Welcome again to everybody. Thank you for joining us for the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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A moroccan-belgian dude defended a Muslim woman on a subway against a racist guy and he got hit in the face by a heavy object. He died after being in a coma. He was murdered by a racist.
The headline: 'Man passed away after defending woman from attacker'
Passed away. Passed. Away. Like he peacefully lived his life until old age took him away.
I have a crush on a guy, and I haven't seen him in a while. But I saw him recently in the line for the night club I was going to go into. But instead of going up to him I panicked and went back home. Why am I like this?
No one is always at the top of their game. Such things can happen for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't cancel out the progress you have done up until now. The best thing to do is to not to dwell in it, and instead to try to learn from it, having hope and trying again in the future. (From my point of view.)
Fear of rejection is rough. But like all fears if you just face you realize its not so bad even at its worst. After you get shut down a few times you realize is isn't that debilitating, nothing really changes. You thought they were cute and you didn't get to spend time with them before and afterwards its the same. I found a short and direct line was the best way to go.
Kinda feel bad for sending the bulgarian at you guys. I debriefed him since nobody else was available. Apparently he got mad at you for talking about deepseek & programming, as in actually harassed you & interrupted the conversation. I don't even find that funny, & him still asking for more places "like that" but without nerds is just sad. End of the line buddy. I've thrown him at everyone else already & it's just awful. He even harassed Keith Rankin. I think he is doomed to be a mangy dog on the side of the road
I thought this was supposed to be the side of the road tho
Do you think using AI is a good way to study theory? I've been using it as a way to ask questions. For example: answer this from x perspective or what would x author think about this?
In my area of professional expertise I am afraid that the AI hallucinates too much and I am afraid that the same thing will happen when I ask questions to the AI and that I am not realizing it.. at the moment it seems to be going well because I only use it for very specific cases, but perhaps it is because I do not have real expertise in Marxist texts.
answer this from x perspective or what would x author think about this?
A better approach would be "in x book author discusses this thing, in the current situation I am examining this other thing and applying the theory to get this understanding? is that a correct application of the theory?" would go way better.
LLMs aren't good at being people but they are good at being systems of words.
Hallucinations aren't as big of a concern to me as shallow or skewed readings, imo. Think of all the ways there are to misinterpret Hegel or Marx, and all the reddit comments and YouTube videos and Trotskyist and liberal articles that comprise the training data. I'd be careful asking information-seeking questions.
Some models can probably be useful to help you parse difficult passages, and talk through concepts if you learn better through dialog. Also can find secondary resources if you're using one that can search the internet.
But as long as they're only supplemental to actual theory and you don't get overconfident in your early understanding (which is a problem regardless of LLM usage) I don't think there's much harm. No matter how you study you're gonna have misunderstandings that become refined into understandings through the process of learning and discussion.
I've hit a weird spot recently. To sum it up, life is going very well despite everything going on in the world, but for about a month or two i've been dealing with somewhat more executive dysfunctioning and emotional dysregulation (thanks AUDHD). I've also been a lot more busy, hence why my activity on the 'grad has been a bit slow. My job situation has been pretty stable.
Oh, and I'm starting next year with two international family trips, first I'm going to the Philippines, and then I'm going to Mexico.
So I picked up this book called "The Hundered Year Marathon" by Michael Pillsbury at the library and it's genuinly so bad, I'm only 20 pages in but omg I don't think I can read anymore i'm cringing so much, i'm kind of tmepted to write a review of how bad it is but idk if that would be helpful
Get an LLM to write your bad review. that's what they made it for.
Is there a federation issue going on right now? It looks like a lot of lemmygrad comments aren't showing up on hexbear or lemmy.ml for the last couple days or so.
Two attacks by supposed Islamist in Europe in one week. Welcome back early-to-mid-2010s. Probably an indicator of the economy being in the gutter.
Have a wonderful week, everyone! Quantitative efforts build up towards qualitative developments. Remember this whenever you feel like your goals are unbreakable walls. You will burst through, eventually.
As always, communism will win.
I hate PDFs.
i hate adobe
Only thing Adobe does right is fonts.
PDFs were the worst thing that happened to Postscript.
Last week of summer vacation 🙄 gonna enjoy this little piece of freedom. Have a good week everyone!
I also started trying to learn Chinese. Wŏ xihuān xué hanyŭ 😄
我希望你有很好的时间在学习中文！不是太难
:) I plan to study a little every day, making a habit of it. I'm sure I'll make steady progress that way. I think the biggest challenge will be learning all the characters and getting the sounds right. Sorry to respond in English but I started learning last week 😁
Do you have any suggestions to music I could listen to?
I've never written anything here before, I'm just a lurker tbh lol but I think I can help you a little, I started learning mandarin in 2024 so it's been 2 years now and since then I've made some mistakes and some stuff I got right, I'll write about the songs first then I'll write about the language after, btw the music recs I'll give are not necessarily so you learn with them (many have complex lyrics), I'm supposing you just want to know more about chinese music, another user gave a better answer in case you want music to learn the language.
If you are an r&b fan then you're lucky bc that's half of chinese music since the late 90s or so, there's quite a lot of rock and other genres too though, pretty much every early Jay Chou song is good (mostly r&b), listen to his Fantasy album and see if you like it (especially the first 3 tracks which are my favorite ones), but pls dont learn mandarin by listening to his music, there's actually a joke that not even chinese people understand much of what he used to sing at the time lmao, there are many rock/dream pop artists like Faye Wong, maybe I'm too biased but there's almost no bad song in her discography (maybe except for her songs from the 80s, I dont listen to those so I dont know), listen to the entire Fuzao album made by her if you dont mind listening to albums, but if you just want one song then I'd say 感情生活 which it's an alt rock gothic rock inspired song, if you like dance-pop then listen to Magician by Lexie Liu, if you like the more soul inspired part of r&b then listen to 飛機場的10:30 by David Tao, for more rock albums there's bands like JaJaTao and Omnipotent Youth Society which both have highly acclaimed rock albums, I didn't listen to it yet but I heard Soft Lipa (rapper) is considered one of the best hip hop artists which lyrics are in mandarin so it's probably worth if you like hip hop. I'm just giving broad recs, if you particularly like anything a lot, tell me.
Now for my unsolicited tips regarding the language lol, I'd say use Anki, or any similar flashcards app, it can be either sentence decks or vocabulary decks (many great decks are shared by the community), I like vocabulary decks but some people swear sentence decks are better, but please dont make the same mistakes as I did and dont spend 90% of your study time on flashcards, I'm pretty good at reading mandarin and recognizing Hanzi characters, I can read most sentences that people write in chinese social media, but I'm very bad at actually listening and understanding what people say bc I completely neglected on actually training the ears with podcasts with transcripts and just started doing it this year, also if you're not gonna live in China I think its almost useless to know handwriting, so don't stress over that, unless you find it's the best way for you to memorize hanzi.
Don't use Duolingo, if you want to use a Duolingo-like app then Hellochinese is even better than that for mandarin and the design is even kinda similar iirc, I didnt use it too much though honestly so its not necessary but many love it, say it's fun and even prefer it to any other apps so maybe you're that type of person so it can be a huge plus.
One thing that I thought was useless so it delayed my learning by a lot was that at first I didnt care about tones, I used to read any word without pronouncing the correct tones, and after learning almost 1k hanzi I had to relearn it all again from 0, seriously, memorize the tones for every hanzi you learn, and some months from now I'd advise you to learn some of the basic tone sandhi rules and have them on mind, imo they're not too important right at the beginning but they're more important later. Don't stress over them too much either though bc it doesnt make you difficult to understand if you forget some tone sandhi rules when speaking, all of this might look overwhelming but by the end of the year you'll realize it was easier than it sounded, as you said learn it a little every day. Sorry for writing too much lol
Thanks :) I'm using HelloChinese as a starting point. I think it works pretty well because with some writing on the side it covers vocabulary, reading, listening, tones, pinyin, and hanzi. Assume I'll need to move on at some point but it's a start
music with the intention of learning chinese? i'm not sure about that, but ultimately i wouldn't recommend since tones aren't used when singing songs and so it requires a lot more contextual information to understand what's actually being said. i would recommend starting with simple listening practice of people speaking: peppa pig is a popular starting point. but, making it a daily habit is the most important part! i haven't been great about studying for quite a while haha
Do you have any suggestions to music I could listen to?
This channel has quite a few songs with lyrics in Pinyin and Characters while it plays:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4o6oZ3ce4&list=PLBwqeFGNGi1BTR1l-aciAjo6KpppAbtiY
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Yay
There's this Dutch artist Sophie Straat who has been in the news recently for asking all white men to go stand in the back at her show for one song and white men online are absolutely seething lmao
Love her and her music, I have seen her at protests as well
Why did she ask for that though?
Provocative activism basically. It's to make room in the front for queer people, women and other marginalized groups attending. It's for the opportunity for a mosh pit for said people.
Nice
🛞 You WHEEL have hope, car-rade.
You gave me an idea. What kind of car would Karl Marx be in a pixar Cars movie?
Maybe a Chinese EV if we're going for "what he'd sync up with if he were alive today."
Where is this comrade?
Ksar of Aït-Ben-Haddou, Ouarzazate Province, Drâa-tafilalet Region, Morocco.
Nice, I was there myself
Thank you. I'm planning to do a North Africa tour in the future, I'll make sure to visit there as well!
Morocco is awesome
So my uncle asked my help for spellchecking some of his documents (he's an attorney). However, the docs required a specific program that supports Window$, macO$, and Debian-based distros, and I have Fedora. It took me a long time to create a compatibility layer. Since all else failed, I had to create a Win10 virtual machine.
In the end, my uncle ruled that I'm tech-illiterate. Lol, lmao even.
what kind of program is he using that he can't export to pdf lol
He uses a program issued by Ministry of Justice, which can export to .pdf, .odt, and .txt. He's the know-it-all kind of person, so I have to adapt instead to not cause another fight.
Le Mao
I hope you all have a nice week :D
Have a nice week! ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ
Thank you Comrade! 🫂
You too Oppo
You too, Oppo!
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