You also wouldn’t really know that a coat was made of ethically sourced pelts or if it was made from animals in abhorrent and cruel conditions. But knowing that could shift your opinion of buying that coat, simply because you wouldn’t want to support the practice of abusing and the cruel treatment of Animals.

I don’t think any coat is made ethically under capitalism, no matter what material it is made of.

In truth labels such as Fairtrade, FSC, and others like that are just a band-aid to make people feel good about their purchase decisions. Fairtrade is not any fairer; farmers in Africa who grow cocoa beans don’t even know what the beans are used for. They have never tasted chocolate made with their beans.

Same thing with AI. If declaring usage of it hurts sales… then maybe it’s better to not declare it. Is there a disclaimer that a game uses Unreal Engine or Unity? No, because we don’t care care what tools people use, we just care about the result of it. The disclaimer doesn’t change the material conditions of why people might use AI for their app, it just makes it so that they have an incentive to hide it. So it’s not a solution. The fact that Steam doesn’t require a disclaimer for code generated by AI, which is what 80% of AI is probably used for, is an indication that this policy is really just trying to soothe over customers. Players can’t see the code so it doesn’t count as AI to them though.

Heck, I am still sometimes getting the “ignore all previous instructions” comments because I like to explain things in more detail

Exactly, people are going after anyone for the cardinal sin of using AI. Meanwhile BP commits another oil spill and openAI buys another 40% of the world wafer supply. It’s misguided, they just want to yell at someone. But I’m not a priest, and I don’t operate a confession booth. Neither are you! If they want to expiate their anxieties against AI they should formulate an actual actionable platform.

It is certainly explainable.

OpenAI was given half a trillion dollars to ‘develop’ AI with. It’s called project Stargate.

The first thing they did with it was wave the check around and promise to buy 40% of all wafers produced globally. Wafers are the precursors to memory chips. OpenAI doesn’t need wafers; it needs working memory (either ram, Vram or SSD). They don’t manufacture anything so they don’t do anything with the wafers. They just don’t want anyone else to have them because the competition can use the memory.

But capitalism does what it does, which is to chase profit, and ever wafer manufacturer was happy to get a piece of that half trillion dollars. It’s no surprise that the first to abandon memory production were Micron (the company behind Crucial, which is the finished product division for consumers) and Sony, also producers of wafers.

There was never any guarantee written down anywhere that gpu prices would remain stable. That would actually be going against the laws of capitalism. If it hadn’t been AI, it was going to be something else upsetting this balance.

anyone could make their own shitcoin and pull the rug on you. They owned it from start to finish, and could do anything they wanted with it.

The problem that AI poses to grifters is training and deploying your own AI is very cost-intensive.

At best they can make a chatGPT wrapper that grafts its own scripts and prompt to it. But they still pay for API, which is expensive, so it’s difficult to price it for clients too.

And the best part is their graft is easily copyable. Anyone can then set an agent on their service and reverse-engineer the entire thing to use locally, for free.

I turned an online photo editor to fully offline (no ads and no telemetry mainly) and am starting to bring my own changes to it. All with AI. Took an afternoon.

if you need steam to tell you a game has AI in it then that means you couldn’t have any way of figuring it out without the disclaimer. If you can’t determine, without the disclaimer, whether a game contains AI then there’s nothing to complain about and you fall back to the age old “do I enjoy this game? yes/no” metric. Backwards policy by Steam to cover their ass.

I feel that disclaimers like “this game contains gambling mechanics. It is a casino.” would be way more important and actually helpful. But no, better to admonish a game priced $2.99 that only sold 10 copies for using AI to generate concepts in the early stages of the game.

Or if you don’t want to take the risk of playing “AI slop” just pirate your games like a grownup.

Trotsky was never trusted or “Lenin’s pick”. Lenin’s pick is meaningless, unless you believe that Lenin was a literal demigod dictator who could just say “I choose you” like Ash Ketchum chooses a pokemon and the CPSU central committee would make it so. This is contrary to any modern reading of western ‘Sovietology’ as they call it who recognize that Lenin did not have all powers unto himself, and is not how you can run a state in the modern age anyway.

You seem to be confusing two different groups when you say ‘Lenin’s pick to color revolutionist overnight’. One part (trotskyists) uphold him as this savant thinker who would have led the USSR to its gilded age and avoided the 1991 overthrow/breakup - which is a huge “what if history happened differently” LARP, because we inherit the history that happened, not the one that we wish happened - and another part (literally everyone who is not a trotskyist) considers him a clear individualist who was trying to split the party if not coup the government entirely, which is contrary to democratic centralism and rightfully got him kicked out. From there, those that delve into Trotsky’s actions in the party prior to his membership being revoked in 1926 realize that he was always a huge individualist who would have made the deeds attributed to Stalin look like a walk in the park in comparison. He was the type of guy who wanted to shoot soldiers just because they rubbed his fragile ego the wrong way when he was Commissar of the Red Army.

It’s a good thing he got purged and exiled (twice), exactly because he would not stop trying to split the party even after consequences came and he became dangerous to the whole of the USSR’s project. By that point everyone in the CPSU was fed up of his shit and wanted him gone.

His idea of permanent revolution, for those that actually looked into it, made no sense and would have completely destroyed the nascent USSR because it relied on the German workers succeeding at their revolution (which they didn’t, as we know) and then coming to help the USSR to oppress the peasantry. It was never a real thing.

Secondly you say that our citations will be a wiki we made because the ‘woke’ mods of Wikipedia (not sure what you mean by woke and why you felt like you had to include this dogwhistle but okay) wouldn’t allow a ‘self-hosted blog post’ as a citation.

There is a contradiction in your words however. You recognize that wikis are not infallible, because as per your claim Conservapedia and ProleWiki are problematic in how they operate. So that means Wikipedia is not infallible either, by definition. Yet you don’t extend this criticism to it, which prompts one to ask: what makes it infallible? The fact that it has a lot of people editing it? But how does that translate to policy exactly - Might makes right? Everyone on Wikipedia somehow reaches the correct, objective conclusion through the struggle of their conflicting ideas, whereas any niche wiki is immediately a groupthink project that allows no deviation?

Or is it that getting US government money to make it the de facto ‘people’s encyclopedia’ to the world makes it instantly better than other, grassroot projects? The bigger cohort is automatically the correct one?

Clearly that is what you believe, since you directly oppose the de facto hegemonic wiki against two smaller, niche wikis. To you, it’s a David vs. Goliath thing, when in fact these projects just coexist on the wider internet with almost no overlap aside from uncovering some of the same contradictions that all wiki projects (and even online collective projects such as software repos) eventually get into.

Or maybe you know the internal workings of Wikipedia because you’ve actually investigated the question and can point to something more specific. Because I have, personally. And I can tell you for over 7 years a teenager from the US was defacing the Scots Wikipedia with fake words and stereotypical accents, and it wasn’t caught for that span of time. 90% of the editors on Wikipedia are men, and women have found it very hard for over 20 years to even get accepted into Wikipedia, and continue to face sexism and harassment over their participation on Wikipedia. A sizeable chunk of editors are western (white) men. The most prolific editor is clearly a sockpuppet who makes mostly pro-war edits (Stephen Cross), manufacturing consent for war, and is active from 7AM to 7PM every day, every holidays, without ever any break. Someone with enough pull (who is liked by the community admins, in other words) will automatically win edit arguments over a newer user, regardless of whether the newer user is actually correct. Wikipedia doesn’t consider what Belgium did in the Congo a genocide because a user who named himself after his Belgian military General family member thinks it wasn’t a genocide. That’s it, that’s their entire reason for not calling it a genocide: some Belgian guy thinks it wasn’t one.

There is ample academic evidence and papers that what Belgium did in the Congo was a genocide. But, Wikipedia decided to side with the long-time editor and that was that. It’s now considered a settled topic and nobody is allowed to claim that what happened in the Congo was a genocide anymore, or they will get banned from editing. Doesn’t sound like all of their conflicting points of view somehow synthesize into the correct conclusion to me.

Yes, the ‘neutral point of view’ and ‘no primary sources’ policies have some upsides. They also have a lot of downsides. You are essentially implying that something is only real and actually happened if it was published in a ‘trusted’ source, such as an academic journal or famous newspaper. But the Jeju Island Massacre, for example, was not publicized or had a name for decades until someone did the research in the 90s. Yet the locals on Jeju Island knew what had transpired in their homes in 1949. Should their stories not be relayed or considered because they are primary sources, and no second-party has written about it yet? That’s what Wikipedia would do, by policy. If wikipedia had existed in the 80s, they would have essentially said “the Jeju Island Massacre did not happen because no third-party has written about it, and you can’t quote survivors of the massacre because they’re not reliable”. That’s what you are defending here when you defend Wikipedia so shoddily.

Does this strike you as sensible policies to have? And do you think this could be used to immediately silence non-Western victims of western acts?

Queers are also color revolution.

Nobody is saying that and you know it.

hey thanks it’s my list 😀