They do a bunch of DNS stuff but their main product is a proxy that tests traffic and blocks malicious connections e.g. Ddos attempts, bot traffic etc. It also distributes your website over DNS to reduce loading latency when people want to connect to it from far away. It works great which is why people use it (it’s tough to block specifically malicious traffic) but it’s also a proprietary US company that needs to basically take over your front facing website to do what it does, and since they analyse traffic they also get to keep a copy of it. There’s been issues in the past with them collaborating with law enforcement no matter what their clients might want. And of course if their service goes down like it did today none of their websites are available anymore

a joke?

Zuckerberg is deeply cynical, he’s only doing any of this because meta is in a bad shape (facebook is hemorrhaging users, the metaverse was a huge black hole for money, and they decided to go open source with their Llama model which is biting them in the ass now bc capitalism). And now of course with trump being president again he’s trying to court him like all the other capitalists - if you remember that picture from I think december last year, with musk, zuckerberg, bezos and some fash guy standing together at a Trump function. But it’s nothing new, I called it the Boris Johnson method because Johnson has this weird-ass haircut that he thinks it makes him look working class, which is a lot to unpack. Same with tommy robinson whose real name is the much more aristocratic Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Tommy Robinson is a nickname, it’s not his legal name or anything.

For a “New Socialist” publication it doesn’t do a lot of socialist critique and a lot of aesthetics critique 😵‍💫

I found a lot of it to be the academic in his ivory tower bemoaning the fact that the unwashed masses now had access to his niche hobby lol. Lots of name dropping expecting the reader to be familiar with the person and their theory, it’s so duplicitous.

The whole part about Zuckerberg not “needing” a bodybuilder physique, and that he’s “allowed” to “ignore what looks good or not”. It’s completely backwards. First of all whether you need or don’t need something is irrelevant, and Zuckerberg does not have a bodybuilder physique by any stretch lol. In fact he looks natural.

This is a bodybuilder physique:

And this is Zuckerberg in 2025 (he doesn’t seem to have changed a lot in physique since 2023):

He wears oversized shirts and you can tell he has a big chest under it, but nothing too outrageous I would say. If you look at his forearms they’re not that well-defined, which means he also has some bodyfat % which would also make his chest look bigger.

Bodybuilders get this way by taking a myriad of products to cut down on body fat %, build muscles beyond their natural limit, dehydrate themselves, and show vascularity (judges like seeing some veins under the skin). Zuckerberg is doing none of that lol, and there are very real health benefits to being physically active and building muscle mass. Muscle moves bone moves things - there’s a pervasive myth about huge guys that can’t even scratch their back anymore because their muscles are too big to reach, but it’s actually the other way around. Building muscle mass naturally makes you better at physical things including dexterity and agility.

Anyway that was my long tangent. As for Zuckerberg not having to care about what looks good, this is just a 41 year old man trying to pass off as gen z down to the haircut. It’s the Boris Johnson method. This is why I say this article has it all backwards, it starts from the conclusion and then tries to find whatever will support its thesis even if it has to make nonsensical points for it. It feels like someone who’s sad the common people now get to enjoy his niche interests. it’s just gatekeeping.

Unfortunately the headline is catchy and people will just link it probably without even reading to the end and it continues to do damage. I would probably be nicer to that author if the website wasn’t called the new “Socialist” because I can’t even tell what current of socialism that’s even supposed to be. The one that says you know better than the masses and if they’re wrong they should just shut up and let the art elites decide for them? And then they wonder why people are so antagonistic towards what they perceive to be ‘proper art’ and are turning towards making their own with AI?

I will say, it’s very funny that despite the author knowing about all these obscure capitalists (let’s call Vivienne Westwood what she is lol), they can’t seem to actually offer a critique of ‘bad’ fashion beyond “it just looks stupid and ugly and it’s unnecessary 😡”

This is why I wanted to cooperatively write an ultimate guide on AI that would explain how the tech works and give concrete examples, but it’s a huge task even if you spread the workload.

Did you read that “AI is the aesthetic of fascism” article? https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/. This was so bad. I thought of it because you talked about ceding the field to liberal and right-wingers.

Honestly outside of some spaces I think people are either pretty positive about AI or just go along with the flow. I remember shortly after chatGPT came out I was in a group with a bunch of people from all walks of life - we pretty much had nothing in common, put together by pure randomness. Everyone was ecstatic about AI and didn’t feel like it would replace their job at all. I was actually at the time the only one who didn’t really like it lol. I tried using it back then but couldn’t get results esp. on the writing, which was frustrating and this is why I want to write the proletarian guide, so people don’t have to do trial and error.

I think I had a bigger part on the environment in the drafts but either I never wrote it in or I removed it. I always urge caution in how we approach the climate… with AI it’s difficult to even tell just what kind of impact it’s actually having. There was a whole thing with an article about a texas county or something that urged people to take fewer showers bc it needed the water for a data center, and the source was a satirical newspaper that was putting out an anti-AI story. I probably didn’t include it in the essay because I didn’t know what to add to that.

and when you look at the gallons of water used (first of all they’re not taken out of the environment, they go back into it, but yes they can deplete) it turns out to be almost nothing compared to the entire area consumption. I’m pretty sure I meant to write more about the environment in the essay because I also remember writing about the colorado river and how the US dammed it to provide free water for water-intensive crop culture in arid Southern California, to the point that when the river reaches Mexico there’s almost no water left.

On top of which the meat industry is the biggest waster of water followed by the US army for biggest polluter, that was kind of my point with the linkedin moralizing… CEOs congratulating each other for cutting back on Youtube a little (or, I kid you not, emptying their inboxes once in a while). Like the average person in the US consumes as much water in a year as it takes to produce between 14 and 22 burgers period. But again, capitalism.

I kinda circle back to the climate in the second section when I address westerners… we want instantaneous solutions, without going through the development phase of these solutions. And if we don’t have them we don’t want anybody else to have them either.

The one thing I’d support against AI is banning it in the West so that China can overtake us lol. But even then, there’s a lot of research going on by computer scientists in the west using neural networks for very cool things.

Even if I might seem super pro-AI sometimes I really want there to be good arguments against it and especially of course how it’s being handled in capitalism, because this is how we solve contradictions and uncover dialectics at work.

I just feel that a lot of it has been settled, even as far back as artisanal intelligence which came out only 4 months after chatGPT and yet is still completely, totally relevant - a huge blemish imo, it should be outdated in some areas already, but the arguments against AI are still the same almost 3 years later.

I don’t even think everybody should necessarily learn AI in depth, it’s fine to be uninterested in it, but a lot of people seem to make it their life mission to tell the world that they should feel bad for using it when they could just not say anything, or at least like you said be a little bit curious about it. I’m all for explaining my methods with AI and sharing best practices because I think it’s important. Not speaking about people here specifically, I see a lot of these takes on Twitter usually. Actually I’ve just blocked the words AI now on that platform, I’m tired of seeing all the “discourse” lol. The twitter format of having only 280 characters when we are some of the biggest yappers is not conducive to expanding on ideas and promotes making gotchas and easy wins instead. Lol my essay is super long but it’s ultimately all of my points about AI condensed into one volume.

Obviously you can’t see it from my end but I took some 10 minutes to review this discussion, your account, and the whole context basically. It’s not really important for my comment to mention this, however I do think it’s important that we be transparent about how we moderate, once in a while.

Anyway, Lemmygrad isn’t a chan site. You always have the choice not to comment and leave a conversation.

We actually just finished uploading all of ProleWiki FR, from prolewiki EN. Total time was 7 days. There’s a total of 3750 pages uploaded already, and we’ll bring the Library books soon too (they’re still translating).

Total LLM involvement was writing the scripts and handling the translation. And it’s a pretty nice script too, it cuts each page into chunks, sends them to the LLM with a system prompt, saves progress after each chunk, automatically retries if the API fails… if I’d learned python specifically for this I would still be trying to write that code.

“But could you have translated them yourself”, some might say, and yes but we’re 3 sleep-deprived tankies and this is a machine that runs 24/7 haha

I think openAI uses the any publicity is good publicity adage and while the data contamination makes sense on the surface, it’s perfectly able to produce non yellow images, and in fact even smaller local image gen models are also able to produce specific colors. When you send gpt a prompt for image creation it changes it into something the tool understands and I think they inject “yellow tint” or some similar keyword into the prompt. It would be very easy to auto add a negative prompt to remove it if they wanted, too.

That’s exactly the situation I was thinking about lol, that brainwashing debacle from 2023. I even still have the receipts because a friend talked about it on discord.

Oh I would be much nicer to her if she wasn’t falling off the edge right now and if there was a chance to have a discussion with her like if she was a commenter on lemmygrad. Her coverage of Palestine is what made me unfollow shortly before I started getting her takes on AI. I don’t remember entirely what she was saying but she was getting called out by Palestinians and I agreed with them.

Edit: it was absolutely tone deaf posts minimising the genocide in Sudan and trying to refocus people on Palestine. compounded by the fact she claimed we are allowed to oppose the genocide in Sudan but not Gaza, the consequences of having no material analysis.

I agree with you, and she’s going all out on this. There are 9 instances of dehumanizing people in this other tweet of hers:

She knows how to communicate things simply but she’s also not a marxist by any means, she’s an idealist and ironically is pandering to her audience by saying the things they want to hear about AI. It’s ironic then that her entire brand is making arguments that other people can reuse so they don’t have to make their own. She’s the chatbot to her audience. People pay her money because she says the things they like to hear.

Her entire criticism falls flat when it’s her that makes it, and it’s not even unique to Caitlin. Her entire online persona is fighting against random people to defend her opinions by dismissing all criticism and never learning from others. I know MLs who have tried to confront her with an actual materialist analysis and she just devolves into insulting them so she doesn’t have to concede anything. Seems like she’s the one avoiding “uncomfortable feelings” on a typical day. I mean, I don’t really care, she can do what she wants. It’s just hypocritical and reeks of projection. Her whole business model is “waking up the sheeple” which synergizes pretty well with a patreon page.

Does Caitlin know how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together? Could she build herself a house by making her own dried mud walls? Or do we agree that there are some skills that are obsolete in society as we find new ways to do stuff. Like I could make her arguments against her too, seeing that she’s an online writer. Is she too good for a typewriter? She needs a tool that tells her she’s great at grammar by correcting it for her automatically? It’s just too easy to make the opposite argument, she needs to find better material if she wants to do something greater than pander to her audience and actually make them engage and struggle with the material.

Sorry, it’s just that her elitist speech annoys me greatly. Nobody is superior to anybody else for using or not using something. You’re right that people process things differently, and there’s been a lot of judgment there too even before AI, if you don’t grieve ‘correctly’ or don’t display the ‘correct’ emotion in a situation. A more correct analysis is capitalism commodifies everything and in this process we become isolated from each other because even human relations become property to be bought and sold, but also we just socialize differently nowadays. Lemmygrad is a social space, objectively speaking. It just happens online. And we can certainly ask if that’s bad and if people shouldn’t have IRL friends too but there are also positives that come out of such spaces. Even the DPRK has an internet cafe with online video games now (networked inside the cafe).

And I hope you don’t feel bad and don’t let yourself feel bad for using a chatbot to process your grief. Ultimately you have to do what you have to do. If it works for you nobody can tell you otherwise.

Unironically once you start getting into using AI (by which I mean neural networks in general) you will have to learn a ton of things. And this is pretty frontier stuff, because it’s so different from how software has worked so far. I’m not saying I’m somehow smart for learning AI, I really amn’t lol, just that there’s a lot of stuff to cover outside of the proprietary “neat package in a box” stuff.

She’s talking specifically about chatGPT but she’s not curious enough to go learn what she’s actually mad about (proving her own point about people who “don’t want to go through all the mental and emotional labor of learning a new skill”: just pretend that if you bury your head in the sand it doesn’t exist anymore) so she ends up just talking about chatGPT and openAI. It’s just so easy to infirm all of her points that it’s not even interesting to do so, it shows just how little analysis she actually has to offer on this, but she has a large audience and really should do better.

And instead of pointing the finger at people like Altman who want 500 billion dollars for their toy, she points it at other people. Like in both tweets, the sheer contempt she shows other human beings for daring to use AI is pretty blatant. She’s not saying “capitalist lords want to replace your mom with a chatbot”, she’s saying you’re dumb and a lesser person if you use that service, point blank. She tacked on “oh yeah and capitalism” at the end as an afterthought.

Also because the yellow tint bothers me on GPT images:

I believe it’s intentional, because GPT is perfectly able to produce non-yellow tinted images, and it only happens with their model. It gives them an instant look.

To undo it I use photoshop, create a new layer, fill it with a yellow tone lifted from the image (use color picker tool), paint the entire layer 2 with this color, then set the layer to ‘Divide’ (or ‘division’, I’m not sure in english). Then use the layer opacity bar to remove more or less of the yellow. I find that when you remove 100% of it, it makes for a very harsh, bright picture and this is probably another reason they do the yellow tint, it looks warmer.

Definitely need to make my key. Mistral doesn’t ask for CC either (just phone #) and their api is completely free with absolutely wild rate limits - 500k tokens per minute and 2 billion token output per month. All their models are available incl. mistral-large, but you sometimes get hit with rate limits on the model. If that happens just provision in your script that it auto falls back to another model if it gets error 429.

Only thing I regret is they don’t allow multithreading on the free plan lol.

That’s interesting yeah 4.5 flash is completely free

Might have to try them out too

It’s also that the most ‘capable’ person for a job has more often than not had privileges that made them capable. College costs money and not just in tuition but also in travel fees (if you have to go to another campus for a course), textbooks, and the “cost of opportunity” of not integrating the workforce yet too, which means your parents need to be able to support you for the years you’ll be in college.

It’s no surprise that social mobility doesn’t exist in capitalism and children of wealthy/ier parents will themselves find high-paying jobs. This comic is old but illustrates it, https://digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/privileged-kids-on-a-plate-pencilsword-toby-morris/, this is basic sociology that even liberals recognize. One thing it doesn’t touch on that artisanal intelligence did is that the promise of meritocracy makes one feel like they have to grind to make it out of the race while not realizing that they were never going to cross the finish line. And ‘the grind’ often means working for unlivable wages and accepting undignified work.

Flipping a coin to decide on a hiring decision is also “fair” and “meritocratic”. It was the essay artisanal intelligence iirc which argued (a bit) against meritocracy and tbh I can see it. It’s kind of a capitalist delusion, it means only the most deserving, well, deserve anything.

There’s lots of emerging usecases like this, beyond the hype of the big tech players who try to get adoption because it looks good to the investors. Ultimately it’s another tool in our arsenal to solve problems with, 5000 pages is simply impossible by hand and you would not even necessarily get an “error-free” output. I mean I’ve played video games that had more typos than the AI introduces lol, and they were written far before AI.

Ultimately we took the stance that it was better for them to have ProleWiki content than try to obfuscate it from scraping. OpenAI is pretty egregious in their scraping but at the same time we do get some visits from chatGPT when people turn on search, and I think that has to count for something. Besides it’s not like we’re a private login-only website, anyone can read our pages at any time.