It’s both, pertaining to the dialectics and the materialism. But it’s not simply mushing the two together to make them into a neat ball. Dialectical materialism compared to its hegelian idealist form has different laws or rules that emerge.

Explaining black holes with dialectics is possible, it’s just we may not be able to explain them yet. I can see a black hole as the negation to… gravity, probably? Light? I’m not sure even the most advanced research on black holes could tell us for sure how exactly it fits within diamat. And things don’t exist in isolation but in relations, which the sum of it forms what we call nature. We are as much part of the natural world as black holes, the planets, the mountains and the animals, and subject to its universal laws all the same.

It can be helpful because darkness is not the negation to light, as negation/contradiction is not the direct opposite/antonym. The contradiction of light/photons is not solved by “the absence of photons” (darkness), it’s solved by its negation - so what negates light/photons? So like I can see people trying to apply dialectics to stuff around them to get a feel for it.

Conversely at times diamat can help us analyze where the material conditions stand, and at times can help us determine a trajectory. Actually it can do both but philosophy is tough lol, it’s tough to go from “I read about this example of dialectics in motion” to “this is my own analysis of the current situation” and this is why there’s so much mistaken dialectics. I probably make a lot of mistakes too.

When Mao analyzed that Japan was an empire on the decline (On Protracted Warfare if I’m not mistaken) he based his analysis on the material conditions in Japan, these conditions themselves subject to dialectics, and from that was able to analyze their trajectory and how he foresaw the war progressing.

Contradictions are the motor of change as they explain not only that change is possible but the mechanism to how it happens. It explains why we don’t live in a metaphysical (static) universe. But as Marx said The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and this is true of dialectics as well. We inherit the current material conditions (of nature - which includes but is not limited to society) we live under, but also have the power to resolve these contradictions. When applied to social life we call it historical materialism (it’s not just “applying diamat to history”, it refers specifically to social life as per Stalin)

A good diamatical analysis is powerful, but it’s tough to make a good one. It usually comes about after a process of collective struggle, unearthing the dialectic over trial and error and struggling with the material.

Lol and the RCI (ex-IMT) changed their names because it was too toxic. Literally just changed the trench coat.

A lot of parties and orgs exist solely to collect dues from members and justify their own existence. Trots are the most brazen about it but far from the only ones. If you look at their recently unveiled socialism AI for example, they sell absolutely ludicrous paid tiers for it, like 20$ a month and you only get ~500 messages. Which is a lot to use in a month, but deepseek for example is completely free to use with no usage limits whatsoever and can also look at the wsws site or whatever other source you want.

The more important part is looking at who talks about their “AI” (it’s a RAG wrapper around chatGPT but I digress) and you see it’s mostly other WSWS members. Not even other trotskyists. And they have a whole spiel about “I asked socialism AI X question, here’s what it had to say”. It’s so blatant; they know they will only ever sell this AI to their own members to extract more money from them.

I think one marker of a red flag is a party that hypes itself up severely, and has excuses for all their dysfunctions. I remember someone telling me the CPC (Canada lol not the based one) doesn’t go too far in their program because they don’t want to be declared illegal or censored. I mean… isn’t that a good thing to be attacked by the enemy? If you’re made illegal then you just go underground and you use that censorship to agitate people. But no yeah it’s apparently better to be no different from socdems and not make too much noise because god forbid we do anything but electoralism and collecting dues. It’s true what she said, those who don’t move don’t notice their chains.

Another marker is “oh but the comrades on the ground are super revolutionary” but then there are no such revolutionary members in the central committee or in leadership positions. In fact it only ever seems to elect reformists and social-democrats. That’s not a red flag against the comrades on the ground, it means that the party has ossified leadership - and chalk another red flag up if the leadership is always the same or very similar. Third red flag: if they have ready-made answers to handwave criticism away and nobody wants to talk about it with you. Like how People’s World doesn’t belong to CPUSA or a CPUSA committee but to a private name. Technically it belongs to Long View Publishing Co., Inc and Long View [Inc meaning Incorporated meaning a private company structure of a certain type btw] belongs entirely to John Bachtell. He owns People’s World and can do whatever he wants with it.

But when you point that out the only response you get (drilled into members’ heads no doubt) is that by law they “can’t” have a party newspaper. Okay then find that law, cite it, assuage our doubts instead of entrenching yourselves further in “I must defend the party at any cost”. What do you owe them that they got you like this lol.

Frankly at this point a party needs to deserve me. I don’t mean to sound arrogant because I think every comrade should think like this. It’s not a given that you just join whatever party calls itself communist, they need to deserve you and offer something that makes you want to stay. If they only ever use you and your labor then that’s not a party that’s an employer.

With that said IRL organizing yields much practical experience and as someone else you can’t fully understand theory without practicing it. But we deserve to be discerning about who we give our time to.

If you don’t get paid to make these comments honestly you’re missing out. Imagine doing nato propaganda for free.

To illustrate some of what you said, I sent deepseek web some of the stats with no specific instructions (taken from a prior conversation with the agentic software where the same LLM came up with these stats for how I could make this script work):

(this was in a fresh conversation - as you can see in the spoiler tag, I didn’t give deepseek any instructions about what it should make)

It returned this:

{
  "steps": 28,
  "scheduler": "Karras",
  "sampler": "DPM++ 2M Karras",
  "width": 1024,
  "height": 1024,
  "prompt": "(ethereal female figure:1.2), face merging with swirling landscape, melancholic expression, deep azure, cerulean, sapphire and slate blue color palette, subtle hints of silver and misty white, abstract fluid forms, organic geometry, painterly textures, soft dramatic lighting, sense of quiet introspection, deep emotion, inspired by symbolic portraitism and abstract expressionism, high detail, artistic masterpiece",
  "negative_prompt": "bright colors, vibrant, cheerful, cartoon, anime, 3d render, photorealistic, sharp edges, hard lines, smile, happy, explicit, ugly, deformed, blurry, logo, text, signature",
  "seed": -1,
  "CFG scale": 7.5
}

It took sort of a roleplay role which is fine for the example; querying the API instead would probably keep it more to the point and actually acting like the artist and not “as if I had to pretend I was an artist”, because on the web interface it has an entire system prompt injected at the beginning that the user can’t see.

I simply copied and pasted its settings into my interface, and this is what came out. I could put some of my thoughts about it but that’s not the point of course. In this case I was only a proxy for the AI to communicate with the image generation engine.

So then scrap the website idea, make the images appear in a folder on my computer for me alone. It’s only a small part of the whole that showcases the idea, it’s not the entire experiment.

Is deepseek an artist, can we say it did not have intention when making the images? I don’t even have to code the script and parameters, deepseek can write that itself. Therefore I am only the tool that does the operations deepseek can’t do (like running the code or starting the web gen interface, although it could do that with agentic)

You can be productive towards packaging potato chips, your job for which you receive a wage, or productive towards writing essays that teach new marxists. They’re two very different things (and no shade on chips packaging it’s just that I knew someone who did this job and hated it).

As marxists we recognize that capitalism does a lot of things well (but we can do them better). and Lenin recognized this too when he said the USSR had to learn from capitalists as soon as possible. In that moment they learned all about HR, productivity, management, etc. All very capitalist concepts and we could call it Labor resources instead of HR, quotas instead of productivity (I guess), and organization instead of managing, but that would just be semantics. We don’t change the nature of things by calling them a different name. Capitalists and liberals are not always wrong just on virtue of being liberals, but they are very tunnel-visioned and mistaken in the cause of things.

What they miss is rest time. You need to take care of yourself too and know your limits, and not only that but enforce them. There are techniques for this. And this goes for organizing too. What they want is to always produce more, but that’s not always so easy. One easy way to do this is to squeeze your workers more, but even then they run into limits, technological or otherwise. They want you to always do more at work but they don’t give you the (physical) tools to actually save time.

To me productivity is doing the best you can with what you have available. You will always have constraints, they’re not a capitalism thing. You don’t necessarily always have all the time in the world, or all the knowledge you need for a task. To do revolution you need thousands of people and you might only have 5 right now. Those are constraints and being productive/efficient in this context means to figure out what you can do with 5 people that would be most effective. When you have 10 people, what is the most effective thing you can do with 10 people? Etc. I’m kinda meeting up with the broad definition you gave here. You might like to read some of my design essays: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Comrade:CriticalResist#Design_essays.

Or the guy that got a unitree humanoid robot shipped to his door and used an LLM (I forget which one) extensively to code it. These come with only an sdk and very little documentation

I think this is the way yeah. For extra protection you can also do physical backups of the project (copy pastes) at various points, because even if the LLM doesn’t know you have gitted your project, it may still run the command. The newer deepseek is much more biased towards doing this, I wrote “commit your findings to a file” and it wanted to git it. There’s always the possibility it can squash all commits or erase them (much like someone can write rm -rf in any terminal!) but this is why we invented prod/dev redundancy and RAID backups lol. You don’t necessarily have to be this paranoid when using agentic AI but it’s an extra security and some peace of mind.

I also checked and crush is completely able to write and run bash commands (incl. rm) on files not in the folder you opened it on. Definitely something to look into, I’ll check if there’s a way to containerize it better and make a post for [email protected]. Yog and I brainstormed the idea of making another linux user just for crush, then putting your main account in that user group along with the crush user, but not the crush user in your main account’s group. That way it only has perms to act on the files belonging to crush/crush, though it can still try to run any bash command it wants. And you would also have access to crush’s files with your main account so it’s more convenient. But I don’t know much yet about how linux users work, I’ll have to look into it and will make a post about it if I find something.

I think crush also has config files you can edit to blacklist or auto deny some commands.

The way these tools are being marketed by tech companies is completely wrong and prone to making disasters like this. It’s a tool; it’s like selling a fruit-only knife then leading customers into thinking it can only cut fruit and nothing else (until inevitably someone cuts themselves on it). I agree google has some responsibility there if this happened (his story seems a bit fishy tbh but that’s not really the point) and this is also why OSes bake some protective measures in such as user permissions. It’s also why everyone has been telling everyone to make backups for years even though nobody does it lol. 10 years ago steam introduced a bug that could wipe linux drives.

I see from his video that anti-gravity obfuscates the chain-of-thought and the outputs - it’s a proprietary model so they don’t want to share that, but it makes troubleshooting impossible. He also had it set on ‘turbo’ mode which bypasses requesting permissions to run commands - there should be heavy discouragement to users doing that,including making them actually edit config files imo, it shouldn’t just be a nice-sounding toggle because then people think “turbo means it goes fast of course I want it to go fast”.

They want to market agents as a do-everything app but it’s still software under the hood. And I don’t trust google to ship any good product anyway, but obviously that’s not how google markets itself. And of course you’re stuck with expensive google models if you use anti-gravity.

People are also right that this should run in a container with no way to escape it, and even crush (the one I use) is not great about this - though it should be possible to containerize it yourself. Coming from a company like google this kind of stuff should come out of the box with the software and set up for you. This is also one of the many reasons I switched away from Windows, the moment they announced integrated agentic I knew you would never be able to fully remove it.

I can believe what happened is possible – if anything it serves as a PSA not to trust software blindly. When I was a kid the most hilarious thing you could do on the internet is tell someone to delete system32 so. From one of OP’s comments it seems the problem was the space in a folder name that windows parsed incorrectly because of the OS’s rmdir command? No way to tell for sure since gemini obfuscates the output, and of course that’s just what OP thinks the problem was.

Someone tried to reproduce with more locked down perms and the output (pic) was just as concerning from anti-gravity. It said its “instructions” prevented it from running the command, when it should say “the agent prevents the command from being run” (and deepseek does say this in crush). I.e. this should be hard-coded but it seems to be passed to the LLM instead.

And as much as it sucks, you live and learn. People have been accidentally wiping their drives for decades at this point, I’ve probably done it too before when I was younger. If anything software was better about preventing this sort of thing in the 2010s, the 2000s were wild lol they gave you access to buttons that could reformat everything without even a confirmation button or an explanation of what the button was for.

The calculator was also a nuclear device when compared to what it replaced/came before it. so was the car, and yet today nobody would tell you you can’t afford not to own a horse (except Homer Simpson maybe).

Things change and if we want to criticize that from a marxist perspective we have to offer something better than “I don’t like change”. It’s not all greener pastures with neural networks, but we need to be clear about what it is we criticize, and for that we need to understand things deeply.

But it is clear that people are using AI or attempting to use AI as a means to outsource mental tasks, and decision making that is endemic to the human experience / cognitive growth.

But what is the ‘human experience’? I push for people to define their words when it comes to talking about neural networks because more often than not it shows more similarities with what already exists than a break. It’s not that different from what we already live with daily. The more you use, understand and work with LLMs the more you realize that it’s really not so dissimilar from what we already know. You’re worried about a Wargames situation, i.e. the artificial intelligence making the logical conclusion that to win a nuclear standoff you should dump your warheads on the enemy first. But this has always been the plan; as soon as this technology was going to be available people were going to rush for exactly that - it just happened to happen in 2022 instead of 2065 or 2093, and so we have to reckon with the reality of it now, not later. Complaining that this is now possible won’t change that it exists and that it’s being used, so instead I made the choice to find my own uses out of LLMs that could be useful to communists (and incidentally I think we could probably organize for socialism much more efficiently around “the army wants to offload targets to an AI” than “AI bad destroy it all”). I’m not saying this to be dismissive, but rather that again we need to offer a studied, marxist perspective on the matter.

But speaking on the human experience/cognition, I mean, there are plenty of neurodivergent people who may not fare well with typical peer-to-peer communication (speech or written) and they appreciate having LLMs to organize and make sense of their thoughts and feelings. Disabled people have found answers from LLMs. Human cognition is not universal, and we see that LLMs already offer assistance there. When walkmans first came out, there was a huge panic around what they actually meant for society, that the youth saw them as a form of escapism, that it was an identity thing – it went so far that even novels were written about kids turning into mind-zombies after getting a walkman and some people event went on TV to say that using a walkman was a gateway to committing crime. We’re talking about the iPod that reads CDs.

I’m not even convinced by these studies that supposedly find all sorts of ills with usage of LLMs because I bet in just a few years plenty of errors will be found with them. They are lab studies, not real world, and I remember studies saying the same thing about search engines when they came out. I talked in another comment about how search engines are a memory bank for us; instead of remembering everything, we offload it to the search engine – I don’t necessarily remember what each property in CSS’s box-shadow does, but I know how to look that up on a search engine and find the information. Likewise we stopped remembering phone numbers the moment we got mobile phones (although we should probably remember one or two emergency numbers).

Significantly how? Both LLMs and AlphaFold are transformer-based neural networks. The LLM chatbot is trained on sequences of words, and AlphaFold is trained on sequences of amino acids. Certainly training AlphaFold to make real amino acid chains was ‘easier’ because we know how they’re formed so it only has so many sequences it can produce and there’s a checklist to determine whether the sequence it produced is real or impossible, so it’s also easier to have it produce a reliable output and makes it very good at a specific task, but they both work the same under the hood. Word prediction LLMs can’t have that deterministic output because we use words for so many different things. It would be like asking a person to only ever communicate in poetry and no other way.

one clear scientific purpose

Computer scientists in academia are using Deepseek to solve new problems in new ways too. They especially like Deepseek and Chinese models because they’re open-weights and don’t obfuscate any of their inner workings (such as the reasoning chain), so they can fine-tune them to their specific needs.

I have to assume the purpose of amino acids wasn’t so clear when we first found out about them and before we set out to investigate and, through extensive research and testing found out how they work and what they actually do. It’s on us to discover the laws of the universe, they don’t come to us beamed from heaven straight into our brain.

I wrote a lengthy essay on some of this if you want to read it https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI

For outsourcing specifically, from the moment one uses a lighter to light a fire (instead of rubbing two sticks together) or opens a calculator app they are offloading tasks that require mental exercise, experience and wisdom. The abacus can also output a wrong number if you mess a step along the way - and yet people still used it extensively for centuries.

We outsource labor every day too. Not as in offshoring, but as in nobody lives in a vacuum outside of society. The food we eat is grown by others, packaged, shipped, and stocked on a shelf by a different person each step. The device we are writing and reading lemmygrad on was made by someone else. The LLM is not outsourcing human relationships because it’s not a human relationship; even people who use it as a stand-in for a human relationship know it’s not human. But, it solves problems.

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/on-war.pdf this one seems a bit more modern and easy to read. It starts at Book One.

Assuredly yes. Marx was already aware of Clausewitz and read him, but didn’t talk about him much in his writings (at least not that I remember or can find). He did mention him to Engels in a few letters, so we can assume Clausewitz was at one point part of his reading.

Lenin picked up on this and references Clausewitz quite openly in some books, e.g. State and Rev and Imperialism if I’m not mistaken (it’s been a while).

As for Mao it seems he learned of Clausewitz in the latter half of the 1930s in Yan’nan, so after the Long March, when he picked up a chinese edition of On War. This source is pretty fucking interesting because it’s written very factually, uses pinyin romanization in 1981, doesn’t demonize the communists and it comes from the US Army of all things - that’s doubly interesting. They study all generals incl. Mao, Che and Lenin, they don’t care about where they come from or who they were as long as there’s something to learn from them.

Marxists appreciate that Clausewitz was the first general to apply dialectics to the battlefield and war. I actually have a full copy printed in the 1960s of On War on my bedside table haha. It’s a difficult text, especially the first book, but I recommend everyone give it a read or two. You don’t actually have to read the entire encyclopedia because the latter chapters talk about tactics in certain situations and they seem kinda moot in the age of quadcopters on the battlefield…

It’s not just communists mind you, imperialist armies around the world read him too - I know for a fact the officer’s school in France makes first year students read the book 1.

The art was made by Mark Ferrari back in the 90s when he was at the height of his career, so if you look for games he was involved in (Lucas Arts mainly iirc) you should be able to find a few from back in the day.

The jungle waterfall? That one is a classic haha, it’s on almost every wallpaper website.

I like how the sun is moving from the background to the foreground on that one

I mean these artworks are from Mark Ferrari, who is a pioneer in 2d computer graphics and worked on games such as Secret of Monkey Island. He invented dithering to get more than the 16 colors computers allowed at the time; he’s basically THE feel of 90s games x)

Compare to a game from 1992, Executioners, for DOS (so 2 years after Monkey Island):

Okay, I was able to extract some of them to use as a dynamic wallpaper.

Gnome (Linux) allows you to set an .xml wallpaper composed of as many images as you want, and a timer until it transitions to the next one.

On the demo website, you can simply right click -> Save as to save the image you see on the screen. So I just grabbed a scene I liked (haunted ruins though to me it’s more like a lost temple), and saved some stills that I liked, e.g. the one at midnight, 6AM, etc. All in all I have 10 different ones.

To make the images fit your screen, since they are pixel art you want to upscale them without interpolation - that’s the trick to this. Gimp or Photoshop can do it. I blew them up to the width of my monitor and then cropped them to a 16:9 aspect ratio, and they look just as crisp as the low-res 4:3 version.

Then I simply went on deepseek to generate the xml – it knew how to structure it from earlier in the conversation. I gave it the path to the images and when I wanted them to show (so 06-00.png shows at 6AM etc).

It generated two xmls, one is the one that says “load this image at this time”, and another that says “we want to load this xml with these parameters”. Go to your wallpaper picker on gnome and select the second xml. I had to move back and forth between the folders for the file to show up, but it works great! Just had a transition happen while I was writing this comment.

If you ever want to add more images you can add them to ~/.local/share/wallpapers (seems pretty important to have them in there, wouldn’t work without it), give them a unique name, and then ask deepseek to regenerate the xml.

It looks pretty dope ngl, and I’m probably going to be slowly be adding more images to it to have smoother transitions lol.

We’ll make mixtapes like in the old days except instead of recording the radio we’ll be recording our speakers