PSOL has tendencies that range from social-liberal, to “orthodox” Marxist, to Trotskyist to Marxist-Leninist. They even have tendencies that are inspired by the “Arab Spring”. It’s not advisable to be reductionist against them, specially since their broad range of tendencies is usually why they excel electorally but have a hard time getting anything done. (As opposed to parties that follow democratic centralism). They did not side against Dilma in the coup, and in fact voted unanimously in her defense and were even more dedicated in the “Fora Temer” campaigns than the PT itself.

PSTU is Trotskyist so I won’t defend them too much, they tend to fall into left-communism a lot, but they at least have a strong presence in workers unions and are usually the first on the ground for, for example, primary and secondary school teachers’ strikes. They did go against Dilma, in their typical ultra left fashion, demanding that the entire government be toppled. Not that any Marxist should be surprised when bourgeois democracy is undemocratic, though.

I suppose it should go without saying on a primarily Marxist-Leninist instance that Trotskyist or Trotskyist-adjacent parties like these two or the PCO aren’t going to receive much uncritical support, though at least they make themselves present and join forces in critical struggles like this one.

I didn’t link to a Portuguese source because this thread was for the gringo friends, but this movement has been growing for too long for one to confuse their ignorance for it “coming out of the blue”. Now let me attempt to correct the record in English for the sake of the internationals.

Here’s a short article from PCBR talking about the historical construction of this movement.

Summing the history up “shortly” in English, one of the strongest demands from both the PCB (pre-split Brazilian Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist) and the PSTU (United Socialist Worker’s Party, Trotskyist) since at least the June Protests in 2013. Due to the first having some serious organisational problems with their leadership (which led to the split) and the second being fairly small (and Trotskyist, I guess), neither managed to fully oppose the government from the left and materialise this demand.

After the pandemic, with work/life balance dynamics being brought into question, given both the absurd rise of informal work (more than half the “employed” population is informal) and the indignation from workers in the “service” economy from bearing the brunt of the pandemic without any perspective of increase in quality of life from the new “leftist” government, wildcat labour movements started forming from the workers themselves. This includes the fight for better legislation regarding delivery and “rideshare” app workers’ pay and benefits, and for the reduction of the maximum legal workweek.

For some context for the foreigners, the maximum legally allowed weekly workload is 44 hours in Brazil, which can be divided in 6 days of work with 1 mandatory rest day (hence, 6x1, usually split into five days of 8 work hours and one day of 4). We are paid monthly, not hourly, so an employer is legally allowed to demand all 44 hours paying only the minimum wage, though not allowed to pay less than the minimum wage for less hours.

This Rick Azevedo guy accidentally went viral on TikTok for criticising this horribly outdated work scheme and decided to create a single-issue movement (“Life Beyond Work”, VAT) for an increase in mandatory rest days, which grew a lot organically with some support after the fact from leftist parties. The party linked above, PCBR, is what came out of the PCBR (Revolutionary PCB) split in strong support for this demand but is still in its restructuring phase.

Last election Rick ran with PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, “multiple tendencies” leftist party) for a municipal legislature as a single-issue candidate and got elected with significant voteshare despite almost no party support. Considering the horrible defeat by the electoralist left (including Lula’s party, the PT) this last election which abandoned labour issues in defense of an “united front against fascism” again, this was a major win for the movement.

Now, a federal deputy (as in congresswoman) who is also from the PSOL, Erika Hilton, wrote a constitutional amendment that would reduce the work week to 4 days with 3 mandatory rest days, and maximum of 36 weekly hours. (Yes, this doesn’t make sense numerically and is probably so that parliamentary negotions they can back down to 5 work days and 2 rest days.)

After this was announced, both the VAT movement and the radical left parties coalesced around this amendment, calling for national protests, broad agitprop activities and naming and shaming deputies and parties who go against the proposal. Every radical left party with the bare minimum of material analysis is taking this as the pressure point to attack against the right in the government and for building broad support, but obviously each in their own framework for praxis.

And to finally respond to your comment, this is sadly a conquest by the working class despite the leftist organisations, who are mostly hopping in at the last second. There are right wingers being forced to support this because 1) there are lots of working class right wingers who are aware of their exploitation at some level, and 2) in order to mobilise the bases, rightwing politicians often co-op class struggles aesthetically (fascists in general, Bolsonaro as an example), and some leftist orgd are intentionally abusing this to force their hand into supporting the cause or risk being shown as a farce. The same applies for corporate media conglomerates. And of course, 3) it’s an opportunity to weaken the Lula government if they don’t also support the amendment, which is an okay sacrifice from the left as they intend to position themselves as left opposition.

So I wouldn’t say this is strange, in fact it’s been fairly predictable so far.

Edit to add: I forgot to mention the PCR/UP, a different Marxist-Leninist party with a strong base in the urban periphery, was also involved in getting the VAT movement viral and is going into this struggle with full force.

Gotta remember to come back in 8 hours lol. This might be a fun experiment, since basically every corporate social media wants to be tiktok already.

Those actions described in that section are generated by an RL agent, used only for training. For the prediction and therefore results they still either check for aggregate metrics (which must use synthetic data in order to get enough of it), or do the MTurk comparison that generated up to 3 second clips which could in theory be created from real-time user input but since they have corresponding ground-truth frames it must at best be generated from sampled user input from a real gameplay session.

The clips they show on the YouTube video seem to have some interactive input, but the method for creating those is not described in the paper. So I suppose it is possible that there’s some degree of real time user input, but it’s not clear that it is in fact what’s happening there.

As a sidenote: ML researchers should really consider just dropping all the infodumping about their model architecture to an Appendix (or better yet, to runnable code) where they’ll clutter the article less and put in more effort into describing their experimental setups and scrutinizing results. I couldn’t care less about how they used ADAM to train a recurrent CNN on the Graph Laplacean if the experiments are junk or the results do not support the conclusions.

The human rater experiment (IMO the most important one for a human-interfacing software tool) is described from setup to a results in a single paragraph.

GameNGen (pronounced “game engine”)

That’s dumb.

The AI crowd continue to mangle the meaning of words to make their unimpressive work sound “revolutionary”. This isn’t a “game engine”, this is just a model to create plausible video game frames given previous video game frames. A video auto-complete.

At no point in the paper do they mention any human inputs in their experimental setup. They just generate clips, plop it on MTurk and claim “they’re as good as the original.”

From the very beginning of their paper.

Computer games are manually crafted software systems centered around the following game loop: (1) gather user inputs, (2) update the game state, and (3) render it to screen pixels.

Their work neither gathers user input, nor does it keep a game state, it just renders pixels from pixels.

And there’s this noise:

Today, video games are programmed by humans. GameNGen is a proof-of-concept for one part of a new paradigm where games are weights of a neural model, not lines of code.

“It’s all matrix weights”

GameNGen shows that an architecture and model weights exist such that a neural model can effectively run a complex game (DOOM) interactively on existing hardware.

“Effectively run”

While many important questions remain, we are hopeful that this paradigm could have important benefits. For example, the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby games could be developed and edited via textual descriptions or examples images.

Prompt-based games. Thankfully it’ll be cheaper for the poor video game companies (Nvidia subscription fee not included).

Note how nothing that they proposed is even hinted at by their research. They don’t even make the code available, so none of their actual research is verifiable. They just fill their article with incomprehensible jargon about metrics and loss functions so that journalists will just assume they’re really smart and knew what they were doing in order to uncritically report on this.

I propose a better name for the work: “Diffusion Models Are Video Generators”.

That it was an EU ship that came to the rescue isn’t surprising. Despite the EU’s scarce naval resources, they are currently the only ones there. There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. The UK for one brief moment had three. HMS Diamond did some outstanding work as part of OPG but when she left, we left.

There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.

I’m shooting blind as I haven’t looked too deep into how the blockade has impacted global trade, but I think this makes perfect sense for the US.

It isn’t that much further away around the Cape than through the Suez to arrive from the South China Sea to the US east coast, and AFAIK most trade actually happens with the West Coast through the Pacific or through Panama. So higher shipping costs harm Europe much more than they harm the US in this case.

Just like the Ukraine War, sanctions on Russia and China and the Nord Stream, it seems the US is intending on using this blockade to cannibalise Europe’s economy even further. Expect another year of negative growth in the EU, specially with China becoming a suitable replacement as a high-tech producer worldwide. They don’t have to go either through Suez or around the Cape in order to ship to a majority of the world’s population.

It seems these European intel agencies are awfully disorganized and disunited. Maybe they should all officially become subsidiaries of the CIA, that’ll help protect Europe. \s

Did some searching, it comes from CIA director William Burns in 2022-03-08, you can see it here. It was actually 2 days.

“His own military’s performance has been largely ineffective,” Burns said of Putin. “Instead of seizing Kyiv within the first two days of the campaign, which is what his plan was premised upon, after nearly two full weeks they still have not been able to fully encircle the city.”

If you go a bit further back, you have “sources” from the CIA already spouting the 2 days line a couple weeks earlier. Here’s an example from the day after the start of the SMO.

US intelligence officials are concerned that Kyiv could fall under Russian control within days, according to two sources familiar with the latest intelligence.

It goes like this, US Intel are worried it could happen -> report it as Putin hinging his whole plan on it happening -> if it happens it’s because it was a massive gamble and “unfair” in some way, if it doesn’t happen it was an utter failure and Putin threw away his whole country.

A week later, business insider reports it as though Russia failed in the war and practically lost, and actually, it’s Russian intelligence which is bad for wrongly predicting their victory. Which the US intel also predicted. Go figure.

Narrative created. Consent manufactured. Redditor fooled.

P.S.: is there a Ukrainian civil war megathread I could read and contribute to somewhere? It’s fun to look up these little lies but it’s been 2 years now and there’s just too much stuff to hold on one’s head.

In July Mr Putin doubled the federal bonus for those signing up to fight from 195,000 roubles ($2,200) to 400,000 roubles, which regional authorities are supposed to top up. The government is committing vast sums on compensation to the families of those killed in action. And Russia’s splurge goes beyond war-related spending. Mr Putin is lavishing money on welfare payments: in June he raised pensions for some recipients by close to 10%. The government is also spending big on infrastructure, including a highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg, two cities 450 miles (729km) apart. Indeed, it is spending on pretty much whatever takes its fancy. Mikhail Mishustin, the prime minister, recently boasted about a government scheme to pay for children to holiday in Crimea.

“Lavishing” on pensions. Imagine trying to paint that as a bad thing. Wonder how Yankees feel when they find out that the country they’re blowing hundreds of billions on to wage useless wars has free healthcare too.

Although I don’t think this is going to change the result (Trump is still going to win, USA will remain a stagnant imperialist country), it’s going to be very fun watching the chaos unfold within the blue party.

It’s not even clear if Kamala is actually going to be selected candidate. As entertainment, I love it.

Talvez seja só birra com o formato (homem sofistando pra chat de twitch), mas não acho que faz muito sentido não.

Se eleitoralismo é inútil, tanto faz competir no executivo ou legislativo. PSoL tá no legislativo em BH faz um tempão e só consegue ficar menos popular.

O exemplo do Leo Péricles é até bom, mas só porque é o mais extremo possível: fundador do partido que já disputou eleição do executivo federal e municipal (detalhe que enfraquece o ponto). O argumento fica muito mais frágil se aplicar por exemplo à Juliete Pantoja do Rio de Janeiro.

Um bom estudo de caso é a Heloísa Helena, que foi de quase 7% presidencial pra não conseguir nem ser vereadora da própria cidade.

E achei bem idealista essa de “se fizer isso eu entro na UP e ajudo”. Porque não entra em um partido e concorre independente disso? Muito fácil agitar por uma posição pra seguidores na internet, mas cadê entrar e fazer debate interno pra que a posição seja tomada dentro da própria UP?

Claro, ele não entra em partido porque não existe partido eleitoral MLM no momento. Pessoalmente, acredito muito útil usar a base e popularidade dele (e da Laura Sabino??) pra uma tática possivelmente pouco efetiva (mas decidida por meio de organização partidária) do que passar mais 4 anos esperando essa organização maoista se manifestar.

link to article.

I don’t think it’s good to normalise images as “news” in this comm. It is true this time, but is less convenient to verify, and could be abused in the future.

Biden has been providing some great quotes lately:

“I convinced myself of two things. I’m the most qualified person to beat him, and I know how to get things done,” he stated.

They never change.

This graph is golden. How I’d long for a time machine to show this graph to every annoying redditor talking about how Zelensky would march on Moscow with their “spring counteroffensive” 8 months ago.

This other one is also a great visualization. I’ve been in small cities with less than 1 million inhabitants with more territory than that.

If anything, this makes Russia’s new gains sound very unimpressive, if one can only think of war in terms of Paradox game map painting. Clearly that’s not how it works, but I won’t opine on how the war really is going because I haven’t done enough research.

Could this war perhaps be over this year? I wonder how it’ll affect USA elections or the inevitable riot upon Confirmation Day if it ends before then.

Found a new emoji.

Não vejo porque uma moeda “auto-regulada” seria mais democrática do que uma regulada por um estado socialista, que por definição defende os interesses do proletariado.

E eu ainda não vi nenhuma evidência de que criptomoedas podem ser estáveis e realmente usáveis como moedas.

Mas aí entra minha pergunta: porque que criptomoedas seriam melhores que dinheiro regulado por um banco central socialista ou ideias mais complexas como vale-trabalho? Qual o problema da classe trabalhadora que elas solucionam?

A responsabilidade de provar a utilidade de qualquer tecnologias cabe a quem propõe elas.

Não vejo nenhuma vantagem de um estado socialista usar algo tão ineficiente quanto criptomoedas comparado a só ser dono dos bancos.

Se você quer uma análise fria do que é cripto e como se encaixa no capitalismo tardio financeiro, toma aqui um documentário.

The USA is the leading tiktok-using country, I’ll give them that. But according to this statista page, the following three countries already double the total of USA users.

That means ByteDance stands to lose way more by divesting themselves of TikTok than losing their USA audience. Not only are they isolating themselves diplomatically and economically from the rest of the world, now they’re backing down in hubris culturally as well.

Although I really dislike the TikTok business model for obvious reasons, banning it on USA territory is going to be really nice for the whole TikTok ecosystem.

So, when poor oppressed Americans are going to start getting VPNs to escape their Great Firewall?

You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen

I dare you to guess which one said this.