There are Jewish communities within Iran, yes. But peacefully?

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/2025-06-27/ty-... (archive: https://archive.is/0qEg9)

One could blame this crackdown on Israel, sure. But that absolves the countries perpetuating persecution of Jews from their own share of responsibility in it. After all, when the American Government interned all those Japanese-Americans - did we blame Japan for it, or did we rightfully blame the American government?

I do not seek to defend Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, but to say that the Jews live "peacefully and with dignity" in places where they often are scapegoated, persecuted, and killed out of hand is not the way. Look at what happened to the Jewish populations of the region between the 40s and now, and you will see a grim picture of persecution, killings, and exodus.

nettanyahu has tried to bribe iranian jews to come to israel. they've chosen not to so I can't imagine its that bad for them there. additionally, iranian jews have positionsof power in government and mandated representation. it would be a very easy argument to make that iranian jews in iran are treated much better than non jewish palestinians have ever been treated in israel.

While most Iranian Jews left Iran and are currently in Israel, 200k compared to 9k left in Iran, so the numbers don't really support your statement

source?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Jews

" In July 2007, Iran's Jewish community rejected financial emigration incentives to leave Iran. Offers ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 British pounds, financed by a wealthy expatriate Jew with the support of the Israeli government, were turned down by Iran's Jewish leaders.[90][106][107] To place the incentives in perspective, the sums offered were up to 3 times or more than the average annual income for an Iranian.[108] However, in late 2007 at least forty Iranian Jews accepted financial incentives offered by Jewish charities for immigrating to Israel.[109]"

Israel literally bombed their own jews in Iraq to force them to relocate to israel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bo...

“Those who assign responsibility for the bombings to an Israeli or Iraqi Zionist underground movement suggest the motive was to encourage Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel.”

You’re stating a supposition as a fact.

Frankly? I think this is a whole mix of things. There isn't a "real" reason, there's a smorgasbord of them.

Why do "FAANG"s RTO? Because they're massive people-movers, and cities that host them likely hold C-level meetings to pressure RTO so that people spend more money. More on transport, more on food, more on coffee, more consumption = more taxes = more movement = growing value to office spaces = win for the cities. Not to mention that managers at these corporations are pretty wealthy themselves, and likely hold investments that would depreciate were WFH to continue in any great scale.

Why do smaller companies RTO? Because what works for FAANGs surely works for them, too. Literally. I've seen multiple managers push for RTO because the big tech leaders are doing it. Add that a certain 'magical' belief that RTO means more productivity and an enriching 'office culture' where new profitable ideas brew - they're all only human, after all, and are as prone to magical thinking without any concrete evidence as we all are - and you've got perfectly good reasons. And mostly irrational from a business PoV.

Is this the case for literally everyone pushing for RTO? Of course not, I'm sure there are legitimate reasons there, but most of the justifications I've heard, as a huge advocate for WFH who always seeks to understand pro-RTO management, have little basis on evidence that it is something good for the business.

> cities that host them likely hold C-level meetings to pressure RTO so that people spend more money

They don't pressure them, they give them tax breaks. But besides this you're on point.

This is already the expectation from our leaders. It is the belief of a good % of EU leaders that, if Russia were to push into Poland and the Baltic states, and Article 5 was invoked, the US would not respond. Or at least not without some Versailles Treaty-level extortion, as they're trying to do with Ukraine.

Could we not - for the sake of argument here - surmise that, since these AIs need prompts, and usually a few rounds of refinement, and then a selection for uploading to (in this case) YouTube, that the -human- in charge of prompting/refinement/uploading has a point of view, an opinion, an aesthetic preference, emotions?

After all, there are artists that collate "samples" from other artists and produce music from all those different samples. They did not play any instrument, they merely arranged and modified these samples into a product that they presumably find pleasing.

>I predict we’ll see other vendors removing similar bonehead “features” very very quietly over the next few months.

If indeed this happens, I'd hail this event as a victory overall; but industry experience tells me that most of those companies will say "it'd never happen with us, we're a lot more careful", and keep doing what they're doing.

>the EU government, as well as our own, wants to eliminate encryption, VPNs or add back doors into systems to some degree.

This is a continuous concern - some sectors of the EU indeed want to do that. So far, they've been mostly unsuccessful in getting their agenda through, either because other politicians have more influence, or due to listening to public protest/complaints. Still, that's no different than other healthy democracies - the people must vote, both in national elections (EU heads of state propose the European Commission's president to the Parliament), and European elections (who elect said Parliament) in order to keep reasonable people at the helm as much as possible.

I believe "code" here is being used in the sense that you retrieve YouTube (the website - made of code) with the intent of watching X video. But you don't want some parts of YouTube's code (the bits that display ads) to run on your machine.

One could argue that you should, indeed, have the right to block whatever parts of YouTube's 'code' from running on your machine. Currently, this is the case.

It is an unfortunate reality of how the Internet is built.

There's quite a few people like you, that are fine with self-hosted analytics, either because you believe the principles of the websites you visit, or because you've done so-called "good" analytics, and so disable that kind of blocking, hoping your trust won't be abused.

Problem is, some of us don't believe those principles hold, and/or have seen people doing vacuum-style analytics. I've listened to conversations of otherwise well-intentioned devs who are otherwise anti-ads and anti-unnecessary data collection ask for more data to be collected in analytics because "we might need it". Leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. So I block it all - what I can, of course. If they find ways around it that I can't block, at least I've done my best.

When was it not? Telemetry - the act of collecting logs/"metrics" and reporting them back to a remote (tele) station - how could this not be considered telemetry?

It has only been called that recently in the context of software.

Edit: have been doing software since the mid-nineties. You can downvote all you want, but this is a more recent usage.

Actually the name for it previously was spyware or the act of spying. The term telemetry is/was more neutral, but it also has a bad reputation by now (euphemism treadmill).

It's called "spyware" when you don't trust the collector to be acting in good faith.

Used to be that transmitting data about what the user's doing without asking for permission was "spyware" automatically—that it was happening behind your back was already a sign of bad faith.

The opt-in thing is fine, but some of us are still stuck, I guess, on older standards for software ethics, and find it entirely unacceptable and alarming that opt-out was ever proposed in the first place, about as bad as if they'd proposed adding an opt-out bitcoin miner to it to help fund the project—it's disturbing they'd consider that OK to even propose.