Well, the good thing about Jerboa is that anyone can just make changes to it and send them to the devs, so now that more people are using Lemmy, it will improve really quickly!

His logic is not unreasonable, but a few complaints from my side if that’s okay:

• Russia would not be able to make significant territorial gains anyway, and Putin seems to be aware of this. He has repeatedly stated that Russia is in great disadvantage against the West and that his country is fighting for its existence, rather than to expand its already large territory.
• Ukraine being militarily favorable to the West is indeed a threat to Russia, and in fact an existential one. Putin would be really stupid to let that threat develop, so the smart course of action here is the one he is taking. This has occurred multiple times in the past with other countries; e.g. the Cuban missile crisis is a prime example.
• The Donbass war started in 2014 after the Ukrainian government was overthrown. Citizens overwhelmingly voted for a supposedly pro-Russian Zelenskyy to end this situation. So I doubt joining NATO or fighting Russia at all would be their desire. In fact, some territories under Russian control voted to join Russia.
• A peace deal with Russia is a practical way to end the destruction Scholz is talking about. If this is not an option, then the argument against it must be something different from the destruction itself.
• Imperialism is an economic concept, not a territorial one. Very slightly expanding your country’s territory is not imperialism.
• Finally, US officials admitted both that they had been preparing for this war and that they expected Ukraine to attack first, meaning that the conflict was bound to occur regardless of Putin’s actions.

My guess is, we should support whoever makes our revolutionary task easier. According to Lenin, anti-imperialism does exactly that, and according to Mao, we should join forces even with reactionaries if that serves the Revolution, provided we don’t let them influence us.

No, they are acting in self interest. Just like everyone else. Every player is incentivized to join the strongest player if they can.

Basically, RISCV itself is open source, but it’s just a specification. Actual processor designs implementing it are usually not open source.

Theoretically current RISCV boards are not fully open since the processor itself is not. That might or might not matter to you, but you can always use an FPGA board. Anyway, hmu for anything, it’s nice to help with projects as a community :)

So, they were… trolling? Spreading their pro-China… opinions? Which constitutes a… “secret police station”? (???)

AI is just dirty cheap intellectual labor. If you are not concerned about people hiring other people to do x (post comments, whatever), then you should only be slightly concerned about AI making that orders of magnitude more feasible to do.

https://the-federation.info/

Click ‘active last month’, either for the whole Fediverse or after selecting a platform from the list.

Seems like China is starting to challenge the US at their own game… Interesting to see where this is going.

As AI evolves, its behavior is progressively entering the realm of normal inter-individual variability among humans. Solutions like this will eventually fail catastrophically, provided they are not already failing.

You’re right, Lemmy does the job :)

The issue with debate is that it’s an inherently hard problem. Every platform tries to solve it in a different way (voting consensus, etc.). I think federation would help prevent platform-introduced biases.

You are absolutely right… I posted a while ago about a solid-state lab project I was working on. I made pretty large steps towards that, but I eventually realized that it would only make a difference if I could leverage the latest technology. So I’ve spent the last months working on a smaller-scale project (a very low-cost ultrasound imaging machine) and finally I’m starting to see some tangible results; I will build and present the final prototype in collaboration with my university, but the important thing here is that I’m getting both experience and reputation, plus I’m convincing a friend (an engineering lab researcher) to join an eventual, larger-scale, solid-state lab project. The idea is not to get “something that works and is open source”, as it was before, but to research cutting-edge technology.

Well, a lot of stuff I’d say. For example:

• A federated structured debate platform.
• A (good) biochemical pathway simulator.
• Open-source ASIC design automation tools.
• Software to help research on diplomacy/politics via game theory.
• More cool games why not!

Lmao I used to do that too.

Thank you!

I can’t access the site, sorry.

I hope they ship all the ASML EUVL machines. The US is just fucking over the entire world at this point.

Yes, I never use DDG to search for stuff about Russia, but otherwise seems fine. Search results involving China are pretty negative, but I’d say that’s because widely visited English-language websites are. In fact, the Quora page gives a pretty positive view of academia in China.

Try this

Hi, sorry for not responding earlier. You seem to be very knowledgeable. I was trained in ethics as part of my medical training, so the extent of my knowledge may not be as great as yours. Anyway, these are the specific pieces of knowledge I was invoking:

• Ethics only applies to entities with free will. I don’t believe countries have free will since they act in a deterministic fashion.
• Ethics deals with principles that must be upheld. These principles include not causing harm, acting for the benefit of others, etc. I understand that these principles are the main mechanism for making choices.
• In the paradigm I was trained on, ethics only states what one should do, and doesn’t deal with punishment.
• A nexus of causality transfers responsibility. I believe there is a nexus of causality when any deterministic process is involved.

So, my point is that this specific situation must not be resolved by you stated means since:

• Here, punishment is incompatible with seeking the good of others.
• Since countries are deterministic, ethics doesn’t apply to them.
• Since countries are deterministic, even if ethics were to apply, responsibility is transferred (e.g., since I know 100% sure how a country will respond to my actions, I am triggering their response as much as them).

Maybe. But my point was that

1. Countries aren’t subject to any actual laws enforced by an authority beyond themselves or more powerful countries.
2. The behavior of a country approaches an ideal, homogeneous benefit-seeking entity better than a person.

So the legal dynamics between countries are very different from those between people.

Heck, I’m not strong in English… Okay, what about “a country is not a person”?

Thank you! I eventually found out about the AI-generated pictures. I know it’s weird on my part to listen to libs like that, but they always turn out wrong, so whatever… In this case I was pointing out that, even if what the webpage said was right, they weren’t claiming anything special.

Yeah, we’ve all studied ethics. Ethics (no matter if you believe it’s inherent to reality or a useful construct) acts in two scenarios:

• If the individual follows it, it makes them act in a way that serves society.
• It allows to create laws that apply to all individuals for everyone’s good.

Ethics doesn’t state that “you should punish others when they act contrarily to ethics”. That’s law. And the reason it punishes people is because that discourages them from acting in that way again. Free will, if you wish.

Now, at the international scale there are no real laws. Implementation of laws depends on the ability of individual countries to enforce them, for their own interests. If we could create laws that affected every country, then yes, we could simply model these laws after ethics. But we can’t.

So, in the example I gave you, suppose you are a citizen of country #2. I already stated that the best course of action for your country would be to side with country #5. But then, since you believe you should punish that country because it acted unethically, you will push your government to side with #1 instead. You tried to enforce laws that didn’t exist, and now you’ve acted against your best interests.

The mistake here is that ethics doesn’t deal with punishment. Punishment is specified by laws, seeking the best interest of society. But the best course of action here was not to punish, yet your instinct led you the wrong way.

I’ll clarify then. You’re assuming individual ethics apply to large groups of people, which disregards the reason why those ethics exist in the first place. They exist at the individual level as an “acceptable” set of behaviors to discourage behaviors outside it. There are two important differences between individuals and countries:

• Individuals differ in their willingness to do harm or good, while for very large groups these differences simply disappear in every case. As I mentioned, every country acts for their own good, and if they do good it’s simply because that’s what it’s most useful to them at the moment. I.e. ethics do not offer meaningful judgements at that scale.
• Individuals are overseen by governments, while countries are not. This means it’s impossible to reward or punish actors from outside the system, and any rules are created and enforced by the actors themselves. I.e. ethics do not offer any utility at that scale.

For these two reasons, ethics do not make sense at an international scale. I’ll illustrate with an example:

There are 5 people. 4 of them make an agreement to beat up the 5th. This person learns of the plot against them and decides to attack each of the others separately, one by one, by just waiting outside their homes.

In this case, the 5th person should have simply called the police. What they did was unacceptable, since they attacked first, thus escalating the conflict.

However, at an international scale, things change dramatically. There is no police, so there’s just country #5, presented with a choice: either do nothing and get beaten up, or attack first. Did they act right or wrong? Well, it doesn’t matter, since there’s no way to change the result. The country will always choose the second option, and, furthermore, the other 4 countries will know damn well what #5 will do. In fact, they will not plot against it unless they think they are going to win in every scenario.

Now, imagine this happens, and country #5 has already attacked country #4. Now, the remaining 3 would be able to beat up #5. But let’s say #2 and #3 decide to side with #5 and beat #1; maybe in that situation they would suffer less losses, get better profits, etc. But in this case it’s in the best interest of #1 to oppose #5, and thus to keep #2 and #3 on its side, so it decides to convince the people on those two countries to hate on #5. Now they can’t side with it, since they would face backlash, so they need to co-operate with #1.

While a purely ethical analysis only concludes that ‘#5 attacked #4’ (which doesn’t provide any useful course of action), the more useful benefit analysis affords that #1 has managed to obtain the highest benefit, by manipulating #2 and #3 and capitalizing on conflict between #4 and #5. The useful course of action would have been for #2 and #3 to side with #5.

This isn’t about ethics. Countries are not people, they only act in their own interest with exactly zero regard for anything else. Russia attacked Ukraine because it was the least bad option for them (Ukraine joining NATO would be very bad for them), and the US imposes sanctions because it is also the best possible move, and now they can do it without facing backlash. And that includes propaganda if necessary, on both sides.

The point I’m trying to defend is that manipulating the public’s opinion is part of the global dynamic, and everyone should be aware of, and oppose it, to get what THEY want, rather than what the large-scale political chaos imposes on them. You seem to agree on that, so that’s great, I don’t see the need for further debate.

But why Russia specifically? You can only demonize yourself or your enemies, and Russia is the enemy here.

In October 2020, the already finished script for the third season […]

On September 10, 2021, Karl Urban confirmed that the season officially wrapped filming.

Here, if you look for the word ‘Russia’ it appears in 5 out of 8 episodes. They literally infiltrate a Russian facility, where the Russians appear as the antagonists, plus Russian characters act in other vile ways in the plot.

I can think of new media that vilifies Russia. For example, The Boys.

This is great news! I had read elsewhere that Chevron would not pay taxes or even for the oil itself (which seemed pretty unlikely), but I see it’s simply a propagandistic narrative and they are indeed going to pay.

Wonderful read as always, I love Cory Doctorow’s essays.

Thanks for the sources, I find this one particularly interesting. I’ll need to look into it more carefully, since we already know there’s a great deal of manipulation around this issue.

Edit: tl;dr: “we have extremely hard evidence that the Chinese authorities are putting people in prison for breaking the law”.

I’d say I can do it on purpose, but not always.

Well, I can trigger a similar response by contracting specific muscles. The feeling is pretty similar, but it typically starts in the upper back and goes up to the scalp, not the opposite.

Theoretically, yes. Speech-to-text + text-to-speech does exactly what you need, so at least it is possible. There are probably more sophisticated ways to do it, but of course, even your language, pauses, etc. could be fingerprinted in theory, so…

If I find bugs that affect me or want to add features, I can tackle that myself and send them the patches. I’ve already done this to great extent with LibreOffice and Avogadro 2, plus some small contributions to other programs.

I know a few friends that unfortunately suffered this. They are now in very bad mental health and have issues with intimacy, socializing and whatnot. I’d say this post is distasteful at best…