DiscourseFan

War is violent and mucky and you never know if you’re going to make it out on the other side. I think a great value of Marx’s later work is the reminder of its inevitability. All we can do is prepare and hope it works out better this time.

Its a rough sketch. In the end, the viccisitudes of individual history are unable to capture the broader conditions of the events they take place in.

Just, like, it was the first populist political movement following the ‘08 crash, and while Obama was supposed to be the liberal technocratic answer to the failure of neoliberalism, he was not able to create policies that restored the social and economic post-war order in the US. After Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 nomination, the populist left, which still retained a hope of a new kind of society, no longer had a political representative, and Trump managed to clinch the nomination by campaigning in states that had been neglected by the Clinton campaign. Biden was another, more radical but still fundamentally liberal technocratic attempt to save the status quo of America politics, but the largest economic gains were for the educated professional class, and many people in the country felt left behind and ignored—-again, now with the backing of popular support, Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to completely reshape the country. And he has at least in part succeeded.

I don’t believe you’ve considered the possibility of a data center on Pluto…

But in all seriousness, if there is a possibility of building industrial centers outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is surely not here yet. Lots of areas would need improvement.

There are many difficult problems involved in building LLMs that I have to think about on a regular basis, which the models themselves cannot help me with. I think that just because the cognitive load has been taken off of some tasks does not mean that there is nothing that requires serious thinking anymore.

So the art isn't AI generated either? Idk why people trust these "AI checker" sites when they have been shown time and again to be inaccurate at best, often defamatory at worst.

Way too much AI-generated content in this post

Broadly, but its more narrowly a statement about NDAs

Such is the law of the falling rate of profit, a general tendency of Capitalism.

Yeah if you actually work in AI you usually can’t say much at all about what’s going on.

Ah I see

I've been a user for almost 3 years and have more than a thousand karma

Syllogism:

Universal claim: all cats are animals

Particular claim: Max is a cat

Singular claim: Max is an animal.

Why is every service considered a “rent”? These services basically depend on commodity production—bell may have had a monopoly on phone service but not on the phones themselves. Or the copper used to manufacture their cables, or the housing which their employees slept in or the food they consumed. Service monopoly =! Neofeudalism, just because it is a more recent phenomenon does not mean its unique, JP Morgan had a rail monopoly, nobody considered his business “Neofeudalism.”

Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.

I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.

You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.

This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.

The political situation is absurd, but its clear that people are far more resilient against state control, so in some ways its improving.

I think you'll find that most of the texts you can access right now are not available at your local library.

It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.

All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord!

Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.

This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.

Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.

As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.

Hitler did not come to power out of a Jacobin movement, he came to power during a time just like our own, when a moderate government was convinced that there was no better alternative to their style of rule. It is dangerous to argue in favor of a stable middle class when history would prove that such forms of society are often fleeting when they do occur. Waves inevitably crash along the shore, which doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful while they roll along it.

Human society is prone to convulsions, though. Just like the often body requires a shock to become stronger, healthier, societies need to be a push to avoid stagnation and decay. Though its true that you risk permanent injury, if you go too far.

There are numerous videos of high level professional poker players winning large hands with incredible bluffs, this whole "Nash equilibrium solution" is nothing more than a conjecture with some symbols thrown in. I will re-iterate, there is no such thing as perfect knowledge when you have imperfect information. If you play "optimally," you will get bluffed out of all your money the moment everyone else at the table figures out what you're doing.

I mean not many private corps are publishing unbiased scientific research papers these days. I think that’s what people are referring to, an entire research division which is mainly or at least often working in the public good.

Anybody who plays poker “optimally” is bound to lose money when they come up against anyone with skill. Once you know the strategy your opponent is employing you can play like you have anything. I believe I’ve won with 7,2 offsuite more than any other hand, because I played like I had the nuts.

Unlike Chess, in poker you don’t have perfect information, so there’s no real way to optimize it.

People would say the same thing about a calculator, or computation in general. Just like any machine it must be constructed purposefully to be useful, and once we require something which exceeds that purpose it must be constructed once again. Only time will tell the limits of human intelligence, now that AI is integrating into society and industry.

> Do you have any easy book recommendations to learn this kind of insights - grammar and the way of living.

Goldman’s Devavanipravešika [0] was what I learned Sanskrit from, that will teach you the grammar but Sanskrit grammar is notoriously difficult to learn, it functions almost like a computer language (though, not quite), it was the first formalized language, formalized into a system of thousands of rules that young kids of the upper castes would spend years memorizing. This book is a much simpler way to learn the grammar, but it still won’t be easy.

>Do you have any Bagavad Gita book recommendations that goes into the kernel of the teaching without all that noise?

Any interpretation you read will have some measure of sectarian influence, even my interpretation is quite contemporary, I’m drawing from more recent currents of thought to discuss the Gita in terms of an economy of force—-a good stepping stone between the text itself and this contemporary thought would be this volume of essays, in particular “The God and the Warrior,” by Mario Tronti, which touches on these things directly [1]. In the end it will be up to you, after your own studies, to form your own interpretation and your own relationship to the work.

[0] https://avg-sanskrit.org/avgclasses/Books&PDFs/TextBooks/Dev... [1] https://assets.kingston.ac.uk/m/ced5eece7fb5ed9/original/Voc...