How its going: German leftists and streamers are beginning to pivot to keep themselves and their audience out of repression crosshairs.

Thanks for pointing this out. It is cruel that ukrainians are doing that to their own people. It wouldnt be great towards the enemy but the own population is a different ballgame imo.

Its kinda hard to understand what it is depicting. Seems like russia is doing a lot of warcrimes according to this site? Ukraine possibly some but seems like russia is leading by far.

Or did I miss something important here?

Great move. Although it would have already been great when M$ had donated to a fascist dictator and when they undermined the head of the icc but I’ll take it.

Honestly, i started reading this but after like 5 or more parts just saying “no” i lost interest.

I think it is incredibly disrespectful to counter arguments with just saying the opposite.

If you are interested in meaningful debate, let me know.

Okay. So I now had the time to read yogthos article about it. At one point i was pretty angry to be honest but in general, it is pretty well put. That does not mean I agree with one iota of it though. Here’s my answer to it:

here are my thoughts on ai, as an IT professional.

Atrophizing the brain

Gen-AI is like a bycicle. You can drive large distances in a short time with less effort than running. If you use it all the time, you will lose the ability to walk though.

Copyright

While it is true that large companies will circumvent or outright break copyright laws and are massively overadvantaged by them, the fact that AI does the same but faster does not help small creators at all. They remain the massively overexploited class, also through ai

Humanity’s survival

The argument that AI is somehow important to humanity’s survival is absolute bullshit. Our survival currently depends on breaking capitalism before it breaks the planet, either by war or by overheating.

Dont oppose progress

it is correct that marxists should not oppose progress on principle. “Democratizing creativity” on the other hand is a bullshit phrase, suggesting that creativity itself was somehow held hostage (which it isnt) instead of ideas being held hostage (which can be changed).

Planted thought

The mere existence of the arguments I debunked above shows the actual problem. Capitalist planting positive ideas in our heads to somehow view AI in this favorable light. They do the same in the opposite direction with russia, china and other countries.

Democratizing Creativity

It is true that a factory worker can now make a poster. But it also means that the same poster can pop up next to it saying the opposite. That is not a good development. The barrier of creativity is the same as an entry barrier to a market. If you pull it down, more and lower quality products enter the scene. That by itself might not be a problem but you have to keep overview to secure that the chaos does not spark pandemonium. In a food situation, we are talking about mass deaths in lieu of sufficient controls and regulations. China is the best example why “excessive” control leads to great outcomes.

Grassroots boycott is bad

The argument that grassroots boycott does not help is also false. There are thousands of examples where grassroots boycott prevented larger issues. Especially in the society we aim to create, everything will be handled at the grassroots level (communism). Using and adopting AI and normalizing it in leftist spaces makes it impossible for example to adhere to “thats a fake, leftists dont use AI”. The same argument can be made for using a flamethrower. There is a natural ethical border. This btw does not mean ai is not okay to use as a testing or planning tool. it is not to be used in an outward, open way as to not align oneself to it.

Losing the arms race, resistance is futile

The problem with the argument that we need to join the arms race does nothing for workers. We are not making AI tools or building server farms to be only used by us. We are using the enemy’s tools which helps them. Every prompt we make can be analyzed and used against us. Especially leftist creators can therefore be complicit in helping dismantle the left. We should instead use guerilla strategies in countering this threat. For example, we could poison information where we have access too, ask everyone to delete and or poison their data as well. We could think of new ways to attack this instead of making funny pictures.

Demand public AI

This is equally futile as “public” means government controlled, which means corporate controlled with some roundabouts. What we need is black sites. Privately or collectively owned basements with computers and GPUs, to be used to purposefully build countermeasures. We need no oversight, no “moderation” in terms of a less “radical” approach. We need john connor style resistance to a terminator level threat.

The tool is inert

Of course, there is no need to quickly draw something anymore with ai. But there wont be anyone able to draw it because of that. it is the deindustrialization of the west to the benefit of india and china atm and the deabilitation of the people toward ai in the future. A person who uses a calculator from the beginning will never learn to calculate by hand or in their head because we are not able to know without practice. Tools are okay to use in general. But we are in a giant hype bubble. The people who reject AI today will be the ones to ask about drawing or photographing ideas tomorrow.

Infinite ableism and hybris

“Hand my camera to a novice, and it is unlikely they would produce anything interesting with it.” which is a take unbecoming of a marxist. All humans (and animals) are the same. We can all learn the same things, only parted by certain traits which are not important. This argument leads to race theory if you go down the path stringently. There of course is a difference between years of experience but they are not nearly as important as people would like them to be.

Real coders

As a coder myself, I totally agree that high level languages are cheating. You absolutely need to understand THAT there is something underneath and you OUGHT to understand the basics of that lying underneath. Otherwise you have script kiddies who can make a beautiful website but dont know how to turn off the computer. It is again the capitalist way of specializing people into dependency. Therefore, someone who does AI for example would need at least some understanding and possibly training to understand the stuff they are creating. instead they produce hundreds or thousands of misses by using electricity and water which both are scarce due to capitalism.

Skill issue

The argument here is that a worker does not have the time to learn how to use the camera to take the great picture. The more important question is “Should they?”. The counterargument here is that there are more than enough pictures of anything and everything out there and reality is so vast that we cant even grasp it (dialectical materialism) so that there is absolutely no point to add fake reality into the mix.

Energy usage

This argument is either deeply ignorant or plainly made in bad faith. AI is not only the power it uses to answer prompts but always includes the power of training. By using ai, one already has insanely high power draws (about boiling a liter of water per prompt) but additionally, you have scaling effects of the hype, meaning millions of people using the stuff, scripts that produce hundred prompts a second and mixing the results. You have mass training efforts which use exactly the whole datacenters that were mentioned and one computer chews through kilowatts. a datacenter chews through megawatts. and they would not be built on every corner and especially not in low income neighborhoods if they did not suck this much energy and produce this much noise polution. The argument is so dishonest, it makes me very angry.

Who will control the tools

Like the atomic bomb, AI arms race will definitely kill us and someone needs to stop it. We should be the ones to very deliberately boycott AI, especially in overt usage as to not spread the hype any further. It is the democratic model. We only have finite amounts of times in our lives. We should spend them for healthy outcomes, not unhealthy ones.

I’m currently learning chinese and although I wasnt able to read the signs fully, I was able to recognize some. :)

I’m happy for you.

Yeah, I was very sad when I read about it and it turned out to be fascist shit. The term is pretty cool though. I thought they meant the revisionism but it turns out they were wildly off. Because I havent yet gotten my hands on good literature on the topic of western history revisionism and the sheer tons of lies they spread. Its a problem because it is true but the fascists again are more visible.

thank you for this. :) made me laugh

That’s the weird thing about the Madoff example. He wasn’t poor, and was very well respected on Wall Street.

It’s always the same mechanic. If a rich person gets persecuted, it is because the system needs to appear legit. Or they are trying to suppress something else. Today I learned the term “boomer truth regime” which I will be trying to further research since it sounds pretty much like the issue a lot of us are facing atm.

Do you mean actually or for the westoids?

In capitalism, a scam is when a poor person does it. If a rich person does it, thats called innovative strategy. (Not joking)

In my opinion as a clerk, banks are always scams. Why the fuck would someone want to store their money somewhere in the first place except for electronic transfer (which also is a scam in its implementation).

There was the concept of cheques. If you hand someone a cheque you better make sure the money is there when the person liquidates the cheque. Honestly, cash would have been better and more honest.

Anyway, I think it will all get better when we implement council governance and decapitate the capitalist systems.

Good point. I suppose this might be the extract phase of the bubble. Businesses have been known to do this as they start with market destroying cheap prices, then once the market is wrecked and eveyone else wont come in, they jack up the prices until consumers jump, then they jack up business prices until businesses jump and then they die (pretty much cory doctorrows main narrative). It sounds like the stock market is doing the same (which makes sense if you think back to the penny stock era when workers could invest in cheap stoch, which turned out to be a scam).

From my perspective stocks are a huge scam. But as an aspiring dialectical materialist I’m happy to be shown a better idea.

I mean, dont you love the constant babbling of schMerz about the lazy german youth? I mean I do kinda wanna catch a drone instead of listening to him though. ;)

My head explodes looking at that picture. Does anyone have comprehensive (marxist?) analysis to look at for someone who tries to get away from western prop?

Exactly. It has been pretty top notch for the last three years but aside from gaming it has probably been ver good for 5-10.

Important note: Linus Torvalds was recently seen in a first ever photo with bill -the biggest farm land owner in the US and the reason covid vaccines are patented - gates. This could be the reason. Of course they are surveiling the percentage of competition in THEIR market. So - tinfoil hat ON - if torvalds gets funky ideas now or we start seeing major shifts in policy, we need to raise the alarm immediately.

Well, we (linux nerds) have been saying that for a long time now. It is just not reaching people. And of course that is only for people absolutely want to play games. Everyone else who uses windoze is just coping.

No public transportation! We need dodge rams with only one seat! Cars should have a minimum size of two lanes! - average us politician probably

I have around 8 tb of space i can use to download stuff but we need to come up with a strategy how to pack and redistribute it imho. I’m on the matrix server if you want to dm me. Would like to help.

Whats the problem with space? Do you need patterns for the addresses? I’m possibly in a situation to help. Let me know what you have tried so far. I also am on the matrix server if you want to dm me.