Most of the time crypto scams, stock trading and other practices target most of the times proletarians. The idea that by luck we can defeat capitalists with stocks is naive at best. With whole teams invested and with proper knowledge of the market, with a big chunk of assets to manipulate the direction of prices, and with both insider information and control of the media, they have all the tools to win, and we have almost none.

Nice, another improvement on existing LLM models. It’s impressive how fast the Chinese are advancing in this technology. The nice thing is that they made their work open source as well.

I am not anti-AI or something like it and I use AI on a daily basis. If you work on a domain where there’s plenty code written for it or documentation, AI acts like a very efficient search tool. It does not replace traditional documentation or stack overflow, but it significantly reduces the time I take searching for specific syntax, or an example of how to use a library, or how to use a specific feature or parameter of a library. Occasionally it gives me bad advice as well, such as doing something that results in low performance, low security, but then I can check the actual documentation and code to see the details. For code reviews, I think it’s only partially useful, while sometimes it spits something useful, most of the time it spits out bad or irrelevant advice that ends up polluting the code review screen for actual human devs trying to review the code. However, even with all the gains, which is kind of a mixed bag, I think it’s very unlikely AI will increase speed 10 fold. At best, it will be like a 25% improvement at best, and only specific to some times in the project lifecycle, and most of the gains only happen when you are dealing with generating boilerplate code and adding non business-specific functionality. Most of the time I had to maintain existing code, debug existing functionality and fix some security flaws, AI didn’t help me at all.

I believe AI can’t replace jobs in Software, however it can indeed hurt the software and IT workers in the short and long run. The expectation of the belief that AI will replace workers is enough to do this, even if the outcome is not true. The performance of workers will always be benchmarked against AI tools and that will make negotiation of salary and higher positions harder.

The same can be said about digital artists, even though I think it’s more complicated, since the assessment of quality of art is subjective and many shareholders only see digital art as a cost. For example why hire an artist to design a logo when instead you have a person with a prompt?

It will be a lot of fun once the GenAI hype collapses. The bad part is always the workers paying the price for the bad decisions of the capitalists.

I think it has weight, however, his accusation lacks evidence. He is presenting very circunstancial evidence about a US COVID leak. There’s not even hard evidence of a genetic manipulation of the coronavirus. It’s very unlikely the media will give any attention. If there was even a request for a US lab to use Chinese facilities to spread the virus, both China and the US will keep denying the issue, even if China was the victim in this case.

He exposes some progressive views but he is still a liberal. He was one of the economists that advised Yeltsin’s Russia regarding shock therapy. So he has this gigantic skeleton in his closet.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/06/1097135961/the-day-russia-adopted-the-free-market

I still listen to him, because I like having a broader view on things, but I would never consider him a comrade.

I couldn’t see any reason to move to piefed. It looks so similar to Lemmy. What makes it “better”?

Yes, but I think at every time a communist revolution has any chance of happening, a fascist takeover is also on the table. The reason is twofold, the capitalist class will want to remain in power so it will look after fascist groups to coup the government and reducing democratic rights (like happened in operation condor in South America); capitalism will very likely to be in crisis, so fascist groups will try to win over the dispossessed proletarians and unhappy petit bourgeois to shift them ideologically to the far right.

The last is what is likely happening right now in the whole global north. Since our communist parties are disorganized, the anger sentiment of the population is being captured by the far right.

And the term “final solution” actually came from Canada.

How to tell someone you don’t know how compression algorithms work, without telling them directly.

The feeling that your job is shit, since your manager is pushing that shit feature to appease the corporate execs who doesn’t care about your personal opinion, but you have to do it because it pays your bills, and your family depends on you. At least until you find another job with decent pay.

We live in capitalism, so we workers are alienated from the products of our labor.

Quora is full of reactionaries as well, so I don’t think it’s much better than Reddit. If you look in the right channels you can find good info in Reddit on geopolitics, as long you stay away from the mainstream subreddits.

Thanks, sir, for the good laugh. You made my morning brighter.

We’ll probably have to do it again. But this time the fascists have nukes.

2050: people still wondering how to center a div because html and CSS is a nightmare.

I hope Lula does not try to hinder the whole process again.

I think my generation, that grew after the demise of the Soviet Union, were spoon fed the liberal ideology to an extent that we barely recognize ourselves as workers, and fewer among those recognizing ourselves as the revolutionary class. After the demise of the left that surrendered themselves to neoliberalism, we are suffering from decades of no ideological work to dispute our conscience and the result of this is the big return of far right ideology, since today capitalism is in crisis.

So unfortunately even the most obvious welfare measures that were the results of previous generation of workers’ struggles are being dismantled under the applause of many workers.

I don’t see any way out of this but doing a lot of agitprop and organizing work. I think in a few years we’ll have another opportunity for turning the tables, since I think far right wing politics will turn the landscape in a nightmare, and people will turn from it after the coming downturns. The problem is how much damage these people will do to workers’ movements until they fall.

It’s impressive how irrational US capitalism is becoming. This is just an insane race to squeeze all profit possible from workers and remove any cost associated with environmental regulations. This ignores even the science behind it, since quality controls and work safety have already shown that they can improve business outcomes. These people only care about profit margins, and for them, everything else is just a cost entry in a spreadsheet.

Good mention of Vargas dictatorship. People don’t discuss Vargas dictatorship as much as the 1964 dictatorship (part of operation condor), but both were very brutal against communists.