You’ll probably have better luck regarding history and theory of communes on hexbear’s anarchism communities.

There have been many attempts at something like networks of self-organised communes, even before Marxism and Anarchism were coined.

In colonial Brazil, self-sustaining and self-governed communities called Quilombos were created as an alternative to the Atlantic trade slave-society imposed by the Europeans. As far as I’ve read they often organised themselves in federations with regards to war but were self-contained with regards to their own economy. Not sure what’s a good English source, but Clovis Moura is the best Portuguese one.

Over time, with the consolidation of colonial (and eventually Brazilian) authority, the settlements were either wiped out or relegated to the margins of society. The few that remain today are constantly under judicial and criminal attack.

Other two more recent examples of federated autonomous communities would be the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Mexico, which recently got dissolved and the Shining Path (and following splinter groups) occupation of Peruvian territories.

Do note that all of the provided examples had to deal with the constant threat of organised violence, be it from the state or from organised crime.

Going back to Brazil, two other examples of communes would be some of the communities defended by the Landless’s Workers Movements (which is less militant and more legalist) or the armed League of Poor Peasants (which, surprise surprise, was created as a reaction to brutal state suppression).

Given all that, I don’t believe communes can be seen as “safer” or “more peaceful” ways of building towards socialism or fighting imperialism. They have a role to play (even under capitalism) and are objectively good in many cases, but they’re still going to be in the crosshairs of imperialism.

Wherever alternatives to imperialism (and therefore capitalism) present themselves, they must be brutally destroyed and made an example of. This is probably paraphrasing a few dozen Marxists and also a couple Secretaries of State.

In all its bloody triumphs over the self-sacrificing champions of a new and better society, that nefarious civilization, based upon the enslavement of labor, drowns the moans of its victims in a hue-and-cry of calumny, reverberated by a world-wide echo. The serene working men’s Paris of the Commune is suddenly changed into a pandemonium by the bloodhounds of “order.”

And what does this tremendous change prove to the bourgeois mind of all countries? Why, that the Commune has conspired against civilization! The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers unequally in any battle known to history. What does that prove? Why, that the Commune was not the people’s own government but the usurpation of a handful of criminals! The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution. What does this prove? Why, that the demon of the Commune has changed them into Megaera and Hecates!

The Civil War in France

It’s very low effort and low reward praxis. Kinda like reposting stuff about rallies or from organisations to your friends, it is useful and probably not detrimental, but be careful not to fall into “consumer praxis” pitfall of liking, sharing and subscribing to Second Thought and being satisfied with only that.

If you have some green areas near you try climbing trees. It’s a pretty weird hobby and you can start with what feels like humiliating small steps (climbing a hip-height branch). But it’s a great way for getting a different and closer appreciation for nature and also of exercising balance and body control rather than just the muscle growth you’d get at the gym.

I also second martial arts, specially more cultural ones like Capoeira, Kung Fu or Karate rather than competition-focused ones like Boxing.

The OECD has some good sources for data and viz on trade, as well as many other topics related to global economics.

https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/trade.html

Just be aware that it’s a liberal institution.

This is an age-old debate (see Luxembourg’s “reform or revolution”).

The Marxist-Leninist line holds that protecting or enhancing the material conditions of the proletariat before the revolution can both increase the number of prospective party-members or militants (i.e. you can’t organise rallies if you’re starving) and gain the confidence of the working class by representing their immediate interests (i.e. protecting workers rights) unlike bourgeois parties.

Smaller more tangible reform fights are also ripe ground for recruitment of militants, as inexperienced comrades can get a lot of first hand experience organising for, for example, solutions for food security (Black Panther Party’s free breakfasts).

However those reforms are means to an end, and that end is revolution. So reforms should not be a one-and-done thing (see the UK’s NHS) but rather a front in heightening class war and highlighting capital as the enemy and their resistance to reform as evidence. I once saw a comment in another Lemmy instance that said something like “we tried to implement public healthcare, but capital resisted too hard so there’s no hope”. That is due to social-democrat and reformist monopoly over the discourse about public healthcare, which needs to be challenged by communists.

The term “class war” is not hyperbole. In a war, you should settle only for defeating your opponent, hopefully forcing them to capitulate or maybe even eradicating them. You don’t take your single victory in a battlefield and pack your bags to go home, that’s the reformist line represented by Jeremy Corbyn and in a more aesthetic sense, Bernie Sanders. But you also don’t wait while your enemy marches into your territory hoping that their cruelty will materialise an uprising to defeat your opponent in a single blow, that is the spontaneists line held by every other Trotskyist splinter party or academicist communists.

Bolsonaro took Brazil out of the Chavez-founded UNASUR in order to join the US-aligned PROSUR (which excludes Venezuela and Bolivia) as soon as he went into office.

Huh, another one for my list of deeply unserious individuals. The text in the screenshot is so bad, at first I thought it was satire. But turns out it was probably written by a discord teenager from some YouTuber’s fanclub.

Their own page describe themselves pretty well, citing a thousand concepts and authors without elaboration or sources, or ever making clear any of their actual positions from either a theoretical or organizative perspective. Bonus points for calling “leftists” “mentally ill”.

But then you click on the page of the “main representative” and it’s an “autodidact” debatebro.

What purging and murdering proper communists over a century does to a country.

Side note: apparently editing their wiki is open, in case actual queer anarchists comrades from hexbear are feeling bored right now.

Edit: also it’s definitely a “me” thing, but I deeply hate how they overwrite the meaning of the already extant word “leftism” in Marxist theory (in short: unpragmactic idealism) with their own, which is just the “globalism” nonsense all over again.

Those actions described in that section are generated by an RL agent, used only for training. For the prediction and therefore results they still either check for aggregate metrics (which must use synthetic data in order to get enough of it), or do the MTurk comparison that generated up to 3 second clips which could in theory be created from real-time user input but since they have corresponding ground-truth frames it must at best be generated from sampled user input from a real gameplay session.

The clips they show on the YouTube video seem to have some interactive input, but the method for creating those is not described in the paper. So I suppose it is possible that there’s some degree of real time user input, but it’s not clear that it is in fact what’s happening there.

As a sidenote: ML researchers should really consider just dropping all the infodumping about their model architecture to an Appendix (or better yet, to runnable code) where they’ll clutter the article less and put in more effort into describing their experimental setups and scrutinizing results. I couldn’t care less about how they used ADAM to train a recurrent CNN on the Graph Laplacean if the experiments are junk or the results do not support the conclusions.

The human rater experiment (IMO the most important one for a human-interfacing software tool) is described from setup to a results in a single paragraph.

GameNGen (pronounced “game engine”)

That’s dumb.

The AI crowd continue to mangle the meaning of words to make their unimpressive work sound “revolutionary”. This isn’t a “game engine”, this is just a model to create plausible video game frames given previous video game frames. A video auto-complete.

At no point in the paper do they mention any human inputs in their experimental setup. They just generate clips, plop it on MTurk and claim “they’re as good as the original.”

From the very beginning of their paper.

Computer games are manually crafted software systems centered around the following game loop: (1) gather user inputs, (2) update the game state, and (3) render it to screen pixels.

Their work neither gathers user input, nor does it keep a game state, it just renders pixels from pixels.

And there’s this noise:

Today, video games are programmed by humans. GameNGen is a proof-of-concept for one part of a new paradigm where games are weights of a neural model, not lines of code.

“It’s all matrix weights”

GameNGen shows that an architecture and model weights exist such that a neural model can effectively run a complex game (DOOM) interactively on existing hardware.

“Effectively run”

While many important questions remain, we are hopeful that this paradigm could have important benefits. For example, the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby games could be developed and edited via textual descriptions or examples images.

Prompt-based games. Thankfully it’ll be cheaper for the poor video game companies (Nvidia subscription fee not included).

Note how nothing that they proposed is even hinted at by their research. They don’t even make the code available, so none of their actual research is verifiable. They just fill their article with incomprehensible jargon about metrics and loss functions so that journalists will just assume they’re really smart and knew what they were doing in order to uncritically report on this.

I propose a better name for the work: “Diffusion Models Are Video Generators”.

That it was an EU ship that came to the rescue isn’t surprising. Despite the EU’s scarce naval resources, they are currently the only ones there. There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. The UK for one brief moment had three. HMS Diamond did some outstanding work as part of OPG but when she left, we left.

There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.

I’m shooting blind as I haven’t looked too deep into how the blockade has impacted global trade, but I think this makes perfect sense for the US.

It isn’t that much further away around the Cape than through the Suez to arrive from the South China Sea to the US east coast, and AFAIK most trade actually happens with the West Coast through the Pacific or through Panama. So higher shipping costs harm Europe much more than they harm the US in this case.

Just like the Ukraine War, sanctions on Russia and China and the Nord Stream, it seems the US is intending using this blockade to cannibalise Europe’s economy even further. Expect another year of negative growth in the EU, specially with China becoming a suitable replacement as a high-tech producer worldwide. They don’t have to go either through Suez or around the Cape in order to ship to a majority of the world’s population.

It seems these European intel agencies are awfully disorganized and disunited. Maybe they should all officially become subsidiaries of the CIA, that’ll help protect Europe. \s

Did some searching, it comes from CIA director William Burns in 2022-03-08, you can see it here. It was actually 2 days.

“His own military’s performance has been largely ineffective,” Burns said of Putin. “Instead of seizing Kyiv within the first two days of the campaign, which is what his plan was premised upon, after nearly two full weeks they still have not been able to fully encircle the city.”

If you go a bit further back, you have “sources” from the CIA already spouting the 2 days line a couple weeks earlier. Here’s an example from the day after the start of the SMO.

US intelligence officials are concerned that Kyiv could fall under Russian control within days, according to two sources familiar with the latest intelligence.

It goes like this, US Intel are worried it could happen -> report it as Putin hinging his whole plan on it happening -> if it happens it’s because it was a massive gamble and “unfair” in some way, if it doesn’t happen it was an utter failure and Putin threw away his whole country.

A week later, business insider reports it as though Russia failed in the war and practically lost, and actually, it’s Russian intelligence which is bad for wrongly predicting their victory. Which the US intel also predicted. Go figure.

Narrative created. Consent manufactured. Redditor fooled.

P.S.: is there a Ukrainian civil war megathread I could read and contribute to somewhere? It’s fun to look up these little lies but it’s been 2 years now and there’s just too much stuff to hold on one’s head.

Rising rents coupled with high borrowing costs and low wage growth have hit some especially hard. “Lower income households are not keeping up,” Goldman said. “Everything looks great but when you look beneath the surface, the disparity between the wealthy and nonwealthy is widening dramatically.”

Everything is great, you’re just poor. Have you tried not being poor?

We’re in a “vibecession,” Joyce Chang, JPMorgan’s chair of global research, said at the CNBC Financial Advisor Summit in May.

Apparently somebody is saying that. From JPMorgan. Do with that what you will.

In July Mr Putin doubled the federal bonus for those signing up to fight from 195,000 roubles ($2,200) to 400,000 roubles, which regional authorities are supposed to top up. The government is committing vast sums on compensation to the families of those killed in action. And Russia’s splurge goes beyond war-related spending. Mr Putin is lavishing money on welfare payments: in June he raised pensions for some recipients by close to 10%. The government is also spending big on infrastructure, including a highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg, two cities 450 miles (729km) apart. Indeed, it is spending on pretty much whatever takes its fancy. Mikhail Mishustin, the prime minister, recently boasted about a government scheme to pay for children to holiday in Crimea.

“Lavishing” on pensions. Imagine trying to paint that as a bad thing. Wonder how Yankees feel when they find out that the country they’re blowing hundreds of billions on to wage useless wars has free healthcare too.

Not sure about a “smile in your death bed” but there are roles for anyone to play in a revolution. Most people can’t have the energy (or free time) of a Lenin or Mao, but you can still join an union, party or other kind of organisation and do as much work as you’re able to from there.

Thankfully I’m able to help out in minor ways like that, to the best of my limited capabilities.

Although I don’t think this is going to change the result (Trump is still going to win, USA will remain a stagnant imperialist country), it’s going to be very fun watching the chaos unfold within the blue party.

It’s not even clear if Kamala is actually going to be selected candidate. As entertainment, I love it.

Browsing reactionary spaces, seems they’re trying to brew the theory that the secret service purposefully let this happen, or though sheer incompetence. Wait a week and they’ll start saying the secret service was compromised by Biden.

Really funny seeing the in-fighting between the “civility and democracy” libs and the “trump is the worst thing since Hitler” libs right now.