I do agree with that, fascism is really easy to organize… Granted it always has a shelf life for the same underlying reasons

But conservatism more broadly? It only feels that way because there’s been a concentrated effort for a century to propagandize people. Liberals gave so much ground that cutting social programs and public private partnerships became the default position for both parties. There’s so many lies that go uncontested… Some of the myths commonly believed about capitalism and government are insane, and that isn’t an accident

In the days of FDR it was really easy to organize for progressives… The momentum was there. People’s lives were improving noticeably, they had hope for the future, and they had confidence in the leadership

Political momentum is the key. The pendulum is shifting quickly left, so it’s becoming easier to organize on the left than it’s been for generations. It’ll get even easier if the promises are delivered on, disenfranchised voters will need less and less convincing to mobilize

Holy shit, you’re a fucking retard. Like of the “people look and laugh” scale. I’m unironically going to take your response to share with technical people in my life to laugh over

And no hate to the mentally ill, I’ve never laughed at them. I laugh with them, because they’re delightful and love joy to an extent that leaves me jealous

But you’re not a real person. You’re a joke, if your ego was two sizes smaller I’d be gently explaining to you how no number of code katas would result in Microsoft XP

No, I mean this is a well documented thing that happened… They literally infiltrated leftist groups and would sow division and call for endless votes and debates on banal issues

I am talking about intersectionality, but I don’t think we should use that word. It’s big and scares the common idiot. Also it has implications about being idpol, which is thoroughly tainted at this point

I’m not saying you have to give ground… I’m talking about focus on good messaging. You don’t have to throw trans people or Palestinians under the bus. You don’t have to hide your positions or be apologetic either

But we all need to focus on message discipline. We need to be evangelical. Houses. Healthcare. Food. Wages. Tax the rich. Fix our democracy

Basically everyone agrees on the real issues, and we must be as Mumdani. He doesn’t back down, he’s totally unapologetic about his stances, but he doesn’t get distracted

Tight, focused messaging. Universal problems, simple to understand solutions. No pamphlets, no scary words

Okay, well I disagree on the effectiveness of ML methods, they industrialized quickly but easily fell to corruption and ended up falling to capitalism

But do we really need to debate that? I’d love to build something better than capitalism, but a glorious revolution isn’t on the table.

In the mean time, I totally agree.

I bet we’d agree with everything possible to do right now. I think imperialism is bad, but I’m worried about the future for my friends and family. I’m worried about my neighbors, about my country, about human rights violations against my countrymen

But I’m not going to live or die on stopping imperialism or on Palestine - we have to fix our county so we even have the ability to resist the forces of capital at home if we ever want to reign it in globally

I don’t think we should sacrifice these issues either, but I don’t think we have to… I just think we have to focus on that can be done now. We’re not going to unwind the World Bank and the IMF to get the global south off the debt treadmill tomorrow

We could overturn citizens united and start trust busting tomorrow if we fix healthcare today. If we fix housing, and food availability. If we bring back social programs

The empire is collapsing. I think that’s set in stone.

But Rome never truly fell, the people woke up the next day. The question is, do we fall into a dark age as we wait for the contradictions of capitalism to make the economy go poof, or do we wind it down gently

I think we can make material conditions for people better, which means that when the music stops progressives will be in power and have the trust of the people

And we can argue about how to build something better then. The next steps are the same

If you believe in ML or aspects of it, fine. I don’t care if you’re a full on tankie. You can be a militant vegan or radical environmentalist too.

But when progressives march, we all have to set down (not give ground on) our single issues to join them. Because they’re the movement marching against capital right now under a banner that we can all fit under without compromising any of our goals or ideals

No we don’t. The CIA and FBI intentionally created this culture in leftist movements, why do we need to debate and reach consensus on everything?

We can just stop infighting, shut up about praxis and labels, and march together until we differ. It would leave us in a better place to go even further, however we might envision it

Healthcare, lower rents, higher pay, workers rights, tax the rich. Just get on the bus, you can get off whenever you like but we can’t all hold up the bus driver

Then what is it measuring? Right and left are directions, they’re labels that are extremely contextual

I genuinely don’t know which of many axis you might be referring to. I think you’re probably gesturing to something like equal/inequal distribution of power, but you could also mean progressive vs regressive, or even liberal vs fascist

Some guy came out of nowhere and invented a new currency. One based on ideas that couldn’t work

The nobles on one side said “we have to maintain the status quo, despite that being impossible”. The nobles on the other side said “we have to accept our financial losses and find a new way forward”

There were no other groups in the room. They were all nobility

And the whole thing went on until the starving peasants broke in and brought out the guillotines

It was not simple. It never is. What is simple is the sanitized version fed to the masses to placate them

Because we don’t have better words. We’re different, in probably 5 different ways, but there’s only one word for it

I wish. The world would be a much better place if the left could agree until we differ

Neat way to reduce a complicated situation to something simple. No deeper lessons to be learned

Thinking takes effort. It’s easy to spout platitudes

The French revolution wasn’t that simple. Read up on Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, and how he pushed the assignant and destroyed the French economy

It’s never that simple. Life, and how humanity organizes itself, is always far more complicated

So is semiconductor design, application of transistors to implement logic gates, etc. We still have people who can do that, not very many, but enough. Not many people work in assembly language anymore, either…

Yeah, that’s a lost tech. We still use the same decades, even century old, frameworks

They’re not perfect. But they are unchangeable. We no longer have the skills to adapt them to modern technology. Improvements are incremental, despite decades of effort you still can’t reliably run a system on something like RISK.

That’s an insane paradigm. That’s putting so many things on one axis

You have to try to understand others from where they are. The right is generally bad, but they also believe in people… Which has merit. The left is generally good, except when their plans are bat shit insane

Personally, I believe anarcho-communism is the ideal situation. It’s also bat shit insane. I don’t know if I could live in such a society, I’m certain most people today couldn’t

You have to see the nuance and see where people agree and differ. Every successful political movement is evangelical. I refuse to believe most people don’t want to live in a better world, they’re just generally really fucking stupid

But they have values… Some are good and some are bad. Some are inherent and some are learned.

Good things are good, bad things are bad. We have enough food to overfeed everyone… People shouldn’t starve. You can believe in that fact, I think nearly everyone believes this, while also being a too dumb to understand how to solve that contradiction

There’s no objectively best system. The world is a messy place. The best system is the one that works best at the moment

You’ve fallen into the trap. Political stances aren’t on a spectrum, they’re multi dimensional

Some leftists believe in anarchy, in a lack of hard boundaries and a more organic cultural resistance to bad actors. Some believe in rigid structure, in the rules creating equity and equality.

Tankies believe in an authoritarian, top down force that will impress ideology onto the masses.

All lefties believe in equity and/or equality. That’s the common thread. Tankies are crazy high on the authoritarian vs anarchy spectrum, but they genuinely think that road will lead to an equitable society

Okay, but if it’s writing 800 lines at once, it’s making design choices. Which is all well and good for a one off, but it will make those choices, make them a different way each time, and it will name everything in a very generic or very eccentric way

The AI can’t remember how it did it, or how it does things. You can do a lot… Even stuff that hasn’t entered commercial products like vectorized data stores to catalog and remind the LLM of key details when appropriate

2000 lines is nothing. My main project is well over a million lines, and the original author and I have to meet up to discuss how things flow through the system before changing it to meet the latest needs

But we can and do it to meet the needs of the customer, with high stakes, because we wrote it. These days we use AI to do grunt work, we have junior devs who do smaller tweaks.

If an AI is writing code a thousand lines at a time, no one knows how it works. The AI sure as hell doesn’t. If it’s 200 lines at a time, maybe we don’t know details, but the decisions and the flow were decided by a person who understands the full picture

Highly authoritarian leftists

I don’t think we should be having the AI write the program in the first place. I think we’re barreling towards a place where remotely complicated software becomes a lost technology

I don’t mind if AI helps here and there, I certainly use it. But it’s not good at custom fit solutions, and the world currently runs on custom fit solutions

AI is like no code solutions. Yeah, it’s powerful, easier to learn and you can do a lot with it… But eventually you will hit a limit. You’ll need to do something the system can’t do, or something you can’t make the system do because no one properly understands what you’ve built

At the end of the day, coding is a skill. If no one is building the required experience to work with complex systems, we’re going to be swimming in a world of endless ocean of vibe coded legacy apps in a decade

I just don’t buy that AI will be able to take something like a set of State regulations and build a complaint outcome. Most of our base digital infrastructure is like that, or it uses obscure ancient systems that LLMs are basically allergic to working with

To me, we’re risking everything on achieving AGI (and using it responsibly) before we run out of skilled workers, and we’re several game changing breakthroughs from achieving that

AI isn’t good at changing code, or really even understanding it… It’s good at writing it, ideally 50-250 lines at a time

Who cares? It’s subjective.

If it’s reposted all the time, but people like it a lot so they upvote instead, why do we need more accurate data?

Because your diet sucks. A few months of eating only unprocessed food and you’d probably eat McDonald’s exactly one more time in your life

And I do specifically mean McDonald’s… It’s uniquely disgusting, even among fast food. It tastes like it’s reconstituted food scraps doped with sugar