Salamander

Since my work involves sensors, I set up a continuous testing setup on a raspberry pi and got its IP whitelisted. I ssh into it when something is annoying to do in the Windows laptop.

Haha, yeah, trusting ChatGPT with how to manipulate the database and change config files is a risky move 😆 I did use it myself to remind me of the postgresql syntax to find and alter the field.

Sorry, I went to sleep. Glad you were able to sort it out 😄

😁 👍

So, ultimately my problem was that I was trying to set all of the limits to what I thought were “reasonable” values simultaneously, and misunderstood what ‘Message’ meant, and so I ended up breaking things with my changes without the reason being obvious to me. I looked into the source code and I can see now that indeed ‘Messages’ refer to API calls and not direct messages, and that there is no ‘Direct Message’ rate limit.

If I let ‘Messages’ stay high I can adjust the other values to reasonable values and everything works fine.

Thanks a lot for your help!! I am surprised and happy it actually worked out and I understand a little more 😁

Have fun! 😁

Thanks!

I was able to crash the instance for a few minutes, but I think I have a better idea of where the problem is. Ths $emote_addr variable seems to work just the same.

In the rate limit options there is a limit for ‘‘Message’’. Common sense tells me that this means ‘direct message’, but setting this to a low number is quite bad. While testing I eventually set it to ‘1 per minute’ and the instance became unresponsive until I modified the settings in the database manually. If I give a high number to this setting then I can adjust the other settings without problem.

Yes, I see this there. Most of the nginx config is from the ‘default’ nginx config in the Lemmy repo from a few years ago. My understanding is somewhat superficial - I don’t actually know where the variable ‘$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for’ gets populated, for example. I did not know that this contained the client’s IP.

    # backend
    location ~ ^/(api|pictrs|feeds|nodeinfo|.well-known) {
      proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8536/;
      proxy_http_version 1.1;
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

      # Rate limit
      limit_req zone=mander_ratelimit burst=30000 nodelay;

      # Add IP forwarding headers
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }

I need to do some reading 😁

Thanks! Yes, I saw both messages and I am now going through the NGINX config and trying to understand what could be going on. To be honest, Lemmy is the hobby that taught me what a ‘reverse proxy’ and a ‘vps’ are. Answering a question such as ‘Are you sending the client IP in the X-Forwarded-For header?’ is probably straight forward for a professional but for me it involves quite a bit of learning 😅

At location /, my nginx config includes:

      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

So, I think that the answer to your question is probably ‘yes’. If you did have these rate limits and they were stable, the more likely explanation is that something about my configuration is sub-optimal. I will look into it and continue learning, but I will need to keep my limits a bit high for the time being and stay alert.

I don’t recall any of them being from mander (unless they were dealt with before I started testing?), but thanks for taking preventative measures :)

I don’t know what ‘Antiyanks’ is

It’s the codename for a particular long-term troll and is based off of their original username pattern (which they still use sometimes). I have reason to believe it’s also the same troll that used to spam the racist stuff in Science Memes.

These are most of today’s batch (minus the JON333 which was just a garden-variety spammer that made it into the last screenshot).

No, they were not in mander.xyz. But I am generally quite relaxed when it comes to accepting applications. I mostly reject an applicant if it is very clear it is not an actual user, and then actively follow up on recent accounts for a short time. So the possibility of silent spammer accounts accumulating over time is always a concern.

So, a ‘Comments’ Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct?

Correct, per client IP.

Setting the limits to more reasonable values, like ‘20 posts per minute’, causes the server to stop serving posts. My front page goes blank.

So, I am starting to think that ‘20 pots per minute’ means ‘requesting 20 posts per minute’ and not ‘creating 20 posts per minute’.

I am still having doubts about what these limits mean, but setting reasonable numbers seems to break things, unfortunately.

Hmmm - after changing these settings to what I think are reasonable settings, the server crashed and I am now getting ‘Too many requests’ messages… So, perhaps there is something not working so well with these rate limits, or I am still misunderstanding their meaning.

Thanks for the heads up. I don’t know what ‘Antiyanks’ is, but I already had to ban one comment spammer.

The rate limits are indeed a bit confusing. The settings are:

Rate Limit: X Per Second: Y

I understand this to be ‘X for every Y seconds’

So, a ‘Comments’ Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct?

Maybe the reason you see 99999999 is due to troubleshooting. I have increased my instance’s limits multiple times while troubleshooting server issues, because the meaning of the settings was not clear to me. These limits are usually not the reason for the sever issue, but I put some high number and did not bring them back down after the issues were resolved.

I have lowered them now to more reasonable numbers. I will also be more strict with new applications for the time being.

I bought a National Instrument’s data acquisition card (PCIe-6535B) not knowing that National Instruments is not very Linux-friendly and I was not able to get it working. At least it was a used card so I did not pay to much for it, but I learned my lesson not to assume compatibility.

Once I also used ‘rm -rvf *’ from my home directory while SSH’d into a supercomputer (I made a syntax error when trying to cd into the folder that I actually wanted to delete). I was able to get my data restored from a backup, but sending that e-mail was a bit embarrassing 😆

The thing that confuses me about Real Utopias is whether the author rejects revolution entirely, or wants cooperatives within a post-revolutionary Socialist system. The former has no real chance to actually damage Capitalism, while the latter is already used in countries like China as they gradually build into higher and higher stages of Socialism. Socialists already advocate for building up Dual Power, the Soviets for example were already in place before the October Revolution, but also understand that as this Dual Power grows the resistance from Capitalists grows as well, Revolution still becomes a necessity.

What I am getting so far is that he considers the revolutionary strategy to have a low probability of succeeding, and he argues that this is supported by historical evidence. The cooperatives are just one part of the strategy that he describes early on, once I am done with the book if I do think it is interesting enough I can try to summarize his thought.

In the textbook and in one of his online lectures he appears to start off aligned with Marx but diverges from Marxist theory. On Chapter 4 ("Thinking about alternatives to Capitalism, page 69) he describes his understanding of Marxist theory and in what ways he thinks differently. So, I suspect you will probably disagree with him strongly! Maybe I will too.

At this point I am not saying I have formed a strong opinion. The reason why Erik Olin Wright’s work brings me value is because his framework is aligned with my unpolished starting opinion of anti-capitalism through structural changes. His work helps me formalize my internal logic as I navigate through uncharted (for me) ideas about revolution as a mechanism for transformation.

I want to add that the purpose of my list is to equip the reader with solid foundational knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, so that the reader may better make up their own conclusions and further explore theory and historical texts (though I do include a section on history later).

Doing a good job 😀

I also think that, eventually, you’ll want to read Anti-Dühring. Engels counters the cooperative model from a Marxist perspective. It’s the much larger book the essay Socialism: Utopian and Scientific comes from, so if you’re down for a challenge you can read Anti-Dühring instead of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Anti-Dühring’s table of contents looks very interesting, so I will get to it eventually, but it is a lot of material. These are some very resource-intensive opinions to build!

Ultimately, it boils down to 2 possibilities, neither of which are good for the cooperative model:

I follow this logic but I am at this time not ready to accept or reject the notion that these possibilities describe the range of possible outcomes from such a strategy. In the Real Utopias project the cooperative model is not seen as the end-point but rather as one mechanism to erode capitalism. The author did not think that the ruptural transformation pathway would have a good chance in creating a society with the properties he deems ‘desirable’. There are so many unconstrained variables and unknowns that the output of a fast and chaotic transformation process is undefined in many ways, and so there is no reason to expect that the properties of the society that emerges will fall exclusively within a narrow range of desirable ones. Slow but intentional structural change has (he argues) a better chance of incorporating desirable properties while rejecting undesirable ones.

You’ll have plenty of time to develop your own opinions, cooperatives are certainly better than traditional firms, but you’ll find Marxists typically don’t agree with “utopia building” and other cooperative forms of ownership, and you’ll best see why generally in section 2.

I’ll have plenty of time but also will need plenty of time, socialists like to write big books it seems.

Blackshirts and Reds was a good entry point for me since I don’t have much historical background. It helped clarify terms like “fascism” that I’d seen used a lot but never truly understood. It also laid out some contrasts between fascist and communist dictatorships, which I found helpful early on.

One thing that really caught my attention was the bit on Kerala and the so-called “Kerala model.” That led me to Prabhat Patnaik’s article “The International Context and the Kerala Model” (available on scihub), which explained how IMF-backed liberalization can destabilize local economies by -for example - replacing self-sufficient agriculture with luxury imports.This was quite insighttful.

That said, the book does blur things together to build its narrative, and it doesn’t source every claim. I feel like this sometimes leads to misleading simplifications. For example, it says:

In Latvia, the communist activist Alfreds Rubies, who protested the inequities of free-market “reform,” has been kept in prison for years without benefit of trial

Reading that, you’d think Rubics was just an activist jailed for protesting neoliberalism. But when I looked him up, he was a politician that tried to crush opposition and backed a failed coup. That context matters, and the omission feels like nuance is missing. I found a few other cases like that - claims that technically check out but lack important context. Still, I learned a lot, and it made me want more source-heavy stuff. Something more like a history textbook that compares narratives directly and points at more direct sources (like UN resolutions, court documents, this type of things I like going through).

Another thing that I can add is that I am reading other things in addition to your recommendations. One memorable book that I am enjoying is ‘Envisioning Real Utopias’ by Erik Olin Wright. From what I have found online there is a mixed reaction to Olin’s ideas from socialists/communists. My understanding of his claims so far is that there are mechanisms of social transformation that may be accessed by exploiting vulnerabilities during the social reproduction process. I still need to read through a lot of the book but so far he has suggested that worker cooperatives (like Mondragon Corporation) and the creation of ‘cooperative banks’ (willing to lend money for transforming companies into worker-owned) create one of the viable mechanisms through which the capitalist system may be eroded. I have found some of the criticism of trying to solve capitalism with more capitalism, which is an easy criticism to make, but I do think Olin makes some good points. As of this evening I would say Olin’s description of the problem of social transformation, how he categorizes strategies in terms of desirability, viability, and achievability, and his data-driven approach to assessing policy strategies (such as looking at what has actually happened in universal basic income experiments), is what I am most in alignment with. But still lots to learn.

Already finished Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds a few days ago and and watched Parenti’s speech. I am still going through the list, little by little. Great stuff, thanks !

but I will selfishly re-assert the importance of Dialectical Materialism

Ok, I will make sure I cover it then, I started this morning. Materialism is familiar to me and dialectics in the context of debate are also familiar, but ‘dialectical materialism’ is new. It has been about a decade since I put some dedicated effort in studying philosophy, and back then I mostly did morality, theology/metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Economics and politics were not super interesting to me back then, but now they are, so it is a good time to revisit.

From a surface reading it makes sense that the resolution of conflicts that arise due to material conditions is one pathway to change. I am curious to understand how a framework is built from this concept and whether Marxist theory rigidly asserts this as the driver for change or if it is one important tool for building a perspective on class struggles but the framework accepts flexibility and complexity.

As for National Liberation, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is the best Marxist explanation of it. National liberation against colonialism and Imperialism is seen as progressive, and the product of oppression, not the oppressors. Palestine, for example, is supported wholeheartedly against the Settler-Colonialism of Israel, including resisting genocide using force to do so. Oppression creates its own violent reaction, even if in a perfect world neither would exist.

I will leave ‘National liberation’ study for later as there is already enough on the plate. In the context of Palestine, the Palestinians need to do what they can do to survive. They have grown under an active genocidal campaign, they are direct recipients of unimaginable violence. I think it’s straightforward to frame this as a case of self-preservation. What is the alternative argument? That they should erase themselves?

What is arguably dangerous (I am not saying this happens in Marxist philosophy) is when an ideology recognizes, as an example, the ‘Imperial Core’ as the ultimately responsible entity of oppression and places everyone who benefits in some way, perhaps simply by being born in Europe or US, as part of the enemy. Someone can justify bombing civilians in a Western country using a robust and coherent ideological framework that is further justified by the violent injustices that they have experienced. When I think of an ideological framework that discusses violence, I’m interested in what mechanisms are in place to keep violence in check.

Make sense?

Yes, it does, very much so. Thanks a lot!

It is good to hear. For what it’s worth, I just went through a bit of an exercise for Cuba trying to look for examples of the types of violence that they committed and also looked into some of the other groups that I associate with the concept of a “violent revolution” (ETA in Spain, IRA in Ireland, different groups in Yugoslavia). What I found is:

• The groups that I associate with terrorism tactics are nationalistic, not fighting for socialism (at least not as a main goal).

• The Cuban revolutionaries used guerrilla tactics that, from what I can find, did not use terrorism as a tool. Their enemies, including CIA-backed groups, did.

So, that’s points in favor to Cuba.

When people say “kill the landlords” online, they are usually expressing frustration at the parasitic nature of landlordism, they are not announcing that they intend to kill grandma.

Good to know! Before the 2016 US election I would rarely choose the literal interpretation when reading statements like this online. When Trump was elected and I realized that people online were not actually being sarcastic and making jokes, I began to take online statements more seriously and literally. I still think there is a high probability that some people who write about violence online mean it literally. That doesn’t necessarily reflect on Marxist-Leninists though, many ideologies/religions can be pushed to extremism, and it is not entirely fair to ask everyone not to use figurative language online.

I am half way through Wage Labor and Capital now. It is very interesting, I think that I will like Marx’s Das Kaptial because I do like dense/analytical. I already have several questions but I will first read more and then see if I can get some help in the communities you mentioned.