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Cake day: December 1st, 2023

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  • The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.

    NKVD means “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”. And in Stalin’s era they still retained the pretense of a democracy on new principles from the 20s.

    But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren’t built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.

    No. If you ever learn Russian well enough … I actually don’t know what specifically to recommend you. Vysotsky’s songs? It’s just everything you read that will communicate some idea of how it all worked.

    Soviet “militia” (it was called that, but in fact it was police, of course) was quite similar to all three things you’ve mentioned.

    Also NKVD was both what later became KGB and what later became MVD (after Stalin and Beria USSR had sort of a moment of epiphany, not complete, but hundreds of thousands of people were released from prison camps, hundreds of thousands rehabilitated postmortem, and it was said publicly and officially that such things shouldn’t happen again), so it included both people in black leather coats who’d come at night and people in white coats who’d regulate road traffic and catch small time thieves at day. With pretty similar methods between them.

    Imagine if German police under Nazis and Gestapo were one and the same organization administratively. There’d be more “cultural exchange” than there was in reality.

    Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it’s the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.

    I will, but my knowledge of Stalinism is closer to the root, and Russian is my first language, so I don’t think this will be useful for that kind of example.

    The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.

    Since USSR came into this discussion, official unions in USSR made that difference very small. Their main activities were about organizing demonstrations on all the important days, though. And also the usual Soviet organization stuff - distribution of some goods via that organization to its members (like some fruit which would rarely be seen in some specific area due to Soviet logistics being not very good), sending children of some members to some kinda better summer camps or some competitions, all that.





  • The whole problem with shadowbans is that they are not very easy to prove (without cooperation from Meta). One can be shadowbanned from one area (by geolocation), but not from another. One can be shadowbanned for some users but not for other. The decisions here can be made based on any kind of data and frankly Meta has a lot to make it efficient and yet hard to prove.

    Shadowbans should just be illegal as a thing, first, and second, some of the arguments against him from the article are negligible.

    I just don’t get you people hating him more than the two main candidates. It seems being a murderer is a lesser problem than being a nutcase for you.







  • I can do that in Russian too. I can’t do the former in English.

    There are plenty of things possible in one language and not (yet\anymore) in another. I don’t see what does this have to do with any kind of demonization. Maybe for people knowing only one language, which, yes, is more common for English speakers than I’d like to think.

    I suppose a speaker of Finnish would have something to enlighten us about some languages being in some regards inferior to his own, too. Or a speaker of Icelandic. Or maybe even Persian. There are languages having dozens of words to distinguish shades\textures of snow or sand, or not having future tense.






  • Sorry, I don’t remember what I used then as a tutorial, possibly nothing, and I don’t write assembly often, it was just an opinion based on the experience from the beginning of my comment. That said:

    You have call and return, so you can use procedures with return. You have compare and conditional jump instructions. And you have timers and interrupts for scheduling. That allows for basic structure.

    You split your program functionally into many files (say, one per procedure) and include those. That allows for basic complexity management.

    To use OS syscalls you need to look for the relevant OS ABI reference, but it’s not hard.

    So all the usual. Similar to the dumber way of using C.

    In general writing (EDIT: whole programs, it’s used all the time in codecs and other DSP, at the very least) in assembly languages is unpopular not because it’s hard, but because it’s very slow.



  • Soviet school curriculum actually had a little bit of that. Well, how to tell ranks, what to do in case of war (also fire alarm or any other emergency), first aid, disassembly and assembly of the AK rifle, orientation on terrain and basic survival skills, not sure about actually firing at targets - I wasn’t alive back then.

    In our school (I was born in 1996) there was literally one time where our class was taken to a shooting range, but it was more like a tour. The got to shoot a few rounds at targets, yes. The first aid, ranks and AK disassembly\assembly parts I do remember.

    There were war-themed games (“Zarnitsa” etc) teaching coordination, subordination, orientation, and of course using radio (to communicate and to intercept the other team’s communications). EDIT: That I only heard about.