I mean, the Global South is already doing our labor for us. Must they do our revolution too?

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It is correct to say that his portrayal of Yugoslavia in To Kill a Nation was very one-sided towards the Serb side. He is also a Statesian nationalist, as seen in his book Superpatriotism, where he tries to explain that there is “real patriotism” in the US versus the bourgeoisie’s “superpatriotism” and how the two are actually very very different for idealist reasons.

Despite this, take the good and leave out the bad. He is a very engaging and engaged writer and has a long bibliography, for one thing.

the code is often over weirdly overengineered

With the GPT + deepseek combo it fixes that problem (in my layman’s eyes); deepseek has a problem of overengineering especially if you don’t scope it correctly but if it works on an initial script, it will mostly stay within it. It’s also able to simplify GPT code.

For the life of me I have never been able to learn javascript, so when I need to code something for ProleWiki I just throw the problem at them. You can look into https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js our script file for what they came up with - the color scheme picker, the typeface picker, and the testimonials code. Color picker is a bit overengineered because we have a theme that should only be available for one month out of the year and it was simpler to hardcode it in.

I still have to think about the problem, if I don’t scope it well enough they will come up with whatever they feel like. For the color schemes when I had the first custom theme working I told them to refactor the code so that we could add new themes in an array, and they came up with everything. So now I can add unlimited themes by just adding a line in the array.

Potential simplifications that they don’t think about (and hence why it’s good to know how the generated code works) is that there’s no need for className and LabelId in the array, it could generate that from the value. But eh, it works.

edit - using it as a “copilot” is also a good use, though I find that sometimes it just utterly fails. It’s still an RNG machine at heart. But if you get it to work, it can really help unlock your other skills and not get stuck on one part of the process.

I mean, AI as a word has been used in tons of different ways. We still say “NPC AI” in video games and that’s just a whole bunch of if statements, no LLM involved. And on the other end of the spectrum we still talk about AI in movies like I, Robot, with fully sentient machines. My line when I say “AI” with no qualifier is neural networks, the parameters that we hear so much about.

And I don’t think GenAI is “the” grift like the tweet implies, because the AI they describe (machine learning, ML) is the exact same - neural networks with trained models. They talk about the Kinect using ML - you can do machine learning without the neural network - but was the Kinect not “wasteful”, “unethical”, and “useless”, to use their words? It was an expensive system that worked okay (on some tech demos) but barely had 3 games. The EyeToy for the PS2 was more fun.

A lot of the conversation around Generative AI surrounds image generation and I feel that’s harmfully reductive. It centers a lot around artists and the purity of their art (as if they’re the only people impacted by AI) when there’s so much more to talk about; GenAI can do code - there was a whole discussion around it here the other day, and maybe it’s not super great code, but it can do code nonetheless and for people who don’t code and need something, it gets the job done.

Yes, there is also a whole lot of stuff you can do with AI without LLMs. In fact, I’m not sure how LLMs specifically became so ubiquitous because you can do neural network AI stuff without ever needing an LLM. I remember back when AI became big (2022 or so), China announced they’d used an AI to map the wiring on a new ship model. What took an engineer one year to do was done by the AI in 24 hours.

GenAI including LLMs have hard limitations that I think are, conversely, overlooked. LLM AI will not do everything, but it can get you part of the way there. The grift is moreso tech companies trying to pretend their toy is a panacea. When asked about AI making stuff up in an interview, OpenAI’s CTO “well you know, it’s very human in that regard [emphasis mine], because when we don’t know something, what do we do? We make stuff up”. They admit it themselves that they have a bullshit generator. But when it works, it works - you can use GPT 4o or o4 or whatever the new model is called as a tutor, for example, for photoshop, guitar, or whatever other hobby you have. It works great! You can ask it any question you have like a tutor, instead of being limited to what the page cares to tell you about! And yes I could ask someone, but: a- people are not necessarily available the moment I have a question and b- google is crap now and if you ask on most forums they will tell you to google it. So chatGPT it is. We just have to take into account that it might be making stuff up to the point that you need to double-check, and that OpenAI clearly has no plans to fix that (not that they even could).

For coding my choice nowadays is start with chatGPT then pass it over to deepseek once I have the prototype, it works great.

I just recently learned that Methyl anthranilate, the artificial grape flavoring, also repels birds and is used heavily by the agro industry nowadays. I imagine because of all the other products they also use they don’t need the birds around anymore.

You can also use old cd-roms tied to a long-ish string btw, the sparkling makes birds stay away.

he locked up a lot of people during the cultural revolution sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons

He was not the one who signed arrest orders or ran trials though, a lot of different people were involved in that. You can’t blame Mao as an individual for stuff that other people did. You can’t run an entire state with just one person.

the backyard steel and culling of the sparrows

Nobody in the 60s knew about the importance of sparrows in agriculture. Not even in the West. I think it’s easy to say “oh well duh of course don’t kill the sparrows” but who here among us is an actual farmer? Who here knew that sparrows ate more bugs than grain before it was told to them? I can barely grow a plant, I have no room to judge others when it comes to growing food.

I just didn’t find it to be very relevant to me

I’m an adult in Europe and I find Mao’s writing to be both relevant and applicable. But there is Mao the general and Mao the chairman. By the end of his life he was definitely saying some stuff that I don’t think even he believed in. But theory is an all encompassing body, and that is true in all fields. One couldn’t read one physics paper about gravity and then say “now I know how to launch a rocket to the moon”. I opened up my copy of the red book randomly and here’s one:

“Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through, so as to form correct ideas and leadership – such is the basic method of leadership”

It makes perfect sense to me, but that’s also because I have the associated baggage to understand what he means there and how that fits in not only to more of Mao’s writings but also in regards to other figures, the ‘best practices’ if you will of organizing.

I also found it really interesting that deepseek would refuse to answer any questions on Mao

The deepseek devs want it to be mainly used for math, coding, and other STEM applications for lack of a better word. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact personally I think people should stop using LLMs as oracles so much and focus them on tasks instead. Deepseek produces great results (and all for free with no rate limits) if you give it some code to start with, because it needs proper framing of the project to avoid trying to overdo it. I usually start with chatGPT, have it do the first working version of the code, and then switch it to deepseek to finish it, and it works almost perfect on the first try.

Regarding good examples of post-apo, I think battlestar galactica counts. Cylons attack and kill everyone in nuclear winter, only a handful of civilian ships and a military one, a relic that was turned into a museum, make it out. There’s like 3000 remaining people in total. For most of it (season 1 at least), the conflicts come from trying to make something out of this situation and racing against the clock. The military ship takes command but some people resent that because the military gave themselves that authority, but they also make things run (although because the main characters are on that military ship it necessarily endears them to us). A prison ship was part of the convoy and now you have the question, they’re criminals, but they’re also the only survivors of humanity. A lot of “picking between bad and worse” decisions have to be made. For most of it the cylons aren’t even that prevalent. In fact in cannon they’re more of a boogeyman and most people don’t initially believe it. Apparently because of the writers’ strike that happened near the end of the show the fourth season is weaker lol.

The apocalypse genre has a lot of fascists and zionists writing in it. World War Z, both the book and the movie, made “Tel Aviv” (or was it Jerusalem) one of the last surviving locations on earth with a big wall around it that keeps the zombies out. It’s not really subtle lol. So accordingly they portray their fascist or zionists tendencies

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Juche

The dialectial movement of history doesn’t happen by random chance. To make dialectics complete, it needs a trigger . This is where, juche says, Man intervenes consciously. It centers people and consciously applies marxism from the masses to the masses.

There are 6 maoist parties in nepal, and these are just the ‘relevant’ ones (in quotes because I can’t say how relevant they actually are, just that these are the ones you’ll hear about). the CPN (self-proclaimed maoist), government leader until 2024, was defeated in elections and is now part of the opposition. The CPN was ruling alongside socdem parties in a coalition. Not to be confused with the CPN-UML, Unified Marxist-Leninist, which despite using the hammer and sickle are also closer to socdems

The extent of the revolution in Nepal was to drive out the monarchy, which is good, but even liberals have done that (famously). It’s not a sufficient feat to call them communists over this. They haven’t removed monarchists either, there is a monarchist party (Rastriya Prajatantra) still in congress.

Gonzalo was marxist-leninist-maoist-principally-maoist. But it’s mostly splitting hairs by now, if you say maoism it means maoism.

The over-reliance on Soviet aid, which is how internationalism became so big in socialist circles, ultimately paved the way to destroy the communist movement in the West and the USSR. The US waged a war of economic attrition, pushing the USSR to participate in “proxy” conflicts (I don’t like that word) that they orchestrated, but the USSR could not sustain as easily. See Afghanistan for example.

On top of which, the union was bankrolling most european parties. they were probably also helping other parties, but i mostly know about their participation in europe. after the dissolution, these parties found themselves in an ideological crisis and are now all reformist. Most of them switched to eurocommunism and completely abandoned any actual theory.

Ultimately the end of the USSR caused worldwide economic crises, the Arduous March in DPRK, the special period in cuba, the looting and selling of the GDR, etc. It was of course difficult for these countries to build their own economic base under the sanctions, but the USSR seemed to have operated under the impression they would continue to exist forever (no doubt Kruschev actually believed his own ego), and so not a lot was done either to build economic autonomy.

China has learned from the USSR’s mistakes, and is not keen to repeat them. It is also not their responsibility to fight the revolution for us. Under Mao – which also saw the deal with Pol Pot that later led to the invasion of Vietnam – the PRC sent millions of $ to Albania, which were ultimately all lost and given out at a time China could barely bear to.

They learned from this, and now have stopped signing these deals. They have taken the point of view that they can’t decide what’s best for a country, and this is correct. It’s easy to say “Maoists want China to do this, communists want China to do that,” but who are worth supporting? Pol Pot called himself a communist. The USSR recognized the Khmer Rouge for what they were, but they were not free of mistakes either. They supported the establishment of “Israel” initially. So who’s to say what is correct to meddle in, and what is not? Should socialist states send money to the ACP because they call themselves communists? That’s the kind of things China has said, we can’t decide. It’s not our place to decide.

Yes, this was the first part of that single shipment they made to fight against the ISIS terrorists who captured Marawi city on Mindanao island in 2017. Note that the Reuters report is what the Filipino government said (that they hope there are weapons in it), and gives no timeline on when they would receive this shipment. The shipment referred to here (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2114152/china-arms-philippine-police-counterterrorism-mission), in late 2017, has actual evidence of delivery and calls it a second batch.

The takeover of Marawi was an outright siege of the city and it took the government months to take it back. An estimated 100 civilians died during the takeover, most of them killed by the terrorists.

There are an estimated 4 million guns in circulation in the Philippines, plus around 1 million owned by the police. 3000 M4 rifles is a drop in the ocean - it comes out to less than 0.1% guns added to the country. If you’ve been to the Philippines there are security guards everywhere, even patrolling the streets, and they carry guns openly.

edit: moreover the “maoist” Nepali government is social democrat at best. I don’t think they’re all that relevant or worth considering their point of view, they clearly don’t know what marxism even is.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_CIA's_Shining_Path:_Political_Warfare

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Problems_with_Maoism

and will let their own people be used as cheap disposable labor 48+ hours a week making US toys.

This hasn’t been happening for years, it’s come to a point where factories have trouble finding workers and have to offer more and more incentives, and most people pick it up as a summer job to save some money. Of course, development is unequal and this is true across generations too; there are people in China who have been factory workers all of their adult life (and maybe even their teenage life), but this is rarely the case with the newer generations.

Retirement age for them is something like 55 for women and 58 for men.

In general it’s safe to say China plays the long game. It’s not unique to the CPC; even imperial dynasties planned ahead like that. Deng, Xi etc plan ahead for centuries after their death. We can see that with Hong Kong for example, the lease was 100 years. After 100 years (and the fall of the original government that signed the lease) , China came knocking and said time’s up, give it back now. They understand that there are short(ish) terms sacrifices to make for long term prosperity.

They are wrong about the second thing - China does not sell weapons to the Philippines, but equipment. There was one (a single one) instance where they sent a handful of rifles after an isis affiliated group took over a major town on Mindanao island. Considering their relations with India I also doubt they provide weapons, but I’m too lazy to look it up right now.

I have to wonder how those benchmark tests work because my experience with deepseek is also generally subpar :/

I’ve had uses with code, but it needs to know the language in the first place. It’s done some “simple” JavaScript for me (still too high level for me so at least it allowed us to move forward). For server configs while it knows where to find the files and what to edit it’s never really solved my server issues either. And if it fails too often in a chat, it will start going in loops suggesting things it’s already told you to try.

When these things work they work great, but they change all the time. I’ve had good uses with chatGPT as a design co-pilot just to help me get the wheel rolling on a project, and it’s how we got the new ProleWiki homepage. But they change the logic every two weeks and what used to work suddenly doesn’t, and then you have to learn a new secret prompt to get it to act just right. Sometimes it’s more work setting up the AI than just doing it myself.

It depends on the AI, perplexity at some point will just stop giving you sources. ChatGPT tends to fuck up when you switch from ‘offline’ to online mode. Sometimes they add sentences that make sense in context but then you check the source and it doesn’t say anything about that.

But limiting their replies to what exists in a given web page shouldnt be too hard

There might be a way but in my experience it just tends to say what you want to hear with high confidence, and I end up looking through the sources myself anyway. Their interpretation of the source can be wrong too, aside from generating text that’s not in it. They might think a piece of data (e.g. a number) is attached to a certain information (say $ spent) but then you open the source and it’s the opposite (the number is $ earned or something like that). But at least they can find mostly relevant sources which is more than you can say about google these days. Although both perplexity and GPT want to shoehorn wikipedia in their answers, and you can try to tell it to not use wikipedia, but it’s a crapshoot and works only half the time.