Idk who would find this fun besides middle school students.

(I’m unfamiliar with Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Don’t let the behavior tech bros convince you to dislike one of the only legitimate, and beautiful uses of technology that can unite people from all corners of the earth.

Sure they will have inaccuracies. Sure it requires more electricity than opening a pocket dictionary. But people will use these tools to understand each other and their cultures better, fostering good will and breaking efforts to propagandize us against each other. Many people will choose to learn once dying languages after using these tools. Many young people will communicate with their grandparents for the first time in their native tongue because of translation apps.

I share the same apprehension with using them as an authoritative source, but I think flaws and all, the benefits of trying to communicate across language barriers will be orders of magnitude more impactful than their downsides.

The number of people I have had interesting conversations with due to (the extremely error prone) translation capabilities on 小红书 is already large even after only a few months on the service. These cultural exchanges would have been impossible or extremely laborious a few years ago.

I can never read your posts without a funny accent again

the peasantry, the proletariat, the petite bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie

Almost inconceivable that this alliance could exist and it would support socialism. Turns out the material conditions in the global south are radically different from those in the imperial core.

Libs not understanding what socialism is, while frustrating, is such a boon to our efforts worldwide because they cannot effectively combat them without knowing how they work.

Future “fell for it award” recipients

Cold War 2:

Soviet Union 2, 3, and 4:

I think they are more minimal, but I don’t see them mentioned in discussion of microkernels.

Completely agreed.

I just don’t think what we do in the present should be dominated by the possibility of developing AGI in 50 years

I agree, but I think that the ecosystem that AGI develops within decades from now will develop from the ecosystem that is currently developing LLMs and genAI. All the same components are required.

While super intelligence is far off in the future, but the reasoning systems and architectures required for it will be developed in the coming decades, of which the intermediate lesser intelligent systems will provide capabilities that accelerate the development of improved intelligent systems.

It will be necessary for China or some other AES state to be ahead of bourgeois entities long before AGI can meaningfully iterate upon itself or gains can provide compounding results.

Similarly to the USSR developing nuclear weapons shortly after the US prevented the US from using them for heinous acts to enforce their hegemony, China must do the same with AI, but even earlier given how willing the US will be to deploy these systems without carrying the immediate backlash of vaporizing millions of people.

Definitely a better design. Are the BSDs microkernels? I am quite unfamiliar with the architecture of BSD kernels. I have only interacted with userspace BSD software and their manpages.

This is one of the core reasons I have come to the belief that using Chinese platforms will serve us better than using western FOSS projects like the fediverse.

The response to the fediverse has been to coopt, and the response to tiktok has been to outright ban, which clearly implies bourgeois entities believe the former can be used to serve their interests and the latter cannot.

It is clear they feel that Chinese platforms are more resilient to their operations than homegrown open source ones, evidenced by the fact that they can trivially deploy LLM bots to any server or spin up their own.

Thank you for this info. Lots of great launch points for looking deeper into this.

my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.

Observation of the development of FOSS ecosystems seems to back this up and does give me some hope for the state of technology to build alternatives to capitalist run software.

We do have our own asymmetries like not having the profitability requirement and being able to onboard developers without the barriers the constraints of employment impose.

I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.

Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.

Not sure if I am making the correct inference of what you are hinting at, but my initial thoughts are that something that creates a broad distrust of social media would result in a better world than a world where pre-existing comrades are the only people who have that distrust with no way of breaking through the astroturfed counter narratives.

Given FOSS bros tendency towards liberalism and reactionary ideology, open source would probably be a bad way to deploy something like this. If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet…or at least minimally build a cadre of capable comrades I could trust to use it responsibly.

he rise of macine learning and LLM usage aren’t a concrete step towards AGI.

Agreed entirely with LLMs. However, creating and deploying LLMs and ML will broadly create the conditions required to be able to bring about AGI. Developing an educated tech workforce, ML domain expertise, and chip manufacturing is a necessary step and one that doing LLM and genAI bullshit helps accomplish.

ML is broad enough to include the same architecture biological brains operate on simulated on silicon, so while pedantic 🤓, it is likely a significant step towards general intelligence.

Yeah, LLMs suck ass, but they need not be intelligent to yield extreme influence capabilities. The average person won’t notice a person in a crowd that has 8 fingers on each hand, nor will they care so long as it supports their preferred narrative.

I’m not a bazinga that believes we (or China) will LLM our way into a utopia in a decade or two. LLMs will not become intelligent.

However, I believe AGI is inevitable, will provide a massive first mover advantage, and will enable capabilities for those who wield it to subjugate those who don’t. That means it is imperative that proletarian forces wield it before capitalists do.

Be for real lol. You’re posting on one of the only places on the internet that isn’t completely owned by the bourgeoisie. Your reach is already limited by segregating yourself on this site. Pretending that posting on “the internet” (e.g. the biggest sites) which is mostly controlled by gigantic bourgeoisie interests and petite bourgeoisie interests is a purely proletarian act is silly. In practice “freedom to post” is ancillary to feeding you advertising. You are playing in their sandbox and have always been.

I knew my comment would inevitably get this response.

Reaffirming that I do not believe that posting is praxis. With regard to bourgeois owned platforms, it is without question any serious revolutionary discussion that cannot be coopted will get squashed. Occasionally they fail to control the narrative, and the limited opportunities we have to sneak in counter narratives are more easily squashed with deployments of large scale LLM opposition. Obviously we should have no confidence of using their platforms to counter their interests to any effect besides finding like-minded people and taking interactions off their platforms.

What makes LLMs different from existing tools available to bourgeois platforms is the ability to extend into public spaces they do not directly control like the fediverse or BBS forums and image boards.

The inherent contradictions in capitalism make it effectively impossible for this technology to be really gate kept from proles over time without a literal crackdown on ownership or development.

Gatekeeping is not required, especially not preventing the purchase of GPUs.

But even taking account purchasing, corpos and NED orgs can benefit from economies of scale, whereas people going to Amazon or Best Buy will be limited to a handful of units at a time. This is the least significant limitation we face.

The asymmetry is not just the accumulation of GPUs, but also other resources like IP addresses and uniformity of deployment. Individual proles or small orgs will not be able to launch campaigns similar to how a NED funded org, tech PR team, or other multinational corporation. Our IPs and accounts will be blocked, theirs whitelisted. Our efforts will be disparate and unable to react to real-time information like sentiment analysis, theirs will. Any three letter org can probably go to Facebook or Google and be handed hundreds of thousands of real looking, aged accounts.

Per GPU, they will be able to spew more LLM bullshit than us given, even on our own platforms, because they have organizational advantages.

It becomes necessary for proles to find a tactic that allows them to make the equivalent of a Hamas piss rocket or a Quds drone, something that is incredibly cheap but because of the capitalist state of the world requires a wasteful amount money to defend against.

Strongly agree that something like this is needed. However, what enables the asymmetry here is a limitation on material resources and labor. No such limitation exists with digital systems that cannot be trivially copied and deployed by bourgeois interests.

Only idea I have for something like this is a system that requires user verification by existing members, possibly gatekept by irl meetings and capped at some rate per user. Few people use the fediverse because of tiny barriers to entry. No one would tolerate a system that imposes more burdens.

DDoS prevention solutions are probably capable of thwarting most technological solutions we can come up with to create our own asymmetries.

The type of software that major botnets/intelligence services/ad companies specializing in guerilla advertising was is called a Persona Management Systems.

Do you have any specific knowledge on the characteristics, capabilities, or implementation of these? I would be very interested in learning more.

Only one party needs to collapse for the dialectic to switch to reform vs. revolution.

Still too high

These people are all capitalists with many competing interests. Will be entertaining to see the ways in which this prevents coherent policy decisions from being made.

Like chuds being mad about NED regime change programs having woke sounding mission statements.

The black signs they’re holding are pretty cringe (It says “Oppose green (color of the DPP) communism. Fight against dictatorship”)

Libs are incoherent everywhere it seems.