legatus

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Figes' books in general, but with a few searches I came up with a few reviews. The first, on the LRB, is quite positive, but the author, Geoffrey Wheatcroft does not seem to have, based on his wikipedia page, much expertise on the topic. The other, published in Victorian Studies, is more academic, and is quite negative. The author, Andrew Lambert, cites numerous errors. His most important critique is that this book narrates what he calls the "old-crimean war", and that it largely ignores what are now considered some very important aspects of the war. If you want some alternative books, consider taking a look at this thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5v7ggr/what_...), where u/kieslowskifan, a user who I absolutely admire for his knowledge, recommends a few crimean war books to a fellow redditor. Happy reading!

A People's Tragedy, while important as it has been widely read, is nowadays criticized quite heavily in the historiography of the Russian Revolution. Consider reading a few other books (like S.A. Smith's for a very recent one) if you want a different perspective.

Hey there!

I'm not an historian or anything of that kind but I'm really interested about the Russian Revolution and I spent quite a few hours on finding the best books about it. My knowledge about those books mainly comes from r/askhistorians (highly recommended!) and academic journals such as the American Historical Review and the Slavic Review. I saw a few other people recommending Miéville's October and even Reed's Ten Days. Now, I'm not claiming those books are bad in any way (I own Reed's) but if you're interested in an historical analysis those are probably not your best shot. Miéville is a sci-fi author who describes himself as a socialist, so he is not trained as an historian and, at the same time, he's definitely simpathetic to the Revolution. Reed's book was written during the Revolution and is a great book if you look at it as a primary source, but it's definitely a partial one. If you're interested in a book of history, then I would recommend you either Fitzpatrick's "The Russian Revolution", which is a short (about 200 pages) book from one of the great pioneers of the revisionist school in soviet historiography. For a more recent (and longer) book I would take a look at S.A. Smith's "Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928". I want to make it clear: Miéville's and Reed's books are great, but one should approach them knowing the context. It's similar to another great book (highly recommended!) by Orwell: Homage to Catalonia. It's similar to Reed's Ten Days, but I would not recommend it as an history book. Hopefully, those recommendations should be enough, but if you have other questions feel free to ask. For a quick look about Soviet historiography, here is a _great_ article by Sheila Fitzpatrick (the author of one of the books I recommended above) reviewing 5 books that came out in 2017: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n07/sheila-fitzpatrick/whats-left

Once you know the context, you can appreciate more books like Reed's and Mièville too.

Happy reading!

I found this analysis by u/SoulDrivenOlives very interesting, so I thought that maybe here people would both find value in it and add in some of their thoughts. I recommend reading it all if you're interested in the recently displayed AlphaStar SC2 AI.

The real link would be this one: https://www.wsj.com/articles/they-own-the-system-amazon-rewr...

Here is the outline'd version: https://outline.com/Km9vL4

Needs a (2017) tag

Paper referenced: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jamie_Farnes/publicatio...

In "Why I write" (1946), Orwell states that “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Could you mind explaining, if that's the case, how Orwell was disillusioned with socialism, unless you mean the socialists of the PSUC?

EDIT: Found this quora question: https://www.quora.com/What-s-the-full-Orwell-quote-that-is-o... The quote you provided is a summary by a person that is definitely right or at least alt-right leaning, so he is definitely heavily biased. In any case, as you can read in the quoted passage (this time the real thing), Orwell criticizes the "book socialist" or the orthodox marxist, which he already did in Homage to Catalonia. He's criticizing the soviet union's socialism, not the CNT-FAI's one.

There are different examples of radical socialist societies in history, too bad all of them were oppressed by all too powerful neighbours. If you like Orwell, you might like reading "Homage to Catalonia", his experience fighting for Republican Spain in the Civil War. The CNT-FAI supported a radical socialist society, in particular, an anarcho-syndicalist one. Another example is the Free Territory of Ukraine, during the russian civil war. In the early twenties it was conquered by the bolsheviks, since they didn't want Makhno, the military leader of this anarchist society, gaining popular support outside Ukraine. There are other examples: in Korea during the thirties... There are alternatives to both capitalism and Communism (in the Soviet Union sense). The fact that those alternatives aren't considered is caused by lots of propaganda against leftist ideal, take for example the two red scares.

Absolutely agree it gives an idea of what we're fighting. What I wanted to point out is that, whether or not they make a lot of money off of it, this fact should have no consequences on whether we allow it or not.

Can I ask what the amount of money that can be made has to do with this? First of all: they make a case against a particular type of advertising, not all of them. While I honestly believe an argument can be made against any type of advertisement, that's not what they're doing. Second: if an industry is based on immoral practices, what do we care if they make a lot of money? It's like saying "we should not go against slavery, it's a $X billions industry". If they make the money by using data the users did not know they were giving, then I don't care how much money they make: they should not be making it.

That's an interesting explanation. "We have decided to disclose this exploit as it has reached its end-of-life and it's not affecting Tor Browser version 8 which was released last week. We also wanted to raise awareness about the lack (or insufficient) security auditing of major components bundled by default with Tor Browser and trusted by millions of users." is the explanation provided by Zerodium. End of life? Raise awareness? Sounds like shitty PR to me... There must be other explanations. Anyone has any idea, beyond the one already provided above?

Oh I see, thanks for pointing it out! Hasn't it been introduced though? I'm not really a U.S. law expert, so I have trouble understanding. Isn't this the bill? (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/download/stop-bezos-act-2018?...)

Does it result in the error for you too? Maybe it's related to that, otherwise it's really suspicious.

Why has this thread disappeared from the front page? By the way, the link results, for me, in "Sorry, a potential security risk was detected in your submitted request. The Webmaster has been alerted. "

The paper (available at https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-01...) says that the part of the zebra finch brain analyzed had a resolution of 9 x 9 x 20 nanometers. If I'm reading it correctly, should they not be able to analyze synapses, too? At that resolution, shouldn't synapses have been imaged too?

This post introduced me to the field of connectomics. I must admit I am extremely fascinated by this field and the technology that characterizes it. Can anyone suggest me a few introductory resources, such as books and introductory papers, that they consider reliable?

Thanks for the response! I think the link you provided includes the ");" at the end, leading to an error page. Removing ");" leads to the article I think you wanted to mention. Anyway am I correct in saying this may allow research to analyze bigger and bigger neural networks (the biological ones)? I remember OpenWorm (http://openworm.org/science.html) which was able to recreate virtually the nematode's brain thanks to a few "maps" of its brain. Could this technology (coupled with the improvements that will come in the next years) allow something of the OpenWorm kind with more and more complex organisms?

This, to me, seems incredible stuff. Can someone with some knowledge of the field point out if this is really ground-breaking?

Some info:

https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/dont-forget-your-base-867...

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/850766326943690752

Info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narita_International_Airport#C...

https://throwoutyourbooks.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/narita-ai...

EDIT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs6jhn_9xaU

Well, the database contains data about users too... doing so would put users at risk. An interesting concept is ZeroNet [1], which allows entire websites to be shared in a peer to peer way.

[1] https://zeronet.io/

An important aspect that the author, in my opinion, doesn't touch is attention. Most of us, humans, tend to be capable of paying attention to a _single_ task for little time, such as some hour. Now, take a computer. A computer, given sufficient electricity is capable of paying attention to such a task until its hardware has problems. Imagine if someone such as Einstein or Schroedinger were capable of paying attention to a single task (such as unifying physical theories) without needing food, water, waste release, sleep, social life. Also the task is poorly defined: increasing an A.I. intelligence isn't a single task, it can be achieved by, for example, creating faster hardware, increasing efficiency, optimizing software, as well as much higher level tasks.

Well it only shows torrents they track... if you downloaded a torrent that wasn't being tracked it won't show it.

"In addition, the site offers a nifty spy tool where you can see what your friends are downloading, without knowing their IP-address. If someone clicks on a link you send them, their alleged download history shows up immediately, without the IP-address being exposed."[1]

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/i-know-what-you-downloaded-on-bitto...

Could you please elaborate why Italy has one of the worst laws? Never read about it.

Abstract: Given a state-of-the-art deep neural network classifier, we show the existence of a universal (image-agnostic) and very small perturbation vector that causes natural images to be misclassified with high probability. We propose a systematic algorithm for computing universal perturbations, and show that state-of-the-art deep neural networks are highly vulnerable to such perturbations, albeit being quasi-imperceptible to the human eye. We further empirically analyze these universal perturbations and show, in particular, that they generalize very well across neural networks. The surprising existence of universal perturbations reveals important geometric correlations among the high-dimensional decision boundary of classifiers. It further outlines potential security breaches with the existence of single directions in the input space that adversaries can possibly exploit to break a classifier on most natural images.