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Image is of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline, which transports gas from Russia to China. This isn't an oil pipeline (such as the ESPO) but I thought it looked cool. Source here.


Trump has recently proposed a 500% tariff on goods from countries that trade with Russia, including India and China (who buy ~70% of Russia's oil output), as well as a 10% additional tariff on goods from countries that "align themselves with BRICS." Considering that China is the largest trading partner of most of the countries on the planet at this point, and India and Brazil are reasonably strong regional players, I'm not sure what exactly "alignment" means, but it could be pretty bad.

Sanctions and tariffs on Russian products have been difficult to achieve in practice. It's easy to write an order to sanction Russia, but much harder to actually enforce these sorts of things because of, for example, the Russian shadow oil fleet, or countries like Kazakhstan acting as covert middlemen (well, as covert as a very sudden oil export boom can be).

Considering that China was pretty soundly victorious last time around, I'm cautiously optimistic, especially because China and India just outright cutting off their supply of energy and fuel would be catastrophic to them (and if Iran and Israel go to war again any time in the near future, it'll only be more disastrous). Barring China and India kowtowing to Trump and copying Europe vis-a-vis Nordstream 2 (which isn't impossible, I suppose), the question is whether China and India will appear to accede to these commands while secretly continuing trade with Russia through middlemen, or if they will be more defiant in the face of American pressure.


Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.


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Introducing: HexAtlas (hex-atlas.netlify.app)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by hex_atlas@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net
 
 

Hello and warm greetings to my fellow news mega enjoyers and to the wider hexbear, lemmygrad and lemmy.ml community,

I've been finding myself browsing the newsmega often and was often thinking of a way that would help me contextualize the discussions and news that I'm reading. I remembered an atlas I had in school that would show the location of industries and natural ressources (and more) and decided try to recreate a digital version similar to https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/. When I stumbled upon lemmy-js-client I found a fun way to display lemmy comments geographically, which I would like to share with you:

https://hex-atlas.netlify.app/

⚠️ Spoiler Tags are not implemented thus CWs are not hidden

Nexus Features:

I'm open for suggestions, but would like to continuously add new features:

  • Mastodon.social (well documented)
  • Marxists.org (will be difficult)
  • ~~Moon of Alabama (looks easy)~~ (Thank you @someone@hexbear.net for pointing out the transphobia)
  • Usability and performance improvements
  • and maybe more cool features where the guiding ideas are: "IRL Victoria 3 UI" and a "cockpit for newsmega-enjoyers" (e.g. comparing regions and seeing commodity/capital flows, real-time 1% flight data, vessel data - to enjoy the ansar allah blockade, virgin chad ranking, etc.)

Basic usage:

  • You can either search for a place or click on it. You'll see various scopes: provinces/territories, countries, intermediate regions, sub regions, continent. You can click also on these to change the scope. What it actually does is send it as a search query into lemmy and you see the search results to it (I built a fancy search page). IN the Fediverse Tab you can select the instances, sort types, and other settings from lemmy. On the Nexus Tab you have a similar behaviour, just for the various modules. You'll see the wiki of whatever is selected on the map :

  • use query to search location by query e. g. brics and find discussions pertaining to the selected location.

  • the query field can also be used to find and filter content by communities that are not listed

  • on Mobile long press pictures to unblur it (not fully tested) on desktop hover with mouse

tldr: Attention [Pink]: Select an option [Purple] to reveal selected information [Yellow].

It's in a prototype stage so please keep in mind:

  • ⚠️ Spoiler Tags are not implemented thus CWs are not hidden ⚠️

  • It's mostly optimized for desktops. Sry comrades with old hardware - no optimization, yet :( @kota@hexbear.net post inspired me to look into this tho.

  • Provinces/Territories: While I was doing manual edits to some regions I realized I'm doing something very political (duh). Following this, I'm looking for solutions to implement user defined regions (if there's interest from you) e.g. #fromTheRiverToTheSea #brics #udssr #whatever Comrade @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml offered help, but I have only experience with front-end and am not sure how and what to propose. All my ideas are leveraging the current state of development and might be annoying to you. If you have experience, suggestions, etc. on how to make this work, feel free to start a discussion, reach out, etc.

  • Provinces/Territories: If you want something particularly aggravating changed asap, feel free to start a discussion and vOtE! I'll update manually.

  • Countries that span two continents are only displayed as belonging to one e.g. Russia - Europe (Dataset used: https://github.com/lukes/ISO-3166-Countries-with-Regional-Codes)

  • Right now this project is exclusive to hexbear, lemmygrad, lemmy.ml and their federated instances. I have an inner conflict: Generally, fuck intellectual property and I would like to make it foss, but this would make it available for lib/chud content as well. Should I? Help me resolve this.

  • No login implemented

Please consider this a tribute to this community, which I've been lurking and a member since the r/CTH days (nevar forget). I started web development not too long ago and am deeply inspired by dev titans among others:

@nutomic@lemmy.ml

@dessalines@lemmy.ml

@SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml

Thank you and the mods and admins for making hexbear/lemmy what it is today.

rat-salute

Enjoy your weekend :)

(After I post this I will leave the computer for a while and wont be able to really check and respond for a few hours)

Death to fascism

Death to capitalism

Death to imperialism

Trans rights are human rights

EDIT: After some consideration I decided to make the code public under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE ( AGPL-3.0 license )

https://github.com/hexatlas/lemmy-atlas/

https://git.altesq.net/hex_atlas/lemmy-atlas/

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32974288

More than 20 countries are convening in Bogota next week to declare “concrete measures against Israel’s violations of international law”, diplomats told Middle East Eye.

The “emergency summit” is due to be held on 15-16 July, co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and South Africa as co-chairs of The Hague Group, to coordinate diplomatic and legal action to counter what they describe as “a climate of impunity” enabled by Israel and its powerful allies.

The founding members of the group included Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa.

States due to take part in the summit include Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Honduras, Indonesia, Ireland, Lebanon, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Portugal, Spain, Qatar, Turkey, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay, and Palestine.

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While everyone was focused on the BBB and its implications for student loans they just go ahead and do this.

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The MV Eternity C is the fourth cargo ship that Yemeni forces have sunk during their anti-genocide solidarity campaign.

Snip:

In a statement on Wednesday, the Yemeni armed forces announced that its navy “targeted the ship ‘ETERNITY C’, which was heading to the port of Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat) in Occupied Palestine”, after its crew ignored warnings and calls issued by the naval forces.

According to the statement, the military operation was carried out with “an unmanned surface vehicle and six cruise and ballistic missiles.”

Noting that the vessel “completely sank”, the statement said the operation was “documented with audio and video.”

The crew was, however, “rescued” and “transported to a safe place” by the Yemeni forces, the statement said.

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At least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are set to leave under a push to shed staff, according to documents obtained by POLITICO — potentially spelling trouble for White House space policy and depriving the agency of decades of experience.

Handing the next century of space exploration to China, who is planning a sample return mission to Mars by 2028, land on the Moon by 2030, and construct a moon base by 2035. xi-lib-tears

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The American Federation of Teachers said it would use the $23 million, including $500,000 from the A.I. start-up Anthropic, to create a national training center.

https://archive.is/GDMyT

The tech industry’s campaign to embed artificial intelligence chatbots in classrooms is accelerating.

You know, I'm very broadly against private schools and homeschooling, but honestly this is making at least reconsider homeschooling.

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest U.S. teachers’ union, said on Tuesday that it would start an A.I. training hub for educators with $23 million in funding from three leading chatbot makers: Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

The union said it planned to open the National Academy for A.I. Instruction in New York City, starting with hands-on workshops for teachers this fall on how to use A.I. tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.

While it's good that teachers still retain oversight over the work they'll be doing its still a fucking mistake to incorporate a fucking tickle-me-Hal-9000 into the education of the youth of tomorrow.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the A.I. academy was inspired by other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, that have worked with industry partners to set up high-tech training centers.

Carpentry. An industry that's been historically compared to education.

The New York hub will be “an innovative new training space where school staff and teachers will learn not just about how A.I. works, but how to use it wisely, safely and ethically,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “It will be a place where tech developers and educators can talk with each other, not past each other.”

It would be infinitely better to just gut the chatbot industry and all the vipers in it.

The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots. These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.

Human-like essays such as how to iron the wrinkles out your ballsack, how may pebbles to you need to eat per day for a balanced diet, how smoking two-three cigarettes per day is healthy for pregnant women, etc. Great education for impressionable minds.

In February, California State University, the largest U.S. university system, said it would provide ChatGPT for some 460,000 students. This spring, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest U.S. school district, began rolling out Google’s Gemini A.I. for more than 100,000 high schoolers.

We're doooooooooooooooooooomed im feeling super whooooooooooo right now

The Trump administration, which recently froze nearly $7 billion in funding for schools, has called on industry to pony up for A.I. education. Last week, the White House urged American companies and nonprofit groups to provide A.I. grants, technology and training materials for schools, teachers and students. Since then, dozens of companies have signed on, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI.

Working on privatization of public services of course.

Some tech executives hope A.I. will become the fourth R.

Some communists hope ai tech executives will be the first to talk to the brick wall.

“Reading and writing and arithmetic and learning how to use A.I.,” said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. “You’re going to have to learn those skills over time, and I do think our education system is the best place to be able to do that.”

Why is learning how to manipulate a chatbot so important? I'll tell you why. made-it-the-fuck-up

But some researchers have warned that generative A.I. tools are so new in schools that there is little evidence of concrete educational benefit — and significant concern about risk.

Zero benefits, all risk. It would be like making the titanic 2 but with a 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 United States Naval Gun loaded forward facing into the prow of the ship under the deck waterline for the express purpose of destroying ice bergs before they impact the ship. But a thousand times less funny to watch.

Chatbots can produce plausible-sounding misinformation, which could mislead students. A recent study by law school professors found that three popular A.I. tools made “significant” errors summarizing a law casebook and posed an “unacceptable risk of harm” to learning. Outsourcing tasks like research and writing to A.I. chatbots may also hinder critical thinking, a recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found.

Corporate translation chatbots go made-it-the-fuck-up when asked anything

“I do think that there is a risk,” said Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, noting that he frequently cited the critical thinking study to employees. He added that more rigorous academic research on the effects of generative A.I. was needed. “The lesson of social media is don’t dismiss problems or concerns.”

These fuckers know it's gonna just fuck shit up but who gives a shit when there's money involved matt-jokerfied

Union experts have also raised alarms about the industry’s practices. Some tech companies have trained their A.I. models on swaths of texts scraped from the internet, without compensating writers and other creators, or outsourced the labeling of training data to low-paid workers.

Yeah it's all stolen shit and they want you to pay them for doing it.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement of news content. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.)

Lmao

Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, also warned that tech firms could use A.I. deals with schools and the teachers’ union as marketing opportunities to make students lifetime chatbot customers.

Another fun thing, futher fuckjng commodification of every aspect of our fucking lives

“It’s a long-game investment by companies to turn young people into consumers who identify with a particular brand,” said Dr. Griffey, a vice president of University Council-A.F.T. Local 1474, a union representing University of California librarians and lecturers.

Kinda like how Apple computers made a whole generation of easily gifted pseud-hipsters

Ms. Weingarten said that she was aware of the concerns and that her union, which represents 1.8 million members, had developed A.I. school use guidelines to address some of them.

Yeah bullshit

One of her main goals is to ensure that teachers have some input on how A.I. tools are developed for educational use, she said. In 2023, she began discussing the idea with Microsoft’s Mr. Smith.

Should've stonewalled the entire thing out Weingarten.

The union’s partnership with Microsoft formally began last summer with an A.I. symposium in Chicago where teachers learned chatbot basics and gave the company feedback on potential classroom uses. After Ms. Weingarten met last year with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, the union also began working with OpenAI.

[The union’s new training hub will be in the downtown Manhattan headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents nearly 200,000 New York City teachers and other school employees.

Microsoft will provide $12.5 million for the A.I. training effort over the next five years, and OpenAI will contribute $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources. Anthropic will add $500,000 for the first year of the effort.

Go bust and sink the economy

On Monday, some 200 New York City teachers taking an A.I. workshop at their union headquarters got a glimpse of what the new national effort might look like. A presenter from Microsoft opened by showing an A.I. explainer video featuring Minecraft, the popular game owned by Microsoft.

Fucking gross

Next, the teachers tried generating emails and lesson plans using Khanmigo, an A.I. tool for schools for which Microsoft has provided support. Then they experimented with Copilot for similar tasks.

How fucking hard is it to write a fucking email

During the workshop, Peter Bass, a first-grade teacher in Manhattan who is an A.I. newbie, asked a chatbot to generate “an effective letter to parents on attendance.” He read the polite but firm email that resulted aloud — to laughter from teachers in the room.

“I’m very old school,” Mr. Bass said, noting that he typically drafted his own letters to “students individually, based on who they are.” Now, though, he said he was intrigued to see if he could streamline his process with A.I.

“If I could find a way of microwaving it a little,” Mr. Bass said, “it could be useful.”

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She got TRIGGERED by mechahitlermusk and quit, typical millennial can't take the heat smuglord

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Can you believe it folks, I'm outside in my jorts, old man shorts, sunning myself, with no sunscreen mind you, that stuff causes cancer, and Iran, of all people, tries to drone strike me in my naval. Very rude, I'll have you know, I have actually the strongest naval of any president, that, quite frankly, anyone has ever seen. trump-anguish

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pronounjak-rage ugh what woke trash, this doll is literally unfuckable

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