If it were only that, but traditionally 3rd party candidates are all the rage 2 weeks before the US elections, and then the day after the elections they’re gone from the discourse, and you’ll hear nothing about them for the next 4 years.

If you like black metal, Praznina and The Stone are amazing Serbian bands. Praznina’s 2023 album “Čovek koji Nije” is one of my all time favourites

As Kropotkin wrote to Lenin in 1920

It would seem that the soviets should have served precisely this function of creating an organisation from below. But Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and taking over of the people by the ‘party’, that’s is, predominantly the newcomers (the ideological communists are more in the urban centres), has already destroyed the influences and constructive energy of this promising institution – the soviets. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in Russia. And their organization suffers from the defects of bureaucratic organisation.

Yeah this happened once during the 2020 July protests in Serbia. As we walked, we passed a WW2 memorial and the guy leading the group took a moment to stop, comment on it and chant “death to fascism” a few times. Then out of the blue two guys started yelling “death to communism”.

To be fair, “death to fascism, freedom to the people” is a communist slogan known by everyone from ex-Yugoslavia, but getting triggered by someone disavowing fascism right next to a statue that shows how fascists murdered civilians in raids in your own city is… worrying.

Great article! I agree that the left needs to better present its vision to the world, both as a concrete political proposal, as well as in general popular culture, things like art and stories that show the future.

I’m not sure if this is a thing already, but maybe monthly events could be organized here for reading and discussing specific solarpunk novels, competitions on creating solarpunk art etc? It would be one way to strenghten a specific image of the community that could be used to manifest ourselves to the world.

We’re back!!!

I also learned that from this post

Seconded! And unlike DDG (based in the US), Qwant is in the EU

Seriously. For some people cooking, baking, sewing, cleaning, doing the dishes, laundry are all for women and not “manly”. A “manly man” is then someone who cannot take care of himself at all and needs a mother/nanny substitute his whole life just to survive. And that’s somehow “strong”???

I stopped running with music when I ran a half marathon once and about 17km in I just started getting annoyed by it. I’m out there dying, and some asshole is screaming into my ears.

Idk, I enjoy running by itself. I ran a full marathon without music and didn’t get bored once. I’d either just enjoy myself, think about random stuff, look around me, play music / sing in my mind etc. But to each their own I guess.

The guy is a nazi in his own words. Or rather, he wrote that he stopped considering himself a nazi because he doesn’t agree that Slavs are subhumans, only the other groups.

Though Filosofem is soooo good. It really sucks that some of the best music was made by some of the worst people.

It was actually quite an interesting discovery that Newton’s first law, the way it’s usually repeated, was written in Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan”, which was published when Newton was around 8 years old.

I forced myself through the first two seasons, and it turned out to be my favourite series, same happened to a friend. The show massively improves in season 3.

We just call him “cat”

Yes! There are normal types that just grow straight up, but I really liked these braided ones. Makes me wonder how many cool plants you can end up with when you shape them during growth.

I memorized 100 digits some years ago using physical memory. I would type the digits of pi on the numpad and memorize the movements of my hand, how it feels and which button goes when by position. Then when I would have to recite it, I’d imagine a numpad, move my hand and just say the number that corresponds to the imaginary button I’m pressing.

Don’t know if that could work for 70k digits though

I think the idea behind the graph was to make it look like blood flowing, but the execution was… not the best

PPS: also, if you just study a lot of STEM in college, your views on humanities may still be atrocious, like elonstans.

This was very depressing to learn. I know a lot of software engineers, some of them PhD students, who are really smart and clever people, able to abstract concepts, form connections in thought, recall relevant information and make intelligent conclusions every day. And then they say things like masks don’t do anything during COVID, the vaccines don’t work, Russia is defending itself, the wokes are oppressing everyone and destroying everything etc. It’s almost impressive to see someone seemingly intelligent act like the lowest Trump supporter with certain topics like someone just flipped a switch.

I still cannot come to terms with the fact that people find it completely normal that modern civilization rests on a handful of companies. If Google, Microsoft and Meta were to disappear tomorrow, half the planet would collapse given how many completely depend on their infrastructure. This by itself should be enough to induce a mania of local development and decentralized structures, but alas.

This was partly explored in Erich Fromm’s work “Escape from Freedom” and “The Anatomy of Human Destruction”, but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.

Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it’s a symptom that something’s terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don’t display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.

Image recognition depends on the amount of resources you can offer for your system. There are traditional methods of feature extractions like edge detection, histogram of oriented gradients and viola-jones, but the best performers are all convolutional neural networks.

While the term can be up for debate, you cannot separate these cases and things like LLMs and image generators, they are the same field. Generative models try to capture the distribution of the data, whereas discriminitive models try to capture the distribution of labels given the data. Unlike traditional programming, you do not directly encode a sequence of steps that manipulate data into what you want as a result, but instead you try to recover the distributions based on the data you have, and then you use the model you have made in new situations.

And generative and discriminative/diagnostic paradigms are not mutually exclusive either, one is often used to improve the other.

I understand that people are angry with the aggressive marketing and find that LLMs and image generators do not remotely live up to the hype (I myself don’t use them), but extending that feeling to the entire field to the point where people say that they “loathe machine learning” (which as a sentence makes as much sense as saying that you loathe the euclidean algorithm) is unjustified, just like limiting the term AI to a single digit use cases of an entire family of solutions.