What about the “Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices” that somebody linked above? Not sure if it’s the same as the “1996 Geneva Amendments” you mention, but both Ukraine and Russia are listed as signatories, and the language does seem to me to cover this exact situation:

Article 7
Prohibitions on the Use of booby-traps and other devices

1. Without prejudice to the rules of international applicable in armed conflict relating to treachery and perfidy, it is prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps and other devices which are any way attached to or associated with:
   (a) internationally recognized protective emblems, signs or signals;
   …
   (d) medical facilities, medical equipment, medical supplies or medical transportation;

It says “medical supplies”, without reference to humanitarian aid, and clearly stressing in “any way associated with”. A “red cross” is also a recognized emblem. I can appreciate how “humanitarian aid” can be narrowly defined as medical supplies under direct control and chain-of-custody of the Red Cross Organization and doesn’t apply to random medkits. But I can’t see how this language above would not apply.

Or is it the case that this would be a crime, committed during war, but not a war crime? How does that work? Does it have to be a violation of a specific Geneva Convention® version to count as a war crime, and not just any UN war-related convention?

Only because it’s English and the model is already trained on a large corpus of English text, so it has some idea of what a “table row” is for example. It could learn the concept from reading assembly code from scratch, it would just take longer. Hell, even Lego bricks can be trained on! https://avalovelace1.github.io/LegoGPT/

Our system tokenizes a LEGO design into a sequence of text tokens, ordered in a raster-scan manner from bottom to top. … At inference time, LegoGPT generates LEGO designs incrementally by predicting one brick at a time given a text prompt.

Language is language. To an LLM, English is as good as Java is as good as machine code to train on. I like to imagine if we suddenly uncovered a library of books left over from ancient aliens, we could train an LLM on it (as long as the symbols themselves are legible), and it would generate stories in the alien language that would sound correct to the aliens, even though the alien world and alien life are completely unknown and incomprehensible to us.

was executed was allegedly executed

Modern journalism sucks. Can’t use affirmative voice for anything. Everything is “alleged” this and “sources say” that. Even with a concluded court case that has found proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt - the fairest way that we as a humanity have settled on for determining the truth or falsehood of questions like this - they still won’t say the words.

12:30 AM GMT 🤡

In a world gone mad, posting a map of the Gulf of Mexico is a revolutionary act.

I know you are just nitpicking on whether the current dictatorship has an official policy to deport American citizens, but I want to clarify, for the benefit of anyone else who might not be aware of this, that the American government has in fact already deported multiple American citizens by mistake. This GAO investation found that while ICE doesn’t keep track of such stats, based on the data that is available it must report that indeed “ICE and CBP took enforcement actions against some U.S. citizens.” The numbers are in the hundreds-arrests-per-year range, and dozens-per-year deportations. There are many interviews in the press with American citizens who say they were illegally detained or deported. Some Americans had to sneak back across the border after being illegally deported. Many Americans sued and won settlements for their illegal deportations, so now it is official court record that such events happened.

This is not just a matter of ambiguity, cases of “who can really know whether that person was a citizen or not”. These are cases where CBP has been clearly negligent, where the victims had been able to procure for display real birth certificates, real passports, and the agents wouldn’t look at them. The court-appointed lawyers would “lose” the documents and claim none were received in front of the judge, or there would not even be court hearings at all, just deportations. When sued later, no one would take responsibility, no one reprimanded, just settlements paid out. Sometimes the CBP would get sued, receive a court judgement affirming that the victim was a citizen who was unlawfully deported, then ignore the judgement and deport them again. This has all already happened… under past administrations. The implication is that the willful negligence under the current one will not get better.