problems weren’t a thing there despite the much larger userbase.

    For the record, to me it’s less about privacy and more about setting expectations. I’m not anonymous online, I’m pseudonymous, I’ve had this handle for a long time. I am my online identity, and when I post and vote I don’t feel anonymous, even if I’m relatively protected from someone knocking on my door or messaging my boss about a statement.

    If voting “ledgers” aren’t presented in the discussion, that’s because they aren’t intended to be part of the discussion. This reduces the value of influential individuals votes (ooh Bill Gates liked X, Kamala Harris disliked Y etc.) and shifts focus to how the community values of the content. It’s the same reason that we follow communities rather than individuals. We get an internet “hive mind” of sorts without cult of personality.