What I mean is the best you can hope for is to minimize the damage done to yourself. sure the nazis can just make up whatever charge and condemn you to whatever they want. But the Filton 24 trial showed that to date, it wasn’t always a slam dunk. The fact that the prosecution leaked selected bits of evidence footage helped shift the jury and even the case.

this is also why people have got to stop filming everything btw. Filming ought to be strategic; it’s a tool, not a ritual. Basically the best you can do is limit what they can get on you, and make it difficult for them (and it might also protect your comrades since they look for connections). Same reason I encrypt my hard drives; Al Capone was done in for tax evasion, not for the murdering and killing. If they want to compel me to surrender my decryption key, it still affords me some time to think about it.

Of course a VPN alone is not going to save anyone, we should make that clear. If you have a VPN but still connect to a google account to do google searches with, police will just ask for your search history from google directly, they don’t need to decrypt your hard drive to access it.

Browsers also fingerprint you, and there are add-ons and even browsers such as Librewolf to fake your fingerprint, but I’m not sure how secure you truly are after it.

Where’s the evidence for that? Now YOU’RE moralizing, what are you doing to help ppl understand that they can keep themselves safe by not paying with a credit card? "personaly-responsibility"ing is uuuuuh, yeah, not the best framework.

I’m not moralizing. You can pay for mullvad with a cash envelope with no return address, they explain this procedure on their website and it’s in fact one of the main reasons you would want mullvad.

Give me the evidence of this, not just words. Was there ever an instance of them being under judicial pressure? (which is what most corps break down under. i think i remember reading something about the telegram or signal ceo refusing to hand in its users private data.)

In 2023 swedish police raided the mullvad HQ, they wanted to seize a server for some customer’s data. The employees explained how their servers operate (no-logs and ram-only servers), and police left empty-handed. Even if they had seized the server there would have been nothing on it to tie the customer to the mass of traffic, unless the customer used something such as an email address or a credit card payment to mullvad. Only weak link is if police monitors your devices and finds your mullvad account ID, but that wouldn’t be the fault of the VPN.

What other VPN provider do you propose we use? Which one gets your seal of recommendation? Everyone in this business in the imperial core is a chud, because marxists are a tiny minority. The only other option if you want to remain morally pure is to not use the internet at all, which is valid, but if you have a bank account, go grocery shopping, buy stuff online, or work for literally any company, you participate in the system that perpetuates these chuds. Your boss also bankrolls far-right shitheads, he just doesn’t say it.

As long as mullvad’s service remains the same, which is definitely a question but not one that has been brought up, because all that has been brought up has been “cancel mullvad immediately”, then what exactly is “my” responsibility in this? that circus party works on 5M SEK, meanwhile the Moderate Party, the biggest right-wing party in Sweden - and also in government - made 140M SEK in 2024, with 100M coming from the State itself as it pays elected parties/officials. That’s not even talking about my actual national parties that have way worse politics than these Moderates do. We’re not gonna defeat fascism with the power of our wallets and individual actions.

They hand over data to the authorities like it’s candy at Halloween. They don’t really have a choice to cooperate, but the workaround is to simply not collect all that data or collect as little of it as possible so that there is nothing to hand over.

Some stuff like metadata (such as when you send the email and to whom) will always remain in cleartext, Proton has it and hands it over too. It’s a problem with email, though all chat platforms that I know of haven’t really found a way around encrypting metadata.

This also means when registering on a service you need to give them as little info about yourself as possible. Like I said, using a VPN doesn’t mean you can say whatever on the internet without repercussions. There was a case where proton handed the authorities the recovery email to the user’s proton account.

The problem with tuta is they hand over inventory data (banking info, credit card payment data etc), real-time metadata, even the entire emails, encrypted or not.

Neither tuta nor proton have fully sourced their code so people can’t audit it.

Ultimately it’s a company in the imperial core, in Germany of all places lol. Proton Mullvad and Signal have the same problem - they want privacy but they set it up right in the belly of the beast.

Email in general is just not meant to be private, it’s tech from before they even had to worry about privacy or spam.

There are more specific issues, their severity depending on how important this is to you, but:

• tuta relies on Amazon Web Services for its DNS… odd
• encryption is only possible between tuta users, as mentioned
• they restrict access from the tor network (tor itself is not without its controversy lol)

• corporations we buy from every day do the same shit and worse. Proton fundraised for the (US) Congress outfit Freedom House.
• 5 million SEK sounds like a lot until you realize it’s 500k USD, not 5 million USD. I would still love half a million to do communist stuff with lol, but it’s not 5 million dollars.
• mullvad has no idea who I am and which customer of theirs I am. If you pay for your VPN with a credit card you’re a chump.
• they are also the only vpn with a proven track record of not leaking customer info, because they don’t have it.
• this is a tiny no-name party that he’s supporting. At least for now - in 10 years it could be an AfD situation. Current perspective is euro govs are going to ban VPNs faster than this party will win an election.
• the other co-founder distanced himself from that donation, at least publicly. Who knows if something will be dug up on him too later.
• europe is fash central, and there’s also a LOT of fascists in software, including open software! (and just terrible politics in general)

Important news and absolutely worth being aired out, but I don’t see anything that will do anything for me except be able to tell myself that I’m morally pure. Like I disagree with “Even if you’re comfortable with funding this” (I know you just crossposted OP) - I’m not funding anything. Let’s not do “vote with your wallet” politics in a communist space; Mullvad’s founder is funding this, not me.

Proton is not trustworthy, tutanota is not trustworthy, there is no such thing as a private internet. There is only harm reduction so that when the fascist state comes for you, they find very little info to convict you with. At this point if you really want to be private not using the Internet is your only option. Being on a VPN is not an invitation that you can do whatever without legal repercussions.

You can rent a Virtual Private Server and host your own VPN on it, but that also won’t hide you, because all requests you make will be coming from the VPS, and you’re the only person on it. I looked into it when deciding on a VPN, and it doesn’t seem to be an option (unless you live in a place where internet is restricted, in which case you are not looking for anonymity but simply bypassing restrictions).

If there’s ever something better than mullvad that comes along I’ll switch. In the meantime keep an eye on the situation.

Also switch away from Google search because they save every search you make whether you use a VPN or not.

The military was disloyal to him, which is how they came to coup him in turn. They’ll obey orders for a while, but they won’t defend the revolution.

That’s actually very smart, for people who aren’t afraid of using WSL. Then you would just sudo apt installthe dependencies (and I assume since it’s an ubuntu subsystem it already has python 3.12), and then run the installer for Linux through WSL:

curl -fsSL https://codeberg.org/CritBase111/speech-to-text/raw/branch/main/install.sh | bash

I also heard that your C:\ drive mounts in the WSL through /mnt/c/, so you can pass any audio file to stt by simply specifiying ‘stt transcribe “/mnt/c/Documents/my_video.mp4”’

but I assume you will have to run stt through the WSL cli from then on?

I support Allende and what he tried to achieve was amazing, but he failed nonetheless. And spectacularly too. Even Castro was telling him to be tougher on the opponents. He was in power for 2 years and 10 months, and ruled by emergency decrees, a power afforded to the President to bypass Congress approval on new laws, because Congress was controlled by the opposition and hostile to him. He also had to issue states of emergency, which temporarily promulgated martial law in a region.

This is not a criticism of Allende of course, it was his attempt at enacting socialism in a hostile world, not only internally but externally as well. The US ran thousands of articles against Allende every year, and bankrolled protests and opposition against him.

But what he shows is there is no path to a socialism promulgated on the basis of elections in the bourgeois state. He validates the theory of the vanguard party. He won the presidency, but not state power.

Not necessarily, for two reasons:

1 is that the PSUV has never considered themselves democratic socialist, their official movement is ‘21st century socialism’. Chavez had also attempted/participated in a coup in 1992, and though it failed and he eventually won the election in 1998 he allegedly was only convinced of the electoral route on practical purposes.

2 is that I am wary of outsiders trying to fit a mold onto existing movements. We saw this with the Black Panthers (they were apparently every possible shade of marxism) and the EZLN (that anarchists claim are anarchist, and the EZLN saying “no we’re not anarchists”).

Of course, I support Venezuela in the path they chose. But we still see several contradictions of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the country, and I am not aware that PSUV is trying to overcome them, i.e. making their socialism a transition stage to communism.

Okay, so, I had to look at the windows flow a bit more in-depth. Winget was a good tool but it’s actually unmaintained and people have been reporting some possible malicious packages. So I redid the entire install script to not use winget anymore. It’s much easier to install stuff on Linux, there the install script would have just done everything for you 😭 but no worries, it is what it is.

What you will need:

• Install the latest Python version here: https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/. Python now offers the ‘install manager’, and they said this is how you will install Python from now on. So it’s probably better to use the install manager, and install the latest 3.12.x version of Python from it. Add it to your PATH if there is a checkbox for it, otherwise it will be pretty much useless (it should just be checked by default but it is what it is).
• ffmpeg: ffmpeg is required for STT to work. On its own website, ffmpeg links to this website: https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/. Scroll down and download ffmpeg-release-full.7z. This is a guide that explains what to do with this zip file afterwards: https://www.wikihow.com/Install-FFmpeg-on-Windows. I’m sorry that ffmpeg is such a mess to install on windows but they don’t provide an installer unfortunately.
• yt-dlp: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases. The latest as of writing is yt-dlp 2026.06.09, and the file is simply called yt-dlp.exe. Click on it in the list to download, then run the .exe to install yt-dlp on your computer.
• Pandoc: You can install pandoc from here: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases. The latest as of writing is pandoc-3.10-windows-x86_64.msi - it’s also an installer that you just run to install pandoc.

Then you can run the install script provided on my codeberg repo. In Powershell (not cmd):

iwr https://codeberg.org/CritBase111/speech-to-text/raw/branch/main/install.ps1 | iex

The install script is very simple; it just sets up a folder called stt in C:\Users\YourUsername. Everything that STT sets up by itself stays within that stt\ folder. When stt is installed correctly, the installer script will tell you with the words “stt installed. Open a NEW terminal window and type: stt --help”

Open a new cmd or powershell, and simply run the command ‘stt gui’. It will open the user interface in a new window, which is probably easier to use. I find that when I was on Windows I preferred user interfaces, and on Linux I prefer command-line tools lol.

The first time you actually start transcribing or translating a video, stt will automatically download the models. This happens automatically, you just have to wait. But it means the first transcription will take a bit more time to finish.

If you ever want to uninstall stt from your computer, run this in PowerShell:

# Windows (PowerShell)
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path.Replace("$HOME\stt\.venv\Scripts", ""), "User")
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force $HOME\stt

ffmpeg, yt-dlp and pandoc are pretty nice tools to have on any computer. ffmpeg can convert and compress any video file. yt-dlp allows you to download videos from any website by just running ‘yt-dlp https://link.com/’ in the CMD, and pandoc can convert any text format to any other text format, so you can convert . So they are dependencies, but they are generally good tools to have. Python as well is pretty nice to have as a lot of open-source software uses python. You only install it once then most open-source software is available to you.

It’s the exact same thing.

Where did democratic socialists ever succeed? What do they actually ask for?

Exactly. Same outcome as social-democracy.

which operating system are you on? I can provide more specific instructions.

The difficult part is installing the program, using it will come naturally once you’ve done it once or twice.

yep, it does everything.

stt transcribe 'file.mp4' --target-lang es,fr,pt,jp --format srt will transcribe the audio from the video (auto-detects language), then translate the result into their own .srt (subtitles) files. You can chain arguments together such as es,fr,pt,jp -> it will create a different file for each combination. so one .srt for spanish, one .srt for french, etc.

stt translate 'file.txt' --source-lang en --target-lang --format txt,srt will only translate a previously existing text file. you can chain --format (or any argument, including the input files) to output the translation as plain text file, and another .srt file

if you have pandoc and yt-dlp installed, the app integrates with them to provide more input and output formats with pandoc, and yt-dlp to download the video automatically from a web page (so instead of ‘file.mp4’ you can provide a youtube link). It automatically uses them, you don’t have to do anything special.

it also needs python 3.10 or higher and ffmpeg to work. It downloads the models on first use, expect about 5-10 gigabytes of download. Needs I would say around 4GB of Vram at the minimum to work.

translation can be hit or miss in terms of quality, some language pairs work better than others. If it’s bad, just open deepseek web, switch to expert, paste the original subtitles, and tell it to ‘translate these subtitles to [language], output within three backticks for code formatting’.

run the install command for your OS in a terminal window! They are located here: https://codeberg.org/CritBase111/speech-to-text#quick-install. So if you are on Windows for example it’s the iwr command that’s followed by a link.

After you have installed stt correctly (the installer will tell you “stt installed, Open a NEW terminal window and type: stt --help”), exit the terminal window and open a new one. In the new windowe, run ‘stt gui’ from your terminal (powershell if on windows). It contains all the options the tool offers. By ‘run from the terminal’ I mean literally just open a terminal window and type the command + enter). It opens a window that looks like this:

So for example, since you are translating videos, you can paste the youtube URL to the video in the input field, then change the Target field in ‘Model & Language’ to the language you are translating to. If you scroll down in the graphical interface, you will see output formats, and you can select ‘txt’ to make a simple text file, or also check ‘srt’ for a subtitles file - a subtitles file can be immediately loaded into the video.

Then press the Transcribe button in the bottom left. It can take a while, but it will work. It will save the files on your computer, transcribed and translated!

It’s still a few instructions but I tried to make the app as user-friendly as I could 🙏 the hardest part is installing it - when it’s running it can’t destroy anything on your computer, at most it creates files (the transcriptions) that you can delete.

if you want to use the terminal version, do ‘stt transcribe --help’ and it will show you the commands you can use. But the graphical interface is the exact same as the terminal version, you’re not missing out on anything if you use the interface.

With the heatwave seemingly over I may br able to go back Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are. So far in chapter 1 it was very broad and simple, its a book for complete newbies but I hope/expect it picks up in later chapters.

Check out my speech to text suite, if you’re not using tools it will speedrun your efforts for your friends. https://codeberg.org/CritBase111/speech-to-text

If you have yt-dlp installed, you can just do:

• stt transcribe youtube.com/watch/etc --target-lang es --format txt,srt

This will pull the video (not just from YouTube), transcribe to a txt and SRT files (subtitles), and translate to Spanish, all locally. Translation has some varying results.

If you have a lot of videos you can pre download them, then run stt with a --batch command on the entire folder containing all your videos.

Or there is also a simple GUI that you launch with ‘stt gui’

Unfortunately codeberg had a server outage and may not be entirely back yet so I’m not sure if its accessible right now. If it’s not back let me know and I’ll upload the files somewhere else temporarily.

It’s always the same story with the west when news of chinese tech hits us.

First it’s “they’ll need at least ten years to catch up! By then we’ll be soaring a century ahead!”

then “well okay they made a huge leap earlier than expected, but it’s not actually good. they still have this or that bottleneck to close. I don’t see them doing it any time soon, it took us 50 years to do it.”

finally “oh, it’s only been 2 years and they’re already at our level. well um, chinese quality! ban imports! taiwan!”

I don’t think we can see it as a wholly ideological issue. People need power, and solar, nuclear, wind etc work regardless of the system that builds them. If Europe accepted Chinese solar at Chinese prices, it would also find a way to enrich its bourgeoisie with it - in fact, we will obviously only start seeing chinese solar appear if the EU bourgeoisie finds a way to make it profitable for themselves. At best, we can look for places where the contradictions sharpen, by which I mean where the limitations and failures of the system are exposed.

In general though I am on the side of ‘an imperfect solution is better than no solution at all, while we find the perfect solution’. I find that Europeans especially, but maybe all Westerners, seem to have a view that it’s all or nothing - either perfect solution with no drawbacks, or nothing. But we still need power, and in capitalism it’s going to be produced by the market. But as you also pointed out, countries such as France were able to build nuclear before - as for uranium, they can get it elsewhere that doesn’t require a colony, and installing solar is not exempt of exploitation either. In the 60s and 70s, much of Europe built nuclear plants, so it’s possible to build them safely. Except when Germany decides that they need to find an alternative source of power to replace the 35% nuclear produces in only 5 years time… absolute kino.

I come back to what I said about the contradictions sharpening… expose the limits of the system, the answers it doesn’t have. The left refusing nuclear out of ideological principles (such as my local ‘communist’ party, don’t laugh) is not exposing those contradictions, I find that they are in fact conceding to the liberal state that some things are simply impossible for us to solve. At the very least we should have had all buildings in europe retrofitted with cheap solar by now, if we’d started 20 years ago.

A good energy mix is actually using all sorts of production and storage methods to build a resilient grid, but I don’t think Europe will ever be able to do that under capitalism lol. Only China does it.

0 damage btw. But I thought China made their buildings out of tofu 😵‍💫

edit: and of course CNN has to do the “but at what cost” fallacy with a random citizen they were able to immediately get a hold of lol

they immediately treat it as a terrorist attack to make China seem unsafe (or sow further seeds of “actually the chinese people dont like CCP”) when, considering how woefully pathetic it looked… was probably likelier to be an accident. nobody in china cared to answer CNN’s call lmao, good call.

not sure how much it would help, I have between 30 and 40% humidity, sometimes up to 50%. but I can look into it

Yep, and then when you propose opening nuclear plants people scream that it’s not safe… I live in possibly one of the safest places to put a nuclear plant, if past issues are an indication. Meanwhile that coal pollution doesn’t magically get funneled to space!

Instead, the decision was to shame people into consuming less electricity - dont have to make more electricity if you convince people to live like peasants. I looked at the numbers…if everyone lowered their consumption by 20%, which is huge, you would only reduce total consumption by 6%. That’s nothing. Its also once again our responsibility as consumers to investigate and look at our footprint but like, how am I supposed to know how much electricity my oven needs? How do I know how much power my computer consumes? Why is it our job and not appliances makers, who make these machines and know exactly how they fare.

I think the one good idea the EU had was the power rating sticker on appliances lol, pushed companies to make more energy efficient products over time.