It’s to stop all the SEESEEPEE spies from slacking off at work…that’s gotta be it!

Sweet, this makes me immediately want to go buy a kobo! I love ifixit.

He doesn’t let his PR hacks tell him what to do!

They are, for sure. I mean in some sense, the explain-ability is why it’s correct…you might need to explain why it’s correct to a judge one day!

Ah, well in that case I won’t take your word for it that it’s good. I’ll take your word for it that it’s working for you for now… Again in a legal context, that’s like “I got chat GPT to write this contract, and it’s working great,” but of course…it won’t be when things go wrong haha!

I have to take your word for it because I don’t know what good code looks like lol. Again, to compare to what I’m familiar with, you can also ask an LLM to draft you a purchase agreement for shares of a private company, and if you’re not a lawyer it’ll look good…and it’ll be able to sound like it’s explaining to you why it’s good…but it will not be good haha

I’ll have to take your word for it! “figuring out” sounds like a higher-order process than a large language model is capable of to me, but if what they do is as good, then great.

I think I’m just skeptical because of how horrendously bad LLM output is in my field of expertise (despite looking fine to a lay person), so I immediately analogize that to other areas. The output of law and coding are both really about language, and the process of creating that output on the part of a lawyer or coder are really about language, so I can see how one might think LLMs would be able to recreate what lawyers and coders do. But boy it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that LLMs will ever get there, at least for law. I have no doubt some yet-unimagined technology could get us there, but “next word prediction” just isn’t gonna be it.

I’m not a coder, so I can’t speak to the quality of code generated by these models. I am a lawyer, and every time I see stuff that lay people think is impressive in my field, I can’t help but guffaw and think “none of this is going to function, and no one will know for years. We’re so fucked…and then one day we’ll have to clean all this up and it’s gonna be so much work.” I kind of assume it’ll be similar for code? Like…it’ll obviously be somewhat better because there is a lot of testing you can actually do, whereas in law “testing” takes many years…and by the time you find out something doesn’t work, the burden of having done it wrong all this time, thinking it was right is catastrophic (which is why lawyers are so conservative about language that they “know works.”

I can see how little features can get added and these tools can deliver on those projects fast…but like…can they do bigger things with consistency? Can they like…set things up well? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but…I guess i’m thinking about Go. It took a long time for neural networks to get to be good at 19 x 19. They got good at 9 x 9 pretty fast. But as the game gets more complicated, it’s way WAY harder to do good long-term strategy. And the machines got there, no doubt. But the entire universe of Go is a 19x19 grid, on which the spaces are black or white or empty. How much more complicated is a language? Even a programming language? infinitely more complex, of course!

So I worry that we’re going to have individual features that work well, but systems that cannot function…looking like the uhhh…weasley house in Harry Potter…but without the magic to hold it up lol.

AI is a broad term; of course neural networks and machine learning have been important in a lot of research etc. That’s all great. LLMs…it’s all anyone wants to talk about (maybe image generation too) and it’s junk for any application that matters.

If looms could only make burlap, and the capitalists tried to make burlap underwear a thing, I think the luddites would be wise to say to the public “hey, don’t buy this crap…it’s uncomfortable!” Of course, in reality, auto-looms did a lot of the same stuff traditional weavers could do. I think pointing out that when techbros say LLMs output is great, pointing out that LLMs output is generally garbage is effective. Luddites couldn’t really say that the output was significantly inferior (or maybe it was and people didn’t notice…jesus I hope that’s not the case with this garbage!).

Maybe that’s what we disagree about. To me, the auto-looms are only making burlap and I don’t see any reason to think they’re going to get much better. And they’re lighting the planet on fire :P

I am not willing to capitulate to this kind of BS: “LLMs are very useful and they’re clearly here to stay.” I just think that’s horseshit. That’s what the capitalists who are selling them want you to think, but I genuinely believe if you ever look at it in a critical context you’ll see.

I mean…looms actually seem useful. My experience with large language models is that they’re only useful when the output doesn’t really matter. Like…they’re fine if you’re “searching” for things that aren’t really defined and you don’t really care about the answer (i.e. “what are the five trendiest coffeeshops in Barcelona that are likely to have english speaking staff?” it can’t actually know any of that…what’s “trendy” even mean? Whatever, who cares, go to a coffee shop on your vacation, have a nice time).

But when it matters you just cannot rely on them…They can’t be relied on to use the correct words when precision of language matters, they can’t do “research” or “analysis” in any meaningful sense…like maybe better than a sharp middle-schooler? But not as well as a dumb undergrad.

And I don’t see any reason, understanding what the technology is to think they’ll get better at those things. It’s predictive in nature. You know…like maybe it’ll go from 60% reliable to 90% reliable over the next hundred years because they’ll find some way to focus on high-quality and relevant training data, while still using gigantic training data to get the model up and running…? But since it’s fundamentally a predictive model (trying to predict what a good answer would look like), it’s never going to be able to actually be relied upon for answers to questions when it matters.

And idk what the cost would be when factoring in all the externalities…environmental destruction, energy consumption…hell, even the infrasound from data centers fucking up everyone’s brain…like…there’s just no way this makes any economic sense. Right now it’s all mega-subsidized, but when that comes to an end…is it gonna cost $10 per prompt on average? $50? Idk, but I know everyone using it now will not want to pay for it.

I guess everyone else learned the playbook and started beating them at it

This is a good post! 🎉

I haven’t seen it! What makes it a Christmas movie?

I like the theory that the fellowship of the ring is a Christmas movie because if you read the books, they use a Gregorian calendar and if you add up travel time etc, apparently you can prove that the fellowship left Rivendell on December 25!

I hope this is a nice conversation and you’re not frustrated; it’s nice for me!

inside

I don’t disagree it shouldn’t be an echo chamber; I’m glad you’re here (not that I have or should have any say in the use of the space!). Definitely not “inside” though. When I say “inside” I mean within a democratic centralist organization with some kind of political discipline. Organizations I’ve been part of would, from time to time, task members with researching and creating a report on AES countries, and then presenting their report internally to help develop well-considered positions on them. That’s the level of “internal” that I mean! Like…among people who trust each other, and only those people.

strategic criticism

If you mean that “strategic criticism” winds up just being “no criticism” I think that may be a fair critique of a lot of ML orgs.

Theory

Obviously the importance of theory is something people disagree about heatedly but to me, resistance to imperialism in the imperialist countries is so minimal that I’m happy to see a wide variety of tactics and let what happens happen. I got my theories but I ain’t gonna go out of my way to criticize someone else’s (hell, I was general Secretary of an IWW branch for several years…Marxist friends joke thay of course the anarchists made the Marxist be the organized one)

authoritarianism

When it comes to the word authoritarianism, I think a lot of Marxists have the same knee-jerk traction, which is to turn to Engels’ On Authority. Not for no reason, I think he makes a good point:

But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.

So am I authoritarian? I mean I guess so, in that I believe in revolution. I believe “authoritarian means” may be appropriate. I don’t think any MLs see authoritarian means as a desirable feature in and of themselves. I think every ML wants to see them discarded as soon as they are no longer necessary. I think reasonable people can disagree about what that looks like, obviously…but that’s a difference of degree, not of kind, right? At least I would see it that way.

Big agree that intellectual dishonesty is bad. We should all think and speak and work as clearly as we can. Insofar as MLs (or anyone else for that matter) think unscientifically (worshiping books, class reductionism, etc), that’s bad!

I think some people can hold China accountable; Chinese people! When I say “we can’t hold them accountable” I mean “the internet.” (Of course I think people in the CPC have the most power and greatest obligation to hold the government accountable, but I understand skepticism about that, obviously. I don’t think that skepticism is merely a result of western propaganda or something. I worry about that too; they clearly don’t do a stellar job lol).

propaganda

You said your categories but not what you meant by them, just that they are important factors for you. So having a target audience makes something more likely to be propaganda, as does intention to spread a political message, as does the actual effectiveness of reaching people? That’s all fine; I don’t think these really help us come to agreement on what is or isn’t propaganda. Like…it looks to me like your messages in this thread have a target audience (tankies and/or potential tankies), they intend to carry a political message (comparing china and the us like this let’s China off the hook for its own evils)…maybe they don’t reach many people (maybe even just one?). But in the scheme of things I don’t think that factor particularly weighs in favor of anything on Lemmy being propaganda lol; way too puny for reaching any substantial number of people (And fwiw I would say the same thing about my own messages).

no!! It takes place around the Salzburg festival which is in…July I think?

I don’t think tankies think what you think tankies think. Maybe I’m wrong, but my impression is that when Marxist Leninists get together, criticism of “AES” countries is a perfectly fine topic of conversation “inside” the group, but when it’s done “outside” it serves the interest of the US/capital/imperialism. And I think there’s something to that; it does! A little full of yourself to think it could matter more than looking reasonable to outsiders or educating your insiders…but it’s not totally crazy. I don’t know, there is plenty though, like look at bad empanada (I think he’d be considered a tankie, right?). Guys done quite a bit on the Uyghurs.

I say all this as a Marxist Leninist (I assume I’m a “tankie” to people who use the word “tankie” lol).

Of course, I’d also say it’s a bit silly to think one could “hold [China] accountable” by the opposite means.

We disagree about what propaganda means, I guess. I don’t think “doing anti-China propaganda” means you hate China or something, I think it just means you’re conveying a political message that runs counter to their political message. I don’t understand the distinction between political messaging that is or isn’t propaganda?

I mean, I do understand that context; it is a propaganda piece portraying China as comparatively better than the US.

China is comparatively better than the U.S.

Making propaganda to that effect is good.

Everything is propaganda. You’re doing anti-China propaganda; I’m doing pro-China propaganda. with a veneer of nuance or whatever but my words have political meaning and so do yours…

I’ve never understood how any expression of political thought could not be propaganda… or that there’s an especially good/principled way to separate what you and me are doing from whatever you mean by propaganda…if it’s a government paying for it I really don’t think OP qualifies…or else the PRC should get its fuckin money back lol

The Sound of Music is not a Christmas movie.

My wife and her family and a whole bunch of Canadians all think it is and I am so flummoxed by it.

Who said atrocities are justifiable? Didn’t I just agree with you it was bad?

You’re the one that brought up Hong Kong as a “this was bad therefore it’s totally ridiculous to say anything positive about China.” I agree with the first part, but not the second nor the connection.

Maybe it’s not a majority, I don’t know, but at least some of the protesters were wishing to stay a UK colony; the Union Jack was much in evidence (which is pretty wild really). Or were those CPC provocateurs or something? If you tell me that was a vocal and ridiculous minority, that’s fine, I wasn’t there, I’ll believe you.

Look man, I’m happy people were brave and cool and protested for what they believed in, even if it’s not what I believe in, and it’s bad Chinese cops/authorities/whatever hurt them for it. I don’t know why that would mean I should think that saying good things about China is wrong. I also think the surveillance and mistreatment of the Uyghurs is bad…like way worse than what happened in Hong Kong. There are also lots of good things to say about China.

Nope that’s bad. Cops hurting protesters is bad even when the protesters are wrong.

Less bad than the wrong protesters getting their way and Hong Kong staying a colony of the UK…but still bad, for sure.