domain:asteriskmag.com
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside)
TIL. I find that there is something deeply ironic about a subreddit on Wikipedia. Like if I learned that Linux devs had weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams.
Only that I see only a single post which is meta ("how do I appeal a ban?"), while most other posts are simply "look at this cool WP article I found", so it is more like a bunch of Ubuntu users having a weekly Teams meeting.
scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach
I wish you would not do that. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." If we allow that kind of metaphor, we will also get "he went after her as fast as a Catholic priest would go after the altar boy" or "as stupid as a green card Trump supporter".
I agree that communism might seem to be defined circularly, and at times might be, but the same can be said of of the Christian claim that god is good.
Nor is it likely that any moral philosophy will fare much better. Personally, I am an utilitarian, but if someone goes "On a rather fundamental level, all matter seems to be made out of a few fundamental particles. Why should one configuration of these particles be better or worse than another one? You speak of utils, but so far these are so hypothetical that they make phonons look like real particles by comparison. Do you propose that we build an orphan collider to try to produce a few non-virtual utils, like we did with the Higgs?" then it is very unlikely that I will find an argument to convince them.
Of course, since the early 1900s communism has a bit of a "No True Scotsman" problem on top of that.
You claim that this circular reasoning something related to being on the autism spectrum? Do you have any citation for that? Or is posting on a text-enabled website like reddit instead of tiktok sufficient proof of autism these days? Did the APA update the DSM-5 again?
I think that with the fall of the USSR, most orthodox commies went the way of the dodo, mostly. In 1970 in Europe, you could definitely get laid if you signaled knowledge and support of communism. The texts people wrote about it were probably longer than what you would find on reddit, but I do not see how this is an argument that commies were less autistic. Today, Stephenie Meyer is probably inspiring more tokens of fanfiction per day than the work of Karl Marx.
I think that besides the fact that unlike Twillight, the dictatorship of the poletariat has been tried and found wanting, another reason is that the principal victim class for which communism claims to speak are no longer very sympathetic. In the times of Marx and Luxemburg, all you had to do to convince your friends of the worthiness of the cause was to take a stroll through the working class quarters.
But capitalism had mostly solved these extremely unpleasant side effects of the industrial revolution, at least in the first world. A member of the working class who has a TV set and uses it to watch Fox News is no longer someone who a saloon communist could mistake as a victim of capitalist oppression.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos). Victims of colonization. Of course, unlike Marx, they have much less of a master plan, a grand strategy, a theory of victory.
If affirmative action leads to equal outcomes, then historical wrong has been righted. If it does not lead to equal outcomes, then the historical wrong is even larger than previously thought and we need to put our hand on the scales even more.
But they are also much totally compatible with capitalism. Companies can cheaply signal their guilt and repentance by doing a few land acknowledgements, participating in pride month and hiring a few DEI candidates.
For the record, I think that they are less convincing an ideology than communism. In 1900, a communist could have appealed to my utilitarianism, pointed to the misery of the working class and convinced me that Marx's plan was better than ending up in a world where 1% own most of the stuff. By contrast, it seems pretty clear to me that from a utilitarian point of view, the optimal answer to racial discrimination is color blindness. And contrary to SJ, I still care about the overall distribution of wealth (because the utility a person can get out of it is roughly logarithmic, so one billionaire and 999 people without savings seems worse than 1000 millionaires). I mean, history shows that "murder all the rich people and take their stuff" goes extremely poorly, but I am convinced that we could raise the maximum income tax without stepping onto a slippery slope which ends with gulags.
You’re just spewing nonsense and buzzwords instead of making an argument, and then pivoting between different items of nonsense when challenged. It’s not a “grasping claim”, elections have been cancelled, elections remain cancelled for the foreseeable future, and no one from the State Department seems unhappy with that. Which makes my original claim way way way up at the top of the stack, before you started your pony express Gish Gallup, still entirely valid.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11hr ago
I’m really tempted to argue against your points on the merits, but I think it’s more important to talk about the rules. Particularly this one.
If you have to make up an imaginary hypothetical paraphrase for someone, that should be a warning sign. It should make you wonder if you’re getting things quite right. It’s certainly not a good reason to pivot into general-purpose bashing session.
This post looks a lot more like waging the culture war than understanding it.
Shrike
11hr ago
Please don't blame GWOT expenditures on the inability of the USAF to manage the budget projections of its aircraft development and production.
Not just aircraft - ships, fighting vehicles, helicopters, tanks and artillery projects were killed or trimmed down during the relevant time-frame. I agree that DoD development retardation is a thing, but I don't believe you can spend $8 trillion and fight a 20-year unconventional war and not have it impact your ability to fight a conventional war, both in terms of procurement and in terms of troop training.
If nothing else, the DoD shifted and pursued procurement programs that were very useful in the GWOT but of dubious utility in a hot war (drones being a big example).
Shrike
11hr ago
My point is that I don't think we, or the Taiwanese, are going to do this.
I agree. We should not rely on brinksmanship to deter China.
One nice thing for Taiwan is that it's very unlikely that "quickly" is in the cards, just based on how the island is. I guess there could be some kind of coup situation.
I think air assault is an underrated scenario (unironically: look at how well this worked for the Russians!), but I agree that a Chinese blockade is probably more likely.
But it won't be meaningfully done by taking our support away from Israel and/or Ukraine. It's not like we balance our defense budget.
Every Standard and Patriot missile we launch off in support of Israel and/or Ukraine is one we do not have stockpiled for a fight with China (and after how we've been moving around worldwide 155mm shell stockpiles for Ukraine, don't try to tell me those stockpiles aren't fungible! They are!)
I actually from a purely pragmatic perspective support some degree of stress-testing weapons, so I am less inclined to view limited battlefield expenditures as a waste. If we use 10 to improve the effectiveness of the other 1000 by 10%, it is clearly worth the cost. But you can't pretend like the weapons we are firing off now aren't relevant to a Pacific fight.
If the US committed to really fucking Russia over by giving Ukraine every edge we could then that's the strongest way to deter China because we are demonstrating capacity, will, and competence.
I mean - if the US should go full commitment for Ukraine, then by the same token it probably shouldn't screw around at all, we should just give Taiwan nukes. (Frankly, I trust the Taiwanese with them much more than the Ukrainians!)
DradisPing
11hr ago
So in an effort to update my skills and move in on the AI hype I've been doing a MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration project.
I couldn't think of a useful and functional project to do, so I'm building an api into Minecraft and integrating it with Claude Desktop.
So far it's pretty fun. The limits of Claude have been interesting.
There must of have been a huge amount of work fine tuning models to get them to work with images.
I assumed it would be able to complex shape generation by reading a region into a 3d array and modifying it. Claude seems to have a lot of problems manipulating a big chunk of json data like that.
I asked it to generate a small house in front of me, and this is what it gave me: https://imgur.com/a/CDNKm7K
Also it was behind me. It seems to have a lot of trouble understanding the direction I'm facing. There might be a problem with the data I'm sending.
It seems to handle the more simple tasks I built primitives for well. Creating cuboids of a block type, messaging players, finding players, spawning creatures.
Lately I've been trying to Dockerize it for easy deploy. I'm not all that experienced with Java so it's been an adventure. Or Docker really, there must be easier ways to debug Docker failures than what I've been doing.
I'm looking forward to doing a deploy and terrorizing my friends with AI commands. I see potential for it in twitch streams.
Longer term I'd like to introduce some features for better building generation. I kind of assumed that the currently available tools would be more advanced given how fast everything else seems to move. But after reading up on Model Synthesis and Wave Function Collapse it seems like it'll be a ton of work to get anything working.
I can probably get it to spawn in things from .structure files, but that's much more limited than what I was hoping for.
I fully understand how cosmically unfair it seems to rightists that Hitler and Stalin can kill masses of people on the same order of magnitude but only the latter gets a pass because supposedly his end goal is the virtuous one (and you can't at all relate to this assessment of it, leading you to conclude that it must be a wordcel conspiracy), but to that I can only respond, git gud.
Ha, this reminds me of the most recent Jubilee video where Mehdi Hasan "debated" "20 Far-Right Conservatives". The kid at 22:10 has apparently been fired for proclaiming himself a fascist. I bet he wishes he was a Stalinist now!
Sure, "git gud", but the Nazis have a permanent debuff in the form of the post-WWII liberal order. The aspiring Nazi can't just go on Jubilee and plead his case in economic terms like the communist; they're saddled with rationalizing racism, deporting non-whites, anti-semitism. They have to actually sit down in front of Mehdi Hasan and tell him to his face, "You're not American (or English, whatever) and you will never be. Our countries should violently expel the third worlders and we're gonna start with you, Mr. Hasan".
On net, Jubilee is probably doing society a favor by exposing Twitter anons to the wider population. When confronted, they sputter, awkwardly fidget like Connor Estelle, and most everyone watching dismisses them. Though in fairness, the online racist community almost certainly has better representatives than these folx.
somethingsomething
11hr ago
I feel like your last point is basically the social safety net and pro-union wing of the left (and now right?). In that respect we already do have a lot of pushback against pure capitalism in a practical sense, and a lot of it came from socialist strains.
gattsuru
12hr ago
I'd expect a lot of capabilities to be hidden, so that we can't guess about what the actual capabilities are...
((and to be fair to Skydio, this does look like it's intended as a scout rather than a kamikaze. And the cost comparison is probably doing an invoice vs cost-of-parts comparison.))
But I'd also had hoped that the United States military did enough that the stuff it does release looks a little more impressive; if you don't present anything it's clear you're hiding something. There should at least be some hobby-level projects around, but as a hobby-level project this is the sorta thing I'd expect to see from the CtrlPew crowd on a weekend rather than a dedicated engineer on a summer.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
12hr ago
Increasing efficiency is still pretty close to a primary goal, though.
Pretty close? Is there anything closer?
You may have an answer, or you may not. It's fine to say you're not sure.
develop tech as close to immortality as you can, then go travel around to see all you can see that's out there.
Wouldn't this just be the sort of pursuit of pleasure/leisure that you've been criticizing? Or do you not see it that way?
As I asked, what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
I'm much more interested in the way you think about value than the way you think about Marxism.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
You may not believe or understand why I wouldn't put a given act past multiple different actors. That is your limitation, not evidence of either my position or of culpability. This sort of (inaccurate) mind-reading and incredulity of alternatives is why we disagree about who the serious people are.
No_one
12hr ago
Would you believe Russian theories about some silly yacht and I dunno, Serbians if their warships were observed lurking over a future bomb site ? No, you wouldn't. You can't expect anyone to believe these paper-thin denial and deflections.
I'm very curious on your original assertion, that Ukrainians as a class are bitter on the US forcing them into fighting Russia, when they had no hope and it has gone so badly for them - taking half a million deaths in the process, such that suggesting Ukraine is right to fight and America is right to help them would therefore earn you their hatred. To me that sounds the same probability as "I'm Johnny Walker, from Texas Oblast, and I think that the USA is stupid to provoke the mighty Russian bear" as a being a genuine statement on US citizen's views on foreign policy - that's the inglourious basterds three fingers meme right there on every level. It's just... Russian signaling all the way through. Are you sure these are Ukrainians?
But to be fair, you also asked me a question. These warhawks have been fighting, have family fighting, and broadly support conscription when I asked them, though there was some discussions about draft dodging. Maybe they are foolish or p-zombies, but I myself am British, and so there's something very impressive about people paying a price and are willing to pay it to go fuck you to a fucked up bully even as others think you're foolish (1939-41 were our best and worst years). I do note they've done a lot better than anyone expected, aren't done yet, and have proven that even Russia can really bleed, they've done magnificently. I don't think of them as sheep or conformist, possibly to a fault - one issue of cossacks is they can be like herding cats, but they certainly have a common enemy today (even if they want Zelensky out tomorrow).
Maybe sober reality will make them regret their actions, but honestly, I think the fact Ukraine made itself into a very unwelcome meal for Russia is unlikely to be regretted, and they are proud so far of what their country has done (which includes rolling over the 4th Guards tank div, which is one of the funniest things to have happened to a power that claims to be super in a very very long time, imagine if a US armored division was routed in the Gulf war and their tanks captured to a degree that the Iraqi army could restock vs pre war, the T-80U is now on the endangered species list).
Finally, and this is utterly vital to stress, they also clearly have their own agency. Ukraine chose this, for better or for worse.
I like the fuckers, it's vibes for me, and I think while this is hard pounding, they may well pound the longest. I think it would be good if they do.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
12hr ago
Is there a way to quantify "use value"? If not, this seems to be a rhetorical trick. Why would I care about a notion of value that exists simply to win arguments about communism?
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
We strongly disagree on who serious people are, so that's not surprising.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
You are doing the motte-and-bailey language game again, where you make grasping claims you'll walk back when challenged. We could do that point noting what has changed in the last 75 years, or in the last year, and so on. We can do it with different types of relationships, or even what different terms for government mean.
Really, though, it just goes back to the hyperagency bias. Keep on keeping on with it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
12hr ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
Please keep it civil, and make your points without the personal attacks.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
12hr ago
Yougov: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Worst_World_Leaders_poll_results.pdf
68% have an unfavorable view of Stalin, with only 26% undecided (a subset of which presumably have not heard of him).
Edit: stefferi beat me to it.
Arnaud
12hr ago
the ancient Christians, who steamrolled over the strength-is-beauty-is-justice pagan ethos of Rome, did not need mustache-twirling wordcels in high places berating anyone on their behalf to gain followers, nor did the French Revolution with its cries for égalité.
I'm going to take issue with both examples here, both nascent Christianity and especially the French Revolution had wordy intellectuals at the hearts of their movements. Robespierre wasn't just selling like, vibes man.
FtttG
12hr ago
My second draft is well underway. So far I've cut out 18% of the first draft, representing over 15k words - more, actually, as while cutting I've been adding in some details as I go. Would love to have the second draft ready by the end of the month, but it may not be until the end of the first week of August.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
12hr ago
You know, I floated that by the wife, and she wasn't a fan. These were really for her, so she gets them how she wants them.
But man, it was fun flexing some craftmanship on those back slots. Used a spacer to make sure they were exactly 24" on center apart to match the studs they'd attach to. Outlined the brackets with a marking knife, hogged out the middle with a router, and then finished up with a freshly sharpened chisel. Was a perfect fit. Probably couldn't slide a playing card in there.
Edawayac_Tosscount
12hr ago
I assent to everything you said, albeit without any of the prerequisite expertise to give me proper knowledge. In short, and I hope this does not do your piece a rhetorical disservice, I vibe with it.
I've dealt with the products of the current AI paradigm as a mere enthusiast, watching 4chan /g/ threads from about 2021 and onward, looking on with both excitement and disappointment as text and imagegen models, though both increasingly easy to deploy in reduced scope on consumer hardware and increasingly capable when developed and hosted by professionals, nonetheless retained epistemic and recollective issues that, while capable of being papered over with judicious use of the context window and ever-more training data processing power and storage, nonetheless gave me the impression that there was a fundamental kink in the underlying implementation of mainstream "AI" that would prevent that implementation from ever achieving the messianic (or demonic, or, at the very least, economic) hopes foisted onto it.
That said, I'm provisionally materialist, so barring me becoming convinced of the human soul I don't see why in principle software couldn't achieve incredible intelligence, either by your definition of it or in some more nebulous sense. I'm just thoroughly disappointed by the hopes piled onto (and consumer software & web services tainted by) the current "AI" bandwagon.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
12hr ago
Noted.
It hardly even counted as a "mod"; I think I just edited two numbers in an ASCII file.
I loved it when game companies didn't even bother compressing their text. As a kid I replaced all my Civ 1 Civilopedia entries with my own bad-imitation-of-Dave-Barry-style humor just for the hell of it.
If I was actually any good at modding, I'd have figured out how to get 5 to penalize doom stacks (something like the bombardment area-of-effect damage mechanic in SMAC?) without outright forbidding stacking. I still like 5 best overall, it's better than every other version in almost every way, but that one awful change nearly outweighs all the rest.
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