Highly recommend: Killing Hope by William Blum, it dissects the history of the many authoritarian regimes the U.S. supported since WWII, coups the U.S. engineered, the revolutions it strangled in their infancy, governments it systematically destabilized, and the popular movements it crushed (often under the veneer of “stability” or “containment”).
> At one point you say, “Nobody reads ‘hope you had a great weekend’ and thinks better of the person who wrote it.” Who is going to read that and think that “nobody” only applies to you?
I argued why I believe this does not a good way of communication in business or professional-focused environment, because as explained, habitual padding tends to train readers to skim, because they learn that the lines often contain little of substance. For people who value directness (which, in my experience, includes many in serious professional settings) this kind of attitude is not appreciated. That said, it is simply my own rationale for preferring a more direct style of communication.
>Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings.
I come from a culture where elaborate politeness and social niceties are not only common but often expected, and I do practice them in the appropriate contexts. However, when the goal is to build something, solve a problem, or exchange ideas efficiently, I prefer a norm I explained, that is, directness and the substance of the message to take over.
Anna's Archive or any piracy of book does not replace Google Books search functions at all. The search functions of these website just looks inside the PDF text, Google Books helped me many time to find manuscripts or old books that were not OCR'd properly. It's really a big loss.
I'm not sure if you understand how casualty classification works. “not positively identified as combatant” is not logically equivalent to “proven civilian.” No one claims it is. What it does mean is that the IDF has no evidence those people were combatants. And in law, statistics, and every serious conflict dataset, you don’t get to assign lethal status based on vibes.
Also calling Aman “a single unit not tasked with research” is false. It’s Military Intelligence, and Israeli sources say this database is the only one they can stand behind.
If your position requires assuming thousands of unidentified dead people were combatants without evidence, then your position is not analytical rather ideological.
No and this is misleading. First, that’s not how civilian status is determined. Civilian vs. combatant is not decided by uniforms or post-strike assumptions but on direct participation in hostilities at the time and positive identification. Someone actively firing an RPG is a combatant at that moment but that does not justify retroactively classifying every unidentified body as militant. I'm honestly surprised that I've to explain that.
Second, the example is a hypothetical case to erase the real issue. The claim about ~80% civilian deaths is not based on “assuming everyone is civilian,” but on subtracting those Israel itself could identify as militants using intelligence-linked, name-based records. Israel’s own database explicitly excludes people it merely suspects or assumes were fighters.
Third, this logic fails at scale. Gaza’s death toll includes tens of thousands of women, children, elderly, and entire families killed in homes, shelters, hospitals, and aid lines, not people observed using RPGs. Field reports and Israeli investigations show many victims were later posthumously labeled militants without evidence, inflating numbers.
Forth, the argument flips the burden of proof. You don’t get to call people militants because you can’t identify them. If that standard were accepted, any mass-casualty air war could declare most of its victims “terrorists” by default, which is exactly why serious militaries and conflict datasets reject that logic.
In war, a person is civilian unless positively identified as a combatant. “Unidentified” does not mean militant. that’s true in international law, conflict research, and even the IDF’s own internal counting. The “17% identified by name” point actually supports the claim. Israel’s own intelligence database--which Israeli sources call the only authoritative militant tally--shows ~8,900 confirmed or probable militants killed out of ~53,000 total deaths at the time.
The “RPGs in their hands” is a strawman. The database does not count assumptions; it requires intelligence-linked identification. Israeli investigations and internal testimony show civilians were routinely misclassified as “terrorists” in field reports to inflate ratios
The Ukraine comparison is simply wrong. Ukraine has uniforms, unit records, POW lists, and mutual identification. Gaza is a besieged civilian population where Israel itself admits it cannot identify most victims. No serious dataset suggests 99.9% of Ukraine’s dead are civilians.
moreover, many independent investigations suggest the same. Airwars’ civilian harm analysis documented unprecedented civilian casualty patterns (large family deaths, high women/child counts), far exceeding norms seen in other 21st-century conflicts https://gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org
Even conflict data experts (e.g., Uppsala Conflict Data Program) note that the proportion of civilians in this conflict is far higher than typical war patterns and comparable only to extreme cases like Rwanda and Mariupol https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/classified-israeli-mili...
You can try. I'm on Safari Version 18.6 (20621.3.11.11.3) [Seqouia 15.6.1] on my Mac, unsure of the version in my iPhone and iPad, but all of them ignore the ICC profile.
> but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best
My argument is that even a name like awk is much more relevant to the people who used this software back then, of course it was not the best way to name it, but at least it held some meaning to it. Unlike modern software, awk and others were not written with the consideration of a wide user-base in mind. Regarding whether we "lost the plot" or not, I believe that we did, because as mentioned, in the 80s there was a current of people who named software conventionally, and up to the 2010s, the names still used to hold some rational even when word-played or combined with cutey names.
> It sounds more like this person just had a personal vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive.
Not at all, I find it quite fun, just unprofessional.
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Sent by replying to an automated RSS email, via msmtp (light SMTP client, which is unlike firefox, not a consumer product and its name has to do with its function).
Nobody says "gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client" in conversation. You say "the streaming client" or "llm-stream" the same way you'd say "Pegasus." But when someone new joins or you're reading code, "llm-stream" is self-documenting. "Pegasus" requires looking it up every single time until you memorize an arbitrary mapping.
You don't need to know what Ingres is. "PostgreSQL" still tells you it's SQL-related, which is infinitely more than "fluffnutz" tells you. And once you learn it's a database, the name reinforces that knowledge forever. Good luck remembering what "fluffnutz" does in 6 months.
Sonic hedgehog is a terrible example this case. Researchers literally had to tell parents their children had mutations in the "sonic hedgehog gene." The scientific community recognized this was a problem and it's a widely-known controversy. It's cited as an example of bad naming in medical ethics discussions.
Boaty McBoatface? officials overrode the vote to name it after David Attenborough. The actual research submarine got the joke name. Again, this proves my point.
Fat Gary was an internal chip designation that never needed to be public-facing. Perfectly fine.
"Names are only for distinct identification" if efficiency was not at a question. Why use worse identifiers when better ones cost the same?
