Technology – tools – takes on the character of the superstructure it’s in, in a dictatorship of the proletariat AI will necessarily be proletarian in character.

try crush (FOSS) with a deepseek API key, 5$ gets you something like a whole month of agentic including coding. It’s really really cheap.

Loyal to deepseek because they don’t have anything to even upsell you, and API access is so cheap and does most things. They’re slowly upgrading it, probably prior to dropping v4, but they have a 1M token context window now on web and the API documentation says it is not 3.2 anymore on web. 3.2 itself only came out in december last year. we’ll see when v4 comes out but i have high hopes for it.

oh that’s probably why we have a bunch of account requests pop up suddenly haha

So your problem with AI is when it doesn’t conform to your personal view of what counts as art/appropriate usage but I’m making a strawman and being ridiculous when you prove my point. wild.

I was directly replying to the comments in the reddit thread.

Westerners have a view of China that is 10-20 years in the past, or more. They thought only the US would be able to innovate in AI/neural networks with Europe contributing maybe 1% of it, as has been usual in the past. Then China comes along and not only do they provide similar state-of-the-art performances and innovations, they 2. provide more research (look at all the AI related papers being published on arxiv, >50% of them are Chinese) and 3. choose to work open-source/open-weight instead of proprietary.

Now overvalued companies like OpenAI can’t compete, so their second best shot is “but do you really want China to control AI? We should control AI, like we’ve controlled the world’s supply of new things for the past 100 years. Now give me 500 billion $$$”

AI is like the steam machine was in its time. The benefits of steam were not readily apparent, they needed the machines to be designed first to use steam, and the infrastructure to make use of that steam. But once they did, everything accelerated quickly. We are in the first 4 years of AI still, it hasn’t even been half a decade yet. At this stage, at the state-level, AI is considered almost existential. A country that had the steam machine simply outpaced anyone else in production, allowing imperialism at scale. You could out-produce commodities, out-outfit your army, out-manufacture weapons with the steam machine.

AI has that potential, whether it will reach it is another question but at this time it’s not a question of “I don’t like how it looks” or “it’s not really art” anymore. The US government is not interested in AI because it does slightly better customer support, it wants it for war and imperialism. Like focusing on the surface-level arguments of AI is just a distraction, there’s so much more at stake here than our social media experience. Any attempt to “fight back” against it will just put it in the hands of the state and remove it from our hands. Refusal to use it or learn how to use it is self-defeating, as it once again only puts it in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the reactionaries. Do we want to win or do we just want to have good optics? And while we congratulate ourselves on having chased “AI slop” out of whatever big conglomerate social media platform, Raytheon will happily make AI enhanced missiles, unbothered.

Meanwhile China is using AI in education, agriculture, infrastructure and healthcare - which is not a coincidence at all, food especially, considering their history of famine in the country. Other Global South countries are following and developing AI too, though they are doing so slowly, and could benefit from Chinese models (and BRI infrastructure such as the chips required to run and train these models).

They’re scared. China has ~half an energy grid’s worth of reserve electricity produced at all times while we here don’t even know what solar panels are. A lot of people in Europe still have never seen a solar panel in their life, because we tariffed Chinese solar panels to ludicrous 300-1000% amounts so that people will be forced to buy overpriced shitty EU-made panels. And then they don’t buy these panels because they’re too expensive.

I suspect as China’s development with AI progresses we will see more of these arguments about somehow fighting against Chinese AI (as if that was somehow possible) while trying to leave US companies alone. All this talk they’re doing in the comments about China while not mentioned OpenAI or Anthropic is an example. And yes, it’s weird that there’s suddenly anti-China top-level comments out of nowhere, but there’s also a lot of communists that I’ve found on this cluster of subreddits.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI

The 70s were wild. They seem so distant (half a century wtf) but the more they surge back, the more I see similarities to today’s climate. The first airplane hijackings, a burgeoning indie scene in the arts, a very “i don’t even care about this shit anymore” attitude, the black panthers, invention of Gonzo journalism, the legacy of the many liberation movements and struggles of the 1960s, the oil crisis, and now even the kitsch is coming back in style!

Is Salo as shocking as people say or is it one of those things where its reputation makes it look bigger than it is? You got me intrigued when you said it was written by MLs lol.

At this level they are not competitors anymore, they are good friends with each other - including in politics. It’s how capitalism progresses as it asserts itself as the hegemonic mode of production. All the talks of “if this law gets passed it’ll be bad for business and I might just move my company” is exactly just talk; by the time the law is even publicized to the public these guys have already been told all about it and ran the numbers and simulations and know exactly how they’re coming out of it. Shadowy elites, though, that depends. I mean, they’re pretty blatant about it. We know who they are – Bill Gates Elon Musk etc. The shadowy part might be that they keep up the appearances in front of the cameras (so to speak) but behind it they all know each other intimately.

There’s an old joke that after convicting the accused, the judge, the prosecutor and the attorney all go grab drinks together.

I’m reposting most of what I find on twitter with the prolewiki account but if you don’t have an account you can’t read twitter anymore unfortunately

some people put up jmail.world website which looks like gmail but you’re logged in as epstein as a way to browse the email correspondence more easily. I think there’s a few other archives, MeidasTouch I think is one? Note I know nothing about these websites, I can’t personally endorse them.

some of the files were deleted shortly after being published by DOJ, but were archived.

I can post some of the stuff that was found, but I’ll do it in spoilers. Warning - not for everyone to read. I don’t even know what content warnings to use but if this is a difficult topic for you please just don’t open the spoiler, if anything ask me if you have a question and I can try to answer you differently if you really want to know.

Halfway through I decided to delete the list because I couldn’t continue but I think it’s important to type this all out and conserve it. I think more stuff will come out of this latest round, but this is what I’ve seen mentioned so far.

I think you’re talking to OP comrade 😳

I have a hard time taking trots seriously, never did tbh lol, so I’m not really up to the meta on SIOC and permanent revolution. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, permanent revolution was where trotsky agreed with the mensheviks that the peasantry could not be trusted and would turn counter-revolutionary, and therefore there needed to be a solely workers government that oppressed the peasantry, whereas the bolsheviks instituted a joint dictatorship of the workers and peasants.

This would create resistance from the peasantry but incite workers in industrialized countries (namely europe at the time), along with material help from the workers government in russia ig, to wage revolution of their own and then come to help trotsky’s workers government suppress the rest of the peasantry.

I don’t know like I said I can’t for the life of me find anything related to trotsky interesting in the slightest, so I have a hard time wrapping my head around this but… I can see several issues from the get-go lol.

I didn’t ban you.

+ 40 years of cold war propaganda + times of heightened contradictions + living in the heart of the empire itself.

The CW propaganda was wild, someone once told me people in the USSR were “miming” working at the factory line (like the line was empty and they just mimed work) because there was nothing to produce. Like what? How does that even make sense lol. They were older, probably heard this as a kid in school. It was a real generational shock for me hearing this.

My POV is that yugo has a big audience and should be mindful of what he says, especially since he knows his audience is mostly baby leftists. And secondly Johnstone has herself gone on unhinged rants before:

She herself is a weird hodgepodge of liberalism and mildly progressive views. She’s said several times she’s not a communist and actively refuses to become one.

And when they’re called out for it they double down trying to “explain” how they were right and then never change. They have 0 material analysis, they’re just doing vibes-based politics. Is this how yugo wants to conduct politics with the masses? Would he publish this rant under a party name? If not, then why publish it on twitter under his own name? This is the kind of stuff you say with friends, and they gently steer you in the right direction.

Why are our idols now streamers and youtubers? Why do we care what these petty bourgeois enthusiasts who try to make a living taking money from baby comrades think about how struggle is conducted? Of course they’ll defend their petty-bourgeois views when it comes down to it. That’s what makes them money. Viki herself took a long break because she made, you guessed it, deeply ignorant remarks.

Yet they call for left-unity and expect us to side with their shit views and opinions, sweep them under the rug, while they continue on thinking and spouting whatever words they want. But it’s us, the marxist-leninists, that have to be on our best behavior around them.

Like I don’t know, I don’t always have the right takes and I’ve made comments to people on the internet that I regret. I apologize to them and talk to friends to understand the problem and synthesize my own conclusion from it. I don’t tell more principled people that they’re the ones who need to change and not me, cause that’s what they’re doing here. Coming from caitlin and vicki, it’s deeply selfish and self-centered to say this. They think because they’re big names with an audience that automatically makes them right and everyone else wrong.

When Lenin said “Among the Jews there are workers, toilers, they are in the majority. They are our brothers, comrades in the struggle for Socialism, because they are oppressed by capitalism. Among the Jews there are Kulaks, exploiters, capitalists, just like amongst us all,” he preceded it with:

Only entirely uneducated and completely oppressed people can believe the lies and slanders which are being spread about the Jews. These are survivals from the times of serfdom, when the priests burnt heretics at the stake, when peasants were trampled upon and were blind. But these dark survivals of serfdom are disappearing, the people are beginning to see.

Notice Lenin didn’t say “you must have faulty genes if you believe otherwise you disabled r-word”.

Criticism and self-criticism is a core component of marxism to progress forward. Normally it implies we find issues to remedy and then remedy them, so we all progress together. In this case, I’m not really sure where to even begin. I think it speaks for itself (esp. the “now I’m not calling them the r-word, just the diminutive that’s acceptable in your circles :)”)

But people don’t deserve to have their shit takes swept under the rug just because they’re nominally on “our side”. He chose to publish this on Twitter and leave it up, what are we supposed to do? Smile while he continues saying whatever unhinged shit crosses his mind that day under the shower, never getting challenged for it? What example does this set for the new leftists that watch him, who start to think communism is just about appearing edgy and being counter-culture?

I want to leave one last thought; you suggest to debate rightists, but why not rightist views and right deviationist views? Not everyone who calls themselves a communist is immediately our comrade, people don’t suddenly develop all the correct theory and ideas as soon as they proclaim themselves to be a marxist.

exactly, the contradictions are internal - or in other words, they’re coming from inside the house!

It’s the second time I’ve seen him tweet shit like this. I can probably dig up the previous time if I go looking in my discords.

I can understand being exasperated esp when you’re an somewhat known figure you probably get a lot of trolls and content of this sort sent your way, and sometimes you just quip something back at them. but to take the time to type out all of this and then decide “yes, I shall now send this. It’s a good idea” is something else.

Believe people when they show you who they are. Anyone can appear however they want when they control the camera, but posts like this are off-the-cuff moments where they feel like they’re talking to their friends around the campfire.

Here was the last time actually (archive):

his defense was the person in the video is a millionaire nepo baby so that makes it okay. Like again there’s a difference between saying “eat the rich” and making an entire eugenics screed over a video.

We easily rehost reading lists as category pages, and then located inside https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:Reading_lists. The upside is they can directly contain links, the downside is after that it’s up to people to find them in the midst of all our pages. I am actually (very slowly) in the process of making a bunch of reading lists based on our absolute beginner’s; very short lists but lots of them on all sorts of different topics instead of every topic all at once.

To illustrate some of what you said, I sent deepseek web some of the stats with no specific instructions (taken from a prior conversation with the agentic software where the same LLM came up with these stats for how I could make this script work):

(this was in a fresh conversation - as you can see in the spoiler tag, I didn’t give deepseek any instructions about what it should make)

It returned this:

{
  "steps": 28,
  "scheduler": "Karras",
  "sampler": "DPM++ 2M Karras",
  "width": 1024,
  "height": 1024,
  "prompt": "(ethereal female figure:1.2), face merging with swirling landscape, melancholic expression, deep azure, cerulean, sapphire and slate blue color palette, subtle hints of silver and misty white, abstract fluid forms, organic geometry, painterly textures, soft dramatic lighting, sense of quiet introspection, deep emotion, inspired by symbolic portraitism and abstract expressionism, high detail, artistic masterpiece",
  "negative_prompt": "bright colors, vibrant, cheerful, cartoon, anime, 3d render, photorealistic, sharp edges, hard lines, smile, happy, explicit, ugly, deformed, blurry, logo, text, signature",
  "seed": -1,
  "CFG scale": 7.5
}

It took sort of a roleplay role which is fine for the example; querying the API instead would probably keep it more to the point and actually acting like the artist and not “as if I had to pretend I was an artist”, because on the web interface it has an entire system prompt injected at the beginning that the user can’t see.

I simply copied and pasted its settings into my interface, and this is what came out. I could put some of my thoughts about it but that’s not the point of course. In this case I was only a proxy for the AI to communicate with the image generation engine.

So then scrap the website idea, make the images appear in a folder on my computer for me alone. It’s only a small part of the whole that showcases the idea, it’s not the entire experiment.

Is deepseek an artist, can we say it did not have intention when making the images? I don’t even have to code the script and parameters, deepseek can write that itself. Therefore I am only the tool that does the operations deepseek can’t do (like running the code or starting the web gen interface, although it could do that with agentic)