That’s not how science works. For anything to have value it needs peer review. In the case of history that means additional accounts by other people (ideally with different backgrounds) and ideally physical evidence like documents and other archeological finds. This is especially important in history, as every single piece of evidence is faulty due to distortion through bias. A single primary source all alone is literally worth shit. The last book provides multiple lengthy accounts from different primary sources and so at least meets the minimum requirement for not being immediately throw out.

Blackshirts also literally mentions some of the authoritarian issues I mentioned that you denied. The fact that in some cases it failed to properly adress the needs of the people due to abuse of power and how the structure it self accidently encouraged selfish self defeating behavior. I just added comments about party members basically being a separate class (because of the unrivaled abuse of power you refuse to dispute, while providing a book also mentioning it), while the book debunks western propaganda.

You can say I misunderstand communist theory, that’s a valid criticism. But saying you refuse to engage because my understanding of history is false is dogmatic bullshit. Saying I’m unwilling to change my mind is rich when you literally just say I’m wrong, give me a book largely discussing a different topic (western propaganda and fascism) and then refuse to provide examples for your own claims. While my claims are dubious third hand accounts at best, you somehow managed to stoop below me.

The first two books are theory with random anecdotes with the same citation count as my shit. If that constitutes history, than so does the Bible.

Tho I apologize for lumping then all together as the last book is actually somewhat more interesting (like actually having fucking citations). It rightfully outlines western propaganda, highlights what good happened in the USSR and what bad in the west. Tho if you actually read the thing, you’d notice IT’S JUST AS CIRTICAL OF THE SOVIET UNION! Read it your self! It mostly defends the USSR from western propaganda, but it doesn’t do the same mistake you did and just deny the structural issues. Sadly it doesn’t say much, as it is very much focused on critiquing the west (like the first 50%), so I kinda just dismissed it at first.

Also you completely skipped my request to provide a single example for your previous claim, sad.

Yes… I was saying the theory doesn’t match the situation on the ground. And the links you gave are all theory, which I at no point argued about.

The “separate class” I mentioned was also less of a theory reference, and more of a reality on the ground. Party members are treated differently. My grandpa was a party member back in the western block and had privileges regular folk didn’t. Like traveling around the globe and importing foreign “imperialist” goods seemingly at will. My mom stood out with his gifts, like wearing jeans.

Also you say they have accountability with stuff like recall elections, but I’d like to invite you to provide an example of this actually happening. Like genuinely, I can’t find any. All I find is officials being ousted by other officials, never by regular everyday people. As an example of completely dodging consequences, I’d mention that soviet countries and China both tried becoming leading grain exporters while their populations fucking starved, and people complaining were just labeled liars and thieves!

Which reminds me of a saying we used to have: “Kdo nekrade, okrádá rodinu” or “Who doesn’t steal, is stealing from their family”. A very different context from the one above, but it paints a pretty vivid picture, so I think it’s still worth sharing.

I just feel like creating a class of people with absolute control that mustn’t be questioned under threat of absolute annihilation is a spit in the face of the most core socialist let alone communist values.

They both have one body dictating what the people’s needs are that mustn’t under any circumstance be challenged. Making the whole “according to needs” part null and void. Both have histories of completely neglecting their citizens in favor of pursuing imperial ambitions.

Also not calling anybody capitalist. Saying it’s not really communism isn’t the same as saying it’s capitalism. So considering your comment I feel the need to also express that my second paragraph is in no way saying other countries haven’t done the same under other systems like capitalism. Just covering my ass, feeling the ugly head of pointless what aboutism approaching.

Wtf are those even good for? My pencil case from back in the day alone would take up like a third of the while thing. Does an A4 even fit on it?

Brutal oversimplification is an understatement to what just happened here xD

Only if there are no checks and balances. The typical “communist” regimes like Russia and China can hardly be called communist by any definition. Just like nobody would call nazi’s socialist, despite it being in their name (national socialism).

Fucking “I take all and ya’ll better belive I’ll redistribute favorably or fucking die” is hardly even left. I especially hate when people say “in theory it makes sense, but in reality…”, no it fucking doesn’t even in theory!

An all out attack on thousands of people’s lively hoods without warning, how will they ever get out of thi…oh wait, it’s America, right, they’ll not only not face punishment, they might even get a pat on the back.

The nice thing is, you can pretty easily run both and switch around. Just get a distro with one, and then it’s usually just 1 or 2 commands to get the other as a choice on the login screen. KDE and Gnome apps are also largely compatible, regardless of desktop environment.

I’ve been using KDE mostly, it’s just nice being able to customize it so easily without too much technical knowledge of the environment or hoping someone already made an extension for it like on Gnome. Then again, some may like the simplicity of shopping around for extensions and calling it a day, or later even editing the extensions.

Recently, for my tiny laptop I switched to gnome, it’s also just pretty :)

Wait, how the fuck are only Central Europe, Finland and Estonia in support of encryption. What the actual fuck people?

Idk, it’s rare for an electron app to literally not even run. Meanwhile I’m yet to encounter a python app that doesn’t require me to Google what specific environment the developer had and recreate it.

Everyone shits on Star Fox: Assault for shit controls. Which is half true at best, as in it makes you chose between 3 options (option C being the correct modern one) and the one the cursor starts on (A) is indeed shit. I mean it’s remotely annoying once, but like come on, it’s not even a hidden setting, it MAKES YOU CHOOSE!

The god damn warning labels on absolutely fucking everything. Bro, I just wanna eat at a restaurant without wondering why the menu has a god damn “at your own risk” label… Also can’t go 1 step in a water park without seeing a life guard, they’re fucking everywhere. Not to mention on the rare occasion they aren’t there, you just can’t do shit. Land of the free my ass, feels like the optimal way to do anything is to always have a lawyer by side.

Can’t speak for the science libraries as I’ve never used em, and I’ll gladly just blindly accept that as truth, but for everything else it’s always a pain in the ass. For being designed to “run on anything” it sure is funny that 90% of the time I download a python app it doesn’t fucking work and requires me to look up and manually setup a specific environment for it. Doesn’t help that the error messages are usually completely random and unrelated to this…

I always dread when some fucking madman makes the installer for their app in python, knowing it’ll probably fail… God forbid it’s a script that’s supposed to modify something else. Always a good time for reflection upon the choices that led me to this point.

Even my old scripts I kept around for sentimental value. Half of those don’t work either, and I can’t be bothered to figure out what version I made em for.

I tried my best to scrub python from my pc out of principle, but as you say, it’s soo common my distro uses it as a dependency, fucking bullshit!

It says a lot how the right keeps spamming us with AI images when making absolutely ridiculous shit up.

Except for their low draw and thus unmatched battery life on portable devices, the M chips are honestly not impressive performance wise. Not really the appeal, even tho Apple is trying tooth and nails to pretend that that’s a selling point with their unlabeled graphs.

I mean if you really don’t want a GPU (which IMO is a must, given proper hardware acceleration which makes up for any CPU short comings, but I digress), that leaves you with a much bigger budget for the CPU, and now it’s no longer close enough to the M chips, but an absolute slaughter.

I don’t want to downplay or invalidate any of your preferences, but you HEAVILY miss represent the competition. Have you seen a non apple device in the past 5 years?

Other companies make metal body PCs now. From the dinky cheap ass laptop I bought just for fun, to my sister’s proper gaming laptop, there’s plenty of metal+glass laptops out there. And when it comes to android I only really follow Samsung, Sony and Google, but at least those 3 have had metal+glass flagship phones since I care to remember. (looked it up, Sony: 2013, Samsung: 2015, Google: 2018)

At 600 you can get a computer with an actual graphics card. The only outstanding feature of the M1/2 macs is the very low power consumption, the rest is quite subpar.

I download my music and order it by Artists>Album>Song, basically without exception. Occasionally annoying when a song has multiple authors, because people don’t always write the metadata the same way and it fucks with my music player, but that’s besides the point.

When I make playlist, I just take a whole album, filter out a few songs if need be and shove it into a given playlist, sometimes I can do that with an entire artist, but it’s not always that easy.

Another issue with my approach is the odd single song from a random artist that’s really good, but everything else they ever made makes me fall asleep, that’s a really annoying one… Might start making my own fake albums.

My company is very lenient with how I spend my time (as long as I’m somewhat in the office and get my work done, which I god danm do!) and it’s absolutely amazing. Often before a big release I run out of work and since no one is tracking it, I can just work on optimizing/cleaning our code or fixing some UX issue. I mean what are people gonna complain about? Me not doing the work I already completed? If they ever start tracking us I’m jumping ship, our new team pushes out the best code this company ever had and if that’s not enough, then nothing could be.

I’m also confused about this whole “constant meetings” thing. At work I have an analyst that does the vast majority of client communication for me. From how people talk about work, it makes me think “analysts” aren’t a thing in other companies. My gf (also a developer) didn’t even know what an “analyst” could be. Like seriously? I love that guy! Life would suck soo much without him. The only meetings I attend are technical or educational in nature. And our monthly team leader meetings, just because he wants to make sure everything is ok with us.