kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io
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Polish expat into UK. Information security engineer. Caver & cave rescuer (thus the bat). NHS volunteer & blood donor.
Joined May 2019
> I don't think it should be mandatory
Absolutely yes, but "not mandatory" doesn't mean those who wish to learn national languages should be intimidated and prevented from doing so.
> have knowledge of local languages
That would be much easier if local cultural activists wouldn't be intimidated and then poisoned 🤷
Kabardian and Balkar are *also* official languages in KBR, so per your logic "all people in KBR should have perfect knowledge of Kabardian and Balkar".
> Tatar as one of the official languages
That's the thing - I can't speak about Tatarstan, but in KBR both Kabardian and Balkar are official languages on par with Russian. Yet, Russian is being pushed at almost every level, starting from education.
And this is done using rather crude methods, including assassination of local activists such as Timur Kuashev - now we also know his death coincided with visit of the FSB "chemical" team who later poisoned Navalny.
Many of the later efforts to support local cultures in the USSR were pretty good but were ultimately hindered by the fundamental paradigm of Marxism-Leninism with all its lies and double-think.
So basically you could engage in local culture as much as it didn't step out of the boundaries set by the party line at given moment, which gradually narrowed down, peaking during Stalinism.
Ultimately, in 80's everyone had enough of everyone so much that they just ran away.
Bolshevik very quickly abandoned any ideas of democracy when they started slaughtering anarchists and social-revolutionaries already in 20's.
Then they started truly imperial conquest of all former Russian territories, such as quite bloody conquest of Caucasus, Ukraine, Belarus, Baltics etc.
Notably, in 1920's in Poland there were two fiercely competing visions: one of Piłsudski, referring to "Jagiellonian" idea of multi-ethnic federation (including culture, languages, religions), and "ND" (National-Democrats) of single language (PL) and religion (Roman-Catholic). The latter ultimately won after Piłsudski's death, which resulted in abandoning Ukraine's in struggle with RSFSR and its eventual annexation into USSR. Same for Belarus and Baltics.
Failure of both Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then 2nd Polish republic (1919-1939) was largely due to attempts to enforce the single-ethnic paradigm, for example imposing Polish language and Roman-Catholic religion, or straightforward colonial exploitation that has born the Khmelnitsky Uprising. In 20th century forced polonisation has ultimately caused the Volhynia massacres in 40's.
According to several thinkers (Turchin, Travin) the success of empires is driven by their ability to create a multi-ethnic system that agrees on a single set of ideas. Examples: Romans, Mongols, Russian Empire, USSR.
And vice versa, empires fall when the consensus on these common (but not uniform!) values fails, e.g. by nationalism of one group. Example: Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Or when not everyone benefits equally any more, e.g. USSR.
> there was no ethnic discrimination
Things may have changed since - I saw that in KBR for example, where the authorities were making it increasingly difficult to deliver lessons in national languages and generally discouraging pupils from attending. There was one major legislative change passed on federal level that helped that by making them non-mandatory. Now you have the new "educational activity" act to further harass them.
kravietz 🦇
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Lindenfors, Wartel and Lind on Dunbar's number: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158
My favorite part: "‘Dunbar's number’ is often cited1, has had great impact in popular culture (e.g. it featured prominently in Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping point [21]) and has had consequences such as the Swedish Tax Authority restructuring their offices to stay within the 150-person limit [22], with the implicit but hopefully unintended assumption that their employees have neither family nor friends outside work."
That's international politics, I suppose - Ukraine diplomatic mission trying to buy some support among other countries to do voting in the UN or elsewhere.
kravietz 🦇
boosted
Hm, some really interesting international developments lately. Exhibit one: Ukraine gives its slot (one of it's slots? Haven't looked into it deeply) in the UN Permanent Forum On Indigenous Issues to an Erzyan elder: (timestamp 1:53:10, http://webtv.un.org/watch/3rd-meeting-united-nations-permanent-forum-on-indigenous-issues-unpfii-twentieth-session-19-30-april-2021/6249705719001/)
Exhibit 2: the rather famous Ukrainian rock band Komu Vniz does a song in the Erzyan language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCcOQS1I7Pw&t=1s
There was a pseudo-scientific theory spreading around moms like ~10 years ago in Poland that if you freeze water it "changes its structure" (they meant permanently) and it's "like spring water" (whatever that means) and without filtering.
The article actually praises how they were able to stand united against the government intimidation of their colleague, but I guess it's still the good level of unity, very far away from the situation in the US.
kravietz 🦇
boosted
@requiem @thegibson If I may be allowed to be pedantic here, I ask that my words be considered with some gravity.
The issue isn't static logic. The issue is divorcing instruction decoding from instruction set design to attain performance goals not originally built into the ISA.
It takes, for example, several clock cycles just to decode x86 instructions into a form that can then be readily executed. Several clocks to load the code cache. Several clocks to translate what's in the code cache into a pre-decoded form in the pre-decode cache. Several clocks to load a pre-decode line into the instruction registers (yes, plural) of the instruction fetch unit. A clock to pass that onto the first of (I think?) three instruction decode stages in the core. Three more clocks after that, you finally have a fully decoded instruction that the remainder of the pipelines (yes, plural) can potentially execute.
Of course, I say potentially because there's register renaming happening, there's delays caused by waiting for available instruction execution units to become available in the first place, there's waiting for result buses to become uncontested, ...
The only reason all this abhorrent latency is obscured is because the CPU literally has hundreds of instructions in flight at any given time. Gone are the days when it was a technical achievement that the Pentium had 2 concurrently running instructions. Today, our CPUs, have literally hundreds.
(Consider: a 7-pipe superscalar processor with 23 pipeline stages, assuming no other micro-architectural features to enhance performance, still offers 23*7=161 in-flight instructions, assuming you have some other means of keeping those pipes filled.)
This is why CPU vendors no longer put cycle counts next to their instructions anymore. Instructions are pre-decoded into short programs, and it's those programs (strings of "micro-ops", hence micro-op caches, et. al.) which are executed by the core on a more primitive level.
Make no mistake: the x86 instruction set architecture we all love to hate today has been shambling undead zombie for decades now. RISC definitely won, which is why every x86-compatible processor has been built on top of RISC cores since the early 00s, if not earlier. Intel just doesn't want everyone to know it because the ISA is such a cash cow these days. Kind of like how the USA is really a nation whose official measurement system is the SI system, but we continue to use imperial units because we have official definitions that maps one to the other.
Oh, but don't think that RISC is immune from this either. It makes my blood boil when people say, "RISC-V|ARM|MIPS|POWER is immune."
No, it's not. Neither is MIPS, neither is ARM, neither is POWER. If your processor has any form of speculative execution and depends on caches for maintaining instruction throughputs, which is to say literally all architectures on the planet since the Pentium-Pro demonstrated its performance advantages over the PowerPC 601, you will be susceptible to SPECTRE. Full stop. That's laws of physics talking, not Intel or IBM.
Whether it's implemented as a sea-of-gates in some off-brand ASIC or if it's an FPGA, or you're using the latest nanometer-scale process node by the most expensive fab house on the planet, it won't matter -- SPECTRE is an artifact of the micro-architecture used by the processor. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the ISA. It has everything to do with performance-at-all-costs, gotta-keep-them-pipes-full mentality that drives all of today's design requirements.
I will put the soapbox back in the closet now. Sorry.
kravietz 🦇
boosted
The 74,000 numbers of Barclays Bank
The UK faces an epidemic of telephone scams. Fraudsters are constantly calling people up pretending to be their bank. But how can you be sure the number displayed on your screen in genuine? You can't. The telecom system is hopelessly insecure and shouldn't be trusted for anything more complicated than dialling the speaking clock.
Barclays bank kno
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/the-74000-numbers-of-barclays-bank/
Ja nie noszę zegarka (ani żadnych wisorków, nic) mniej więcej od lat 90-tych jak zacząłem zajmować się alpinizmem, końmi i jeździłem Uazem - w każdej z w/w dziedzin miałem co najmniej jeden przypadek bliski urwaniu ręki przez zaczepienie o zegarek.
Over 40 lawers filed a legal complaint with Moscow court against the arrest of Ivan Pavlov, the lawyer defending Navalny team.
Next step of Kremlin: declare all Moscow lawyers foreign agents 😂
"Megan Cole, a student studying philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) at Birmingham University, is fighting back. Following a year-long tenancy filled with faulty appliances, leaky ceilings, mould, and ant infestations, Cole has won a two-year legal battle against her unlicensed landlord, who has been ordered to repay the entire year’s rent."
- OpenPGP
- 6F7B6BB9A9B632555E1A03C132AF1F39C4EE03F2
- Website
- https://krvtz.net
- Matrix
- @kravietz:krvtz.net
Polish expat into UK. Information security engineer. Caver & cave rescuer (thus the bat). NHS volunteer & blood donor.
Joined May 2019
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