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5 days agoIn other navies they do lol, but not in the US Navy. It’s an empire on the decline and their military reflects that.
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Cake day: August 24th, 2019
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they already have them, but it’s rust because the navy stopped requiring crew to maintain their ships.
4·5 days agoGood for you! How is this relevant except to brag about your setup?
Well, that’s only my two cents and I don’t know either of these writers but I read the original post and the response with great interest. It seems clear to me that Cory was writing a newsletter (literally updating people about his blog) and the LLM portion is small because of this. That doesn’t mean it can’t be critiqued, but clearly Cory was not writing a manifesto for LLMs there so it seems kind of unexplained to me, again not knowing anything about the writers or publications, to want to write a whole response to a small anecdote/rant about someone’s own use of LLMs:
spoiler
Tante’s writer contradicts themselves a few times and doesn’t make a great case for themselves, and a lot of their arguments rely on pure idealism. It seems to me they have not examined their own line on AI and therefore rely on some hodgepodge of things they’ve heard and things they’ve arrived at implicitly glued together. Therefore the response is full of contradictions and seems more like what they took issue with was that someone they read had a positive opinion of AI.
Some of the contradictions:
artifacts have built-in politics deriving from their structure. A famous example is the nuclear power plant: Due to the danger of these plants, their needs with regards to resources as well as security power plants imply a certain form of political arrangement based on having a strong security force/army and a way to force these facilities (and facilities to store the waste in) upon communities potentially against their will.
But then:
That does not mean that it is impossible to take certain technologies or artifacts and try to reframe them, change their meaning. In some way computers are one such example: They were first used by governments, banks and other corporations to reach their goals but where then taken and reframed to devices intended to support personal liberation
The computers used in banks were used differently from the personal computers that made their way into our homes. They had different protocols in place into how they could be used and connect to the network, having to log your work, not leaving personal files on it, archiving work files every X years etc. So we see that it is indeed not the technology itself that’s problematic, but how it is used, and I suppose this is what separates marxists from vibes-based leftism. If someone is punching you and you punch them back, you might both be considered violent, but we see that this violence has a character: someone was attacking, and the other was defending themselves.
Their argument also doesn’t explain why the USSR was interested in machine learning and AI (yes, neural networks are not new, they were being tested with vacuum tubes as far back as the 50s and the USSR was very big into it) and why China is making so many models. They ascribe a universal character to different system instead of taking them in their particular material context. Frankly there is very little material analysis at all in both pieces, because neither look at things in their totality and in the material world. Any analysis or critique of AI that ignores what’s happening in wholly different states just won’t produce anything actionable.
They further contradict the earlier argument here:
A search engine scrapes pages to build an “index” in order to let people find those pages. The scraping has value for the page and its owner as well because it leads to more people finding it and therefore connecting to the writer, journalist, musician, artist, etc. Search engines create connection.
AI scrapers do not guide people towards the original maker’s work. They extract it and reproduce it (often wrongly). “AI”‘s don’t point out to the web for you to find other’s work to relate to, they keep you in their loop and give you the answer cutting off any connection to the original sources.
While the technology of scraping is the same, the purpose and material effects of those two systems is massively different.
(emphasis mine). They agree that things develop differently. But as for the difference they try to make between a search engine and AI, they are starting to twist themselves into knots there to try and keep up their deeply-held beliefs. There is nothing that says a search engine has to be this way, or that an LLM has to be that way. Secondly, Google has been under fire for years for trying to get people to stay in their ‘loop’ and not leave the results page. There are LLM providers that focus on making them into a search engine.
And then contradict this anyway:
Technologies are embedded not only in their deployment but also in their creation, conceptualization. They carry the understanding of the world that their makers believe in and reproduce those. A bit like an LLM reproduces the texts it learned from: It might not always be a 100% identical replica but it’s structurally so similar that the differences are surface level.
So they’re indirectly saying a search engine only has surface-level differences from an LLM, which cancels their entire point about how search engines are actually different enough on the surface to be good while LLMs are still bad. That part felt like they didn’t have a problem with the stuff they grew up with because it was normalized, but couldn’t articulate it and so it produces this contradiction.
Another contradiction:
And freedom is not the only value that we care about. Making everything “free” sounds cool but who pays for that freedom? Who pays for us having for example access to the freedom an open weight LLM brings? Our freedom as users rests on the exploitation of and violence against the people suffering the data centers, labeling the data for the training, the folks gathering the resources for NVIDIA to build chips. Freedom is not a zero-sum game but a lot of the freedoms that wealthy people in the right (which I am one of) enjoy stem from other people’s lack thereof.
And two paragraphs later:
But the argument against using LLMs is not about shopping and markets at all. My not using LLMs does not influence anything in that regard, Microsoft will just keep making the data center go BRRRRRRR.
Exactly, the technology will exist whether we use it or not, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube as they say. So what’s the solution? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Berate people into compliance? It’s like saying I don’t want to use drones in my war because they’re pretty scary and barbaric. Sure, but the adversary is using them and will be very happy that you are not using drones against them (see Hedgehog 25 military exercise in Estonia). It’s self-defeatist to refuse to use something because it’s the “tool of the enemy”, which is the grown-up way of saying it has cooties. They talk about not building the nexus torment, but what if building some of the nexus torment allowed us to destroy it for good? We know this intuitively as marxists: there will not be socialism without capitalism first.
On top of which are several words that betray what the author really thinks, such as putting AI in quotes (because it’s not actually “intelligent” you see), or calling it stochastic, or the inclusion of the “(often wrongly)” in a paragraph I quoted. That’s the sort of keywords you see repeated all the time on twitter from people who briefly tried chatGPT in 2023 when it was underbaked, made up their mind about it then and never tried LLMs again or followed what has been happening since then.
9·11 days agoCould mean the return of affordable RAM unless someone else hurries to buy the contract…
ask them exactly how they think people like jeff bezos report 0$ on taxes and watch the fireworks lol
me when it’s payday on the left vs. me when i am a leftcom and think just because two states have similarities on the surface they must function exactly the same way on the right.
there already are lol. if the site survives long enough anyone can join us with the (beta) “ProleWiki” LLM https://huggingface.co/percyraskova/MLMLML, running it locally (though it will hog your GPU for anything else you might want to use it for).
the person in the commune who likes to build high-speed rail will do it in exchange for produce from the person who likes gardening. I’m not joking.
It’s wild. He not only got beat up but people were outright chasing him, they were out for blood. If he’d hung around there are big chances he would have not made it out alive. In the end it was the people he despised who helped him get out. At one point he was cowering against a window as people were pelting him with water balloons - that’s the part you can see he realized he was not in control of the situation and he was fearing for his life, but that was very tame compared to what came for him later.
A black man helped him through the crowd and the red car he ultimately gets into belongs to a trans couple who were just caught up in the middle of it. They explained in one video they allowed him in because they thought he was pursued by ICE, and once he got in and the rest of the crowd followed they had no choice but to drive away as they couldn’t get out of the car themselves to get him to GTFO the back seat (completely understandable). After a couple blocks they asked him who he was and told him he couldn’t stay. Apparently the owner of the car got his contact info and wants him to pay for the damage to the car lol.
with the shortages expected to continue throughout 2026, probably even extending into 2027 at the very least, we’ll definitely see China fill in the gaps industrially. They are already building the factories for modern high-end chips, which has been the big challenge - just how difficult it is to start making these chips.
My prediction is 50% on chinese suppliers just get banned from trading with the west, and 50% western stores (online or otherwise) will start carrying chinese brands just because there’s still demand for components. So the resellers are missing out on a huge deal of money, to them any sale is better than no sale.
There is of course still the possibility in the second case that they will partner with western “brands” that buy the products ready-made from China, slap their logo on it, and resell it under their own name. This is already widespread - the western company doesn’t make anything, not even the blueprint or design. The factory in China even prints the logo for them before shipping. This is more of a price problem, not so much for China (they still manufacture and sell) or the product itself - it’s the same SSD/RAM stick they would sell in China, it’s just more expensive than it should be.
Communist parties internationally, not just in the US, must now use these documents for agitprop.
For anyone who wasn’t aware as well, Trump is apparently named 600 times in the documents. It’s just been redacted but they messed it up somehow (on purpose? Can’t say, but it’s weird they forgot how to redact a document in Adobe Acrobat) and you can copy paste the redacted text just fine. If you search for “Trump” it won’t return anything but searching for "Trump " or copy-pasting the redacted text yields >600 results
Or so says twitter at least
If you don’t get paid to make these comments honestly you’re missing out. Imagine doing nato propaganda for free.
Step 1: China manufactures over 30% of all consumer commodities in the world
Step 2: western chip makers announce cutoffs for next year to focus on b2b
Step 3: China starts making chips that rival with nvidia’s
There is a >80% chance that by 2027 virtually all big retailers will carry Chinese GPUs and RAM brands because it’ll be too complicated to sell Samsung and RTX Gpus.
mixture-of-experts but the experts are the five heads.
this is technically possible already, just that it takes so much resources that not many people could make this model and the cost would be prohibitive for what is a hobby project. This is why China is developing forces of production first.
New comment for clarity, crush is still crushing through the problem (hah) but it has found some cool stuff already. Their homepage calls json files which contain the models they offer, and we see there is at least GPT4.1 and Deepseek. No word yet on how they use these models exactly but since GPT is closed-source they have to be contacting the service and forwarding the requests, can’t run it yourself.
Will update as it works through the tasks.
edit: so we can only look at the JSON and JS files their homepage calls (don’t really feel like making an account with them) and there is some interesting info. Seems to simply be RAG from the way the service parses the data (there’s a file with the steps it will show to the user on the interface).
No fine-tuning or running their own model and BECAUSE OPENAI IS PROPRIETARY, everything you send through the service ends up with OAI.
With that said I wonder what the current big bottleneck is for archival. Is it physical space, creating redundancy, replacing devices every few years?
lmao
edit: okay I’m trying to dig more into how they provide this service and the terms of service are pretty funny.
Left Insight LLC does not return any results online (I might try to scan deeper later). They probably set it up to own the chatbot.
There’s a subscription because of course there is. Greatest victory for the workers and socialism but also pay us to unlock this victory.
Lengthy intellectual property bit. Can’t use the “chatbot” to compete against wsws was a good one.
This doesn’t hold up in US court where they operate from. They can make licences but nobody owns the output of an LLM. Also more funny copyright bit. The trotskyist revolution will not be televized because the workers will not have paid the TV fees.
I also wanted to look at their html to see if I could find more information there such as interface used or maybe even a comment but it’s a huge one-line block that I can’t lint. I threw deepseek at it, will report when it’s done (oh no that counts as reverse-engineering they will terminate my non-existent account with them!)
Clearly your brain was also optional and so here we are 🤣