While I broadly agree with the view that debate was sometimes a part of religious institutions in the past, this changed dramatically in the 20th century, especially with regards to Islam, perhaps due to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When is the last time you’ve heard of a madrassah teaching that homosexuality is natural? Not to be Muslim-phobic, I am aware if the rich history of debate and science in the Middle East, but the material conditions have changed now, conservatism has been on the rise since the 70s.

You speak of mahaviharas, but Buddhists I have met are just as conservative as the average religious person when it comes to women’s rights, feminism and gay rights. Madrassahs were not ‘open’, even during the Islamic golden age. Even when Islam was less rigid, Mansoor al-Hallaj was executed for saying ‘Ann-al-Haq’, Omar Khayyam had to go on a pilgrimage to prove he was pious, al-Qadir ordered to kill every Mu’tazilite in Baghdad and no doubt there are countless other stories of persecution. That rational thought survived when people were religious is hardly to the credit of religion, and even in periods of prosperity when religious institutions weren’t on the defensive, such things happened anyway and under the sanction of religion. As long as religion is under an institution, it is the nature of institutions to cling to power and hence, suppress dissent.

Well yeah, that’s common sense. I meant it rhetorically, guess I should have worded it better.

No, lol. She got a ~400 page ‘children’s encyclopedia’ because she liked it and I liked reading. Fairly cheap, and useful if you want to look up something like ‘types of volcanoes’. Besides, it was a little home laptop, my dad’s first laptop which he abandoned for his work computer. I doubt if she even knew how much porn existed on the internet, since we used it rarely and it was terribly expensive (dunno about the US, since I am not an American) at that time. I’m pretty sure the reason she didn’t want me using the internet was because kids are dumb and break stuff.

Also, it was far easier to just pick up a book you’ve read many times and find the section you’re looking for than turn on the laptop, wait for the damn thing to boot, call an adult to connect it to some outdated Modem that’s slow as hell, ask that person to search something because you have no idea how that stuff works and then get some long ass site, summarise it and finish your homework. Just saying. Has got nothing to do with repression, since we also had a book full of paintings and quite a few were nude.

And here I thought the US and Europe alliance was over? Doesn’t matter when you’re bombing brown people I guess. All white countries are united with that. Like the Republicans who collaborated with the Democrats after the Civil War against the freed black people.

This is a good collection of book piracy sites and other stuff as well.

I still remember the XP error sound. It was the stuff of nightmares. And in those days, we weren’t taught how to use a Modem because my mum didn’t like us using the internet and instead brought an encyclopedia for school stuff, so I would have to fix all the shit I fucked up without google before anyone found out. Fun times. Really improved my troubleshooting skills, though.

Dude, I know. I am an Indian too, and a socialist. Getty and Thurston definitely aren’t cold war propagandists. It was Robert Conquest, Anne Applebaum and more recently, Timothy Snyder who portray the famine as an intentional genocide done by evil Soviets. Getty and Thurston, especially Thurston was actually notorious for taking a more pro-Soviet stance. Wheatcroft and Davies did important work showing that the famine was caused by a combination of bad harvest and poor planning. As far as I am aware, the popular genocide/deliberate starvation line is not the historical consensus and has not been for some time after the opening of Soviet archives. Even liberal historians like Fitzpatrick and Krotkin debunk the many capitalist lies about the famine. People discussing it online generally have a very strange assortment of sources - from Snyder’s terrible book ‘Bloodlands’ to obsolete books like Tottle’s ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism’ which was written before the opening of Soviet archives. r/AskHistorians is a good source for finding both Marxist and liberal sources, and it generally avoids neoconservatives like Conquest.

I am from the South too but am Marathi.

.world really isn’t very tolerant of certain views. They are very quick to dismiss people as Russian shills/bots for instance. I disagree with this instance’s views of China and the Russo-Ukraine war, and am not an ML (though I do kind of lean Leninist) and haven’t seen much bad faith name calling. It certainly is prevalent in leftist spaces (CIA bot, NAFO shill, etc) but this place is surprisingly decent.

Thurston and J Arch Getty have good books on Stalin. They’re both pretty well respected historians, so you can read stuff about the famine from their books. It’s not a pretty picture. Also, which part of India, if you don’t mind?

I don’t disagree lol

To be fair, a bunch of old scientific closed sourced applications run only on WinXP or 7. Maybe it’s aimed at those people. But I don’t know any that require 10 or 11 that don’t have alternatives…

I did notice the astounding lack of empathy in the original article. Not a word about the Yemen bombing! And then there’s this chat where he’s celebrating the fact the entire building collapsed to catch one guy meeting his girlfriend. Not a word of condemnation, not a hint that this is perhaps a bit inhumane, or the callous language used by these assholes, nothing! Just whining that they ‘made us look bad’ and he called the EU freeloaders. Libs look at literal dehumanisation and go ‘but he insulted the EU!’ It’s a pathological lack of empathy.

See, and when we criticise the West we’re the Russian trolls apparently…I feel sorry for American women and trans people but I really don’t give a shit if the US loses its place in the world. Good. No amount of condescending USAID ‘aid’ will atone for the deaths in Chile, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Korea, Guatemala, Angola, Vietnam, Bolivia, Laos, Libya, East Timor and god knows how many other places.

eliminates mention of “AI safety”

AI datasets tend to have a white bias. White people are over-represented in photographs, for instance. If one trains AI to with such datasets in something like facial recognition( with mostly white faces), it will be less likely to identify non-white people as human. Combine this with self-driving cars and you have a recipe for disaster; since AI is bad at detecting non-white people, it is less likely to prevent them from being crushed underneath in an accident. This both stupid and evil. You cannot always account for any unconscious bias in datasets.

“reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”

They will fill it with capitalist Red Scare propaganda.

The new agreement removes mention of developing tools “for authenticating content and tracking its provenance” as well as “labeling synthetic content,” signaling less interest in tracking misinformation and deep fakes.

Interesting.

“The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance told attendees from around the world.

That was done before. A chatbot named Tay was released into the wilds of twitter in 2016 without much ‘hand-wringing about safety’. It turned into a neo-Nazi, which, I suppose is just what Edolf Musk wants.

The researcher who warned that the change in focus could make AI more unfair and unsafe also alleges that many AI researchers have cozied up to Republicans and their backers in an effort to still have a seat at the table when it comes to discussing AI safety. “I hope they start realizing that these people and their corporate backers are face-eating leopards who only care about power,” the researcher says.