I agree. let’s start with him

Honestly once you start seeing them as edgy kids it just makes detaching from it come naturally. They don’t affect me whatsoever. You think starbucks baristas are not workers? That’s great buddy you’re 14 come back to me when you’ve had your first work experience. You think Marx was a patsoc because your discord server said so? That’s great son but you’re 14, you were assigned Sherlock Holmes for English class go read that first to develop some critical reading skills.

Kind of scummy of haz and co to use the free labor of children to do their dirty online work for them.

Forcing them to defend their point and counter-trolling them in the way they troll you also gets them to shut up pretty quickly. Beyond the pre-chewed arguments they get fed on their discords they have nothing, they will bail and try to get their patsoc friends to jump in for them.

I once told one of them he was a paypig for the ACP since haz and co never took base members with them on these photo trips and he quickly stopped replying after that. I can only hope he started thinking about how he was being taken advantage of but who knows. I once told that guy noah or whatever from midwestern marx “no idea who you are or why you feel included in his conversation” lmao. he seems like a huge tool that desperately wants recognition and fame. But to be honest while that was funny, i saw someone in that discussion actually engaging him in theory and forcing him to explain his own assertions and he quickly dipped as he ran out of ways to do his faux “hello friendo!” shtick, so that was much more productive. Noah krachvik is not his real name btw and he keeps lying about where he lives not for any opsec but because he wants to look like a salt-of-the-earth prole.

Their techniques are nothing new, I guess it works on the internet. Facsists do it too, it’s the dodge pivot retort. Dodge the argument brought up to you, pivot to another, and retort with your own new argument to move the conversation. When people do that if you counter by preventing them from switching topics they will not know what to say anymore. Otherwise they would not be trying to shift the discussion. Attack your enemy where he is weak, force him to fight on your conditions.

Lol some of them might be 16!

I mostly see them on twitter and you certainly have some adults, in the chapters, but if you look at the pictures it’s mostly 5 or 6 people per chapter. It’s always the same people in the pictures, yet judging from their online presence you’d think ACP is everywhere. I can only assume most of them only like patsocism for the aesthetics or are too young to actually join.

saying “the prole.wiki guy” shows they don’t engage with detractors whatsoever. They don’t even read their own theory so don’t expect them to read anyone else.

Once you realize most of them are 14 it all falls into place.

I might get it thanks for the rec!

The criticism of the ACP should be strengthened. I also have “pro-authoritarian” politics, 90% of us here have (and 100% of us here ought to have them). For example I think it’s totally fine for China to execute CIA agents they uncover on their territory, but some would call that authoritarian. I think it was cool of Cuba to nationalize every industry in 1959 without compensation, but some would also call that authoritarian. Likewise I align with the “authoritarian regimes” of China, DPRK, Cuba, and many other maligned states in the world. This framing plays exactly into the ACP’s hand: “ACP supports China but ACP is bad, therefore it must mean China is bad too!” I suspect on some level this is something ACP wants to happen.

Much stronger criticism is their stance regarding basically the entirety of communist history (which they either reject or try to reframe out of left field), and how much of a break they represent with basically all of communism so far. They are the ones making enemies with other communists, by claiming they know better than us and we’re wrong and will be lined up against the wall when the american revolution comes. They talk big despite having nothing to show for it yet in practice.

The way their party works is basically a glorified tiktok house where supporters (members) send the influencers money so they can go on trips around the world and bring back instagram pictures of it. They show up for the photo op then bail without doing any work there. They are a complete break from communist internationalism there too because only the ‘executive committee’ ie the influencers (haz, helali, hinkle etc) ever go on these trips, they never bring any ACP members along with them.

They consistently lie, for example randomly putting the names of CPUSA chapters on their forming constitution and then these chapters quickly distancing themselves from apparently having signed that document. One of them that appeared on the document didn’t even exist.

They completely misunderstand theory and quote-mine every interaction, and have discord servers where they coordinate these arguments. If you’re anything on twitter it becomes blatant very quickly that most of them are 15 and think andrew tate was not edgy enough for them. They all share the same screenshot of a quote and if you press them even a little and demand they detail their thoughts they will bail but not before liking and retweeting their own tweet reply to signal to other patsocs to jump into the conversation. Their praxis is to berate and abuse marxists until they relent and agree with the ACP.

If we want to criticize their communism then we must judge them on marxist grounds not on vibes that they don’t ‘perform’ the role to our satisfaction and tick enough boxes. Their theory is wrong because they purposely misunderstand it and thus show a worrying agenda, and everything else flows from that. Their mistaken theory cannot build effective communist praxis and we see this already in the way they consider only some workers to be actual workers. But it can certainly create some nice little himmlers.

And it’s not just history, it has real consequences today. As I showed in the first paragraph, they are reframing what anti-imperialism and internationalism mean. Practically they are also known to be abusers, both physically and mentally and frankly I would not want to be around any of them.

I expect that leftAgainstACP community will eat itself soon. I’ve been invited to similar communities in the past and they end up imploding because they try to form a united front but it’s a doomed idea. You can see the posts already on that subreddit: “stalinism and the ACP have nothing to do with marxism, here’s why:” from yesterday, for example. Tbh I don’t really like the fandom aspect of this entire thing, it feels more like they’re trying to pit pros and antis, supporting people because they’re on the ‘right’ side of the fence even if they have other terrible opinions, posting memes to laugh at, etc. The moment you have people in these anti-acp communities saying china sucks it’s over, they’ve capitulated to western capital. Another post: “are pragmatic Social Democrats who are more concerned that withdrawing from NATO could precipitate a new global fascist movement and indirectly lead to a world war welcome?” (answers: yes welcome aboard.)

I didn’t intend to finish this promoting something but if you want to do something online but still material against ACP write for the prolewiki pages on them. we are among the top results if you search for their names or terms and they are some of our most visited pages, and there is still so much to add and so many more pages to create. That will be infinitely more worthwhile in teaching newcomers to marxism, which is who the ACP targets, about the danger patsocs are to them.

With so many websites abandoning RSS at this time it’s a majority of pressTV and telesur and not much else being posted tbh. some of the China section from techinasia. I have a couple other websites such as granma, periodico26 and news.antiwar.com for their coverage on possible war with venezuela but we select specific regex filters from these three

Wikitext is the only version it exists in, however you can more or less just copy and paste to the rich text editor of your choice, I think it should preserve formatting.

If you make a nice-looking PDF we can rehost on ProleWiki and link it on the book’s page.

I won’t post actual issues but it was very in-depth and although some of it was overkill (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it as they say), it did find a bunch of varied stuff – all from terminal commands, so nothing that wouldn’t be reproducible or had to invent tools for it.

I started typing up a huge post but i want to keep it more to the point; the tl;dr is these tools allow us to solve problems differently than we could before and this is where they find their place, and everything else is on us to figure out. Like I don’t think frustrations and bottlenecks will disappear under communism, they might certainly look different than they do under capitalism but they won’t go away entirely. We’ve had word-of-mouth, then books, then web pages, then search engines, and now LLMs. And whereas books and web pages only contain the information they do and nothing else (and web pages can be updated in real time but books cannot), LLMs can present that information in a way that speaks to you personally, and allows you to make further queries on it.

As a designer, we are trained to identify problems and think of solutions we can enact to solve them: this is the essence of design work. And eventually, we learn that there is always at least one solution to a problem. If there really isn’t, it means the problem needs to be reframed. Delivering information is one thing LLMs can do, but they can also do translation work, statistical work - or as we see here, help people switch from Windows to Linux much more easily than was previously possible.

Personally at this point the way I use LLMs and AI models is mostly to try and push them to their limits. The usual arguments I read about how “they think for you so you stop thinking”, or “but you could have found the answer on google” or “it’s not actually art” are so far behind where the goalposts are currently at! They’re already obsolete arguments because when I generate an AI image, I know it has errors, but I generate it to test a specific thing - like a way to prompt, or if it can do pixel art, or if it understands complex prompting (e.g. a picture within a picture within a picture all in different styles). I don’t even care if it’s art or not, it doesn’t make the image “unexist” and I’m trying out a tech task, so questions such as “is this illustration art or did I put effort into it” don’t even enter my mind.

Some people might see the image and dismiss it as “it looks bad here or there” or “I don’t care because it’s not actually art” but imo they are closing themselves off - what can you do knowing that you can fix a linux system? What ideas does it give you to solve your problems with? This is the real value. And ultimately we see that it doesn’t matter where a given piece of information came from so long as we have it in our arsenal. It’s like how some comrades close themselves off learning from liberals because they’re liberals, when we see that the US army makes its officers read Mao and Che among other generals.

Before LLMs some people probably said “I don’t care about google, I have my books” (or even “I don’t care about these new car things, I have a horse”). But google can help you find more books, and can also do a lot of other stuff I can’t think of right now - but just because we can’t conceive of these uses yet doesn’t mean they don’t objectively exist: our job is to find them out.

Finally to close this off, speaking generally – I mean that I didn’t get this impression from your comment – I think there is a tendency among even marxists to actually ‘shut off their brain’ as soon as anything AI pops up. “It’s AI so I don’t like it goodbye”. Like a tendency to scold comrades for using AI instead of directing that anger towards the meat or fossil fuel industry (biggest polluters on the planet if we care about the environment), or proprietary models that all have to compete against each other instead of pulling their forces together. This is what I mean by “closing ourselves off”. We leave this technology in the hands of the bourgeoisie because we think we’re too good for it. They don’t seem to think they’re too good for it though, and they control the state.

As for the diagnosis if you want to go further, I decided not to waste more context window and tokens on this (although it only cost something like 5 cents on the API since a lot of it was cache hit, i.e. repeated tokens sent to the API). It got completely bonked and I could just redo a new session and start from scratch but eh, I just pressed escape to stop it from running commands over and over again. And tbh that is a blemish. It started running and re-running commands instead of using both files. This can assuredly be fixed by just a tweak in the prompt, but it still bothers me that I ran so many tokens for something that ultimately 50% failed (the manual diagnosis part). It’s not a huge cost or anything, it’s just something it should be able to take into account itself since it knew that automated diagnosis file existed.

Anyway, at this time I have a list of diagnoses as per the initial prompt - both diagnoses it could run itself, and diagnosis commands I need to run myself. I won’t post an example here because it’s just good security practice but it followed the prompt when making the list: how it found it, what the problem is, the impact, severity as per my 4 categories, and how to fix.

From there it’s up to your preference how you want to go through this list: either your own linux knowledge, google or more LLM. You can just go back in crush and tell it “fix error number X” and I’m sure it will do it, unless of course it runs into permissions issues running commands. But personally I want some manual overview to learn the system and what I’m doing.

And some of these commands I have no idea how many years of linux you’d need to learn to write them yourself let’s be honest. And how many hours of googling you’d do to just find them in the first place! With agents you can do something else like watch a video or play a video game while it writes the file.

Manual diagnosis.md was more of a mess, because it didn’t really understand I wanted it to write the commands it was unable to run earlier, not “assume” it couldn’t write some commands out of thin air. I can still use this file since it collects sudo diagnosis commands but yeah it kinda failed on that part and I decided to stop wasting tokens. What I’m going to do now is check and run these commands, write down the result, and have crush analyze just this output and what it can tell me about it using the first prompt.

One reason they maintain nodes is for their infiltrated agents; They also maintain websites for that. I don’t know if that means they don’t also track you but they have self interest in having tor and keeping it alive.

It might be more likely if you own a node that you get CIA traffic on it…

no matter what one may think they have to admit deepseek is pretty much destroying the western AI ecosystem. On par with GPT5 on the free/cheap version is pretty big, considering how much fanfare there was around GPT5

it was pretty funny that deepseek gave me its own rundown technically lol, but its report on the official twitter thread is more in-depth than I gleaned from my own reading so

In my (limited) experience doing this since 2023, it’s still a very involved process, however, once you have the parameters down you just feed that to the AI until it completes the whole book - you still save a LOT of time but it doesn’t magically appear. I also found most of the time once you’re finished with a translation some deeper googling or asking around finds an existing translation lol.

Regardless if you start with an existing text version LLM translating involves three parameters:

1. Finding the right model
2. Finding the right prompt
3. Finding someone who speaks the target language and can proofread some samples (ideally they speak both source and target)

And you repeat that cycle until you find both a model and prompt that the proofreader approves of, that’s the hard part and it takes time and a lot of trial and error. Once you lock that in however you just feed the LLM the book chunk by chunk.

The prompt has to be strict and leave no interpretation to the LLM - I’ve been trying to get one down since 2023 but I don’t think there’s any boilerplate one. Best I got is the AI translating “word-for-word” to a certain extent, otherwise it starts hallucinating. It will output good romance and germanic languages outputs, just don’t expect something transcendant. It can feel a bit robotic. Also I noticed translating from can be done in almost any modern language, but translating to is better in romance and germanic languages. Don’t have a lot of experience with other language pairs though and again it depends on the model, deepseek is probably goated at translating to and from chinese.

I have a python script I could put on codeberg that connects to an API - it’s made to connect to Mistral specifically (due to french capabilities) but should be able to connect to any OAI-compatible API endpoint. Then it reads the raw .txt files in an Inputs folder, chunks them up, and feeds them to the LLM with your system prompt one by one. Made with crush and deepseek lol, and complete with a pickle database that keeps track of where you were if you quit the script.

One last thing is sometimes you have to clean up LLM artefacts, for example mistral likes to start some chunks with “Here is the translated portion of text:” easy enough with regex.

@cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml

Hey, unfortunately not as I’ve been super busy in that time 😮‍💨

Maybe if you ask deepseek (with search on) or perplexity it might find a workaround! On my end I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get to it.

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.

I was actually thinking of having a deepseek api key for lemmygrad that people could freely top up and use so that we can all share, but I’m not sure how feasible it is on the trust system. I’ll take a closer look and make a post if there’s something I can set up

I finished a guide yesterday, in the process of adding some pictures to it: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9911266

It’s really not that complicated to install crush! I promise haha. If she is on Windows it’s literally copy and paste a command in powershell (winget install charmbracelet.crush), close powershell, open cmd, cd to a folder, type ‘crush’ and send, and it will open.

Then in crush panel type Thinking mode to get deepseek, hit enter,

Then make a deepseek API key and top it up with 5$ on platform.deepseek.com, copy API key, paste with Ctrl+Shift+V, hit enter, and it will just work. Try to send hello to make sure you’re connected.