for free? I’m not as familiar, but my best guess would be for you to see if you could check out some chinese learning textbooks from the library. Chinese Zero to Hero has a free pronunciation course. I’m a huge fan of their HSK courses as well but those are paid. they get bonus points for the cultural revolution imagery in the courses. Hello Chinese is a lot better than Duolingo IMO, and there’s a free version of the app. Pleco is a great free dictionary resource. Anki is another great free resource for drilling vocab. I think DuChinese has some good stuff for free as well. Best of luck! It’s a long road. I know this anathema to lemmygrad, but the chinese language subreddit has really good posts about this sort of thing as well.

我有很多中国人的朋友。我的女朋友也是中国人，所以我学习中文。我也非常喜欢学习语言。你几年学习中文了？

Thanks! I agree - having a window into a different perspective is awesome. Got any recs for mando pop? It’s not pop but I’ve been banging 北京欢迎你 and 老鼠爱大米

When Ben Norton speaks, I listen.

i’ve been learning chinese as an intellectual hobby. it’s a great but rewarding challenge to train the skills and gain increasing access to a different society’s culture and worldview. it’s a humbling experience

late 20s. i’m also gainfully employed and earning a high wage at a household-name company that you would not think would harbor communists

here’s the paper in the ‘70s that set off this quest for the holy grail. many have tried but we’ll see if this one sticks

memristors are a pretty old idea. they mathematically complete electronics and solve some fundamental computing problems. it will be a long road to take advantage of this though because memristors require a different architecture than the Von Neumann one that basically every current computing device has.

like others have said your best best would probably be taiwanese citizenship then you can go to china easily

wow, this is getting ugly. good on Ben for walking away

yeah, starting with a static site hosted as files in a public S3 bucket or something could be a good place to start. Once you understand those basics, maybe try learning the MERN stack.

maybe i’m high on hopium but the best case scenario looks increasingly likely imo. we’ll see how the 2024 offensive goes

the next video recommended: “why China’s absolutely guaranteed to COLLAPSE yesterday”

prohibited the Russian Federation … from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, … "except in self-defence or …”

Not sure what the details are but my understanding is that China essentially doesn’t let its bourgeois run away with their money

It was a slow process. It started when I worked as a server and was first exposed to the desperation of working people. I met people who had to work a dinner shift after spending the first 8 hours of the day sweltering at a brutal roofing job to make ends meet. People fighting over shifts because otherwise they couldn’t feed their families. Outside the restaurant I’d regularly see undocumented landscapers get chewed out and let go on the spot because the boss wasn’t happy with how the flowers looked that day. The icing on the cake was when the “owner” of the entire shopping complex showed up one day, fat and happy, worth 9 figures. It hadn’t dawned on me until that day that someone actually owned the property I worked in. After that experience I got a corporate job and was completely dumbfounded how different the working environment was. It started to sink in that something was deeply wrong.

My politics have always been heavily focused on the environment though. The real nail in the coffin has been waking up to the fact that capitalism will have us go extinct if it’s profitable to do so. I bought into the neoliberal ideal of trying to “shop green,” and that’s when the cracks started showing. I finally came to my sense and realized that I am at the mercy of whatever the markets want to produce, and most of the “green” companies are just trying to juice profits, further feeding the beast. I started reading up on energy company investment plans only to realize the energy transition under capitalism is a ruse because they will pump oil as long as it is most profitable to do so and neoliberal governments are incapable of putting forward the level of investment and market controls necessary to change that. As Luxemburg famously said: it’s “socialism or barbarism.”

Great read - I can’t believe how quickly AlphaFold is enabling science like this

link?

Play stupid games…

This will be an incredible development when they pull it off. It seems murky to me how semiconductor shrinks will be pulled of after the next few, but this could really change things.

feel better comrade

Those numbers have my jaw on the floor