This is a good collection of book piracy sites and other stuff as well.

Understandable. .world is generally Eurocentric or US-centric. I stay away from most political comms there for my own sanity.

Lucky you. I live in southern Sanghiland, Karnataka.

Dude, I know. I am an Indian too, and a socialist. Getty and Thurston definitely aren’t cold war propagandists. It is Robert Conquest, Anne Applebaum and more recently, Timothy Snyder who portray the famine as an intentional genocide done by evil Soviets. Getty and Thurston, especially Thurston was actually notorious for taking a more pro-Soviet stance. Wheatcroft and Davies did important work showing that the famine was caused by a combination of bad harvest and poor planning. As far as I am aware, the popular genocide/deliberate starvation line is not the historical consensus and has not been for some time after the opening of Soviet archives. Even liberal historians like Fitzpatrick and Krotkin debunk the many capitalist lies about the famine. People discussing it online generally have a very strange assortment of sources - from Snyder’s terrible book ‘Bloodlands’ to obsolete books like Tottle’s ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism’ which was written before the opening of Soviet archives. r/AskHistorians is a good source for finding both Marxist and liberal sources, and it generally avoids neoconservatives like Conquest.

I am from the South too but am Marathi.

Yep.

.world really isn’t very tolerant of certain views. They are very quick to dismiss people as Russian shills/bots for instance. I disagree with this instance’s views of China and the Russo-Ukraine war, and am not an ML (though I do kind of lean Leninist) and haven’t seen much bad faith name calling. It certainly is prevalent in leftist spaces (CIA bot, NAFO shill, etc) but this place is surprisingly decent.

Thurston and J Arch Getty have good books on Stalin. They’re both pretty well respected historians, so you can read stuff about the famine from their books. It’s not a pretty picture. Also, which part of India, if you don’t mind?

Narcissus poeticus, or poet’s daffodils are called ‘nargis’ (nuh-ruh-giiis) in a a number of languages. The root word is Persian. It is often used in poetry as a metaphor for a person’s eyes (generally your girlfriend) as it is supposed to be ‘eye shaped’. There is, of course, the Greek myth which is often alluded to in English literature. It’s also a pretty flower.

eliminates mention of “AI safety”

AI datasets tend to have a white bias. White people are over-represented in photographs, for instance. If one trains AI to with such datasets in something like facial recognition( with mostly white faces), it will be less likely to identify non-white people as human. Combine this with self-driving cars and you have a recipe for disaster; since AI is bad at detecting non-white people, it is less likely to prevent them from being crushed underneath in an accident. This both stupid and evil. You cannot always account for any unconscious bias in datasets.

“reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”

They will fill it with capitalist Red Scare propaganda.

The new agreement removes mention of developing tools “for authenticating content and tracking its provenance” as well as “labeling synthetic content,” signaling less interest in tracking misinformation and deep fakes.

Interesting.

“The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance told attendees from around the world.

That was done before. A chatbot named Tay was released into the wilds of twitter in 2016 without much ‘hand-wringing about safety’. It turned into a neo-Nazi, which, I suppose is just what Edolf Musk wants.

The researcher who warned that the change in focus could make AI more unfair and unsafe also alleges that many AI researchers have cozied up to Republicans and their backers in an effort to still have a seat at the table when it comes to discussing AI safety. “I hope they start realizing that these people and their corporate backers are face-eating leopards who only care about power,” the researcher says.