AlbigensianGhoul

I haven't read the book yet, but Cockshott seems pretty active on twitter. You could probably hit him up with questions either through twitter or his university email, and I bet he'd be more than willing to give you some pointers for reading material.

Regarding the neural network, could the whole thing be represented by a linear regression? I'm shooting blind here, but depending on the complexity of your project you could use simpler but easier models that do what the neural net is supposed to do.

I'm not very knowledgeable about either country, but I'm not sure if there's any benefit in the Russian state having better control of businesses and the economy, if the workers have no control over the state. Maybe it'll be more efficient, but I don't see how that efficiency will be directed at people's needs.

And I hope Putin only dies/retires after NATO is no longer a threat. There's no country Westerners want to destroy and dismantle as much as Russia, and a shaky transition might be too much.

It never stops, but I've managed to accept it over time. Some things are mildly joyful, relationships, pets, some specific foodstuffs.

But overall they're kinda like a very diluted juice. I'm not going to give advice because my way of dealing with it is probably not the best one, but once I got used to it, life became somewhat bearable.

Like eating bland food that you know is going to maintain you alive. Or more accurately, like doing that horribly boring job because you know other people need it a lot.

The foreign secretary, David Cameron, is finishing a trip to the Middle East, in a diplomatic bid to reduce tensions as the Israeli bombardment of Gaza continues.

I think it's safe to assume tensions will continue. Somebody should float him the idea for a Isrexit referendum.

No matter how "valued" an industry makes you feel while training you when they have a worker deficit, they'll discard you like shit once you're replaceable or no longer useful.

Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon. They don't build shit. They buy, consolidate and then lay off. It's always like this.

I recommend UltimMC, though the server will need to have "online-mode" set to off, which will disable Mojang server validation and present some security vulnerabilities.

I've only seen this accusation used in the extremely liberal sections of Reddit or our friendly lib instances.

It doesn't really feel like an efficient way to derail a conversation in text: you say something, the person responds asking for a source; either 1) you reply with the source or 2) you don't and the conversation dies.

Compare that with "Just Asking Questions", which can quickly frame complex issues in unstated but obvious ways that usually pander to preconceptions or even conspiracy theories. Those need to be directly confronted (or banned) every time and can easily pass as curious cluenessless.

But irl it can be very annoying. Imagine having a conversation where the person asks you to cite the source of every remark like you're a walking academic article. Dealt with a Trotskyist fake leftist fucko who once even wanted me to cite the Kinsey-scale paper after I offhandedly mentioned it while talking about my bisexual living experiences.

Edit: but libs hate both this and JAQing because they have no actual sources and can't properly answer those questions without sounding reactionary themselves.

Milei was now doing precisely the same, Farage believed. “But he’s doing it on a scale that is almost beyond anyone’s thinking … This is Thatcherism on steroids.”

Can somebody check on Thatchers grave? I think she got out again.

https://youtube.com/shorts/IP6TRajtTfM

Hope this fucker gets removed and removed, with a dash of removed removed. In Minecraft.

Difference is we only "got rid" of Bolsonaro through waiting out on bourgeois electoral and judicial procedures.

This is much bigger, a national strike right at the beginning of his term. I'd say this is a masterclass in what we should've done with Bolsonaro right away and avoided national disgraces like hundreds of thousands of dead to COVID.

I recognize most of these from Srsly wrong, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you found them there. I liked HES which I got from there, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more good stuff, if not the most marxist. This additional review will increase its priority for me.

I never listened to that, but I'll probably browse their stuff to gather more reading material. I sadly don't have much time for podcasts nowadays.

We do have a couple books communities, they’re just dead. Before Makan got banned for uncritically supporting CPUSA he held frequent threads for people to talk about books they’re reading.

I might post some reviews of books as I read them there when I can manage. "Internet Con" as been living rent free in my mind for some months now and I need to get it out.

It takes a lot of effort, but it's really hard to find English-language modern books that don't devote a small section for denouncing "authoritarian dictatorships" at some point, with very vague accusations and scant evidence. I'm not sure if it's just them covering their asses from being called "tankies", or some publisher-mandated insertion, but it's usually small enough that I can ignore it.

But I try to never fully trust a book. If I want to cite some fact from them I usually do a little bit of independent research to make sure that what they were saying holds up.

I wouldn't say that the "slog" books are bad, they're just aiming at a different audience or historical moment. "What is to be done?" was written mostly as a critique of the political movements at the time, and it lays down a lot of the groundwork in Lenin's Democratic Centralism and more of his party organisation philosophy. Just like Capital, it's more the sort of book that you have to study, rather than a book that you'll "enjoy" reading, for the lack of a better word.

Although I haven't read his books yet, Richard D. Wolff seems to be similar to Parenti in style, so they might be good reads.

But on the thread topic, I'll list some of the books I've read or listened to for the past couple months:

• Bullshit Jobs

  • Talks about the psychic harm of working a job that you know to be useless for society. A lot. Wholeheartedly recommend.

• People's Republic of Walmart:

  • Intuitive but a bit shallow exploration of the popular myth that "planning fails, free markets succeed", analysing cases of "planned" monopolies like Walmart, "democratic planning" like the Cybersyn Project, another corporation I can't remember the name and even some portions of the USSR.
  • It's a nice book, the writing style is familiar without being too weird, even if the authors do a significant amount of "Stalin Bad" in one chapter.

• Chokepoint Capitalism:

  • Basically Cory Doctorow independently discovers the concept of finance capital, in his weird socio-liberal tech enthusiast way. He is a pretty good writer, so it's a joyful ride, and he mostly focuses on how Big Techs manage to fuck over both their workers, their consumers and their smaller corporate clients through fraud, regulatory capture, "anti-competitive practices" and more.
  • Random "China Bad" moments, but if you literally replace "China" with "The USA" while reading the sentences actually make a lot of sense. Don't get this as an audiobook, the narrator is bad.

• The Internet Con: Cory Doctorow again, but now he focuses on actions and policies that could slow down if not push back those internet corporations.

  • First he elaborates a lot on how monopoly capitalism is not unique to Big Techs (he is learning), then he talks about how those corporations would actually incredibly fragile if not for legal frameworks like copyright, DRM Protection (not the DRM itself), and other anti-reverse-engineering legislation.
  • He talks a lot about how he believe that forcing those corporations' services to accept being made compatible (as in, make it clearly not illegal to create stuff like invidious or nitter) will severely hamper their control in internet spaces. He also talks a bit about the fediverse, and I've been meaning to write a review about the book somewhere here on that front.
  • He narrates this one himself, so the audiobook is actually good.

• Debt: The First 5000 years

  • I haven't finished this one, but David Graeber (late author of Bullshit Jobs) does a general survey on the anthropological perspective of pre-capitalist and non-capitalist economies. He talks a lot about the myth of "barter societies", and how it's an ahistorical economist invention, describing how multiple cultures from Europe, Asia, Africa and America (both current and in the past) organised their process of distributing their production in ways that dealt a lot with the concept of debt.
  • It's a very long book, but worth a read if you want a more critical perspective on historical economies.
  • At one point he redefines communism as sort of a vibe, like "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs", in order to show how such solidarity-based cultural practices are about as much if not more present in human cultures than competition and individuality. I don't really like the method, but at least he's doing it with good intentions.

• Weapons of Math Distruction:

  • It's surprisingly a bit outdated due to being from before the "Data [Pseudo-]Science" fad, but still holds up. The author explores how mathematical models are used as ways for large organisations to wash their hands off of responsibilities, institutionalise discrimination in invisible and impossible-to-audit forms, or just generally make essential parts of society worse for profit.
  • Mostly she frames the narratives through people who have been "wrongly" negatively affected by those models, like teachers under Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act", every single person during the 2008 crisis, black people due to discrimination through proxy variables for race, and so on.
  • The "wrongly" aspect of the book really irked me, as she often uses language to imply that the issue is just things like "denying mortgage loans" being discriminatory, not that there are people or models in charge of denying people housing or other essential material needs in the first place.
  • She sadly doesn't get into the nitty-gritty of the maths.

• Hundred Years War on Palestine

  • Didn't actually get too far on this one yet, but so far I really "enjoyed" it. Documents the war on Palestine, often with first-hand accounts since the very beginning of the Zionist Project.

Why doesn't lemmygrad have a "books" community? I reckon we could be having weekly or monthly threads like these.