After 15 months of genocide - and resistance to it - the Israeli regime realized that they could not win a military victory against Hamas, and were forced to sign a humiliating ceasefire in order to get their hostages returned.
With much of Syria under the control of Al-Qaeda, and an increasing level of covert infiltration into Lebanon, the crisis in the Middle East is not over, and we may still be in its beginning stages, as the center of hegemony continues its gradual shift away from the United States. Their navy, once considered the best in the world, is likely also not very happy about their ships and aircraft carriers being forced to retreat by Yemen, one of the poorest countries; and all eyes are on Iran, who has, over the last year and a half, demonstrated a newfound confidence and strength to directly strike Israel.
The recovery for Gaza will take, at a minimum, decades; it could indeed never fully recovery to even how it was before, considering it is not in Israel's interests to see their concentration camps recover. But Hamas has proven to be steadfast and the tunnel network has proven its resilience, despite facing some of the most powerful conventional bombing in history. This shows that Palestine's liberation is a when, not an if; and hopefully a much sooner "when" than expected before October 7th.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
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.
Tried out the Chinese LLM DeepSeek R1, pretty good just from vibes alone it is as good as OpenAI o1.
Shorter replies though, but it's free unlike Chatgpt sub. So that makes sense.
I would say it is as bad as ChatGPT. I tried it (asked it some questions on physics, computer science and software development) and it's only capable of providing either wrong or very surface-level explanations on everything. Still haven't been able to find a valid use-case for LLMs
I think the key thing here is that this technology is not supposed to answer questions, do research or make decisions. Regardless of what the marketing implies it is better understood as a word calculator. You input the data yourself, and then it arranges everything for you. It's useful if you tell an LLM to categorize 10,000 legal documents according to well developed criteria. It cuts on labor and becomes an actual material gain. It's completely useless if all you do is ask 'what is Dark Matter', because at that point you're expecting the word calculator to create something useful out of its entire training dataset.
It's supposed to do clerical work, not creative work. Basically.
i had a weird pile of a few thousand ascii codes and no good way to get them decoded other than one at a time manually because of how the output was formatted.
i could have spent a few hours trying to program something i don't know how to do, or five seconds pasting into an llm. totally justifies all the environment damage and social problems they cause. definitely no way to solve my problem in visual basic in a spreadsheet.
i asked it to make some simple modifications to a few (extensively documented) physics models for me and it was able to tell me which moving parts were important for me to modify and gave me a generally correct direction in which to modify them. the code it gave was garbage but i also didn't bother being that specific so idk. i figure system integration still needs to be done by a human but for things like mature algorithms and stuff it can do a decent amount of heavy lifting
They’re very good for completing very bullshit and meaningless tasks quickly
renaming a bunch of files (quicker than it takes to write the script in python or PowerShell)
giving you the exact excel formula for something you could easily find yourself
correcting your emails
anything from GitHub
Makes complete sense why this brainless country has embraced them so much
you just have it spit out all the
mvcommand lines or what?I’m simplifying, but yeah basically It’s essentially a word calculator so anything you can put into English you can get in some quantitative form.
O1 saved me a ton on legal fees by reviewing documents and giving me questions for my lawyer. When the humans charge $600/hr, you want your ducks in a row.
I'm highly skeptical of using an LLM for any sort of legal purposes because of how many citations they make up. It's also a very high risk enviroment.
An actual lawyer looked everything over. It's more like answering questions about what certain clauses mean, helping to identify ambiguous language, helping put the lawyers drafts through it's paces, "If I'm trying to do X does this clause cover that?" shit like that.
Copilot works pretty well
Apparently the overhead cost is less than 5% of ChatGPT ???
Good for html shit which is all I need it for
Not necessarily a bad thing, ChatGPT has a tendency to waffle like me trying to bullshit homework at the last minute back in the day. Still fairly skeptical of AI in general although I admit it could have practical uses (just keep it away from creative stuff)