Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. If you’re wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
(EDIT: Changed “29th February” to “1st March” - its not a leap year)
ah, “acculturation” on lobste.rs where a 2-month old account feels free to mouth off on a mod for not doing their job (possibly because the mod uses a feminine-coded handle?) and praise HN as an alternative
I’ve noticed that the reference to “garden party” is the tone-policing term of choice for lobsters fash to shut down uncomfortable discussions
fucking nazi safety officers everywhere these days.
I feel like the story of Cassandra would be much more gratifying if she’d had access to powered armor.
Shitlibs running to sign up for claude is peak whatever the fuck this moment is.
perhaps the fact that claude was used in war planning will give them a pause.
nah
yeah, that was too much to expect
A potential massive uptick of consumer tier subscribers that they don’t break even on at the same time the DoD fallout drives more lucrative prospects away could be fun to watch at least, a considerable chunk of the llm code helper ecosystem appears to hinge on anthropic not doing anything crazy like suddenly hiking prices.
This concept has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks now but I’ve struggled to put it into words: the reason so many elites love AI is not because they think it will work, but because it offers them genuine utility as a rhetorical device. It’s an always-applicable counterargument to criticisms that their plans or laws are unworkable. Like, some politician will propose a dumb law or some CEO will announce some absurd company policy and in the past they would get pushback, but now they just duct tape over all the cracks with “ahh, but we’re using AI!”.
The latest example of this I’ve seen is from the 3d printing subreddit - a few states are passing laws that would require the manufacturers of 3d printers to prevent the user from using them to print guns, and conversations on this seem to go thusly:
Anti: “A 3d printer doesn’t know what the thing it’s printing is, any more than a regular printer knows whether it’s printing a recipe or a death threat. This can’t work.”
Pro: “We’ll require manufacturers to install verification chips in their printers, then users will verify their 3d files using AI before printing.”
Anti: “Putting aside for now the privacy concerns and the fact that this kind of DRM approach to force users to only use authorized files has been tried before and has literally never worked, how will the AI know if the 3d file is a gun or not?”
Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”
Anti: “…Even if you have some magical algorithm that can tell a 3d model is a working gun from first principles, it would be easy to bypass; a firearm isn’t one descrete object, it’s a mechanical device made up of components that are not dangerous by themselves. The user can always break the file up and print it one piece at a time.”
Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”
Anti: “It doesn’t matter how smart the AI is, it can’t know by looking if a spring is part of a pistol magazine or part of a pen!”
Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”
Seems like it, before they just used to word ‘innovation’ to do the same thing. A think which drives me mad re dutch politics. (We have a problem that our farms produce to much nitrogen, and instead of doing anything about it our govs keep going ‘we will invest in innovation’, which means nothing. It just pushes the ball forward, and more and more stuff gets shut down because of the nitrogen problems (building buildings for example). But the word innovation polls well and feels proactive).
And while this is very specific to the nitrogen problem, people have been doing this with climate change for decades as well. (see also how AI is replacing the word innovation there).
It’s such a powerful dodge. What you’re actually saying is “we’re going to keep doing exactly what we’re doing and see if that fixes it” because the nature of innovation is such that it’s actually pretty complex to “invest” in, and very rarely has the direct application you need. Like, you don’t get penicillin by investing in pharmaceutical innovation you get it by paying some nerd to fuck off to the jungle for a few years and hope that his special interest ends up being useful. Bell Labs was able to basically invent the modern world by funneling the profits of their massive monopolistic empire into
a bunch of nerds poking stuff with probes to see what happenselementary physics and materials science research that didn’t have a definite objective.
I’m so torn on this, because IN THEORY the argument “git blame should show the dunce who committed this” makes sense.
But then why not add the AI as a co-committer.
(All of this of course sidesteps the actual question, “why the fuck are you allowing AI contributions in the first place”.)
accountability sink go brrr
(and to step on my pedestal for a moment: turns out “flat file” semantics for reasoning about and managing computer instructions is kinda fucking terrible, who knew?! (gods I wish we could have had some of the alternatives… worse is better is why they won out, but we could do so much better with modern compute capacity…))
Just want to say this is one of the reasons I love this comm. It’s not just “AI bad” (which it is) but “this is why”. Criticism with teeth.
It is absolutely absurd that the “controls” for all this shit is effectively just “ask it nicely in human language to not do bad stuff” and some external security layers like locking it down to a container and monitoring shit like file access as if it’s a potentially untrustworthy user. Again, it is (and worse), but it’s such a fucking ridiculous departure from the hype.
I mean, OpenAI is doing it anyway. I think Altman is just keen to not experience the same strong arming bullshit. https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175
oh yeah SamA’s statement was definitely PR-adjacent (OpenAI already got caught working with the US government and the people behind Discord’s age verification to create mass surveillance) but Trump’s threats against Anthropic are definitely real
Marcus is just critihyping like mad. He actually believes LLMs in DoD will lead to Skynet, instead of a bunch of probably avoidable targetting mistakes
I do think the “all of humanity” stuff is a little overblown, but this is legitimately dumb and dangerous and will get a ton of innocents killed + allow the military to dodge accountability. Letting ChatGPT potentially run an autonomous weapon with zero oversight is phenomenally stupid
ehh. i’m not inclined to hand it to marcus. i can’t think of an example of him saying something new and interesting.
IBM stocks take a tumble after anthropic release a COBOL skill - the rational market strikes again.
I wrote up my take here but TL;DR - a few markdown files telling Claude it’s an expert at COBOL development aren’t going to unpick decades of risk averse behaviour from bank and government cios. Similar to the SaaSpocalypse this is pure nonsense. Investors don’t tend to let reality dissuade them though.
cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.
It could produce the stupidest outcome though, where Claude finally manages to either destroy or leak the contents of (or both!) a business-critical system that nobody understands how to rebuild.
there is some reason to think this way. also keep in mind that a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn’t be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah, for example. of course what people want and how it shakes down after the bombs drop is different thing entirely, i guess we’ll see, eventually (i assume that decision to strike was already made)
The best thing an unpopular regime can ask for is the enemy they have been bigging up as literally The Great Satan starts dropping bombs and missiles on the populace that hates it.
“If we bomb people and show their government can’t protect them, they will turn against the government and we will win” has been tried by the Germans on Londoners, the Allies on Germany and Japan, and the US on Serbia, and it didn’t work.
@fullsquare
> a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn’t be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollahThis is a bit like saying certain human rights orgs only exist because Soros funds them via OSF, or that the Hong Kong protests only happened because of NED/ OTF funding. In all these cases I suspect authentic movements are funded when their activities happen to align with funders’ current goals.
i had no idea that you can buy anti-ship missiles in any corner store. not sure how do you make sense of how both of these militias mentioned decided to do nothing after the guy signing their checks and sent them weapons was killed
@fullsquare This talking point is designed for replying to someone who denies that there was any resourcing of Islamist groups by the Iranian regime. So not really a suitable response to what I said. Which is that the Anti-Americanism precedes Iranian funding, both were precipitated by decades of US military adventurism in the region.
If you want to understand the genesis of militant Islamism, see the Adam Curtis documentary The Power of Nightmares. Or maybe read this;
https://meaningness.com/fundamentalism-countercultural-modernism
That’s cute, how about you find me a source that isn’t a spooky blob think tank?
Or better yet, enlist and we can rid the world of another Sam Harris fanboy
i don’t give a shit about sam harris. if iranians were broadly fine with theocracy, there wouldn’t be 30k+ dead protesters last month, or major protests every year for a decade. like every other country on earth, you can expect that iran secularizes, except that apostasy or conversion is capital offense, or any significant dissent for that matter, so any survey unaffected by self-censorship would be hard to conduct
While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn’t satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn’t like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you’re going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administration has shown a less-than-comforting attitude towards civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide.
Let’s also not lose sight of the role that US and British intervention played in creating the circumstances for the Ayatollahs to come to power in the first place. The Shah wasn’t exactly any kinder to the Iranian people and was a foreign puppet to boot.
Harris’s take only works if, like him, you assume that the fundamental problem with Iran is Islam, rather than actually bothering to look at the history of the country and how it became what it is today. Because in that case once you get the ayatollah out of the way and introduce the light of Science! to the people they’ll immediately become rational civil libertarians and believe exactly the same things he does. The Irreligious Right is exactly as reductive and stupid as the worst evangelicals, but can better use the language of STEM to hide it.
to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation
I doubt there are going to be boots-on-the-ground. Not for any good reasons, just because Trump lacks the commitment (or even capability of commitment).
That cuts both ways, you just need to be the last person in the room to speak with Trump
Looking at the bloodthirsty freaks he’s put in charge of our military / intelligence / diplomatic apparatus, and I don’t like them odds
I can see a situation where his bombing campaign fails to achieve the objective, a special operation like in Venezuela fails, and Hegseth or Rubio or someone (Putin? Netanyahu? Kanye?) convinces him to invade long enough that inertia carries it forward.
Of course, anything we do is going to take us to the same result we’ve seen with all these interventions. The US military and whatever allies join us will be, broadly speaking, terrifyingly effective at achieving their tactical and operational goals, but because the overall strategic plan is somewhere between non-existent and backwards those successes will fail to actually do anything. We will inflict and suffer that much more death and devastation, and all it will accomplish is making the world less stable and less safe for everyone.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Yes, absolutely, civilization (or whatever word you like better here) will not happen automatically or magically.
And I’m not finding an answer: How do you /properly/ remove an oppressive theocracy, in such a way that the country has good starting conditions to prosper?
Two things seems clear to me: the theocrats will not go by themselves, and the country will not prosper under them.
From the outside? I’m gonna be honest and say I don’t know that you do.
the answer is definitely not to sanction and attempt to destabilize them on behalf of your two equally evil regional client states. The corollary to that is that you cannot produce the necessary conditions for future prosperity by destroying their economy in a way that harms the average person more than the elites.
And that’s assuming that we (the west) even want them to prosper or care about their future as a nation. Perhaps in an alternate universe, that would be the motivation for regime change but that is not and has never been the case.
@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare This hasn’t happened in Iran, but oppressive theocracies *have* decayed from inside elsewhere—notably Ireland since 1980 (the difference now is as night and day, yet there was no revolution and no shooting, and the country has prospered). Arguably Spain’s clerico-fascist system went the same way in the 1970s. And so on.
Iran is different, though, in that it faces a violent, powerful external superpower, which indirectly props up the priesthood.
@cstross @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare OK, but I don’t see the automatism in that direction either. And just letting them simmer in their own little cosmos doesn’t seem very sustainable when they organize and support e. g. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi.
Starting a war now is not the answer, I’m pretty sure, but the question remains.
from Rusty https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people
Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.
Jack Dorsey’s really figured out how to name his companies. He didn’t like the name of Square, so he changed it to Block. He also spent $68M of Block’s money on a massive all-hands party. Now, after Bitcoin’s crash, he has to lay off 4k employees from Block. Don’t worry, somebody on HN was at the party and can explain everything:
Describing it as a “party” feels misleading. It was a company-wide offsite for an essentially fully remote organization. Was it necessary? Probably not. But I found the in-person time valuable, especially with teammates I’d never met face to face.
Elsewhere in-thread, somebody does the maths:
The three-day festival in downtown Oakland featured performances by Jay-Z, Anderson .Paak, T-Pain, and Soulja Boy, and brought 8,000 employees from around the globe.
Oh, well, there you go. 8k employees each buying $4k of hotel and travel, that adds up. Huh, why does that “J. Z.” fellow sound familiar? Maybe it was in one of those WP articles I keep linking?
On March 2, 2021, Square reached an agreement to acquire majority ownership in Tidal. Square paid $297 million in cash and stock for Tidal, with Jay-Z joining the company’s board of directors. Jay-Z, as well as other artists who currently own stock in Tidal, will remain stakeholders. On December 1, 2021, Square announced that it would change its company name to Block, Inc. on December 10. The change was announced shortly after Dorsey resigned as CEO of Twitter.
Ah, I see. It wasn’t a party, it was a presentation from the board of directors.
TIL block is square. I was wondering how there was a huge tech company I’d never heard of until recently.
I hadn’t heard of square either. Are they the guys doing squarespace? No idea.
EDIT: Okay, I did hear of CashApp, and it goes without saying that you need an entire lock-in ecosystem and a crypto-gimmick around a fintech product these days.
Yeah, they rebranded when they did the harebrained pivot to focus on cryptocurrencies.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rentahuman-musk-ai h/t naked capitalism
Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.
gah
Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.
lmao of course they were
it’s always the Elon Musk fans isnt it.
and on the topic of Futurism articles on Elon Musk: https://futurism.com/future-society/court-trouble-jury-hates-elon-musk
one word: LMFAOOOO
Forget who said it (I think e.w. niedermeyer) but if you were a true Musk Hater you would lie your way into that jury no matter the cost
It takes dedication, but the payoff is too big to not try
Not… sneer? What is this?!
Nuke your socials for the trial
Hardest choices, strongest wills, etc.
Imagine the book you could write at the end
Revolutionary Snepuku
Well, just dont use your real name online.
Liteplo says the seed of RentAHuman was planted during his travels in Japan, where humans can lease other humans as escorts.
“The story that I could tell anyone to blow their mind is that you can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” he said.
huh? his big epiphany is learning about prostitution?
I just had one of those “brain-doing-brain-stuff-good” moments (I think normal people call them delusions?) pondering about why it is that AI code extruders are seeing widening adoption.
tl;dr - there’s a bunch of people uncurious about the nature of the abstractions they use and it’s a tragedy.
First a moment of background: My first software dev position was using Lisp and one of the most powerful concepts built into the language runtime was the macro facility, the ability to write code that writes code. The main downsides of Lisp are obsequious Lisp developers and hard-to-master C foreign function interfaces, so what you have is a toolchain of abandoned dependencies made by some real annoying characters, but I digress. The ability to write code that writes code is a powerful concept.
I moved on to working with .Net which sometime around the 4.6 version release got enhancements to built-in language utilities. This led to better code-generators for numerous purposes (certain DI containers started to do dependency resolution at build time for example).
I did Scala for a time, which had a macro facility that was hot garbage and was rewritten between 2 and 3, so I never bothered to learn it. Around this time the orgs I worked for were placing an emphasis on OpenAPI / swagger specs for reasons I don’t know because while there was tooling that could be used to generate both the entire http client and the set of interfaces used by the surface, we did neither (where I am at right now we still do neither form of code gen).
Anyways, things like code generation whether via external tooling or internal facilities is magical but it is deterministic magic: Identical input should yield the same result. It is also hard to use well. The ergonomics of the OpenAPI / Swagger codegen tooling is pretty bad though not impossible, and the whole thing under the hood is powered by mustache templates. The .Net stuff is still there and works well, but I don’t think many work places want to invest in really understanding that tooling and how it can be employed. Lisp well always be Lisp, good job Lisp. There are other examples of code generation used for practical ends I am sure.
The point is that code generation requires being able to think and define certain forms of abstractions outside of the target functionality of a single program and while it’s not hard to do that thinking, it’s just high enough of a bar that your typical enterprise engineer won’t engage with that (but will always be amazed by the results!).
AI Code Extruders change the cognitive burden that would be required for code generation into something that I guess appeals to engineers. You can specify something in the abstract and a Do-What-I-Mean machine may churn up something minimally useful, determinism be damned. Not only would an engineer not need to consider the abstraction layer between their input and the code but they would be unable to fully interrogate that abstraction because the code extruder does not need to show its work.
Just a thought. Probably a very silly thought.
@BurgersMcSlopshot @BlueMonday1984
I am cleaning up behind uncurious people that have made some vexing category errors.
I feel this, I was dealing with this at a prior employer.
I think there’s definitely something to that. It seems like it rhymes with my own interpretation, at least. I did 7 years of support for backend network infrastructure (load balancing, SSL optimization, etc) and one thing that I consistently found was that the way the applications and tech services at most of these companies were structured everything was treated like a complete black box by everyone who wasn’t specifically working on that element. Like, I would find myself trying to trace a problem through the application flow and every other request was essentially being handled by a completely different team and the people I was talking to didn’t even understand the questions I was asking. That level of siloed work is somewhat necessary given the sheer complexity of the systems and infrastructure that modern applications rely on, but also seems to cultivate a certain level of incuriousity. What’s happening inside those black boxes doesn’t even get considered because it doesn’t matter; it’s somebody else’s problem right up until it suddenly isn’t. The current crop of confabulation machines take this tendency to a kind of logical extreme where nobody can adequately look into the black box to understand what it’s doing, and that will similarly be perfectly fine up until it very much isn’t and there won’t be anyone to call to figure out how to fix it.
Not only would an engineer not need to consider the abstraction layer between their input and the code but they would be unable to fully interrogate that abstraction because the code extruder does not need to show its work.
I think you’re actually right on the money here, nowhere near delusional, especially since you come from a Lisp background. I really appreciate Lisp (and Smalltalk) for the “live-coding” and universal inspectability/debuggability aspects in the tooling. I appreciate test-driven development as I’ve seen it presented in the Smalltalk context, as it essentially encourages you to “program in the debugger” and be aware of where the blank spots in your program specification are. (Although I’m aware that putting TDD into practice on an industrial scale is an entirely different proposition, especially for toolchains that aren’t explicitly built around the concept.)
However, LLM coding assistants are, if not the exact opposite of this sort of tooling, something so far removed as to be in a different and more confusing realm. Since it’s usually a cloud service, you have no access to begin debugging, and it’s drawing from a black box of vector weights even if you do have access. If you manage to figure out how to poke at that, you’re then faced with a non-trivial process of incremental training (further lossy compression) or possibly a rerun of the training process entirely. The lack of legibility and forthright adaptability is an inescapable consequence of the design decision that the computer is now a separate entity from the user, rather than a tool that the user is using.
I’ve posed the question in another slightly less skeptical forum, what advantage do we gain from now having two intermediate representations of a program: the original, fully-specified programming language, as well as the compiler IR/runtime bytecode? I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.
I’ve started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about…
Have you been abused by Ed Zitron being mean to your favourite AI? You might be entitled to compensation!
The tech isn’t mature, but neither was the Internet 30 years ago.
Drink!
Like I ever stopped…
Some sort of Zitron-induced psychosis, that’s a new one.
The parent thread is also worth a read. “What if pee pee was poo poo” - brilliant opener
It’s a pretty wild read. This isn’t a rational doomer screed about the annihilation of life on earth, though it similarly bounces radically between being overly vague and overly specific to create the appearance of analyjsis and consideration and confuse when it’s claiming a fact with when it’s extrapolating a trend (hint: it’s almost always the latter and the trend may or may not be real). Instead it’s written firmly for the McKinsey set to convince them their bets on the AI future weren’t dumb and actually it’s the naysayers who will lose their jobs and homes. Also David might need to update his site because there’s an offhanded reverse-pivot back into crypto.
I regret reading that in full. Really, read the opener summary, stop at “What if pee pee was poo poo” and you will be wiser and happier.
Insane that people got paid large sums to write this.
Commented [97]: if we simply imagine something that didn’t happen,
“Intelligence Displacement” indeed.
Yeah, I probably should have included a warning about incoming psychic damage on that link. Sorry.
Although highlighting the phrase “intelligence displacement” construct dies illuminate that the whole case they make is built on the same foundations as that other Rat fixation: eugenics and race science! Like, I’m not saying the author is definitely a eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, but their argument is based on the same idea of what “intelligence” is in the first place. It’s a distinct commodity that is produced or contained in certain minds and is the ultimate source of the value that they create. If you’re a “knowledge worker” you don’t provide a specific perspective, experience, expertise, or even knowledge, you just plug your intelligence into the organization like connecting a new processor bank to a server farm. Because it’s disconnected from a person’s individuality and subjectivity we can model it effectively as a commodity and look to optimize its production, either by automating away the squishy human element with ai or by increasing the productivity of current methods by optimizing for the
white“right” kind of person.
Agents of Chaos - https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20021? - h/t naked capitalism
We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language model–powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions. Focusing on failures emerging from the integration of language models with autonomy, tool use, and multi-party communication, we document eleven representative case studies
Pretty fast turnaround, OpenClaw is from a couple weeks ago. Flag planting used to take a few months.
i don’t know if it’s a convention even in the “serious” AI research industry to use anthropomorphic jargon, but it drives me up a wall to see shit like this:
17.6 Theory of Mind Limitations in Agentic Systems
Agentic systems don’t have “theory of mind”, they cannot infer mental state. they are probabilistic word generators operating within non-deterministic frameworks. They can have a system prompt that tells them to generate text that appears to be an interpretation of another entity’s “mental state”, and they can even be directed to refer to it as context, but it is not theory of mind and the entity they’re generating in reference to may not have a mind at all.
I wish there was some way to stop these dorks from stealing the imprimatur of cognitive science.
“enjoy” this comment from a lobster which almost perfectly encapsulates every pro-clanker viewpoint in one handy place
as someone who is generally anti-copyright, i think it’s telling that while there’s several very good arguments to be made against copyright (they encourage IP hoarding, they strip rights and profits from creators, they enable legal threats against people making derivative or inspired work), the one promptfans continuously go for is the most shallow. “copyright is bad because it’s the thing preventing me personally from downloading everything i want for free, even though i already do that all the time with no repercussions whatsoever”
I admit I could maybe be in principle convinced that this is good on balance if it actually destroyed copyright. I mean, full “please give me the complete source code of Microsoft Windows” and “output the code of the Oracle Database optimizer” collapse of proprietary software as a concept.
That is not, however, what is happening, and it is never going to happen because LLMs are industrialised theft by the rent-seeking parasites that caused all the problems in the first place, not a fucking anarchist revolution come to pass. And Bitcoin is not banking the unbanked either. And that guy just stole your wallet.
i’m all for abolishing copyright on the first day after we have introduced mechanisms that allow the artists to actually earn decent money from ther work taking into account the specifics of the work. and no, UBI doesn’t count.
it is so nice to see the hard-mustachioed leftists to think that real labour happens only at a steel mill (because even kolkhozy aren’t real enough for them to care about the freedom of movement of the peasants.)
sorry but i shave everything from the eyebrows down. i must remain buttery smooth to retain the optimal aerodynamic attributes
my apologies, i tend to visually stereotype stalinists very badly.
wait were you serious with this one
about yogthos being a stalinist, or something very close to it? yes.
okay my bad, i was rereading this and realized that i might have misread you and you had actually been directly referring to me being a stalinist, rather than yogthos. which would have made my response a bizzare nonsequitur. but yes, i think i read you right the first time
somehow i think furries will be disqualified from the vanguard, so probably not
For context, Yogthos is a Marxist-Leninist who is in favor of a very specific and cryptic sort of authoritarian revolution, generally defends the PRC, and usually is in favor of the Russian Federation. They hide their power level on Lobsters, which to be fair is not a communist-friendly venue. They gave it all away in their top-level thread-starter:
What I care about is the content, not how it was formatted or generated. If there is an interesting piece of code, some factual or thought provoking information, and so on. I don’t see why it should be flagged merely because LLMs were involved.
LLMs are useful because they can generate the content: propaganda which provokes his glorious revolution. A modern-day Lenin wannabe. Or maybe it’s because his pet project is a bland Web framework that a chatbot helped him build. Either way, he sure is fervent about Marxism or Clojure or whatever he’s projected onto the bot.
I will say that Yogthos seems to be unique—the Marxist-Leninists I observe elsewhere seem to pretty much universally despise LLMs, and on the Red side of the fediverse his posting is usually met with confusion.
so, dude’s a stalinist (and let me repeat myself) and dumb as fuck. i fucking love the totalitarian left, in so many aspects undistinguishable from any other type of totalitarian gobshite.
