Sometimes things that look very different actually are represented with similar vectors in latent space.
When that happens to us it "feels like" intuition; something you can't really put a finger on and might require work to put into a form that can be transferred to another human that has a different mental model
I used to think like you. There is some deeply human in seeking basic justice that even small children have strong reactions even for the minor perceived injustices, let alone for serious stuff.
However when your survival is at stake (and the survival of your own kind and culture) people often stop giving a damn about who was right and who was wrong and they just try to defend themselves.
Many people understand this when the people defending themselves are Palestinians, and somehow are able to forgive senseless violence that they do, all because "they are in the right".
But somehow they cannot imagine that Israeli Jews are living for a long time in a genuine existential threat. Many people just think that all those Jews who live in Israel should just go back where they came from. That's obviously impossible since many fled countries where they didn't feel safe.
It's hard to understand the determination to fight for having just a normal life. We can't understand this because most people in the world have a "nation" a "fatherland" a place where they don't get butchered just because they belong to a given race or speak with an accent or have a long nose.
The situation is not symmetrical at all. Arabs can live in Israel. Arab citizens are not discriminated, there are Arab doctors, Arab justices, Arab members of the parlament. 20% of the Israeli citizens are Arab Muslims.
Israel is the multicultural democratic state that everybody claims to want Palestine to be. Jews need Israel to exist because they need a state that will protect them and not be at the whims of whatever populist government will turn their neighbors against (as it happened many times in many places, not only in Germany)
And yes, Israel did do many crimes directly and indirectly and has mistreated Palestinians in many cases.
But you have to put things in context. Arabs never accepted the Palestinian state and fought with several wars. Which they lost.
These kind of stuff happened many times in history, even recent history. Many borders were redrawen even in Europe and people were displaced. None of that is a good thing for people who suffered it
But Arabs did something that nobody else did for quite a long time: they engaged in a holy war, using suicide bombings and having an utter disregard for their own lives and the lives of their own children, all in the name of martyrdom. This ideology is very hard to fight. Japanese lost and surrendered, Germans lost and surrendered. Palestinian lost and kept blowing up people and making their own women and children dangerous. This increased the tension and created the condition for security checks and a kind of apartheid.
But this can be solved, if only Arabs stopped demanding the destruction of Israel. Of course, Israel cannot accept laying down their arms and letting them be butchered.
There is truth in the quote: if Palestinians laid down their arms there will be peace, if Israelis laid down their arms there would be genocide.
This seems like a crazy statement but this happens every single time Israel lowers their guard.
The only reason Israeli Jews are not dead is because they are efficient at defending themselves.
They are constantly bombed but they blow the rockets out of the air. They have shelters.
That's why there are so few dead Jews. Not for lack of trying on the Arab side.
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So what is the right thing to do in this case?
Saying "Israel shouldn't have been created in 48 so they are and they always been colonizers so now they just have to go away"?
How can this be reasonable solution? We're talking about millions of people who are born there for a few generations now.
Deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways (and I'd add: engineering things so that you can better deal with things going sideways) was always the limiting factor.
Sure, writing code was slower before the agentic coder era, but as people coded their understanding of what they coded grew with them while coding and that allowed people to make informed decisions on what to do next and how to fix things when they go sideways.
By replacing the human who writes code with an agent that does it but faster doesn't necessarily improve the speed of the overall process by the same amount. Some of the time saved in producing code is simply shifted elsewhere: to reading, validating, and reconstructing the understanding that previously emerged naturally while writing. If the human still needs a sufficiently deep mental model of the system in order to make correct decisions, diagnose failures, and decide what to do next, then that understanding must be acquired one way or another. When it no longer forms incrementally during the act of coding, it has to be rebuilt after the fact, often under worse conditions and with less context. In that sense, the apparent speedup only holds if we ignore the cost of comprehension and review; once those are included, the comparison becomes less about raw code throughput and more about where and how understanding is generated in the process.
Many people understand this tradeoff in general terms. Just like we generally understand the concept of technical debt.
But just as it's very hard to deal with classic technical debt, it will be very hard to counterbalance the short term gains of AI producing endless streams of code
Deportation of illegal immigrants happened in the previous administrations and nothing like the current chaos unfolded.
I grant that some people protesting against the raids are likely doing that because they don't want illegals to be deported,
but I suspect most of the pushback is against the way this whole thing has been set up and the way agents handled the encounters with protesters so far, leading towards a spiral of distrust and a polarization of the issue.
There seems to be an indication that many of the ICE agents have been insufficiently trained to perform police work in a proper and safe way. and instead behave very aggressively. The abuse of racial profiling is making non-white citizens (including native Americans!) feel unsafe too. To make things worse, there is a loud group of people who are cheering the though guys from the sidelines/armchairs.
People who share those concerns are not necessarily pro-illegal immigration. I know things can be done differently because they have been done differently.
But in this case, one political movement is leveraging the deportation rhetoric to rile up their base, providing another political movement the ammonito to call them tyrannical and riling up their base, which in turn causes the first movement to justify their aggressiveness as counterinsurgence.
This doesn't lead to a good place and it has nothing to do with the fact that the country deserves a sane immigration policy.
The current immigration situation is utterly broken, but it has become such over time (and has many complicated facets) but the idea that this can be fixed in a haste by applying lunt force is the product of a new low point in politics.
Don't worry. This will create the demand for even more powerful models that are able to untangle the mess created by previous models.
Once we realize the kind of mess _those_ models created, well, we'll need even more capable models.
It's a variation on the theme of Kernighan insight about the more "clever" you are while coding the harder it will be to debug.
EDIT: Simplicity is a way out but it's hard under normal circumstances, now with this kind of pressure to ship fast because the colleague with the AI chimp can outperform you, aiming at simplicity will require some widespread understanding
I like implementing this standard gRPC interface (of I already have a gRPC based project) because it allows me to reuse a troubleshooting utility I wrote that uses it:
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