Surprisingly, communism was antiracist which explains why it was popular outside the US. There is the fact that many communists were racist on a personal level, but the state policies were inclusive due to the very nature of the ideology. As someone who also comes from the former block, I think that communism was a bad idea with terrible implementation but it also had its moments no matter what the US propaganda is trying to present it as.
Yep, worker's rights, universal health care, women's rights (voting, divorce, abortion, generous maternity leave). Compared to Switzerland which allowed women voting rights in the seventies, communism was putting uncomfortable comparisons at some moments. If you wonder why communism was attractive, it wasn't just because of propaganda or because people were stupid, but because communism was addressing actual problems of the time that the christian conservative establishment of the west was preferring not to handle.
The fact that you put the tatars as the only thing to know about communism shows that you've learned one thing and found it sufficient. At the same time, the link you share shows how later communist leaders acknowledged Stalin's actions as a crime... I'm not here to defend communism though (mainly because it is not defendable), just to provide a perspective beyond the standard tropes.
People can’t think anything good of communism because they’re conditioned to feel that way.
Whats interesting is how equal it was for everyone, one comment I got when asking people who lived through the soviet era was that.
“there’s no advantage given to any religion” (hence, new years being the traditional family get together time). and “we were all comrades, men and women”. A lot of what they hear from the US about gender equality falls on deaf ears because thats what they had and they were told was bad.
A weird perspective, but certainly an interesting one.
It’s always difficult to hear things that doesn’t fit our narrative.
Even if you can point to some positive outcomes the is the main issue of the whole system being so easy to corrupt and coopt for personal gain & power trips.
You might get lower infant mortality, better access to healtcare ans aeducation (as long as the party considers you worthy) but you will almost immediately get crooks and incompetents in leadership positions, whose only qualities are the set of morals to get to a position of power no matter the cost.
And those leadership positions are appointed by or even part of The Party - and the party is never wrong. There is no free press to critisize them and if you do speak up, then you are logically an spy from The West, undermining the perfect communist utopia & need to be punished.
Only if someone is really epically incompetent they might get purged by the inner circles, but it is even more likely they will purge someone actually doing things right who still has some morals left.
You could be the most ideological communist trzing to build the bright future & will still end up sidelined or worse by the corrupt pigs holding to all the power in the communist state.
When the Soviets crashed the Prague Spring in the 1968 there were some interbrigadists that went to fight agains Francos fascists in Spain during the interwar period with international communist brigades. Only now they were watching soviet soldiers shoot people in the streets and crush them with their tanks...
Have you heard about Roma? The communist states tried to help them but in a hamfisted ways like separating kids from parents. They did nothing to actually resolve racism. Many Roma ended up in squalor in segregated settlements. That goes on to this day and improves very slowly. It definitely was not "its moment".
So nice of you to teach me about the roma. I was sure to have never heard about them. /s
The history of gypsies and their segregation is much older though and the regimes inherited much of their attitude based on prior prejudices. The treatment differed in different times and locations. I've heard accounts of casual police brutality and of good integration in the local community and of a "leave everything as it is without engaging with hard problems". None of those was sanctioned on the bases of race theory and in fact the official stance was for equality. Compare it to the US where it was part of local and state legislation. On the other hand, the higher ups in the regimes were often repainted nationalists and common criminals of old so adherence to the ideals was often perfunctory and positive actions and outcomes were falling short of what was possible.
If it's part of legislation, you can fight it. If the official ideology is equality and racial prejudices "don't exist", then any problems are suppressed and you can't do anything.
Soviet union was defacto an apartheid when you consider how non-white ethnics were treated in practice. They just were so good at suppressing everything that it was never "an issue".
There's also corrupted versions in other languages than English! I'm from Portugal and there's also semi-bawdy lyrics that somehow spread across the country organically across hundreds of miles.
Jetbrains CLion is great for non-Qt C++, albeit paid. It helped me deliver a bank-exchange-grade connector in a tight schedule with very little knowledge of C (at that time). Mostly with static checking, compiling, cmake etc.
I agree Qt Creator is really good, and VSCode with the Microsoft C++ extension is probably not quite as good.
However with the Clangd extension it is much much better. Even better than Qt Creator. 100% accurate C++ code intelligence, really really fast error squigglies. Honestly I was kind of surprised it's even possible to get it that good.
It's not quite on the level of Dart (which is basically instant and perfect), but I'd say it's on the same level as Rust at least in terms of responsiveness and reliability.
All observations about teleoperation aside, it's just really funny to me how the robot appears to knock over the water bottles, throw its hands up in exasperation, and then give up and fall down. It somehow makes it feel more human.
It might have been human operated, but it also might have just been copying its training data.
A robot that properly supports being teleoperated wouldn't immediately fall over the moment someone deactivates a headset. Falling over is almost the worst thing a robot can do, you would trash a lot of prototypes and expensive lab equipment that way if they fell over every time an operator needed the toilet or to speak to someone. If you had such a bug that would be the very first thing you would fix. And it's not like making robots stay still whilst standing is a hard problem these days - there's no reason removing a headset should cause the robot to immediately deactivate.
You'd also have to hypothesize about why the supposed Tesla teleoperator takes the headset off with people in front of him/her during a public demonstration, despite knowing that this would cause the robot to die on camera and for them to immediately get fired.
I think it's just as plausible that the underlying VLA model is trained using teleoperation data generated by headset wearers, and just like LLMs it has some notion of a "stop token" intended for cases where it completed its mission. We've all seen LLMs try a few times to solve a problem, give up and declare victory even though it obviously didn't succeed. Presumably they learned that behavior from humans somewhere along the line. If VLA models have a similar issue then we would expect to see cases where it gets frustrated or mistakes failure for success, copies the "I am done with my mission" motion it saw from its trainers and then issues a stop token, meaning it stops sending signals to the motors and as a consequence immediately falls over.
This would be expected for Tesla given that they've always been all-in on purely neural end-to-end operation. It would be most un-Tesla-like for there to be lots of hand crafted logic in these things. And as VLA models are pretty new, and partly based on LLM backbones, we would expect robotic VLA models to have the same flaws as LLMs do.
Well, the human operator was just taking off a VR headset (and presumably forgot to deactivate the robot first). It just so happened to also look like the robot was fed up with life.
I feel many folks are missing the forest for the trees.
1. Build robots to change the narrative around overpriced stock for EV company
2. Align with right wing politicians to eliminate illegal immigration.
3. If AI for robotics is solved, congrats, you eliminated the competition.
4. If AI doesn't pan out, congrats, all the firms relying on illegal immigrants can now buy your robots and have those same illegal immigrants teleoperate the robots from their home countries.
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