Lemmy has a problem where sometimes if you delete posts it sometimes still shows up in certain instances. Deleted a post one and later resposted it only to then realize people could now see both of them.

They got the shortest end of the stick of imperialism. US carried out a genocide against Vietnam, Korea, and Laos. The Japanese also carried out a genocide against the Chinese. The Chinese people started to lose faith in the KMT when it was taken over by Chiang Kai-shek, who started to get close with Nazi Germany who was allied with the Japanese and started to implement fascist policies in China. There is a much greater understanding of the evils of imperialism.

Christianity, which is one of the main material institutions used to propagate reactionary dogma, is also a pretty insignificant material force in Asian countries. The Confucian cultural institutions are much more prevalent. This matters because liberalism just believes the government should protect “individual rights” then remain entirely hands-off. It is therefore not outcome-oriented. If this leads to a horrible society, well, so be it.

Confucianism is very outcome-oriented. It directly argues the purpose of the state should be public interests, to solve problems in society, to serve the public, etc. This is why the KMT fell out of favor. Chinese people thought it was silly that Chiang Kai-shek started to ban certain hairstyles and beat people who didn’t have their hair cut to very specific lengths, when this did nothing to solve real problems in the country like mass hunger and poverty.

There is just, generally speaking, a much greater popularity in Asian countries for outcome-oriented politics. Western politics tends to be more moral-oriented. Take for example COVID-19. The USA did not have serious lockdowns because it would violate the moral principle of individual freedom, so sacrificing over a million people was deemed a worthy price to pay. The Chinese had serious lockdowns and saved the lives of millions, but they were condemned by westerners for doing so, many describing it as Orwellian 1984. Even though the outcome was better, western society is generally not outcome-oriented. The influence of Christianity promotes a good-vs-evil mentality, and so most people think in moralist terms.

The Asian communists also seem to have actually read Marx. A lot of “Marxists” seem to have never read Marx… and this sometimes even applies to those in socialist countries. Many self-proclaimed Marxists simply do not understand historical materialism and that the basis of political power ultimately rests in industry and the production process. Asian communists understood this and internalized it and thus realized if they want real independence as a country they need to develop their own industrial base, and if they want to really improve people’s lives they need to focus on developing productivity.

Marxists outside of Asia have had more of a tendency to think in moralist terms. Socialism for them is more about moral principles, like liberalism’s individual rights, but replaced by “collective rights.” There was a movement like this in China temporarily, the Gang of Four, who implemented policies based on an abstract concept of socialist morality, and this led to economic chaos. When challenged on it, they claimed it was better to be poor than to sacrifice these moralist principles. This caused them to become viewed unfavorably and later ousted from power.

But that mentality was much more persistent outside of Asia, even in other socialist countries.

here’s even evidence for “warm” quantum processing happening within each neuron in the microtubules

No.

Petty bourgeoisie ≠ bourgeoisie. They are best not understood as just the bourgeoisie but slightly smaller, but better understood as essentially a distinct class. The petty bourgeoisie do not necessarily always have class interests aligned with the bourgeoisie. The Manifesto talks about how the petty bourgeoisie may even side with the proletariat at times. It depends upon whether or not they see their future prospects under the capitalist society favorable such that they may grow to become a member of the bourgeoisie, or whether or not they see it as more likely the bourgeoisie will ruin them and they will be hurled into the proletariat. In the latter case, they may find themselves more sympathetic to the proletariat, wanting a social safety net for the workers in anticipation that they may join them soon.

The property relations are also not the same between petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie are either self-employed, meaning their own their own means of production directly, or they run a fairly small business, so there may technically be antagonisms between the socialization of labor and private appropriation, but the antagonisms are very small. There is a reason you sometimes you hear common people talk positively about “mom and pop shops,” because typically with smaller enterprises there is a less of a disconnect between the ownership and the workers so conditions tend to be a bit better than working for a giant faceless megacorporation owned by shareholders who never even stepped foot in the corporation in their lives.

The small scale of petty bourgeoisie property also makes it incapable of being a basis for a socialist society, since a socialist society introduces socialized appropriation on a national scale, so the enterprise must be on a national scale or else the socialist government would be introducing a contradiction between socialized appropriation and private production rather than resolving one. Economic systems aren’t moral ideas written on paper, but real physical machines in the real world, that require real infrastructure and computational technologies to run it, and this will limit the scale in which you can meaningfully operate an enterprise.

If a sector of the economy is dominated by the petty bourgeoisie, it means the technology and infrastructure simply has not advanced enough in that sector to nationalize it. If you nationalize it, you will not physically be capable of operating it on a national scale, which will lead to huge bureaucratic problems if you try to do so anyways. The failure of the government to then plan that sector will cause the spontaneous rise in a black market to resolve the government’s failures, and if you try to then crush that black market by force, you will just be destroying something that came into existence due to your own government’s failures, and thus destroying your own economy.

Small-scale production is simply not the basis for socialist society, and outlawing small-scale production makes zero sense from a Marxian socioeconomic analysis. The proletariat thus can only meaningfully expropriate the property of the bourgeoisie, and then has to focus on encouraging the development of the forces of production, because in the long-run, that will cause much of the petty bourgeoisie to destroy themselves, and the rest to become into the bourgeoisie, which then allows for the gradual extension of that expropriation.

Yes, free lancers and struggling artists are also members of the petty bourgeoisie. That is not an insult because these labels aren’t moral judgements, and it’s not even a declaration that these people are the “enemy,” as, again, the Manifesto points out that the petty bourgeoisie can side with the working class. A self-employed struggling artist might still support working class movements precisely because they are struggling, believing they will likely end up having to get a job in the long-run so they might as well support the proletariat class, and many do. But they also might not, as some might see themselves as just a misunderstood great artist who will one day catch a break and their art will take off, and they will become rich and famous, and because of that belief they could also see their interests as aligned with the bourgeoisie.

The point is just that petty bourgeoisie (1) have their own class interests which are not necessarily aligned with bourgeoisie or proletariat and can side with both depending upon the historical conditions, (2) has a different property form of private production which is too underdeveloped to be the material basis of socialist society as it is distinct from the socialized production of the bourgeoisie, and (3) therefore do not have the same relations to production as either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

It is quite common in capitalist societies for the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie to clash. There are not literally the same class as the bourgeoisie that just happens to be smaller. They are more of a distinct social class. This social class also has a different trajectory to it. The proportion of petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie in capitalist society is always shrinking in proportion to proletariat with the development of the forces of production. But when the petty bourgeoisie’s numbers shrink, it is because they are destroyed by the bourgeoisie, and so in the long-run, all the petty bourgeoisie are doomed to destruction by the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie cannot destroy themselves, at least not entirely. Only the proletariat can end the bourgeoisie as a class. The trajectories of the two classes are thus also different.

Superdeterminism is a bit odd in that it rejects even effective free will, at least in very specific circumstances. Let’s say you set up an experiment where the observer is given the free choice to measure a particle in a particular way. If you were Laplace’s demon and could see the precise state of the initial particle, that information alone would be sufficient to predict the choice the observer will make because they would be guaranteed to be pre-correlated with that value.

It would be like Final Destination where, just by looking at a single variable in a single particle, you would know with absolute certainty what conscious decision the observer would make ahead of time, and all their complex brain chemistry and stuff becomes unnecessary to predict what decision they will make, because you will know with certainty what the orientation of the measurement must be. You could try everything to stop them and change their mind and even fight them, but you’d find yourself entirely unable to change it, because the laws of physics would guarantee the particle would be measured on that particular choice of orientation.

You might be able to get around this by arguing that the these variables are fundamentally unobservable and hidden from us so that you still have effective free will, but then the model becomes pointless. Hossenfelder has suggested she thinks a hidden variable model should be testable and she thinks it may be possible to find patterns in the quantum noise and violations of the Born rule under specific circumstances. If these variables become even partially knowable then even effective free will, at least in certain very contrived circumstances, becomes doomed.

That is kind of the weirdest thing about it.

I’ve been using YouTube since back when they had a 5 star rating system. I’m not sure I’d describe it as “wild” it was just more dominated by smaller creators. The smaller creators still exist there’s just a lot of other content as well so they can be harder to find. I do like plenty of big creators as well. The only thing that particularly annoys me these days if that sometimes if you try to search for things the results are biased in favor of corporate news.

I prefer some basic level of stability and moderation or else things turn into 4chan.

Am the only one who doesn’t want the internet to be a “wild” place?

There is no strong evidence that quantum mechanics plays a direct role in general intelligence, and there are multiple reasons to think it is unnecessary for modeling cognitive processes. In my opinion, the challenge is not classical computation itself but the limitations of the von Neumann architecture. Traditional CPUs operate largely sequentially: instructions are fetched, processed, and stored in a linear fashion. Parallelism can be added through multiple cores or specialized instructions, but scaling this to the level of biological neural networks is extremely difficult.

For example, the AMD EPYC 9654 has 192 logical cores, yet this is tiny compared to the parallelism of the human brain, which has roughly 86 billion neurons, each capable of processing information simultaneously in a massively distributed network. Standard CPU designs simply cannot match this kind of concurrency efficiently.

GPUs can help because they are designed for highly parallel tasks, originally for graphics rendering, which is naturally parallel. Neural network computations map well onto GPU architectures, which is why GPUs accelerate both training and inference. However, this works best when tasks can be fully offloaded to the GPU. It breaks down when you consider real-time, interactive AI. Input from sensors must be collected, preprocessed, and routed by the CPU, and outputs must be translated into actions, using the CPU as a middle-man.

Training and inference on the same model simultaneously is also not practical with this kind of architecture. Current architectures generally require either separate hardware for training and inference or carefully scheduled workflows that switch the GPU between modes, with the CPU orchestrating data movement.

We need a fundamentally different computing paradigm. This would involve processor architectures that integrate massive parallelism directly into the hardware and thus eliminate the CPU-GPU distinction. They would connect inputs and outputs directly to the computational substrate and would be able to carry out in-chip training.

Quantum mechanics is more weird than that. It’s not accurate to say things can be in two states at once, like a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time, or a qubit that is both 0 and 1 at the same time. If that were true, then the qubit’s mathematical description when in a superposition of states would be |0>+|1>, but it is not, it is a|0>+b|1> where the coefficients (a and b) are neither 0 or 1, and the coefficients cannot just be ignored if one were to give a physical interpretation as they are necessary for the system’s dynamics.

You talk about it being “half” a cat, so you might think the coefficients should be interpreted as proportions, but proportions are such that 0≤x≤1 and ∑x=1. But in quantum mechanics, the coefficients can be negative and even imaginary, and do not have to sum to 1. You can have 1/√2|0>-i/√2|1> as a valid superposition of states for a qubit. It does not make sense to interpret -i/√2 as a “half,” so you cannot meaningfully interpret the coefficients as a proportion.

Trying to actually interpret these quantum states ontologically is a nightmare and personally I recommend against even trying, as you will just confuse yourself, and any time you think you come up with something that makes sense, you will later find that it is wrong.

The point that Bell tried to point out in his “Against ‘Measurement’” article is that when you say “we start including atomic scale things we might as well just include everything up to and including the cat,” you have to place the line somewhere, sometimes called the “Heisenberg cut,” and where you place the line has empirically different implications, so wherever you choose to draw the line must necessarily constitute a different theory.

Deutsch also published a paper “Quantum theory as a universal physical theory” where he proves that drawing a line at all must constitute a different theory from quantum mechanics because it will necessarily make different empirical predictions than orthodox quantum theory.

A simple analogy is, let’s say, I claim the vial counts as an observer. The file is simple enough that I might be able to fully model it in quantum mechanics. A complete quantum mechanical model would consist of a quantum state in Hilbert space that can only evolve through physical interactions that are all described by unitary operators, and all unitary operators are reversible. So there is no possible interaction between the atom and the vial that could possibly lead to a non-reversible “collapse.”

Hence, if I genuinely had a complete model of the vial and could isolate it, I could subject it to an interaction with the cesium atom, and orthodox quantum mechanics would describe this using reversible unitary operators. If you claim it is an observer that causes a collapse, then the interaction would not be reversible. So I could then follow it up with an interaction corresponding to the Hermitian transpose of the operator describing the first interaction, which is should reverse it.

Orthodox quantum theory would predict that the reversal should succeed while your theory with observer-vials would not, and so it would ultimately predict a different statistical distribution if I tried to measure it after that interaction. Where you choose to draw the Heisenberg must necessarily make different predictions around that cut.

This is why there is so much debate over interpretation of quantum mechanics, because drawing a line feels necessary, but drawing one at all breaks the symmetry of the theory. So, either the theory is wrong, or how we think about nature is wrong.

I’d keep it but replace the torch and tablet with a sickle and hammer.

I was only anarchist for literally 2 weeks. It sounded good until I actually started to read their books they recommend like Conquest of Bread and realized it just was not for me. I had become very disenchanted with moralism for various reasons in my youth and every anarchist text out there is just moralism.

Answer is probably no, as they have no nukes and no allies.

My main issue with Many Worlds is that it is always superfluous.

We know that the exponential complexity of the quantum state cannot be explained by saying every outcome simply occurs in another branch. That would make it mathematically equivalent to an ensemble, and ensembles can be decomposed into large collections of simple deterministic systems with only linear complexity. If that were how reality worked, quantum mechanics would be unnecessary. The theory could be reduced to classical statistical mechanics.

A quantum superposition, such as an electron being spin up and spin down, is not an electron doing both in some proportions. If it were, it would again be equivalent to an ensemble and fully describable using classical probability theory. If the quantum state has any ontology at all, it cannot merely represent particles doing multiple things at once. It must be something else, a distinct beable that either influences particles, as in pilot wave theories, or gives rise to them, as in collapse models.

Some Many Worlds advocates eventually concede this, but then argue that particles never really existed and are only subjective illusions, while the quantum state alone is real. Calling something a subjective illusion does not remove the need for explanation. Hallucinations are still physical processes with physical causes. You can explain them by analyzing the brain and its interactions.

Likewise, you still need a physical explanation for how the illusion of particles arises. Any such explanation ends up equivalent to explaining how real particles arise, and once you do that, Many Worlds becomes unnecessary. You can always replace the multiverse with a single universe by making the process stochastic instead of deterministic.

The crucial point is that we know a particle in a superposition of states cannot be a particle in multiple states at the same time. That is mathematically impossible and if that is what it was then it could be reduced to a classical description! Any interpretation which relies on thinking the quantum state represents an ensemble, i.e. it represents things “taking all possible paths” or “in multiple states at once,” is just confused as to the mathematics as this is not what the mathematics says.

I go into this in more detail here: https://medium.com/p/f67aacb622d5

They want every revolution everywhere all at once

If you say that, they will always, 100% of the time, say you are straw manning them and that is not what they want.

Like I said, if you can think of any possible fundamental ideological disagreement between MLs and Trots and bring it up to the Trot, they will deny that is actually a disagreement and will say you are straw manning them.

At least something like permanent revolution, attempting to attack capitlist countries and turning them socialist, is an explicit critique of Stalins policy. It’s concrete and can be discussed in regards to how feasible it is with SOIC and how that played out. But more often then not I have little idea what Trotskyists want from a revolution. What exactly would their revolution look like? How would it differ from ML revolutions.

Yes, that is what I am getting at. There actually isn’t even a clear dividing line between PR and SIOC.

Sometimes Trots will pretend there is a dividing line by claiming SIOC believes socialism should remain in one country forever and be completely isolationist, but that’s obviously a straw man because the USSR was far from isolationist and if you read Foundations of Leninism it is clear that the purpose of the socialist country is to facilitate revolutions in other countries, i.e. it’s a strategy for international revolution and not to remain in one country forever, because the uneven development of capitalism makes it only possible that revolutions will occur on a country-by-country basis. It even says in FoL that if socialism remains in one country forever it will eventually regress back to capitalism so it is imperative that it engage in the international arena.

If a person points this out, Trots will usually agree that the uneven development of capitalism leads to revolutions only occurring on a country-by-country basis. I’ve yet to find one Trot who disagrees and I read a book by Trotsky and he seems to say it himself. So it is again unclear to me what the actual disagreement is. If you push them to tell you, they either leave the conversation or will just deflect to criticizing Stalin’s personal policies, but I don’t even see that as an ideological disagreement because MLism is not Stalin worship. A person can think abolishing the Comintern and replacing it with the Cominform was a bad decision while still being an ML, for example. Disagreeing with Stalin on things does not inherently contradict MLism unless it’s a disagreement core to Marxist-Leninist theory.

Even if they give me a “solution” like saying the USSR should’ve implemented different policies, that kind of analysis doesn’t inherently contradict with Marxism-Leninism as most MLs will probably agree there are problems with the USSR and have opinions on things that should’ve been different.

Yep.

Just code. I would not worry too much about following some special guide or method. Just code. Immerse yourself in it. Come up with project ideas you want to do and do them. If you run into brick walls that you don’t know how to do something, then look it up, watch a tutorial, look at StackOverflow, ask an LLM to explain it to you (don’t ask it to write the code for you), etc. And then just keep coding. Do more projects, etc. You learn by doing. The more you do the more you will know. If you are not motivated to do anything, then you will never learn anything. So come up with projects that you want to do, and just do it.

It is possible to get a job just being self-taught if you have a lot of projects to show off. Although, it is harder for two reasons. The first is that some job requirements just put in a minimum education requirement that is non-negotiable. Many require at least a B.S. in computer science if you are looking for a 9-5. There are contract work where you take on just a specific project that tend to have more lax requirements, though. The second reason is that some interviews ask generic textbook university questions which you might not know the answer to if you never went to university, just because they expect you to know specific terminology. Once you get decent at coding from self-learning, you might want to watch online lectures and courses just get familiar with how things are talked about and taught in university.

I do not understand the diatribe you included about religious cultists tricking me

was clearly talking specifically about people who mislead others about Bell’s theorem. You seem to have interpreted what I said. It was not generally applicable statement regarding all of your viewpoints you hold, but a specific viewpoint which is misrepresented in the popular media. I think rather than taking my warning seriously, you misinterpreted my warning as a personal attack even though it wasn’t talking about you but people who may mislead you with false claims like “Bell’s theorem rules out hidden variables,” which it doesn’t, but is commonly statement as if it were fact.

I think the mathematical structure of these laws remains relevant to the debate though, because it negates the logical conclusion of our universe as a mechanical, pre-set system of events, at least by this level of understanding.

My only point was that is ultimately a philosophical position and is not “proven.” Something like pilot wave theory makes all the same predictions as orthodox quantum mechanics yet is “mechanical.” Yes, if you want to argue that we currently don’t have a good reason to believe in anything beyond quantum mechanics and so we should take it as the final word for now, then the universe clearly is not “mechanical” but obeys certain stochastic laws (I guess unless someone believe in MWI but I have my own criticisms of that). My point was less that the orthodox formulation of QM is not stochastic but that it’s not proven the universe cannot be deterministic in the Laplacian sense. There isn’t a no-go theorem that rules it out as a possibility, so technically if someone was convinced for philosophical reasons that the universe is deterministic then you can’t prove them wrong.

At best you could give philosophical arguments as to why you think that is a less reasonable belief, maybe by invoking Occam’s razor or something, but they may have a rebuttal for that. Tim Maudlin for example is a major philosophy who upholds that the universe is mechanical and has rebuttals to the Occam’s razor argument. For example, he criticizes how to count complexity so he argues pilot wave is not inherently more complicated, and he also criticizes other interpretations that stick with the orthodox formalism as not making philosophical sense and thus justifies the change in formalism based on logical consistency.

Not saying I agree with those arguments just pointing out that they exist, and so we should be more careful than to say it is definitely proven that there are no hidden variables.

I’d also like to point out that nomological determinism is not inherently at odds with free will. I think most modern philosophers are compatibilists on some level

Yes, you’re right, I should have specified that I was talking about non-compatibilist free will. Personally, I think compatibilism is just word games. I don’t like the idea of redefining free will to make it compatible with determinism. It just confuses the discussion. But that is just me, I guess.