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‘Brazil is a global pariah’: Lula on his plot to end reign of ‘psychopath’ Bolsonaro
  • “who died in 1985 of intestinal disease before taking office as Brazil’s first democratically elected leader”

    So the U.S. killed Tancredo in favor of Lula?

    Knowing America's history of meddling in Latin American politics, this wouldn't surprise me. However, why would the U.S. want a working-class and clearly leftist politician like Lula in power in the middle of the Cold War? Especially since this president advocated for agrarian reform, the very same policy that just 30 years earlier got Guatemala on the U.S.'s sight.

    More broadly, by the time Tancredo was elected, the U.S. had spent the last ~30 years supporting rightist military dictatorships in Latin America, of which arguably the most infamous were Guatemala, Chile, and Argentina. These were set up to protect American interests.

    And so a question arises, how could a leftist president represent American interests in the middle of the Cold War?

    But perhaps more pragmatically, Lula supported Tancredo in the 1985 elections. I don't know the exact reasons why, but it's not hard to imagine that it has to do with the fact that Tancredo was a social democrat.

    This doesn't exclude the possibility of conflict, which is why I'm asking both (1) why Lula would want to kill Tancredo and (2) why Lula would be of interest to the U.S..

  • What do you think about recent events on c/worldnews? Should we try to prevent such behaviors?
  • ✅ Self-awareness

    ✅ Being prosocial (although I wonder if people would see the "I had to do it" as prosocial, but still)

    Thanks for those two things.

    I'm sure you'll be able to discuss your genuinely interesting views in an effective way (apart from continuing posting interesting stuff!)

  • What do you think about recent events on c/worldnews? Should we try to prevent such behaviors?
  • I agree that maybe there's something that could be done.

    Fact checking is tricky

    As to fact-checking, I'm not really sure what to do. On one hand I worry the 'reputation' system would be too restrictive. On the other hand, in general (by which I mean that I haven't seen this crop up in Lemmy but I wouldn't like to see) I'd hate to see anti-vax, flat-earth, or otherwise blatant fake science showing up.

    Nudging cognition and affect is as well, but seems more viable

    But there is something that could be done regarding the way in which the Lemmy interface nudges our thoughts and feelings. The paradigmatic example in the Fediverse is Eunomia. I wonder (and don't doubt we could find) literature on these nudges to improve interactions.

    The goal could be to avoid finger-pointing as well as aggression, and to incentivize thought/understanding, kindness, and, in general, positive emotions so that we're able to be both flexible and critical. Note that the positive emotions part is not me being hippy-dippy; by now it's well established that positive emotions enhance cognition and permit a much broader set of automatic thinking habits than negative emotions. In particular, negative emotions have no desirable characteristics that positive emotions can't deliver (make sure you read p.110 ¶2 sentences 4 and 5).

    It would be great if we can find a way of changing interfaces in such a way as to nudge us towards positive emotions and critical thinking.

    But until the heavy lifting for that is done (something that, once I feel comfortable with my CS training, I could attempt), I wonder if the minimal Democratic manifesto could be done with tricky situations like these in mind. In other words, make an explicit, clear, and widespread expectation that we're here to share, understand critically, and interact kindly.

  • Today I learned @lemmy.ml tronk @lemmy.ml
    TIL there's open and thriving alternative to Apple's M1 chip-building technique. It's also insanely fast and energy efficient. It's RISC-V

    The speed and the efficiency of these chips are just insane:

    > "As just one example, a recent microprocessor design using RISC-V has a clock speed of 5 gigahertz, well above a recent, top-of-the-line Intel Xeon server chip, E7, running at 3.2 gigahertz. Yet the novel RISC-V chip burns just 1 watt of power at 1.1 volts, less than one percent of the power burned by the Intel Xeon." (Source)

    Perhaps reading from the source is better? 🙂 https://riscv.org/

    Sorry if I'm preaching to the choir, given the type of Lemmy users, in terms of already knowing about RISC-V and in terms of assuming y'all know about the M1. Still, I just learned about RISC-V today, and I'm awed!

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    Why Git has changed the world and will change it further

    !

    This photo is from Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation. In it, there's a chapter dedicated to studying 'fluid networks'. Fluid networks are characterized by (1) high density and (2) malleability. These are the characteristics that make coral reefs, cities, universities, and the internet innovation machines.

    Not only do innovations happen incredibly quickly in those fluid networks, but they are evidently much better at innovating than lonesome geniuses or groups who are innovating for profit, which is what the image I mentioned earlier points out.

    These characteristics of the fluid networks are also present, I argue, in Git. Perhaps not in all of Git, but in projects dense enough, with enough users. Get enough users in a project, and to the extent that the code maintainers can make the repository malleable, you will get innovation at incredible speed.

    Because of this, we can say that Git is indeed a version control system for projects without much activity, but with projects with many users and enough capacity to merge commits, Git is also an innovation machine. This is why Git has not only changed the world, but will continue doing it.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TR
    tronk @lemmy.ml
    Posts 3
    Comments 4