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

Suno is already dead anyway… they made a deal with Warner and this happened:

Which I predicted in my essay about AI and IP but I would just be tooting my own horn (pardon the pun). More notably they spend a lot of time talking about the download options so you get distracted from the actual news, that they are retiring the “current” models (4.5 and 5, their current top of the line) to make way for licensed models, which means exactly what you think it means - I’ll make a post about it actually because this is kinda big.

ETFs are much more comfortable for most people because it’s a “set and forget” type of thing. A company can even trade them for you and manage your portfolio, but of course it remains the market and some risk is associated with it. The typical plan is to save 3-6 months of wages, budget your monthly expenses, and then set 10-20% of your remaining wage into the market. It’s something you do for the long haul, like when you’ll need it in 10-15 years for a big purchase (as if we can still afford those lol).

This is a huge question and at the same time a very small one. I’m not saying this pejoratively, it’s a good question to ask and I think pretty much everyone when they first start reading about marxism think about this question.

It’s wide because there’s so much you could say, and it’s “small” because conversely it feels like there is very little to say about it. It has mostly been settled and yet even years after first asking myself this question I keep finding new answers. This is why there isn’t really a final, settled answer to it.

Anyway. A big component imo is how you make that money. In your post you seized on this; (I hope I don’t sound like I’m talking down to you, rather since you seem new to marxism I want to provide the basis) you said you don’t want to start a business an exploit people, so you already have an inkling of what it means to be a business owner: you will have to exploit people. But there’s more to it than that, it changes your material conditions. If you want to succeed in the market, you will have to exploit employees. There’s a lot of fairytales being told from liberals about opening a business but the reality of it is in late-stage capitalism such as this there’s no two ways about it. If you want to survive, you must exploit them. You must be ruthless on the market. Business is business, it’s not friendship. This simple act of opening a business changes your material conditions and thus changes your entire psychology. If you were not a greedy person before, you will be. It’s either that or the business goes bankrupt.

It’s the same issue I have with workers coops (there’s a few around the world). They may very well give democracy in the workplace but then they find out quickly the imperatives of the market come first, and they mold their own decisions to the requirements of capitalism. The team may really want to work on a project they’re passionate about next, but what they need is a sellable product, so they’ll “democratically decide” to make the marketable product instead.

But business owners are bourgeois. What about other forms of making money? I don’t hide that I generally don’t have a very high opinion of streamers with a patreon, marxists-for-sale I call them lol (actually that’s wrong I have never used that term before today but I’m coining it now). It’s not that I dislike any streamer/youtuber instantly, it’s that you can be as selfless as one can be, you can be the most generous person in the world, you can be basically an example of virtue for the ages…

Eventually you’ll have to make money. If you go down that route, no matter how good your intentions were at the beginning, you start censoring yourself, downplaying marxism (a very bad thing to do since it makes your speech no more radical than social-democrats), or treating your artisanal production like a business – artisans being independent workers who believe they can still do everything by themselves to cut down on costs (and thus maximize profits) and keep the operation “simple”. A lot of so-called communist creators for example lock educational content (when they do make it) behind a paywall. But isn’t the point to educate and agitate the masses to make them class-conscious? Or is class-consciousness only allowed for a fan club that can afford your subscription fee? Everyone wants to be Stephen King and everyone thinks they can do it without writing mass-appeal penny press all year long. But there’s a reason he’s successful and the “craft” authors are not.

Anyway. There is psychology at play, for lack of a better word, about one’s class perception. And consciousness often lags behind material reality. You can still consider yourself a prole while you own a business and you make 3x more than your employees - yes, it happens lol. “Oh but I only make 3x more, most CEOs make 10-100 times more!” – deep down they know that’s an excuse. They feel that because they own the business or “took the risk”, they deserve more. And then their consciousness starts to change.

My comment is getting long lol but basically, it’s about your actual class position. And in recent years this has become obfuscated by the bourgeoisie who tries to buy out the proletariat (at least in the imperial core). For example, it’s getting easier every year to invest in the stock market. Sometimes they offer deals to buy houses (subprimes anyone?). And while we do make a lot of money in the west compared to the rest of the world, costs of living are also high.

So that’s why I say it’s not such a settled question. Where is the line between being a prole with some means, and a bourgeois? I don’t even think you have to give all your money away to the party or anything. How do you treat people at your job? Do you take the opportunity to agitate them? What about outside of work?

Build a 3-6 months wage rainy day fund, if possible, and then budget how you spend the rest of your money including a monthly contribution to the party or something. Despite what it might seem like I don’t even tell comrades to avoid the stock market - this is because banks (which we basically have to use in the modern day) already invest your money, and whereas they might make 10% return on it they only give you something like 0.75% of it. I’d rather invest in ETFs myself and get an average of 2-5% return instead of giving it away to my bank is the logic. And don’t expect that you will become rich off of this alone (the stock market is not meant for people like us to make money), so don’t start making it your whole thing and “beating the market” to make a payday or something. To me it’s just part of smart planning for your future.

And even that wall of text barely scratches the surface. I could talk about communists who suddenly find themselves owning an apartment or house (inheritance) and don’t know what to do with it.

🫡

The pictures in the post

The results are pretty impressive!

I just made a community earlier today to share stuff about using crush: https://lemmygrad.ml/c/crushagent

There’s MCPs you can install and a whole list here https://mcpservers.org/ (both proprietary and local) but the one I tried to install didn’t really work and I’m not sure what the problem is lol. MCPs allow your agent to communicate with specific websites in specific ways, there might be one for the MIA but I got one for arxiv for example, and I’m sure there’s bound to be a wikipedia one. It can help enhance what the LLM is able to scrape since it provides a structured way to access it.

I’ve already spent 0.50$ fucking around

Lol I hate seeing that number go up but imagine how much you’d have spent with GPT or claude! Instantly blown through 10 dollars or more with those two.

Actually for the pdf try mistral API, it has a free option (but they train on your inputs). I could send you my script, it’s meant for translation but all it does is break a text file in chunks, send a chunk to mistral API with a custom prompt attached, then save the result to an output text file. With crush you could have it repurpose the script for your needs. Or abbyy OCR if you have windows (I can also send it to you), it’s probably the best OCR tool currently.

Hell yes 70 upvotes on a comicifier script lol. I made a codeberg account, I just need to figure this thing out and I’ll publish v1.

I just made a new community [email protected] for this including a post about it! It can do some websites and specific links but I’m not sure if it can just make a Google search.

I don’t have much to add to your comment at this time so thanks for reading!