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alyaza [they/she]

@ alyaza @beehaw.org

Posts
1288
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801
Joined
4 yr. ago

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • DeepSeek: The Chinese Communist Party’s newest AI advance is making repression smarter, cheaper, and more deadly. Even worse, they aim to export it to the world.

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  • FYI: we've banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can't even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.

  • Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers

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  • yeah, no shit, that's not the same as "your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features"--not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what's happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don't have a company without systematically exploiting children

  • Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers

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  • it's been very strange to watch this game i grew up on--pretty innocuously, i should note--gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

  • Recommend some relaxing jazz?

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  • have positive reviews destroyed games?

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  • What you mean? Have you seen all those articles publisher website just giving out 8-9 on every damn game they get early access to?

    this has been an issue people have complained about in gaming journalism for--and i cannot stress this sufficiently--longer than i've been alive, and i've been alive for 25 years. so if we're going by this metric video gaming has been "ruined" since at least the days of GTA2, Pokemon Gold & Silver, and Silent Hill. obviously, i don't find that a very compelling argument.

    if anything, the median game has gotten better and that explains the majority of review score inflation--most "bad" gaming experiences at this point are just "i didn't enjoy my time with this game" rather than "this game is outright technically incompetent, broken, or incapable of being played to completion".

  • have positive reviews destroyed games?

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  • no, obviously not; is this a serious question? because i have no idea how you could possibly sustain it

  • how's your week going, Beehaw

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  • currently reading:

  • Like to drive fast? Virginia has an anti-speeding device for you.

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  • Then we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”

    we don't actually--the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:

    Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.

    Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.

    and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:

    North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.

    So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?

    It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.

    UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”

    In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.

    According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”

  • Posting the same thing instead of bumping something old?

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  • Other people talked about it here long ago and I actually don’t have much more to add besides the desire to share it with those that are not aware of the tool. So, do I create a new publication or add a mostly empty comment to something old?

    it doesn't seem like people use Lemmy search very often, and comments on super old threads don't bump them to the top of the order, so reposting is fine

  • Is Authoritarian Communism Really communism?

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  • ?

  • Is Authoritarian Communism Really communism?

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  • on Chiapas:

    • Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government Through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater)
    • Zapatista Spring: Anatomy of a Rebel Water Project & the Lessons of International Solidarity (Ramor Ryan)
    • Developing Zapatista autonomy : conflict and NGO involvement in rebel Chiapas (Niels Barmeyer)

    on Rojava:

    • Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan (TATORT Kurdistan)
    • Revolution and Cooperatives: Thoughts about my time with the economic committee in Rojava (anonymous)
    • Make Rojava Green Again (Internationalist Commune of Rojava)

    on Revolutionary Catalonia and various aspects of the anarchism there:

    • Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (Gaston Leval)
    • The Anarchist Collectives (ed. Sam Dolgoff)
    • The CNT in the Spanish Revolution (José Peirats Valls)
    • Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (José Peirats Valls)
    • To Remember Spain (Murray Bookchin)
    • Ready for Revolution (Agustín Guillamón)

    most of these should be findable on Anna's Archive, or by just googling the title. if not, i can track copies down.

  • Is Authoritarian Communism Really communism?

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  • communism is about works collectively owning the means of production.

    to be clear: you're kind of mixing terms up a bit here and this needs to untangled, because otherwise it will cause problems in answering what you're asking. the correct word for "worker ownership of the means of production" is technically just socialism. communism, at this point in leftist history, consistently refers to a more specific thing: an ideological system that seeks to create a stateless, classless, moneyless society in addition to achieving common ownership of the means of production.[^1]

    this might sound very pedantic--and, to be clear, it is likely the vast majority of socialists are also communists--but conflating these terms can be genuinely problematic when asking a question like this for the simple reason that they are understood to be two different things in practice. you can have socialism but not communism, in short. (indeed, "socialism but not communism" is the rule among states that have arguably been socialist. even if you play fast and loose with the defining characteristics of communism and think there have been existing socialist states, i've never met a person who believes those socialist states achieved anything resembling communism.)

    in terms of the actual question you're asking: most people would probably agree that no, the properties of socialism and communism make "authoritarianism" or a "dictatorial" figure antithetical to either--at least without that desire for "authoritarianism" being shared across the entire working class somehow. this is the reason many leftists consider most or all existing (and former) states that called themselves socialist--your Soviet Unions, your Chinas, etc.--to not be socialist or to have degraded back into capitalism.

    leftists adhering to variants of socialism typically characterized as "authoritarian" and "dictatorial" would obviously disagree with this, however. to generalize a bit: they tend to believe that it is an acceptable tradeoff for a vanguard (the most revolutionary and ideologically advanced section of the working class) to steward and speak for the rest of the working class through the revolution, to the establishment of socialism, and toward the creation of a communist state. separately, they tend to consider the political structures of these countries as facilitating worker ownership of the economy, even if it is not direct. many of them had central planning of the economy, and most of them had highly delegated (for example village bodies which elect city bodies which elect country bodies, etc.) or sectoral (for example X, Y, and Z interest groups must obligatorily be represented in decision-making) political systems that meant workers were represented at every level of government and decision-making.

    unfortunately, whether this is "really socialism" or "really communism" is not a falsifiable belief--and while there are better arguments for the view that "authoritarianism" is incompatible with either in my mind, it's not as if there are no arguments for the contrary view. so you're never going to get a definitive agreement on this.

    [^1]: yes, i know these have been used synonymously at many points by many communists, and that even the distinction between socialism and communism has varied historically. but most people in my experience in leftist spaces do not use socialism and communism to mean the same thing at this point, nor do i.

  • Is Authoritarian Communism Really communism?

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  • However, when we talk about modern nation state, I believe we have not seen successful implementation of anarchism yet.

    well, anarchism is completely antithetical to modern nation states, so if you're using that as the basis for evaluation you're obviously going to be misled. it also begs the question of what a "successful implementation" of anarchism--or any form of leftist ideology in governing--actually is, because ask five leftists and they'll give you six answers to that. nonetheless, and as far as i'm aware, in spite of their massive difficulties (and despite a non-anarchist self-identification in the first case) both EZLN-held Chipas and Rojava are widely held as successful, practically applied examples of anarchist theories of practice and production. likewise, so is Revolutionary Catalonia.

    One problem is that even if it works internally, what would happen when a colonial power tries to conquer it?

    i would encourage you to look to the Spanish Civil War or the EZLN occupation of Chiapas as examples, because this was simply not a problem for either of them. particularly in the former case, the Spanish anarchists acted very similarly to a "centralized" power in fighting the Francoists (until they were organized into the broader Republican military).[^1]

    [^1]: and it should be noted, as an aside: what eventually undermined them and destroyed their power were not the Francoists but purges and aggression conducted by other leftists in the Spanish Popular Front against them. anarchists are, quite legitimately in my opinion, pretty aggrieved at their historical treatment by other leftist ideologies!

  • How to discover new movies and shows without streaming services?

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  • in terms of outlets: my go-tos right now are Vulture and IndieWire respectively; i don't keep up too much with entertainment though so YMMV

  • FTC asks to delay Amazon Prime deceptive practices case, citing staffing shortfalls

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  • Except it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.

    this is exactly what has happened; previously, the FTC was aggressively pursuing anti-trust against Amazon, Google, etc.

  • how's your week going, Beehaw

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  • in terms of notes usually i just do unrefined, copypasted highlights into Obsidian to start and then synthesize my notes into prose later; for most books i also tend to export my highlights into their own markdown document so i always have the initial highlights even after the prose

  • how's your week going, Beehaw

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  • on and off for about two years in varying forms, but i'm still in the process of putting my archive up

  • Quick announcement: We will eventually be upgrading to Lemmy 1.0

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  • Edit : also, did you have a look at Piefed ? https://piefed.social/

    yes, this is essentially our long-term backup plan if Sublinks doesn't work out for some reason

  • how's your week going, Beehaw

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  • Obsidian.md; for fun, although i do tend to write blog posts about the things i read