My answer is I learn things, I work on several projects both individual and in groups, I solve problems for them, etc.

“Oh so you do nothing?”

… yes Ken, I do nothing. Exactly. I’m not paid for it so it doesn’t count as anything.

Although they did do the whole “You’ll get better soon,” thing, and imply that I can get back to work eventually

I get where they come from but at some point it’s like, no. you won’t “just” get better. Science doesn’t have all the answers and sometimes the only thing you are left with is to accept it. It gives people false hope and repeats things they have heard a hundred times already. Sometimes it also implies that the patient hasn’t done everything they could and should find that magical cure that doesn’t exist. Which cure? Well you know, the one that you don’t know about, your doctor doesn’t know about, even the person telling you about this cure doesn’t know what it is. But still, have you tried it??

Everyone thinks they know how they would act better than you in a given situation but they would never want to be put into it.

This is the type of content I log on for 🫡

he locked up a lot of people during the cultural revolution sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons

He was not the one who signed arrest orders or ran trials though, a lot of different people were involved in that. You can’t blame Mao as an individual for stuff that other people did. You can’t run an entire state with just one person.

the backyard steel and culling of the sparrows

Nobody in the 60s knew about the importance of sparrows in agriculture. Not even in the West. I think it’s easy to say “oh well duh of course don’t kill the sparrows” but who here among us is an actual farmer? Who here knew that sparrows ate more bugs than grain before it was told to them? I can barely grow a plant, I have no room to judge others when it comes to growing food.

I just didn’t find it to be very relevant to me

I’m an adult in Europe and I find Mao’s writing to be both relevant and applicable. But there is Mao the general and Mao the chairman. By the end of his life he was definitely saying some stuff that I don’t think even he believed in. But theory is an all encompassing body, and that is true in all fields. One couldn’t read one physics paper about gravity and then say “now I know how to launch a rocket to the moon”. I opened up my copy of the red book randomly and here’s one:

“Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through, so as to form correct ideas and leadership – such is the basic method of leadership”

It makes perfect sense to me, but that’s also because I have the associated baggage to understand what he means there and how that fits in not only to more of Mao’s writings but also in regards to other figures, the ‘best practices’ if you will of organizing.

I also found it really interesting that deepseek would refuse to answer any questions on Mao

The deepseek devs want it to be mainly used for math, coding, and other STEM applications for lack of a better word. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact personally I think people should stop using LLMs as oracles so much and focus them on tasks instead. Deepseek produces great results (and all for free with no rate limits) if you give it some code to start with, because it needs proper framing of the project to avoid trying to overdo it. I usually start with chatGPT, have it do the first working version of the code, and then switch it to deepseek to finish it, and it works almost perfect on the first try.

I am really glad that in 2024, the English world is finally able to answer this question: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_CIA's_Shining_Path:_Political_Warfare

This wouldn’t have been possible before 2023.