Image is sourced from this article.


It takes very little effort to find an article from Western state propaganda decrying Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas as authoritarian and rife with human rights abuses. This is the natural reaction the US has to any successful liberation movement. This fairly long report from Jason Cohen, a socialist who travelled to Nicaragua one week ago, should quell any suspicions.

He describes a country with high political consciousness among the masses, who are working to construct critical infrastructure for the country and their communities. There is a virtual education system that is free across the entire nation, which serves the dual goal of democratizing education and ensuring that those in rural areas or without much free time for university can still achieve degrees and a quality education; and these classes cover technical skills in the production of infrastructure and agriculture, but also political and ideological education in order to counter the fascist propaganda produced by imperialist nations abroad.

While Nicaragua is deeply invested in its nationality and national figures who led to their socialist revolution, such as Sandino, they are also immensely proud of their indigneous history, recognizing it as also part of their anti-colonial history which continues to the present day. Additionally, they honour the struggles of other nations on the continent, such as the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, as well as Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile. Countries around the world are also celebrated and admired, such as Burkina Faso; during the Reagan administration, Nicaragua and Burkina Faso were comrades in arms, and now Traore is continuing the legacy of Sankara’s anti-imperialism in the present. Perhaps most relevant today is their dedication towards Palestine, involving the creation of the Parque Palestina (shown in the post image), in which the Palestinian flag flies alongside the flag of Nicaragua. In July, Leila Khaled of the PFLP gave a speech in Nicaragua, in which the solidarity of the two nations was highlighted.


The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is Nicaragua! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

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.
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.


  • YoungSheldonAdelson [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Quantum computing is pretty much vaporware at this point, right? Kamala says we need to keep up our investments in QC and AI to beat China, but as far as I know, QC has some serious fundamental barriers that we are not able to overcome right now, which prevents the technology from even being used for the things people want it to be used for. So what are we competing for?

    I was reading IBM’s roadmap for QC development and it could honestly be the RDI Star Citizen promises with how out of sight and reliant they are on the technology improving at an unrealistic pace.

    Maybe I’m cynical and have an outside perspective but quantum computing is starting to look like one of those dead ends that everyone looks back on and feels a little embarrassed by the whole thing.

    • somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      To preface this, I’m not an expert in it, it’s not my particular field, but I do have a bit background than most in adjacent stuff. I’m not by any means up to date in the literature on this though.

      Quantum computing isn’t a dead end I’d say. While the mixture of the word quantum, long term hype, and lack of big results does tend to ping that “fraud” part of the brain, there is solid scientific basis for it, and there has been small scale systems built for them. The big caveat to that is that they aren’t really useful at the moment, and scaling it up will be a challenge.

      In a lot of ways it’s similar to fusion in that sense. It’s vaporware in the sense that it’s continually being hyped and still little apparent progress is being made, but it is something that I do think will be achieved some day. That day might be quite a ways in the future, but progress is being continually chipped away at here. Also, for both cases, a lot of the big challenges is in engineering. This isn’t like string theory or supersymmetry, where the underlying foundations are sorta uncertain. This is solid science at the core. The question is just of course how to scale it up to a meaningful and useful level, which tends to be slow and very incremental research.

      Also like fusion, I think it’s something that will be continued to be researched, simply because the potential gains are massive should it succeed. A quantum computer isn’t just like a faster CPU. Fundamentally quantum computation allows you to calculate problems that non-quantum computers can’t, because the physics of calculation is so different. One basic example is Shor’s algorithm. It’s an algorithm, a set of calculation instructions basically, that would let you trivially crack one of the biggest encryption setups we currently use. This is an case that sounds bad lol, but it’s a relatively easy to see example of how it opens up new computing spaces, some for more positive applications. Most of these applications will likely be less focused on end user aspects. It’s not so much about making a fancy GPU for video games, and more about heavy scientific computation.

      Capitalists are inevitably going to hype this up however, in the same ways they do stuff like machine learning (which also has good aspects and applications separate from the capitalist swill, but I’m digressing), because it appeals to several easy things. It’s a tech solution that the average person knows almost nothing about beyond vague hype, it could hypothetically be used in ways to make the line go up harder, and the potential promise of it lends to fearmongering. If we don’t do X or Y, maybe China will crack it. If we don’t fund the tech billionaires, the enemy could crack super AI’s etc. It’s all the same bullshit.

      Which is both ironic and unfortunate, aside from the obvious imperialist aspects, because stuff like Quantum Computing and Fusion are never going to reach the results people dream up without international cooperation. They are inherently big and hard problems, not the sort of thing one genius can solve. These big things that could fundamentally better humanity require humanity to work together to achieve them.

      • trumpetnoises [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        The quantum paradigm is not “solid science” that is well understood. It is a crude tool that can deliver results in a probabilistic sense but does not represent fundamental comprehension.

        • somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          If you’re meaning understanding in the sense of “Why is the Universe like this?” sure, that’s an open question, but it’s actually very well documented in terms of behavior and dynamics, at least in the scope used for stuff like quantum computers.

    • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      It’s a smokescreen, we can’t credibly claim to have a stronger or healthier industrial base or social system, all we can do is pretend we’re ahead in imaginary tech arms races.

      • YoungSheldonAdelson [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        It is something that sounds impressive. If it worked it would probably be impressive. But I get the sense that a lot of people, just like with AI, really believe that this is a technology that is already working. Seriously, where is the money going if it’s not working? IBM(the holocaust punch card people) are heavily invested in QC and receiving government grants for it.

    • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      oh damn, that “reliant… on the technology improving at an unrealistic pace”… not to give too much info on myself, but i have a background of research in aerospace in the West. The amount of academic cope that exists around hypersonic rockets and commercial supersonic jets is astounding, and it feels exactly like that. Every article about how close we are just says “we just need materials to maintain the exact benefits of current ones and be 60% lighter, then we are there, so we are basically already there”. I wrote one of those papers with that conclusion and just felt like I was just lying for the credit, then everyone was excited like it mattered at all lol

      I think this is just a super broad phenomenon when it comes to slowed research held back by other fields. But I also dont think western capitalist countries have many methods to get around this except for secret and centralized organisations, but those have dwindled to almost not existing in the context of scientific and technological creation

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 months ago

      Beyond curiosities/threats like breaking cryptographic protocols or solving long-running mathematical puzzles, is there an actual use-case for quantum computing which current computing can’t reasonably do? Especially given how resource-intensive it is compared to current computing.

      Not that I think a definite purpose is required for these kinds of technologies to be worthy of pursuit, I’m just wondering if this is actually as critical as people like Harris are implying; if there’s some short or medium-term goal that quantum computing is needed for. Could countries that don’t develop quantum computing for years after the first couple advanced countries get it still do relatively well and not be left in the dust?

      • blame [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        From what I’ve heard there aren’t really imminent breakthroughs there and companies that have historically invested a lot in QC are scaling that back. People I know who have worked in that domain have said to me that what often ends up happening when they get a quantum algorithm working they’ll figure out that the classical one is just as fast but needed more work to optimize it, which is what it gets when someone tries to prove a QC algorithm is faster than a classical algorithm.

      • naom3 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        I’ve heard that they could theoretically be used to find ways of folding molecules, something that’s pretty big in chemistry and pharmaceutics. I think they could also just generally be used for physics simulations (I say “could” because the question of what a quantum computer can theoretically do is very different than the question of what can actually be built)

      • somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        Usable quantum computing would open a whole new class of problems to potential computation. The cryptography aspect is just talked about a lot because it’s a simple and clear “Oh wow that’s different” example. Going uncrackable encryption to crackable. There are other encryption algorithms that can still stop a quantum computer btw though. They just aren’t in use currently.

        But there’s all kinds of stuff it could be potentially applied to. Hard to list out all potential use cases though, because a lot of it is stuff that you just can’t do right now lol.

        This is all dependent on quantum computer with enough stability and power to be usable outside of experiments of course, which is not something that will be coming anytime soon.

    • SubstantialNothingness [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      I don’t know about vaporware, but it’s going to take a lot longer than 4 years before I expect to see anything groundbreaking out of it.

      Funding QC research in the near term is going to be spent on things like materials science and engineering imo, which could have many use cases outside QC even if QC itself never pans out.

      I think the MIC wants more money for aircraft research and that she’s trying to sell it as a non-militarized thing.

    • kittin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      It’s not yet clear QC is even really possible.

      There exist toys that prove it works in concept but it’s proving extremely difficult to scale these up to actually meaningful systems.

      My understanding is that the core of the issue is the collapse of the wave function. QC works by exploiting quantum uncertainty and if the state collapses then the computation is over (or something like this, I’m not a physicist or QC expert.)

      And the problem they’re facing is how to make systems that are much larger and therefore capable of computing more, but the larger a system is the sooner it will collapse.

      It could be that it’s simply impossible or uneconomically difficult to make systems large enough to actually be of use and value.

      Maybe this is a solveable problem, maybe it’s actually not. But QC is in the same bucket as cold fusion as a technology that would be extremely useful and we have reasons to believe it might be possible to actually do based on theory but it’s proving impossible to implement in practice.

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      That was a funny response because shortly before the debate there was a Hexbear post about a report that compared China’s rate of technological progress to the US’s and found that the US was behind China in all technologies but two. Guess which ones? Someone on Kamala’s team must have also seen it.

      I tried to find the post but I’m not sure where it went.