That's it that's the post

Vladimir Putin is stuck in his military campaign against Ukraine and could be preparing for another attack, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an interview with The Guardian.

The Kremlin is currently waging a hybrid war against Europe while testing NATO's red lines.

Zelenskyy warned that Russia could open a second front against another European country before the war in Ukraine ends.

"I believe so. He can do that. We must forget about the general European scepticism that Putin first wants to occupy Ukraine and then may go somewhere else. He can do both at the same time," he said.

SponsorBlock, Timestamps, and Generated Summary below:

SponsorBlock Timestamps:

1. 0:00.000 - 0:07.700 Intermission
2. 0:07.700 - 1:53.000 Clip: Russia's Support for Venezuela Against US
3. 1:53.000 - 1:56.500 Intermission
4. 1:56.500 - 3:18.000 Clip: Israel's Declining Influence in US Politics
5. 3:18.000 - 3:21.100 Intermission
6. 3:21.100 - 3:24.500 Hook/Greetings
7. 3:24.500 - 6:11.400 Intro: Israel's Declining Influence and Propaganda Push
8. 6:11.400 - 6:23.000 Kshama Sawant Joins the Conversation
9. 6:23.000 - 1:28:44.900 Main Conversation: Zohran Mamdani's Victory, Revolutionary vs. Electoral Politics, Genocide, and Imperialism
10. 1:28:44.900 - 1:28:50.500 Interaction Reminder
11. 1:28:50.500 - 1:30:15.221 Unpaid/Self Promotion

Video Description:

Timestamps:

1. 0:00 Intro
2. 3:45 Zohran Mamdani Already Capitulating to Capitalists
3. 39:41 The Fake Ceasefire Deal
4. 1:11:24 Democrats Say Trump Needs Permission to Commit War Crimes

Tags:

#usnews #uspolitics #zohranmamdani #kshamasawant #geopoliticsinconflict #nickcruse #usimperialism #Trump #workingclass

Generated Summary:

This program, hosted by Nick Cruse, begins with commentary on international affairs, arguing that Russia is successfully challenging US imperialism by supporting Venezuela, and that Israel's influence over US politics is declining. The main segment features an interview with Kshama Sawant, who is running for Congress against Rep. Adam Smith.

Their discussion centers on the recent electoral victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York. While both agree the win represents a working-class repudiation of Zionism and Wall Street, they offer a critical analysis. Sawant contrasts Mamdani's approach—which she characterizes as making backroom deals with capitalists and operating within the Democratic Party—with her own record of building militant, independent working-class movements that successfully won major reforms like a $15 minimum wage and strong renters' rights in Seattle. The conversation expands to critique the Democratic Party's complicity in genocide and imperialism, using her opponent, Rep. Adam Smith, as a prime example. The key takeaway is that substantive victories for the working class require a revolutionary, independent socialist movement that engages in class struggle, not electoral politics within capitalist parties.

Analysis & Key Takeaways

Nick Cruse's Analysis:

• International Relations: Positions Russia as a key counterweight to US imperialism, highlighting military support for Venezuela as evidence of Western weakness.
• Domestic Politics: Argues that support for Israel is collapsing across the political spectrum and that Zionist influence now relies heavily on censorship and propaganda.
• Electoral Strategy: Is deeply skeptical of politicians like Zohran Mamdani who run as Democrats, viewing their outreach to billionaires and condemnation of certain left-wing slogans as major red flags that indicate a future of capitulation to the capitalist class.

Kshama Sawant's Analysis & Key Takeaways:

• The Mamdani Victory: It is a positive sign of working-class anger and a desire to fight back, but the obstacle is not mass consciousness but the capitulatory leadership offered by figures like Mamdani and the DSA.
• A Revolutionary vs. Reformist Strategy: The core of her argument is that you cannot win lasting, substantial reforms for the working class by making peace with the capitalist class and its political parties (Democrats and Republicans). True change requires "pitch battle, class struggle."
• Proven Model for Change: She points to her record in Seattle as proof that using an elected office as a platform to build a defiant, independent mass movement—one that directly confronts and names its political enemies—is the only way to win major victories. She positions her campaign against Rep. Adam Smith as the national extension of this strategy.
• On Genocide and Imperialism: The complicity of the Democratic Party (including the Progressive and Black Caucuses) in the Gaza genocide and ongoing US imperialism exposes its fundamental role as a party of capitalism. She explicitly calls out Rep. Adam Smith for his pro-genocide votes and his continued advocacy for a massive U.S. military presence abroad.
• The Path Forward: The working class must build a new, independent political force based on militant struggle and international solidarity, exemplified by her congressional campaign's demands to end all military aid to Israel and win free healthcare for all by taxing the rich.

About:

Kshama Sawant:

Kshama Sawant is not a career politician. She is an activist who brings a passion for social justice to her work as a public servant. As a member of the City Council, Kshama pledges to be a voice for workers, youth, the oppressed and the voiceless. She only accepts the average workers’ wage and donates the rest of her six-figure salary to building social justice movements.

https://www.kshamasawant.org/

Nick Cruse:

Citizen journalist Co-Founder #TenDemands Board Member: National RCV [https://www.breaktheduopoly.com/] KC Tenants KC Sunrise [https://allmylinks.com/socialistmma]^[[1] https://substack.com/@socialistmma]

Revolutionary Blackout Network (RBN):

Blacking Out Corporate Propaganda and Educating for a Revolution.

“You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.” -- Fred Hampton (1948 - 1969)

We should focus our actions, time, and resources on Direct Action, Mutual Aid, and Community Outreach. If you do engage in Electoral Politics do not support the Duopoly (Red or Blue Team). No War but Class War!

Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.

☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive, libgen

Archived

[...]

Since the national security law was implemented, Hong Kong police have issued a series of international arrest warrants for individuals residing abroad. So far, none of the 34 individuals placed on the wanted list have been turned in. Nevertheless, they are under intense pressure, even if they live in a democratic country like Canada, as alleged transnational repression by China spreads.

Tay and five other pro-democracy activists living abroad -- Tony Chung Hon-lam, Chung Kim-wah, Carmen Lau Ka-man, Victor Ho Leung-mau and Chloe Cheung Hei-ching -- were charged under the law and subjected to bounties the same day. Tay, who spoke out via his online platform HongKonger Station, is accused of inciting secession and for colluding with foreign forces, two of the four crimes that became punishable under the vaguely worded law. The two others are subversion and terrorist activities.

[...]

"Transnational repression is not only real, but aggressive and sophisticated," Tay said. According to the couple, relatives who still live in Hong Kong were also affected, as Tay's cousin and his wife were taken in by the police and asked to assist with the investigation against Tay.

Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, a former pro-democracy Hong Kong lawmaker who was placed on the wanted list and hit with an HK$1 million bounty before Tay, has also felt the heat in Canada. Despite being a Canadian citizen, Kwok told Nikkei in Tokyo in late October that he has moved to the U.S. with his family because he feels safer there.

Kwok was virtually forced to flee Hong Kong in November 2020, and became stateless at one point, as his passport was canceled by the city. He was subsequently able to reinstate his Canadian citizenship, which he had surrendered to run for office in Hong Kong in 2016.

[...]

Explaining the situation in Canada, Kwok said that many "in the Chinese community have been reading up a lot of pro-Beijing propaganda news." This, he said, has "colored" their views. He argued that unlike in the U.S., "United Front" activities promoting Chinese influence and interests have been "very successful for decades" in Canada.

[...]

For the "first time, democratic countries feel that authoritarian regimes are reaching into their own territories, affecting what [their own] citizens can do within their own borders," said Kwok, who has co-founded a think tank in the U.S. called the China Strategic Risks Institute. Whether the pressure is coming from China, Russia or Iran, he believes such campaigns have given democratic policymakers a wake-up call.

[...]

Kwok called on Western governments to do more. "You're talking about democracy activists, dissidents, that are residing lawfully in those countries, that are [under] direct pressure," he said. "We need a lot of policy response in that respect."

Hey everyone,

We're excited to finally share the results summary of the survey we posted in this community a few months ago! A massive thank you to the n=2158 active self-hosters from communities like r/selfhosted on Reddit and c/selfhosted on Lemmy.World who participated. Your input has led to a comprehensive academic paper that investigates the core reasons why we stick with self-hosting over the long haul.

Our study examined which factors most influence the Continuance Intention (the desire to keep using) and Actual Usage of self-hosted solutions. We confirmed that self-hosting is a principle-driven and hobby-driven practice, challenging traditional models of technology adoption.

The Top 3 most important Positive Drivers for Continued Self-Hosting

The most significant positive predictors of your intention to continue self-hosting were all rooted in intrinsic satisfaction and personal gain, rather than just basic utility:

1. Perceived Enjoyment (The 'Fun Factor'): The sheer joy, pleasure, and personal satisfaction of configuring, maintaining, and experimenting with your own systems is a powerful, primary motivator for long-term engagement.
2. Perceived Autonomy (Control/Digital Sovereignty): The desire for explicit control over your data and services, and the rejection of vendor lock-in inherent in third-party cloud services, is a fundamental driver.
3. Perceived Usefulness: The belief that your self-hosted solution efficiently delivers specific personal outcomes (e.g., operational efficiency, powerful features, and privacy) is important, but its influence was less pronounced than Enjoyment or Autonomy.

The Critical Role of Technical Skill

We found that your self-assessed technical ability, or Perceived Competence, acts as a crucial link between wanting to self-host and actually doing it. Having a high intention to keep self-hosting is only half the battle. Your confidence in your technical skill is what gives you the self-assurance to handle the necessary, demanding tasks like maintenance, security, and updates. Importantly, a certain critical threshold of knowledge is required before competence starts driving that actual, continuous usage.

Other Key Insights

• Privacy Matters: Concerns about privacy in cloud services positively influence the decision to stick with self-hosting.
• The 'Push' Factor: If a user reports high Trust or high Autonomy when using commercial cloud services, they are significantly less motivated to continue self-hosting. This confirms that dissatisfaction with the commercial cloud effectively "pushes" people toward decentralized alternatives.
• Maintenance Isn't a Dealbreaker: The high effort and time required for upkeep, or Perceived Maintenance Cost, was not a statistically significant factor for giving up on self-hosting. Our intrinsic motivation is powerful enough to absorb the necessary effort.

Implications for the Self-Hosting Ecosystem

For developers and the community, these findings suggest that sustained usage depends not only on functionality but also on fostering empowerment and a great user experience. By making self-hosting more enjoyable and reinforcing the user's sense of digital sovereignty, we strengthen the intrinsic motivation that fuels this movement.

Thank you again for helping us publish this research on the future of decentralized digital solutions! This work would not have been possible without your participation.

The full open-access article "A Model of Factors Influencing Continuance Intention and Actual Usage of Self-Hosted Software Solutions": https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/22/10009

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/41530810

Migrants in Europe stand by the basic values of democracy, according to a new study by the University of Mannheim in Germany.

“Our results show: immigrants support the core democratic principles to a similarly high degree as people without a migratory background,” says Professor Marc Helbling, sociologist at the University of Mannheim focusing on Migration and Integration and Executive Board member of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES).

You find the download link for the study here: Liberal democratic values among immigrants in Europe: Socialisation and adaptation processes

Helbling and his team analyzed data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the SVR’s [Expert Council on Integration and Migration's] German Integration Barometer.

High support for democratic basic values all over Europe

The results of the study show that both migrants from democratic countries of origin and those from authoritarian countries are highly supportive of core democratic norms, such as free elections, equal rights, minority protection, and independent courts. On the ESS scale from 0 to 10, the mean level of support for these values throughout Europe is at 8.56 for migrants. For non-migrants, the level of support is at 8.48. For Germany in particular, the Integration Barometer data with a scale from 0 to 3 show very similar values, more specifically 2.67 and 2.66. “These, in all cases, very high mean values hardly differ between the individual groups of people,” Helbling explains.

Experience with democracy in country of origin has a positive effect

The research team found a small but statistically significant difference between immigrants from highly authoritarian countries, such as Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, or Iran, on the one hand and migrants from more democratic countries, such as India, Turkey, or Romania, on the other. “People who have lived in a very authoritarian system for many years tend to develop slightly weaker democratic attitudes. Conversely, people who have lived in more democratic countries for a long time show a bit more support for democracy. However, the difference is really small,” Helbling explains. “In principle, democratic basic beliefs are shared across cultural and national borders and, as a rule, solidified with increasing democratic life experience,” the social scientist sums up.

Problematic minorities within all groups

Despite the overall high level of support for democracy, there is a small minority among immigrants who reject it. According to the researchers, the share of this group accounts for a medium single-digit percentage. This value is almost exactly the same as the one for people without a migratory background, Helbling emphasizes: “Our analyses show that anti-democratic attitudes are not specifically a migration-related phenomenon. There are critical minorities within all population groups.”

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52774830

The convention in question on the UN site: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/home.html

Thoughts?

A century ago, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania fought to free themselves from Russian rule—only to be conquered again by the Soviet Union during World War II. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, they emerged devastated but determined to rebuild on Western terms. Over the next three decades, they transformed from poor post-Soviet republics into some of Europe’s fastest-growing economies—embracing democracy, digitalization, and NATO protection. But after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the old fear returned. Now, the Baltic State s are pouring billions into defense, fortifying borders, and training citizens to fight. Having risen from oppression to prosperity once before, they know exactly what they stand to lose.

Just to keep my fellow lemmygradians updated on what AI tools are capable of, and also because I'm pretty stoked for this project.

I put 5$ in the deepseek api (sidenote: I like that you have to top up a credit balance and they don't auto bill) then downloaded crush. Crush is an agentic coding tool, meaning basically it instructs the LLM to do stuff automatically.

It made me a complete python script to first download all of the ProleWiki content pages into txts (which also means we can do backups, even if it's a little hacked together).

Then with a second script we are running these txts through a (local) LLM to translate them for our French instance. The problem is there are 5000 pages on the EN instance and a grand total of 3 in French, so nobody is interested in joining and writing pages from scratch when you could "just" find them on the EN instance.

For these two scripts (which are running right now) I've paid a whopping 67 cents on API. It amounts to a few hours of prompting and then of course waiting for the agent to work.

Cache hit on deepseek is a godsend for agentic work as it's basically free (less than 2 cents per 1M token), and with a codebase you constantly feed it the same code over and over. This is why my cache hit is so high.

Compare to GPT-5 which costs 12 cents per 1m cache hit.

What's pretty amazing (and scary, it's very scary using crush) is that you can just go do something else while it works and puts everything together. Go have dinner while the agent is on the task, or watch a youtube video.

The third and final script will be used to upload the translated files to the wiki. I still need to think about what exactly I want it to do (write API access is not a problem, the problem is just the logic of it all).

As for running the translation job if you're curious, it saves its progress so I can stop and resume any time I want and I estimate around 6-8 days of continuous running to go through everything (there's a lot of material). Yes we could use an API or even rent a GPU and multithread but eh, I figured I only have to do this once. And there's a LOT of tokens to translate, you won't escape that. Even using a cloud API it would probably take a few days of continuous querying.

But compare to doing it by hand which, well, we haven't even started despite the instance existing for 4 years. So it's basically 4+ years vs 8 days of work.

Later I can adapt this specific script to work on books to bring more exclusive theory to English like we did for the CIA's Shining Path which was done with what is now an almost obsolete model lol (and I definitely improved the prompting since that one). I might actually redo CIA's Shining Path with mistral just to see how it differs.

The problem if anything is this is making me learn stuff like git to make it FOSS and downloadable and make it more robust to handle more usecases lol

About crush:

Before I started using crush I didn't really get what an agent actually did or helped. So this isn't just putting a prompt into the web interface and asking it to generate python code. The agent makes sure to take care of everything, including writing functions tests and fixing bugs. That's right, this thing fixes its code automatically.

It calls tools and terminal commands by itself, and can edit files. When it does you get a git-like preview of the lines edited.

to use crush you just prompt the LLM. "Okay now I want to do this, now I want to do that, there's a bug here's the log" and it will work through the problem by itself. It's scary how fast it does it.

You can extend its capabilities with LSPs and MSPs but I haven't looked into that yet. Which it was more user-friendly to set up, but I got there in the end.

Caveats:

deepseek boasts a pretty comfy 128k tokens context window, but you run through it quickly because it has to read and understand the entire project. Crush handles this (it makes the LLM write to a crush.md file and then restarts the last command sent when context resets), but you're still limited. However with tools like deepseek-ocr, if they ever start integrating it, you have potentially infinite context. Clearly they're going to come up with something, they're already working on it. But you won't be recreating twitter with an LLM yet.

You don't want a specifically coding fine-tune for this as it needs to understand the file structure and the readmes. However I have run into situations where the LLM did stuff it shouldn't have done, for example deleting the database that keeps track of which files we've already worked through because it doesn't know this is the 'live' prod.

Mind you I'm pretty much cobbling this together so I don't git it or anything, it's just a one-time script for our specific needs and I shouldn't put the content files in the same folder as the script, it's just good practice. I def recommend keeping two copies of your project if you're not going to git. Crush works on one copy and then you can copy the files over to the other folder.

Oh also no chance of crush deleting system32 as it opens in a specific folder and can't leave it. Before running a script it also lets you review the code and asks for permission to run.

This is not replacing devs. It's a great addition to non-devs and devs alike. For non-devs it lets us write our scripts and solve our problems. For devs you spend more time thinking through and planning your app and then send the writing of it to the LLM. As a designer this speaks to me because we plan things a lot lol. And if you know your stuff, you can avoid some of the pitfalls the LLM might go into if you don't specifically prompt it for it.

If you also don't know some libraries or APIs very well it can handle them for you. You can totally give crush working code you wrote yourself, it's just that it might not be the most efficient way to use it since it could also write that code for you.

Your workflow is basically 3-10x more efficient with this and that's valuable - take a coffee break while it works, you deserve it. You become more of an engineer than a coder and imo this is where dev work is heading.

Translation work:

As for the translation, which is handled by mistral-3.2-instruct (a 24B model that fits on my 16GB and generates at 15 tokens per second, honestly good job France I gotta hand it to you), it's pretty good but you have to prompt it first. The prompt for this task is ~600 tokens, which is a lot but also not a lot considering I can easily have a 16k context window with this tool.

imo a lot of the "we spend more time fixing the translation than we would have spent doing it ourselves" comes from clients incorrectly prompting stuff (but what else is new lol), translators not necessarily using tools to automate bulk edits, and older models not doing as good a job - deepseek is actually pretty solid at translating because of the thinking, though we didn't use a thinking model for this task.

Translating the filenames is messier and more prone to hallucinating random characters. I think it's because it just doesn't have a lot to work on, you're asking it to translate 5 seemingly random words. Translating the page content is much better, some pages that I checked are pretty amazing.

Not all languages work equally. I used Mistral specifically bc it's french so we assume it understands french better. Some languages don't have 'enough' presence to be trained on effectively, and others are just not a priority for devs. Chinese LLMs are seemingly better at Persian for example but still not 'great'.

Another thing is it sometimes translates jargon two different ways. It would need a dictionary or something like that that says "this word is always translated as X". I'm sure this will come, and in fact a simple dictionary is probably an old-school method for an LLM already. But you would also need to build that dictionary and when you have 5000 pages of content I just don't know where you would even begin.

Even with those caveats it gets us 80-90% of the way there and the remaining work will be to fix stuff manually as we come across it. Or with mass regex edits. If we can get interest to the FR instance with this as one of our editors has alluded to, then we can also count on crowdsourcing the rest of it over time.

Conclusion:

We're doing pretty exciting things for 67 cents.

We taking that frickin cup

Unbelievable

https://www.occrp.org/en/news/eu-continues-exporting-banned-pesticides-to-global-south-despite-pledge-to-end-trade

#EU #EC #Europe #EuropeanCommission #policy #politics #LMIC #LIC

Congressional Republicans are reportedly trying to insert anti-abortion language into government funding legislation as the shutdown continues, with the GOP and President Donald Trump digging in against a clean extension of Affordable Care Act tax credits as insurance premiums surge.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, sounded the alarm on Saturday about what he characterized as the latest Republican sneak attack on reproductive rights.

Wyden said Saturday—which marked day 39 of the shutdown—that “Republicans are spinning a tale that the government is funding abortion.”

“It’s not,” Wyden continued. “What Republicans are talking about putting on the table amounts to nothing short of a backdoor national abortion ban. Under this plan, Republicans could weaponize federal funding for any organization that does anything related to women’s reproductive healthcare. They could also weaponize the tax code by revoking non-profit status for these organizations.”

“The possibilities are endless, but the results are the same: a complete and total restriction on abortion, courtesy of Republicans,” the senator added. “Trump said he’d leave abortion care up to the states. Well, this latest scheme makes it crystal clear: A de facto nationwide abortion ban has been his plan all along.”

Last thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?