Very interesting to read, thanks for sharing.

How is this reactionary exactly? Edit: Like I am for real asking you to explain your thought process. Posting something in SRS does not de facto mean it’s a reactionary position and this reads to me like a misguided sense of strategy at worst, with good faith intention toward trying to think about how to persuade people for the better. It is factually the case that people are influenced by their material conditions and something that comes up on here regularly. I don’t personally think it’s good strategy to fall back only on appealing to what benefits people personally since the overall goal of the cause is a more collective-minded society, not one based in individual gain, but that doesn’t make it reactionary to discuss.

Who’s the “we”? I was never consulted on US policy decisions.

This tracks with the impression I get. That some of this thinking of “just wipe things away / reset / etc., even if through indiscriminate violence” comes from a kind of depressed and worn down worldview. And I think, is also an extension of the normalization of imperial violence, but turned in the other direction. In other words, there are imperialists who think indiscriminate violence is good and fine because it’s against “bad” people. How does this point of view differ from what’s being said here? It’s just changing who is categorized as “bad”. To be clear, I’m not accusing of bad intention. The point is that if you come from that socialization and you change who the target is but you don’t change the mindset, then it’s not surprising you will still have some belief in indiscriminate violence.

Indiscriminate violence benefits colonial/imperial/capitalist interests of expansion and replacement. It does not benefit those who want peace or want to value human life. What matters is ending the institutions of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, etc. There’s no getting around the fact that violence is required in that process at one stage or another because ruling classes don’t hand over power willingly after being told “swiper no swiping.” But there is no benefit to the cause of liberation for it to be indiscriminate, wanton violence.

On the other point about “saving”, I think it’s normal for people in difficult conditions to have some desire to be saved. Maybe more so where Christian socializing and narratives of literal saviors are a thing. But also, I agree that China trying to step in to “save” the USian people would be the least of its priorities. The US’s level of notoriety is only because of its economic and military might and the way it has used that to terrorize the globe. Otherwise, it would be, to most people, just another region that they don’t know a whole lot about. Global anti-imperialist efforts have some motive to defang and stabilize the US and the imperial core in general, so that it doesn’t go even more violently rogue than it has been. International communist efforts have some motive to look after the USian proletariat, the colonized indigenous, the marginalized minorities to the extent that they can build ties with them and do mutual benefit and work toward strengthening their liberation efforts, but not in some exceptional way more so than the rest of the exploited peoples in the world. And that’s a critical point to keep in view. No matter what the socializing says, USians are not actually exceptional; neither exceptionally good, nor exceptionally bad, or exceptionally talented or exceptionally weak. The character of the actions can be better or worse (and good god are some of the US actions terrible), but the underlying humanity is much the same. Filtered through a different lens of material conditions and socializing, yes - but these things are mutable, they just don’t change all at once and often don’t change easily.

TL;DR: If you are from the imperial core, try to learn from other, non-imperial cultures, mindsets, and organized party efforts, and how they have gone about handling liberation, in both the beautiful victories and the devastating losses. Remember that changing your allegiance doesn’t immediately change how you are socialized.

There’s a somewhat explicit connection between the creation of suburbia in the US and anti-communism too.

“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist,” he once said. “He has too much to do.”

(This is attributed to William Levitt, who is credited as the father of USian suburbia.

https://time.com/archive/6598189/suburban-legend-william-levitt/

I’m assuming this is asked in good faith out of curiosity, but I don’t like how it is phrased. It implies that it was easy to do for the US, which is not, as far as I’m aware, proven. It could have taken them months or years of probing, infiltration, and regional military preparation to get to the point where they could do this. I also don’t like how some people are replying as if it definitely was easy and they have the answer for why. The US power base is not god (in spite of it liking to act like it is) and given how much and often it has couped countries over decades, if it was easy for them to coup Venezuela, they would have done so long ago. This terrorist’s act of kidnapping the president looks more like desperation to me than a show of strength. Don’t give them credit for strength they are not proven to have.

Ok, thanks, makes sense with the general idea of what I’ve heard about how things work. Like I’m aware models aren’t storing all the details of what they train on (far from it) but I’m not clear on all the terminology.

Many Bolshevik leaders didn’t think they would live to see a socialist revolution in Russia. If they had given up on the organizing project, concluding that the material conditions were better in Germany or France, there would not have been a Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

This part is so so important. People have got to escape doomer/depression thinking about the state of the world; I do not mean that as a “just get better” criticism either. I just mean that it can cause people to see things in a gloomier way than they fully are and feel more pessimistic than is warranted for the situation. Neither pessimism nor blind optimism is something we can afford. The stakes are too high.

Based on what I’ve seen, it appears like more of a self-hatred problem than it is people outside of the imperial core focusing overly much on the individuals who inhabit it.

I think there are some misconceptions though, which contribute to a sense of near-hopelessness in reference to the imperial core. Such as:

• “The empire living off the exploitation of others necessarily means the people living in it are well off and so the rest of the world has to do a revolution before they would ever be motivated to.” On inspection, many of them are increasingly not well off and some are part of a marginalized group on top of that (such as black people in the US).

• “People in the US have never really tried.” The US is for sure the most virulent anti-communist there is in the world and it derives from a genocidal colonial project that transformed into a global imperial one. After saying that, it’s easy to stop and go “look at how it (seemingly) is now, a handful of weak reformists doing nothing.” But the one feeds into the other. The US had the red scare (well had, more like has ongoing) which vilified anything even slightly “leftist.” The Black Panther Party tried to build a vanguard party with dual power and faced assassination, imprisonment, vilification, infiltration, and so on. Earlier in its history, there’s the Civil War, which I won’t romanticize and pretend was some grand liberation struggle the white power brokers were partaking in, but it is important to note because post-Civil-War did not repress or dismantle the confederacy side properly and they went on to do things like romanticize slavery via The United Daughters of the Confederacy material pushed in schools. So it’s not just that USians (some way more than others) benefit materially from imperialism, it’s also that it has faced enormous internal political repression and a kind of ongoing aggravated internal state between the slave owner faction and the reform faction (and what those factions developed into later on). And it’s not only “non-white” who have ever tried anything. Eugene Debs is a notable socialist name, one who ran for president while being imprisoned over an anti-war speech. The Battle of Blair Mountain is a notable event of how the US state was willing to join in on waging class war against its own people (white included).

• “It has been this way so far, so it will keep being this way.” Change requires transformation, but it is possible. However, it also requires assessment of where things are going wrong and how to do different in a way that will work. When CriticalResist made the point some time back that so many imperial core parties are “ossified and failures” (I believe was the wording), I had an initial desire to push back. I think because I was concerned it was being too demoralizing a picture of ongoing struggle. But we do have to be sober about real failures and the goal of a vanguard party is not to figure out how to cozy up and co-exist with imperialism while doing some token opposition in the margins. So it’s more about movement than it is about judgment. People are going to judge and we will too, but at the end of the day, things are moving. Question is where do they get moved to.

So like the difference between a database and a snapshot impression of one? If so, I think I get the distinction you mean. That models are not storing the embeddings themselves, but instead are storing a representation of them, as trained on. (Feel free to say if that’s still misleading terminology.)

Hmm, okay. I was more thinking of errors the model itself made in describing how things work. But correcting other people is reasonable too.

That said, I’m not so sure about this point:

No model embeds vectors afaik.

From what I can find through a cursory search, there is something called vector embedding going on, at least in the context of LLMs. I guess this smaller model is a different story if it is a wholly different kind of architecture, as you say.

https://medium.com/@narendra.squadsync/vector-embeddings-in-large-language-models-llms-3e746f1063f3

https://labs.adaline.ai/p/how-do-embeddings-work-in-llms

https://ml-digest.com/architecture-training-of-the-embedding-layer-of-llms/

(I don’t know if these sources are reliable, it’s just what I could find.)

Nothing personal, but I don’t see how this is a helpful perspective on it. Maybe from your perspective this is your way of cautioning against complacency. But from my perspective, it reads like “be paranoid and let your imagination run wild with what modern systems are capable of” (which could go way beyond how computer systems even work, especially for those who are less familiar with computers).

If you can find the time at some point and make a resource on the details, that could be very helpful though.

I think it’s largely because situations keep coming up on here where somebody posts something AI and it gets dismissive comments directed toward it. It’s not that AI can’t have problems. It’s that the content of criticisms is often very shallow.

And again, I think AI in the realm of fact is a real concern. I’m not expecting you to manually correct AI output every time you see it somewhere, but if you can correct in this context, you could leverage it in a broader argument about risks of engaging with AI output in matters of fact. Without those corrections, we have to take you at your word that you’ve observed factual errors and the position comes out weaker as a result, even though I think it is a good one, broadly speaking.

This is a good source on what communists mean by imperialism and why China does not fall under that: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Chinese_"imperialism"

You may need to explain both to people because I know some people have this idea of imperialism that it is something like “a country is big and influential beyond itself and has a desire to conquer”, which misses the entirety of why a country is influential, what helpful or exploitative influence can look like, and where a motive to conquer derives from (if one can’t explain where it comes from and they’re claiming it about a country in today’s world that is not predominantly “white”, there’s probably racism involved in the worldview).

To compare:

israel has a motive to “conquer” in the region it inhabits because it’s a colonial project based on occupation and expansion, and is an extension of the western empire more broadly, who not only can benefit from having more land, labor, and resources to exploit, but is systematized to the point of being propped up on this parasitic relationship with the rest of the world.

China, in contrast, does not have any such motive. They are, as far as I know, largely self-sustaining in access to resources, lifted 800 million people out of poverty locally, and have plenty of internal work to do still toward their socialist/communist development goals, none of which is improved by undermining the international working class. What they are doing fits with a country that saw the USSR fall, saw countless countries suffer sanctions, coups, and bombings under the global imperialist and anti-communist campaign of the west over decades, and sees some of that still going on now. They are reinforcing sovereignty (such as in tech), they build mutually beneficial ties with other countries where possible which makes it that much harder for the west to isolate and encircle them and is also just something that strengthens both them and other countries.

Of course they are accused of these ties being exploitative because the western empire doesn’t want people escaping dependency on them and doesn’t want China being powerful in general.

We also need to keep in mind how racist narratives work, the nature of responsibility, and the difference between something explicitly designed and enforced by the CPC, versus something that happens outside of its direct control. The global order is still largely a capitalist one and as such, the movements within it are going to have capitalist characteristics that go with them some of the time. CPC China cannot extricate itself from this reality anymore than anyone else can. The options are to engage with it and the contradictions involved, try to exist outside it and attack it from the outside which risks fast decline and annihilation, or try to exist outside it and survive it which risks isolation and encirclement. China since the reform and opening up policy chose the option to engage with it and the contradictions involved.

Those who want us to hate China want us to believe some confusing things like that: “communism bad” but also “China bad because it’s not communist enough”. Or “capitalism good” but also “China bad because it’s being too capitalist.”

They try to use our own views against us and this is undoubtedly some of where ultra-left positions come from. We have to understand that not every action taken by the CPC or by a Chinese business is going to be saintly in all of its characteristics and that its lack of sainthood does not mean the vanguard has fallen and China is equivalent to the western empire now.

Intention cannot magically transform circumstances for the better. We have to investigate the context of where things come from, the motives involved, and the details of the actions taken. Much of anti-China propaganda depends on people doing none of these things and rolling with a racist narrative that China is a hegemonic extension of the CPC while simultaneously distinct from it and repressed by it, and that the CPC is uh, “bad” “because communism.” While also accusing it of doing very uncommunist-like things… that are more just what capitalists do. But “capitalist good!.. except when it’s China, then bad.” The origins of most anti-China propaganda are not remotely honest, in other words.

It sounds like there are two main things at work here:

1. Validity of information provided by AI without cross-referencing (backing up what they say with other sources). I think this is a valid concern, though trying to have that discussion within this thread probably isn’t the best place for it. It may be better to make a dedicated thread and link to this one if you want to use it as a reference for incorrect output.

2. Correcting information you recognize to be incorrect. If you can provide sourcing on what’s incorrect about the output, that would certainly help the case that we should be wary of posting AI output without other sources.

But your original comment reads to me like the usual reaction of people hating AI because it’s AI, rather than directly addressing these issues. I don’t think it’s too late to course correct and focus on correctness of information.

There may be some truth to this for things that entities especially want backed up, but let’s not over-inflate the logistics of it.

Some counterpoints:

• Backups still have to be stored on physical disks, which costs something to do. These physical disks can also decay over time, even if more slowly than some forms of technology. They can sustain damage, etc.
• Late stage capitalism loves looking for ways to cut costs. It’s not exactly in the business of sustainability. This is going to affect data storage in various ways too. Look at how unhinged Photobucket went, for example, with its persistent reminds that you have photos and they could be deleted if you don’t log back in. Reddit has a motive to keep stuff around because of people using web searches to look for insights posted on there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’d want to keep / try to restore everything. Just enough that it minimizes damage.
• Sifting through billions of terabytes of data trying to make use of it is always going to be less practical than doing “social hacking” (tricks, bribery, blackmail, infiltration, etc. - exploiting of social connections). This isn’t to say digital surveillance and data retention is a non-issue, but that the bulk of the danger is going to be stuff that happens now in a way that’s easy to link to you, not something you said 10 years ago that could hypothetically still be on a server somewhere and hypothetically could be linked to you somehow even though it was said with some form of anonymity. It’s never too late to have more awareness about it and start doing differently if need be. Security in general is never 100%. It’s more a matter of making the cost/benefit painful enough to dissuade someone/entity from trying.

Was imperialist propaganda always this unhinged and I’m just not used to seeing it unfold in real-time? I tried to read through it to see how they’re presenting it and it reads like a window into someone’s paranoid drug trip. The level of narcissism and red scare swill is wild.

The way I see it (I don’t know how mod, or mods, saw it, am looking at it after the fact), the issue is that the comment was victim blaming and counter to solidarity during a crisis. Posting in anger is one thing, but directing that anger at the victim instead of the aggressor is… to put it in the most good faith terms I can think of at the moment, a confused way to direct anger.

If nothing else, I will take this moment to remind people how important solidarity is in moments of crisis.

Even when that solidarity has the character of struggle too:

For instance, in the period of its first cooperation with the Communist Party, the Kuomintang stood in contradiction to foreign imperialism and was therefore anti-imperialist; on the other hand, it stood in contradiction to the great masses of the people within the country—although in words it promised many benefits to the working people, in fact it gave them little or nothing. In the period when it carried on the anti-Communist war, the Kuomintang collaborated with imperialism and feudalism against the great masses of the people and wiped out all the gains they had won in the revolution, and thereby intensified its contradictions with them. In the present period of the anti-Japanese war, the Kuomintang stands in contradiction to Japanese imperialism and wants co-operation with the Communist Party, without however relaxing its struggle against the Communist Party and the people or its oppression of them. As for the Communist Party, it has always, in every period, stood with the great masses of the people against imperialism and feudalism, but in the present period of the anti-Japanese war, it has adopted a moderate policy towards the Kuomintang and the domestic feudal forces because the Kuomintang has pressed itself in favour of resisting Japan. The above circumstances have resulted now in alliance between the two parties and now in struggle between them, and even during the periods of alliance there has been a complicated state of simultaneous alliance and struggle. If we do not study the particular features of both aspects of the contradiction, we shall fail to understand not only the relations of each party with the other forces, but also the relations between the two parties.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

Note: This is not to draw direct parallel to Venezuela, but to make the point that even when there is significant struggle and contradiction within being allies, the historical lesson is to navigate contradictions in order to overcome the greater contradiction, not intensify resentment when solidarity is needed.

Recording audio is a lot of work. I’m sorry that happened and I appreciate that you do this. If I remember right, it was a recording of yours that got me through Blackshirts and Reds, and that’s a pivotal one for humanizing the USSR and its history.

Yes, it’s critical that we not fall into fatalistic/deterministic thinking. We are always wrestling to decide what the future turns out to be. We aren’t just passengers.