Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I had a sleep study done last night. What a strange experience. They wired me up with a plethora of sensors – electrodes, nasal inserts, belly band things, and more – so many that it was difficult to move without feeling like I was going to pull them loose. Then when I was all connected, the nurse just turned out the lights and left without telling me he wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t really sleepy yet and I had brought a book to read. My bottle of water was also completely out of reach. Overall, it was not a good and restful night.
It seems odd to me that they would be able to accurately study and diagnose anyone in these conditions. I guess this is fairly standard for these things though.
I’ve long wondered about that too. For one person I know, it did make a difference; they had a sleep study done, ended up with a sleep apnea diagnosis and CPAP machine, which for them became a significant difference in alertness and ability to stay awake throughout the day (prior to that, they’d had times they felt like they had to force themself to stay awake while driving).
But the process of actually doing the test does seem like it’d be quite a bit different from how one normally sleeps. I guess for someone who has sleep apnea, for example, the disorderly sleeping behavior is consistent enough across environments that it doesn’t matter if the testing environment is weird.
I’m certainly curious to see the results. I don’t tend to snore and don’t suspect I have sleep apnea. My primary problem is that falling asleep can take me more than 1 hour. It makes it hard to get a solid 8 hours and even when I do, I often still feel drowsy and not well rested.
sleep is so important for brain and body health, i’ve been figuring that out for myself for the past few years. i thought about doing a sleep study but the cost was just to exorbitant for me, and it seemed unlikely to be very conclusive for the reasons you explained (i also am fairly certain i don’t have sleep apnea, for example). hope you get something tangible from the results!
I hope the results lead to some kind of solution for you.
I should really look into a sleep study myself. I’ve long suspected I have something going on with sleep; I relate on the not tending to feel well rested, for example. But I don’t want to do it partly for the exact reasons you described about the weirdness of a sleep study. T_T
Thank you! I’ll try to remember to post an update here when I get the results back.
“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: “Rain, rain, go away; umbrellas, raincoats for today. …” And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)
my favorite part of sci-fi is when all their futuristic technology gets to be so dated. alexa on optical tape and mechanical relays. single-panel garage doors. a “weather box” that’s basically just the early-morning news on tv
Hello
Waiting for the new General Discussion Thread 👀👀
I just called the warehouse. General Megathreads are on back order. Apparently there is some type of supply shortage and they don’t have enough bytes going to the factory to keep up with demand. Its hexbear’s fault because they have like 10 megathreads every week.
Visited FC United of Manchester recently. It’s a fan owned club established by angry Man Utd fans who opposed the takeover by a US owner. They had a surprising amount of communist flags hanging around. Some hamsics, Marx banners, Che, pro Palestine. Very cool club.
My dream is to visit socialist football clubs from all over Europe, and they are on my list
Very friendly people. Run by volunteers. I wanted to get a jersey and some guy had to come down to open the fan store just for me. Took me around the grounds as well and gave me a history lesson for free.
For a minute there when I first read this I thought you were saying that the fan owned club was established by a literal angry man lol
The football team?
(I know nothing about football and probably hate it now due to my stupid father so excuse me for my ignorance)
Yup
Oki
Keep saying it but the drought is scary man. Everything is just dust here now. Rivers are completely dry.
It’s crazy to think about the change central europe went through these past summers. We had breathable air, real rain at least twice a week.
We get lucky if it drizzles 5min twice a month, but you only smell the dust that has been lifted from the ground.
It rained for five minutes today. It wasn’t even rain just some drops. Probably evaporated before it went into the ground. Next ten days no rain either and multiple 30+ degree days.
And because our rivers come from inland and more central Europe your problems also come to us again lol. All the rivers are dried up.
Infighting in Dutch leftie land. Popular commie YouTube Left Laser said in an interview to stop focusing on identity politics and to put class war first (more or less). Other lefties find this racist. Fighting between meme pages is happening.
I guess it depends on how he said it tbh. There are a lot of “marxists” that want ignore identity politics completely and put it all the way after the revolution.
I agree.
Most people who invoke the phrase identity politics like to claim that they’re against people saying things like “you can’t speak on that because you’re not _____”, or “listen to _____ voices” (uncritically and ignoring their class backgrounds), but then will happily allow people to smuggle in transphobia, homophobia and racism in under the same shibboleth and barely lift a finger to refute them.
Well, I am not for class reductionism, but I do think that both class and intersectional struggles are necessary.
Class is the ontological driver of Identity inequality. You cannot end inequality between ethnicities, cultures, genders, sexualities, religions, etc, without first confronting Classism.
We do need to be aware of identity power dynamics within our organizations so as to not perpetuate those inequalities but we should not be investing energy battling the bourgeoisie on their chosen field.
Abolish the word “normal”.
It’s not a “normal” person, it’s a typical or average person.
Still thinking about how to replace “normal” in Math. Normal distributions, normal vectors, normal basis and other things mean completely different things.
Normalcy is just another way to oppress people
Just finished Player of things by Iain M Banks.
Set in post scarcity anarcho communist society.
and writer is a Chad
In late 2004, Banks joined a group of UK politicians and media figures campaigning to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest, he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In a Socialist Review interview, Banks explained that his passport protest occurred after he had "abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns.
I know the “video games can’t be art” thing is kinda a dead horse, but I think most of what can be said about video games can also apply to, of all things, architecture. Architects have to deal with physics and usability in a similar way game designers and writers have to deal with the limits of programming and usability.
Architecture is a core of Iranian art, dating back literally thousands of years
I wish gatekeeping what is and isn’t art were a dead horse. It’s boring & fruitless.
Yeah
I still remember in the early 2000s when people said Techno wasn’t “real” music.
Sometimes I wonder if woke up from being apolitical too late. Like, the empire is dying, climate crises etc. etc. and I had barely any time to get organized and stuff since I only got into Communism about 7 months ago.
Frankly, I’m happy that I got the chance to at least see the world as it is without so much baggage from a cult or from liberalism. Certainly, I’m not an isolated case.
So, I have hope that humanity will choose Socialism over Barbarism.
We will win this shit.
etc
I wanted to post that photo of a parent helping their child hold the flag of the USSR but I didn’t find it.
I like to think that we are in a time of changing material conditions. It feels like this year has been monumentous with everything that’s happening. Either that, or I’m seeing things from a far different perspective than a year ago.
I’m a recent convert too, so I thoght I’d give my thoughts on this.
I feel like this year is mostly a culmination of everything that happened from 2020 onwards. Of course, a Marxist would know that the issue is capitalism but the average person is in constant state of “wtf happened.” I know I did.
I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but I think I would’ve become a Marxist at any time from 2020 to 2025 if I had proper education. (Especially education on evolution lol). I can recall so many close calls.
Anyways, the future is bright. And hot as well, living next to the Equator line during climate change sucks.
So I’m planning to try out this LLM craze to see for myself. I’ll mostly use it for data analysis and error checking, but I don’t see myself using LLMs casually much.
I want to run it locally, and I heard Deepseek gives the best run for the money, but the news says Kimi and Z.ai surpassed it. Which one should I go for comrades?
I use deepseek as a search engine because google sucks so hard these days. I just use the free web based version and I almost never get any server busy signals but kimi has a tiny limit on tokens for their online version that makes it essentially useless.
I’ve been rotating through duck.ai models whenever regular searches fail me. I haven’t tried deepseek. Do I have to sign up for an account to use it?
Yeah but you might be able to use a temp mail address.
I also saw some plugins for DS that can load custom prompts to the web version. I’m currently leaning towards it, but I’ll wait for more opinions before my ultimate decision.
Have you ever thought about how ugly the flag of Amerikkka is?
flag in question
Even if it didn’t represent the most genocidal empire in history, it would still be a ugly ass flag. It has too much information: 50 stars, 13 stripes, and a height-to-width ratio of 10:19?? Who designed this garbage??
Don’t forget the fact Captain America’s suit defaces this flag because nobody has time to draw half a hundred stars on his chest.
Reminds me, I remember a commie once pointing out that the Star Spangled Banner song doesn’t even sound that good and I still think about it to this day. It has kind of a goofy history too: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/star-spangled-banner
Some highlights:
After the hours of bombardment and the fear that the British could overtake the fort and head to Baltimore, Key awoke to a proud display of American patriotism and a symbol that they were not going to stop fighting. That morning he wrote notes for a future poem about this event. Later that week, he finished the poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” On September 20, the Baltimore Patriot published “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” Francis Scott Key’s brother-in-law set the poem to music, and the combined poem and music were published under the name “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In 1929, “House Resolution 14” was presented to Congress to name “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the official national anthem to the United States. There were many objections to this resolution.
One objection was that the tune of the “Star-Spangled Banner” was taken from the song “To Anacreon to Heaven.” This song was the theme for the Society of Anacreon, which was active between 1766-1791. The Society of Anacreon was a gentleman’s club that meet monthly to listen to music of questionable tastes and to socialize. Ralph Tomlinson wrote the lyrics and John Stafford Smith composed the melody in 1788 and 1780 respectively. The song alluded to alcohol consumption and love in the last line of the first stanza, “I’ll instruct you like me to entwine the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s wine.” Even though only the tune was used, some members still saw it risqué that the two songs could be intertwined.
If you look it up, the Society of Anacreon, was a club in London. So a song with lyrics that are about a fight with the British, uses a tune taken from a British song lol. Classic colonizer maneuver.
Neat piece of history. Colonizers have serious creative sterility for some reason.
Thanks for sharing!
I liked the Serapis flag better.
let me show you a cursed image:
flag
Flag of the Republic of the United States of Brazil
Hear me out- the color scheme is soothing.
Heard army helicopters near my town tonight, probably scooping up water nearby to combat the wildfires. Wild how fast climate change consequences arrived.
same deal in the Midwest USA
has anyone read
By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer (1990), by Victor Ostrovsky
apparently zionists tried to ban it and couldn’t?
