Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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i had a dream polish reactionaries were annoying the fuck out of me. i don’t know why, i’m not from poland or anywhere related, haven’t talked to a pole in ever
it was kind of hilarious. i’ve been pretty sick and am also in australia rn. the dream came in a nap shortly after i had taken medication that made me really drowsy and seen a falun gong table outside that made me chortle. i guess i came back and dozed off mad as hell about anti-communist misinfo
i distinctly remember having very lucid (as in cogent, not aware i was dreaming) thoughts in my dream, i don’t know the context but i was on the rooftop somewhere (i think i had lost toys up there, and was angrily trying to gather them, which was unrelated to anything else) grumbling about revisionist history where ussr was ‘expansionist’ with regards to molotov-ribbentrop, or however ussr conducted themselves during or after ww2
i remember some guy my dream imagined who was anti-communist polish and writing young adult, space themed novels about poland post ww2 (to be fair, it was sick as FUCK in my dream, vague images or visuals of this novel series came in my head, i remember a huge golden bust against inky black space). it was like he was doing historical fiction but also the backdrop was space?! which is, again, admittedly sick. and yet i still don’t get a single bit WHY I WAS DREAMING ABOUT POLISH PEOPLE😭
cw drugs
I have been given Xanax for the time being and ngl it is kinda nice to lose the ability to feel anything if you need it. But I get the addiction perspective of it.
The proles shall not be drugged into submission, though.
I know this is me being neurotic again but I hate the phrase “powered by ai.” Like…what? No its powered by electricity. Designed by ai, enhanced with ai, whatever. But its not “powered” by it.
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Photos of a celebration of Lula reelection in Brazil!




I wish I could be friends with these people
This makes me want to leave the United States.
Come to Brazil lol
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Mbappe got metaphorically smacked very beautifully by China due to his disrespectful comments regarding Mao Zedong.
I love it tho Mbappe is not that terrible politically as other footballers so it kinda sucks it happened to him. But props to China for putting a stop to the infantile and malicious slander of their political figures, lie after lie turned the characterization of Mao as a dictador in the west while Mao is widely loved in his country.
Honestly, it is good that he was made an example. It feels nice when libs can’t get away with their anticommunist slanders.
I really don’t understand why some churches depict Satan in “demonic” fashion. Dude is supposed to look like an “angel of light”. He isn’t supposed to look obviously evil. Who’s gonna get tempted by that??
If I see some hooded old guy or horned beast offering riches in exchange for my soul, I’m not gonna take that offer based on his looks alone.
These churches don’t even read the lore smh
I think that depiction is showing what happens when you sell out.
Makes sense then. I guess images are supposed to be symbolic.
New Oppo dropped I am a witch now
Cute cat
…raccoon…
Ah you’re right
a cute witch
New Oppo dropped, before Gta 6.
🤍
That’s a really cute profile picture.
Can someone explain the right to bear arms in communist spaces. I get that it’s to have a protection against oppression among other reasons but I mean people still going to kill each other look at the US for example and suicide is gonig to rise too, So I’m not really sure if it’s worth the damage is going to do to society.
Look I know it’s not in people’s nature to commit gun violence it’s the symptoms of the system and lack of any support for mentally struggling people but at the same time I look at myself and if I had gun I would do it too. that’s the reason I don’t fully get it still.
The control of arms should ideally be in the hands of the workers councils and the communist party (or parties), which may then delegate control to the red army and central comittee etc., or to individual members or cadre groups as deemed appropriate.
Arms are a resource that need to be collectively, not individually, controlled so as to ensure they’re used appropriately.
Makes sense thanks.
What country are you talking about? Are you talking about a socialist country like China or are you talking about a capitalist dictatorship like the US? Because as always the answer will differ and depend on what kind of society you are talking about. One in which the state is hostile to the working class or one in which the working class controls the state? Only in one of those does the working class need to be armed independently of the state in order to defend itself from the state (and eventually overthrow it). In the other, the working class is already armed because the workers’s state controls the army and police.
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
But also
“Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.”
Also, when the fascists are armed it would be irresponsible for leftist organizations to disarm their own members. Mind however that individual ownership of weapons is not the same as an armed working class. Arming the working class means having weapons in the hands of the organized vanguard of the working class. Without an ideologically disciplined organization you don’t have an armed class, you just have a bunch of random idiots with guns.
I mean this as a genuine question and not a gotcha: what if the halls of power are taken over by counter-revolutionaries? e.g. what happened with the Eastern Bloc.
it would be an odd combination for a counterrevolution to be so incompetent as to create the conditions for an armed revolt yet so competent as to be able to destroy the revolution. in other words, i suspect that gun ownership rates will be immaterial as they are in the US today. i don’t have a whole lot of certainty in that, so maybe a comrade familiar with albania could solidify things in one direction or the other? i mention them because, tentatively, it seems to me as though the high gun ownership didn’t stop that particular counterrevolution.
Civilian gun ownership doesn’t stop counter-revolutions. If the people are motivated and organized enough to mount an armed defense of the revolution then the conditions would not have arisen in the first place to where that defense is necessary. Counter-revolution happens when the accumulation of errors made is so grave that the people are too demoralized to fight the reactionary takeover.
The Soviet Union didn’t fall because the people lacked weapons. The Soviet army had plenty of weapons, why didn’t they stop it? Why didn’t the security forces? Power doesn’t come from simply “occupying the halls of power”, it comes from the consent of an entire apparatus of state, which in turn rests on having the consent of at least a certain part of the population and the compliance of the rest.
There is this Chinese documentary that analyzed and summarized the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union that might be interesting for you to watch if you want to understand the conditions that were present in 1991 which made it so that, weapons or no, the population was no longer willing to defend the system. Preventing counter-revolution can only be done by not letting things get to that critical point in the first place.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Thank you so much for your in-depth explanation I understand now.
Sometimes I find myself wanting to go like “what would my life be like if xyz part of my life had gone differently?” That sort of thing. I spose in kind of a regretful way, like wishing for a better path. But then, from a diamat point of view, it seems about as meaningful as asking “what if I was a different person?” I mean, my genetics would be the same still, but if my early life had been significantly different for example, I wouldn’t have a lot of the same memories that I have, I wouldn’t have had a lot of the same experiences that I had to grow from. There’d still be aspects of me that would be the same (namely, predispositions) but the rest of it could be pretty different.
But I might be looking at it in more of an old paradigm way too. Maybe the communist way would be to say “yeah, it could have been better and here’s how” for the purposes of better understanding what needs to be better for people broadly going forward. I can’t change what the foundation of my life was, but I can try to contribute to other people having a better foundation.
This is a beautiful attitude. I’m more of the mind justice may be more us learning to accept, only keep past memories as data points for mapping a way forward, releasing resentments. The body will follow the mind.
I’m still surprised that quantum physics was deemed “Bourgeois” during the cultural revolution. Like the more I look into it, it feels very dialectical. Hell it even reflects mao’s quote about having to interact with things to discover their qualities.
The only thing might be that, if you phrase it wrong, it sounds idealist with the whole observation thing. But that’s just because people misphrase it when simplifying it, and Shrodinger’s box which wasn’t actually meant to explain superposition
Man I don’t understand anything about quantum physics. It’s so confusing.
I’ve been working on a book on this subject (very close to being finished but still may make a few more changes): https://www.foleosoft.com/docs/stochastic_quantum.pdf
Here is the basis points, although you’d need to look at the book to see more technical details, since I will just explain them in English here, whereas the actual book is mostly math on every page.
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Einstein pointed out that quantum mechanics is much less “weird” if we recognize that it is a kind of ensemble theory. Ensemble means, for example, if I say there is a 25% chance of X happening, and a 75% chance of Y happening, what I am really claiming is that if you repeat the same experiment thousands of times, and distribute your results, you will find a physical distribution of ~25% of the distribution being X and ~75% being Y. Probabilities become physical proportions over an ensemble (ensemble = large sample size). Similarly, this means that the “waves” in quantum mechanics are actually only physical properties of an ensemble: statistics over large numbers of particles form wave-like patterns, but there exists no wave for individual particles. Believing that the wavefunction describes an individual system, rather than ensemble, as Einstein argued, leads to mental confusion, like believing a cat is both alive and dead at the same time until you look, when the superposition of states is describing that, over a large sample size, the cat is sometimes alive and sometimes dead, but in the individual run, it is always one or the other.
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The Soviet physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev mostly agreed with Einstein but also criticized him, because Einstein was strongly an adherent to a “principle of locality,” which quantum mechanics seemed to violate. Blokhintsev was a dialectical materialist and argued, from that perspective, that the universe is holistic, and if it is holistic, there is no good philosophical reason to be such a strong adherent to locality. Blokhintsev thus argued we should adopt an understanding of quantum mechanics that is indeed an ensemble description, like Einstein advocated for, but is holistic, so it does not need to be local, although he never formalized what that would look like.
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A few year after Blokhintsev published one of main books on this subject, the physicist John Bell wrote a proof showing that the empirical predictions of quantum mechanics, if they are confirmed, are not actually compatible with both an ensemble interpretation and locality at the same time. These empirical predictions were confirmed and even awarded the Nobel prize in 2022. Many people take this to mean that the ensemble view was debunked, that particles are in multiple places at once when you’re not looking, that a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. But that’s not true: Blokhintsev’s ensemble interpretation is still on the table, because Bell’s theorem is perfectly compatible with it as long as it is explicitly non-local.
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Just last year (2025), the Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes published a paper that shows you can formulate quantum mechanics entirely in terms of statistics without referencing the wavefunction at all, and called this unistochastic dynamics. What is interesting about unistochastic dynamics is that it is quite explicitly holistic. In order to predict how any physical interaction will alter the system, you have to consider the arrangement of the whole experiment. For example, in the case of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, you have two beam splitters, which are identical pieces of glass. However, unistochastic dynamics would describe the second piece of glass as having different behavior from the first, because it is situated after the first. (This holism is represented by taking all physical interactions, described by unitary operators, up to a given time interval you want to predict, and composing them together, which then yields the unistochastic matrix needed to predict the statistical distribution of the system at that time interval.)
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One issue with unistochastic dynamics, as pointed out by the physicist David Albert, is that it represents quantum systems as a stochastic process, but does not actually allow you to simulate a quantum mechanics as a stochastic process, because it leaves the step-by-step transition law ambiguous. It puts constraints on what it should be, but many plausible laws fit those constraints. However, there is actually an answer to this as well.
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Schrödinger also believed quantum systems could be understood as a kind of stochastic process and proposed a method for computing the step-by-step transitions, as he proved that, in one of his lesser known papers, under some reasonable assumptions, the solution is merely a solution to a scaling problem. However, he did not know how to actually solve the scaling problem. The thing is, in modern times, the solution to that scaling problem is a well-known algorithm called iterative proportional fitting, and so, using modern knowledge Schrödinger was not aware of because they weren’t invented yet, it is trivial to use his method to compute the step-by-step transition matrices.
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You can then combine Barandes’ unistochastic dynamics and Schrödinger’s step-by-step transitions to derive a transition law, entirely terms of statistics without reference to the wavefunction, that gives any arbitrary quantum system an ensemble description entirely in terms of statistics. This law is explicitly holistic because it requires you to factor in the whole arrangement of your experiment up to the given time interval you are asking about. This then ultimately allows us to formalize what Blokhintsev saw as the correct way to think about it.
In the book I use this framework to then analyze all the major foundational papers on this topic, such as the PBR theorem, the famous Frauchiger-Renner paradox, the double-slit experiment, etc, and show directly how it gives a simple intuition for all of them.
The formalism is mathematically equivalent to the standard wavefunction formalism by construction, as it reproduces the Born rule probabilities at every time interval by construction. It also is only defined, in the book, over abstract quantum information, meaning, no specific physics goes into its assumption. That latter point is intentional, because it means the application of this interpretation does not depend upon any specific physical criteria in the model. As long as the model is informationally structured as a quantum mechanical model, whatever the physics are, you can apply this approach to interpret it.
The interpretation even works for something as abstract as a quantum computer, which, under this interpretation, just becomes a normal computer where a “qubit” doesn’t even exist. I intentionally never use the word “qubit” in the book, because, in my view, there is no such thing as a “qubit” as a distinct physical object (only as an abstract mathematical construct). A quantum computer just contains bits, but the logic gates are (1) stochastic, and (2) have holistic behavior, so computing the stochastic effect of the logic gate requires composing together the full arrangement of the circuit prior to the gate.
I put together a universal quantum computing simulator to demonstrate this. Unlike most simulators which just give you the statistical distribution at the end for the bits when you make a “measurement,” this simulator gives you the values of the bits at every time interval after every gate, and show you how the bit values change over time, step-by-step, through the circuit:
(The random sampling on the version on my website is actually being done using a real quantum random number generator.)
You can change it from “single” to “shots” mode to then run the same program many times over (by default 1024 times), and the overall statistical distribution you get for the bits at the end is the Born rule.
I’ve also been trying to produce a video series explaining it since I fear most people don’t read books these days, but it is not complete yet, but the first two are viewable at v01.mp4 and v02.mp4.
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What exactly don’t you understand? Is there something in particular that you would like to know?
Even as a Computer Engineering Bsc, I only heard about it, but usually in any talk of quantum mechanics I stay like that meme of the dog in front of a computer.
From China! Celeberation of the Long March

YEAAAAHHHH
Wow Lula won! Not bad.
Even though I dislike him because of what he did to Venezuela with BRICS, he is a better choice than Bozonazi.
Well, uh, I know comrades have opinions about Pedro Sanchez here in Spain, but I am kinda hoping the snap elections don’t result in a right-wing victory at the moment. 😭😭
🫂🍀❤️
Yeah, the left hasn’t reached their full potential in Brazil yet. But at least the communist movement has space to grow now. Especially if Lula decides to ban Meta
Especially if Lula decides to ban Meta
Inshallah. It would be amazing.
True, it would also turn into a catalysator for other countries to do the same
tbf being better than a bozonazi is a low bar
for some reason Voyager and Raccoon are both blocked on the hospital’s WiFi. none of my other apps have any issues but both of my lemmy apps can’t load anything. no idea why that would be

















