I’m reading Ravikant Kisna’s “Meet the Savarnas”. It’s infuriating to know that there is such a rampant caste based hierarchical society in India - something which pushes mediocrity not arising out of an accident of historical relations but because it insists on doing so.

My cover image is also extracted from there. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to understand how caste functions in modern day India in relatively blunt and simple language.

Marx had written about Indian caste system being slowly eradicated with the growth of migration and the Indian railways (as it was developing during his time). Many Indian communists confused their analysis by relegating it to a superstructure and thereby a lower priority for the movement.

But as Ambedkar argues the Hindu Social Order is all invasive in this region - and he asks Indian communists to engage with this seriously. This book is the most accessible supplement to that argument in modern day.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace was a good read. So was Kafka. In recent times I found David Graeber to be quite critical. I would also recommend Arundhati Roy.

John McCarthy was an AI evangelist. That explains a lot of the frenzy - like, this was fascistic from the beginning.

I get your points, thanks for being with me so far. I want to say another thing in good faith and want to know if you think it makes sense.

MAD itself is a pretty fucked up situation for the world to be in at all.

Capitalism has scaled up production of components that we say suck unanimously because of the state it brings the world to - for instance, plastics that do not degrade, guns, surveillance technology. These are, to me, components for useful tools in good hands or made out of processes that can be utilised better.

If we are to resist the productive capacity tools or processes being misused, however, we have to go against the tendency of capitalism to misuse its productive capacities. And organising at the consumption level has statistically affected this tendency of capitalism to misuse/fall in wrong hands - e.g. for the BDS brands, and largely for building consensus against gun sales.

the decision is "should I make use of what they're going to build anyway, regardless of what I say, or should I boycott it and potentially make me less effective in the struggle for liberation as a result."

Even from a communist viewpoint, if we resist the relentless kind of upscaling of GenAI more critically we would have gained in our communities/organising spaces. I say this because the GenAI economy is always in a precarious state - with debt funded by big finance and many saying it's a "bubble about to burst". Our chance to fight this capitalism's big bet on AI can lead to a victory for the left.

Vibecoded software due to it's tendency to bloat, risks becoming usable only when backed by a trustable producer (this ends up being big tech a lot of times). Which makes the imperative to be informed about alternatives to GenAI enabled software equally important for the organised left.

Edit: I know you're probably not implying the left not be informed about alternatives to GenAI enabled software but, I mentioned it because if we accept that it must (be informed), an equally large part of organising would be to insulate ourselves from vibecoding.

Your feeling of moving out could be a response to the stress you're facing from being in your immediate environment as well. And nevertheless, always go for small things that are proven to work - like, some exercise, some cooking your favourite foods (it will help after moving out), some reflection, and a whole lot of time for yourself in general. Try not to go too long without a professional to help you, though.

Would you say copyright can't be a tool for good, as you put it?

And if AI exists in any form outside of the subscription model, without hallucinations and bias, and without consuming our municipal water supply, I would've agreed that it creates that kind of worth/alternative similar to the examples on nuclear use you said. But I can't think of an example of such an alternative.

We're just not talking about who owns it and hence who benefits - which is, the corporations. I know China has good models but even those cost too much for me as I live in a third world country and programming was supposed to be a way for me to earn an income.

The comparison between AI and child labour was a hypothetical because, AI may be causing similar levels of damage - it generates through non consensually obtained datasets of human endeavour and hence is as unethical as CL. It's a bit like saying if we keep going down this road, we will become very proficient at writing prompts to take the easy way out while losing the experience of understanding the context. And the argument is, that within the logic of capitalism, it will all be because it was possible. Whether you say its merely a tool or not.

And if I'm building a weekend project (as opposed to a business product), I can speak for myself in that it was always equally an opportunity to learn about the underlying technology so that I can keep it running, have more ideas, and finally, be an expert in it someday. These days I vibecode projects just for the sake of it. And speaking from personal experience, I don't learn much at all. I've heard lots of others face this kind of cognitive decline.

Edit: I'm not sure if that's what you're saying, but if we are okay with LLM's becoming our experts in the long run, they should not be so probabilistic. As in, we can never really monitor at a low level what a given population will get in return if they prompt for x task. Much less, we don't even know how to monitor an LLM's generation process except by asking it to generate something that assures us it's vectors mapped out what an individual user can only hope is what it semiotically connotes.

Hey, hope things get better soon. Take care of yourself and prioritise your happiness. If there are any things you liked doing before you fell into this phase, pick em up gradually and one by one. I've found that helps. Also visit local places you like more - and plus points if its a free public place. I'm here if you need help figuring more out!

I no longer want notifications, thanks

yes

Truly a universal experience. Even the teams don't take themselves as seriously as the fans do

Fun stuff unless played in a colosseum

Conditions are ripe for radicalising football fans, I'd say. I think anyone can see the sport being killed this time, and this is a frontier that I think is both old and new at the same time. There is a lot of theory about media and consumption, but sports gets viewed as apolitical when it's just not.

Even the rules have become technicalised. Football managers are probably going to incentivise players to play lifelessly even more than before. Nevertheless, I live in a country where there is a lot of love for foreign teams and that provides leeway for some political support. Considering this, I'm supporting Iran, hoping that I can reverse some of that internal bias towards popular teams.

The ex-redditor in me wants to say, "Downvotes should not be used for disagreement, derp". It's one of the (UX?) flaws with this format.

Also as a leftist instance, we want to avoid infighting through downvotes.

Sorry for latching on to your comment. Seemed the best place to say this

While on Reddit, I vaguely remember there being discourse on how upvotes should be for adding to the discourse only. Also that there was some archaic form of AI baked into the algorithm so that users who upvoted en masse would not have their votes counted.

While I wouldn't want AI in any form for moderation, I think this discussion is necessary and perhaps we ought to have more information on how it is meant to encourage discussion through upvotes, whether or not we use downvotes.

Of course, I'll give it a try and revert.

PS: I can't view the comment by me that you're replying to. Is it just me?

yes

1. Word Sound Power - I often think about how music stopped being brave gradually - whereas this album names actual Indian politicians as corrupt, names atrocities by the Indian state, and spreads the message of communism with a hell of a bop.

2. Angine de Poitrine because it suddenly came over my feed, apparently it's a meme? It's alright - just a lot of chromatic riffing that sounds especially good if you're into guitar music

Thanks for the input, I'm a bit of a vibe coder myself but largely self taught so I appreciate the advice. I think if it works out as a custom batch suite it'd be great, I'll probably put it out as a github (or perhaps gitlab?) repo but with the major disclaimer that the code would come without any warranty - on a P2P license.

I don't think voice cloning is possible for the texts that I have in mind (Marx, Engels, Lenin) because there is a danger of misrepresenting their personalities without sufficient speech recordings available.

There's this HF space called TTS-Spaces-Arena and Kokoro has the most votes. Even the audio sounds good to me (I'm 2 hours into the audiobook I generated on a fly), so unless there's a reason to go elsewhere, I'll be going ahead with Kokoro tentatively.