Explosive Media, known in Persian as Akhbar Enfejari, has denied it is backed by the Iranian government and its videos have reached millions of viewers across a range of social media platforms.

Speaking to the BBC, the head of Explosive Media, who referred to himself as “Mr Explosive”, said his team consisted of fewer than 10 people and that the Iranian government was a “customer” of his company.

NGL, confusing article. Not even sure why it would matter?

Here’s a screenshot of the archived tweet, if that helps:

Not the cheapest I’ve seen, but for the amount of bed and foundation work that looks like it required it sounds like a pretty reasonable rate. Decent looking roundabout, 7.5/10, could use connections and some landscaping in the island. Better signage, too.

Under the definitions laid out in the IHL, which are taken directly from Geneva Convention Protocol 1, they were not hors de combat. This was a shameful, cowardly act - but it was not a war crime.

color revolution

Oh god.

Lying about fuckin’ everything? Agreed.

It’s exactly the same - someone is changing the signage without knowing what they’re doing. I don’t think he should be harshly punished in this case, especially if he’s right, but this also isn’t at all different from someone fucking with the speed limit signs because they feel they know best. That person may also be right - that doesn’t mean they should be able to make those changes.

Ah, I understand. Thank you.

That’s a decent example of what I’ve been saying - basing a conclusion like that on the wording of an uncited press statement is pretty spurious. There simply may have been more reasons and this was judged the easiest to explain (which happens frequently), and without more information we simply aren’t equipped to make an informed judgement. Much as he wasn’t when he made the initial decision, but admittedly we’re facing far less severe consequences for being wrong.

even the traffic engineers agreed that a stop sign was an appropriate treatment for this intersection when they rejected it on the basis that the traffic volume wasn’t high enough to warrant installing one

I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here.

Sure! And if improvement is warranted hopefully this will bring enough attention that it gets reevaluated. But that all said, even if he was right, being arrested for it is warranted. Hopefully he was right and as a result he’s not punished, but if the only requirement for infrastructure changes was community complaint there would be no speed limits and the bones of traffic engineers would hang from every street light.

With respect, you have no idea if that’s true.

Traffic engineering is an actual science - what he did was extremely well-meaning, but it’s also the pavement equivalent of alternative medicine. Sometimes you’re right, but even if you nail the diagnosis most of the time you’re so ignorant you don’t even understand the potential harm you’re doing in brewing up your own treatment. It is very possible that his traffic revisions have made the area less safe for pedestrians by shifting traffic congestion onto surrounding roads with worse sightlines and higher non-motor vehicle traffic, or simply increasing baseline congestion at this already busy intersection.

As much as this case might have been justified (which we just don’t know without the traffic study), condoning random people fucking with street signage is a terrible idea. There are very good reasons not to randomly change traffic patterns, especially outside of a popular park; fuckcars, but also vigilante traffic engineering is an insanely dangerous game to play. If this brings attention to it and they reevaluate, well done this traffic martyr. But he absolutely should have been arrested for this, if only to prevent a precedent for people who decide to “fix” other traffic issues.

Anyone got a link to the leaks? Would love to know what he spends his time emailing about instead of doing his job

You’re not missing anything, the article is a wild misrepresentation of how nation-state finances work. This piece is pretty transparently pro-austerity/conservative funding bill propaganda.

Yeah, and that tendency is directly addressed in the policy.

Like, say, a candle?

Spelling/grammar checking and machine translation have been in use for decades on wikipedia, the only difference is that AI has improved the usefulness of the tools for first-pass editing. I don’t believe the policy has even changed - you still had to be fluent in the language if you were using the old style MTL tools, too.

Aside from generating videos of young girls with gigantic titties, this is the only thing generative AI is actually useful for.

I can’t tell if you think investigating this is a good or bad thing

Dear sweet jesus, what just happened.

You literally use the word “stupid” to characterize my arguments, I don’t… know how you could possibly be denying that.