One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain’t worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
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Last week’s thread is here.
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.
The Nobels are being awarded and both physics and chemistry prize have gone to AI related breakthroughs.
The chemistry one was very obvious that it would be eventually awarded for the development of AlphaFold. But the physics one has come as surprise for many, and it is controversial among physicists.
Machine learning is extremely important in a lot of STEM fields. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT here, but any situation where a computer is being trained on a large dataset to recognize patterns. It’s allowing for techniques to survey large amounts of data that wouldn’t have been possible before, except maybe by having a dozen grad students work on it for months.
ML and AI-type stuff is sick as hell, but the media hype-bullshit and stable diffusion stuff that people use for slop gives it all a bad name. I know people doing really cool research on different types of cancer and cleft palate data using ML approaches, to good effect. Stuff like that should be prioritized and publicized much more. It’s a tool like any other.
It is the future, computation time abbrieviation matters
I mean, isnt the foundations of machine learning an essential part of what allowed them to create alphafold? The tech has great uses outside of treat printing
Hinton gives off grifter vibes. I can’t put my finger on it but I don’t trust him.
His role in developing the ideas way back when means he is now a prestige hire onto advisory boards etc and it’s gone to his head
I think that’s probably it. He seems to be pushing the idea that AGI is just around the corner. It smells of self-promotion over good science.
WTF I know him from ancient gamer days, and now he gets a Nobel prize…in chemistry???
The world is a weird place.
Also didn’t he say some questionable stuff in his reddit days or something, or am I misremembering and that was just Peter Molyneux?
Yep he started as a game developer. He developed Evil Genius which is a great game.
Idk about this, but that does sound like Molyneux