The Art Of Not Asking Why

I wanted to get a quick update on what changed and what’s new on the Micro.blog, and I went directly to see the @numericcitizen video from a couple of days ago. He has a list on YouTube with summaries. Very helpful. I love the added features!

An excellent exposing piece by Samantha Cole of 404 media shows (with several screenshots from internal Slack communications and spreadsheets) how Nvidia is currently scraping YouTube copyrighted video to train their own AI model.

This is for paid subscribers only, and I say again, 404 Media is worth every penny if you care about these things.

Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI 404media.co

Yesterday, I finally published a post that had become a mental block. At this point it’s been in my drafts for over two weeks, very much against the “rules” I put up. I was aware of this, but at the same time I had to get it out of my system.

I went to a local cafe shop I know, got myself a too-sweet-for-me pistachio late and a dry muffin, and went to work. I didn’t let myself get off the chair until I hit the Post button. The piece still needs work and probably has several typos and such, being as long as it is, but it was at the point where I wasn’t able to read it when I looked at it; my brain half-memorized the sentences at that point.

With that, I hope to go back to a couple of other things I wanted to write about. Most of all, I want to go back to the quicker posts that I’ve been enjoying writing for a while now.

The following was hard to write - and this is an understatement. It will probably be difficult to read, also. If you don’t want to read about feelings of war and trauma or the situation in the Middle East overall, please don’t. You don’t need to.

Like an ant on a tree, I started climbing on a different branch after the events of October 7th, 2023, or “Black Saturday,” as Israeli media dubbed it. I didn’t know it back then, as the change was too slow and too big to grasp. It’s only now that I reflect on what I wrote and what I talked to people around me about since then, over a period of months, that I understand I’m not the same person.

Up until that day, my life in Israel was the past, and my life in the US was the present. Most of my family members are still in Israel: my father, my aunts, my cousins, a few friends, and many memories. The life I left there was of a different person, someone who didn’t just speak a different language but also lived in a different culture, had different beliefs and values, and had different kinds of friends. It was another life.

I’m jumping ahead of myself here, but it seems like a good place to mention that many of my values and beliefs conflict with my past life and with Israel in general. I grew apart from that, and while I miss some people and part of the culture, I feel this is a healthy distance for me overall.

Past and present collide

What Black Saturday did was create a wormhole that brought past me into the present. The separation line melted away, and with it, the familiarity and stability of my reality here in the US. I felt I existed in two places at once, both past and present. It’s hard to describe and exhausting to remember. Most of all, I hated being dragged into this confusing mind mess without a choice or a say in the matter.

To understand how something like this happens, let me share a memory with you. Let me take you back to The Gulf War.

I am 11. My sister, my mom, and I are sitting on the floor in my sister’s room. This room, the smallest in our apartment with only one window, was the dedicated “sealed room”: it’s a room sealed with sheets of plastic, duck tape, and wet towels under the door to create makeshift protection against chemical weapons. At the time, everyone in Israel had one.

The Air-raid sirens in the background, a wave pattern of ups and downs, were reflected in my mom’s heavy breathing. She reminded me of a terrified animal. I couldn’t see her eyes since they were behind a gas mask; mine were too, and so was my sister’s, with additional plastic covering meant to protect younger children from gas. My mom slowly worked the panic-menaced logic in her mind, thinking out loud if she should inject me and my sister with Atropine. Atropine came in plastic single-use syringes, which were meant to be used if we were infected by nerve gas. It is not meant to use as a preventative; the side effects can be really nasty.

Fortunately, we managed to talk my mom down, and Saddam Hussein “only” launched explosive warheads with his Scuds into Israel. But the memory remains, and with it, the feeling of total helplessness when all you can do is to sit, trapped in a room, and do absolutely nothing while missiles explode around you and shake the windows of your home.

I have this memory and a few others, but I’ll save you from those. The reason I’m bringing this up is to set up the stage for the reaction to such severe helplessness. The reaction is what I (and I believe many Israelis and Palestinians) would call “survival mode.” It’s when the planning and stargazing part of your brain shuts down to a narrow tunnel vision of what’s happening right now, this moment. Once this happens to you as a result of an event like I discussed above, this can happen again from time to time out of the blue. It’s not a matter of choice. It happens out of reflex. I discussed this in a previous post, and at the time, I wondered why I was reflecting on it. Well, here’s the answer. Mind’s working in mysterious ways and all of that.

Fear is the mind killer

A couple of days after Black Saturday, an entire country full of people switched into survival mode after the initial shock. What Hamas did that day was not something I can put into words, but I can still feel it. My family over there felt it. And the other survivors of families near Gaza, who were slaughtered in ways even animals aren’t butchered, felt it. Let me emphasize that I am not capable of feeling or even having a taste of what those survivors went through. I believe the human brain shields us from such things with denial and other methods to protect us from going insane, which some of these people probably did. All I go by is a hunch of a feeling.

For days and weeks after black Saturday, a whole country reacted out of a narrow tunnel vision of the need to survive. There was nothing else; no plan, no strategy, and no revenge. There was just a boiling, overwhelming rage and pain.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much thinking since then. No long-term plan and no strategy. The whole thing reminds me of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq on a smaller scale. But we’ll get there.

I was here, in New York City, when the demonstrations started, when people on the left - my left, my people - started chanting a slogan that came directly from the mouths of Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and other such terrorist organization who wanted to exterminate the Jews since 1948 onward. I don’t think (or I don’t want to think) people knew what they were saying exactly. I understand the point, and I understand what they were trying to achieve, but the extreme demonstrators’ actions pushed me away toward the right. I did not want my opinions to change, just as I didn’t want my Israeli past to come back, but sometimes life punches you in the face for a wake-up call.

Despite all I felt and what I still feel, I understand. I wish I hadn’t, and I wish I could just be “pro-Israel” or whatever. It would simplify things. But I simply cannot accept what’s going on to Palestinians today, in Palatine, in their own homes, when bombs fall around them, and their windows are shaking, thinking if the next explosion is going to be the last sound they’ll ever hear. And this is something that drives me further away from friends and family who lean more toward Israel. I know a few Israelis like me, and most of them have left Israel for similar reasons I’m happy to be where I am today. I don’t think there are many of us.

What Hamas did is one thing, and Israel’s immediate reaction is something I still support. But we are almost a year into this mess, with no end in sight and just more bloodshed, most of which belongs to people who have no choice but to stand in the way of IDF’s bombs.

This is where I want to stop for now. I understand this is a sensitive topic for many people. Thank you for reading.

This is potentially huge if it means Google will no longer be able to practice its search advertising policies. The waves from this will affect how we search the internet and bleed into AI capabilities.

Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance | CNN Business

The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly'

and:

Specifically, Google’s exclusive deals with Apple and other key players in the mobile ecosystem were anticompetitive

Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance | CNN Business cnn.com

October 19, 2023. I’m sketching an amulet my mom brought me from her last visit to Israel about a year prior in my journal. My head is heavy with thoughts.

The page describes a feeling that I had a hard time pointing down for a couple of days because it was too big to grasp: Fear. The heavy kind that smothers you slowly with its irrationality. The amulet’s sketch is of a shield of David, which I have hanging on my doorknob.

I’m not a religious person and never was. There was a time in my life when the thought of wearing anything religion-oriented would make me scoff. Over the years in the US, as I taught Hebrew to children in a synagogue, I learned that religion has shades. Not all religious folks are necessarily hard-headed Orthodox who can be distinguished by what they wear. Jews come in all shapes and colors, and I’ve learned that I can be Jewish to a certain degree without showing for it if I don’t want to. With time, I just learned to accept it as part of my past, and through that, a part of who I am today.

And so, on the 19th, for the first time in my life, I was scared of simply being who I am. Scared of being Jewish in the US, of all places. The absurdity of the situation was so pronounced that it alone was what made me realize that what I feel is not normal, at least not me. I took some time looking into space after I wrote in the journal, needing my thoughts to settle. I was happy I could frame what I was feeling though.

The fear sharpened my identity as a Jewish person and connected me to my past in a way I haven’t in years, possibly ever. To be clear, I didn’t want to be connected: not with being Jewish and not with my Israeli past. These are two things I don’t care too much for in my day-to-day life. After all, there’s a reason I still live here, in the US, and lead a religion-free life. This was a rude and powerful pull, as if I was dragged by my hair, kicking and screaming against my will. I didn’t have a choice. The helplessness of this whole situation hit hard and turned into anger.

What I want to expand on is that anger. But to do so, I have to recognize the fear it came from, a place I will probably revisit as I look deeper and explain what has happened since.

This is part 1 of whatever this is going to be. From here, I went on several tangents. I’m not sure what to write next yet; I just know that I need to do so, which is fine (this I tell myself more than to you). The point is to let it out, at least some of it. We’ll see how it goes.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been writing a long post on what’s been going on in my head since October 7th of last year, and I broke my two blog writing rules:

1. Don’t write a post for more than two full days.
2. Don’t write negative things about other people.

Let me explain first what I mean by these self-imposed rules.

Two full days mean usually two full mornings writing and not being done. I revise my posts and check for typos and grammar before I publish them, but this editing process is not part of “spilling the beans.” When I run out of time writing, I give myself the option to wrap things up the next day (or later in that day if I get the chance), but not to sit down and continue writing a second part.

Why not keep on writing? I found that if I’m not done writing down what I have to say in one sitting, I’m probably never going to publish what I’m writing. I will keep on writing until I forget my point and go into endless tangents or get overwhelmed during the editing part, which takes a decent amount of time, and the whole thing will feel like a chore. This used to happen sometimes with my old blog, and it sucks.

As for saying negative things about people, this is something I picked somewhere else a couple of years back: it’s a positive-karma-enhancing tool and a troll-preventative measure in one. It’s one thing to be grumpy and complain about an idea; it’s another to criticize a group of people (or someone specifically, which is even worse) in a negative light. This can be tricky at times, but usually, it means criticizing the idea a person (or a certain group) is after rather than the individuals themselves.

For my October 7th post, I gave up somewhere around the third day of writing. I was also getting too judgmental of people, and I came across as bitter and negative. The post started to look like the kind of post that makes me stop reading and even stop following a person, at least for a while. These are crazy political times for all of us, after all.

It’s natural that there are a lot of feelings about what happened and what is still happening, and it’s a good thing that I feel like I can talk about it more in length now. But. I must remember my two rules, they are there two help me. So, what can I do when approaching a difficult topic like this one?

For one, I should write one idea at a time without expanding on tangents and related events. For another, if I write about other people, I should focus on how they make me feel, not what they are saying and what I feel they are saying. One is authentic and honest, while the other is negative speculation.

I will try to salvage the big mess of a post I have for parts and see what I come up with. I’m also considering some sort of content warning for people who don’t want to read anything of the sort but still like other stuff I write about.

I gave up on The Last Girl Scout 📚. It started out OK, but it quickly became too “cute” for me with “Sugar” here and “Honey” there every time the two transwomen (which is important to mention in the context of the book) talk to each other. I’m not that kind of person and not that kind of a reader.