awth13 [fae/faer, comrade/them]

Because the Russian government of today doesn’t remember and doesn’t care about what this day represents. I wish BadComedian’s videos on YouTube were translated into English so that English speaking comrades could see for themselves the nightmarish level of farce Russian state-sponsored media turned this memory into: evil NKVD drunkards forcing genetically pure Russian soldiers to die while they survive with the help of God™️ and make friends with SS soldiers because “the Russian soul is so kind”, etc. Inviting Israel to the parade is really not the worst of it.

Lol sorry we’re kind of into using centuries-old definitions here since Marxism is, you know, centuries old. Have a nice day too :3

I apologise for misunderstanding you. I agree, it’s just that everyone is really tired already of the LLM hype machine that keeps claiming AI will take over any moment now when we don’t even know if and when that future technology is going to be achieved. Personally, I think the LLM hype is counterproductive to that effort, which is why I use such strong terms when discussing it.

I believe you’re making a mistake Rosa Luxemburg touches on in her Reform or Revolution. A capitalist is not (necessarily) a person or a group of people but a manifestation of class division with respect to the relations to the means of production. Bourgeois revolutions across the world did not necessarily eliminate people or groups of people that are part of the monarchy apparatus, rather they eliminated monarchy as a distinct class in relation to the means of production, subsuming royal dynasties into the emergent capitalist class. When I was making my joke, I was thinking of that distinct class.

In the context of bourgeois revolution, in the consequences of which we currently reside, the bourgeois and monarchy classes are opposites.

Burger King is an oxymoron.

I would agree with you in a vacuum but I understand that every person has their specific circumstances. Are you prepared to say that airline pilots are freely able to choose where and how to work in any country of the world? I am not, and it goes even more so for flight attendants, which were also a part of this conversation.

I’d like to give another example too. As a Jewish person, I’ve always had and still have the option to repatriate to Israel, escape the dangerous, dehumanising, genocidal towards me environment I am in right now and receive appropriate healthcare from IDF that I will never be able to afford where I am right now. I never took and will never take this option because of my moral convictions and views but saying that it was an “easy question to answer” for me is ignorant of my life experience. The “easy question to answer” in the comment I responded to initially is the reason I responded.

I’ve never been to the US lol

Part of my family lives in Russia and there have been many moral quandaries with respect to continuing to live there and working in an economy increasingly oriented towards producing murder. Some chose to stay, some left; I don’t think any choice is for me to judge from a position of superiority.

Alright, if you feel this way. I don’t feel like I’m shielding anything, rather I am speaking to my life experience as a trans person living in a country that forbade my existence and thus rid me of opportunity to work and survive in a way that would align with my moral convictions. Is it a false equivalence to imagine that I am not unique and other people struggle with similar contradictions, albeit probably for different reasons?

No need to be rude, I don’t even disagree with you. Just feel like discussions around this and similar issues tend to go Hegelian and ignore the materialist component of Marxian dialectics, specifically the privilege inherent in boycott, to the point where it feels like the neoliberal “freedom” to work wherever you want is being treated as real.

It is hard to disentangle the corpo AI hype slop, the genuine attempts to move technology forward, and the public’s flawed understanding of both. It be a source of many a confusion!

This feels like a rather privileged take. While it is morally correct to do so, adults typically don’t live their lives doing morally correct things all the time. As an example, I think not paying taxes to the US government is also morally correct since taxpayer money goes to support Ukraine and Israel, among other things. When are all US-based hexbear users quitting their jobs?

It appears to be confusing because other people also read your comments in the same way as me. Thank you for clarifying though, I understand that it must be frustrating getting your thoughts hijacked like that! Before I say anything else, I’d also like to clarify that, in my first comment, I didn’t mean your comment in particular – I was replying to someone who already replied to you after all – but a wider trend I can’t describe more specifically without naming names, which I don’t want to do. With that being said,

LLMs will certainly be a part of its development.

Why certainly? That’s the point where what you are saying now can feel like part of that LLM hype bullshit because I don’t see how a chatbot can help a planned economy. Other machine learning models, sure, and I’ve fantasised about this before too, but LLMs seem to be orthogonal to this use case. Or do you rather mean that the insights obtained while developing LLMs can help us towards those better machine learning applications?

I meant buying into capitalist marketing :p

Good point besides that!

Of course LLMs aren’t a simulation of consciousness with the same abilities of a human, the idea is that if a model was trained first on Marxist theory and history before taking in more information through that perspective there could be a point where this can be used to simulate economic models that would be useful for economic planning.

You couldn’t make it any more confusing than talking about LLMs and economic model simulation in a single sentence then.

As for the inadequate education standards, I think the commodification of education destroyed and devalued these standards in pretty much any field so it’s not surprising that it is the case in computer science. But if you are interested enough in computer science to enter a university and/or work in the field, surely you might at least read up on machine learning and have the necessary background to kind of understand how it works and what it can and cannot do?

Not very Marxist innit

You are confusing the wider field of machine learning, which has been developing in strides throughout 2010s (and before that really) without the media overhyping it to the extent that people think machines can think now, and LLMs, which birthed the media hype cycle that is the subject of criticism in this thread.

You overestimate the abilities of programmers.

It’s rather that I don’t want to make assumptions about the abilities of my peers. While it is true that people I respect and look up to in the hacker/FOSS space are all vehemently against the LLM hype, disregarding the opinion of others on the grounds of feeling smarter than them doesn’t satisfy me. I wish to understand why they feel the way they feel and I just can’t, hence the being gaslighted feeling I described in my first comment.

It’s an interesting observation but I think it kind of breaks down when considering that some of the people doing the LLM gaslighting are trained programmers or computer scientists.