grafmax

Immigrants are a timeless scapegoat for the problems faced by the working class.

IMO US vs Chinese data vacuuming is a false choice. One of the main benefits of these open weights models is that you can get the privacy and cost savings by hosting your own model in cloud infrastructure.

Open weights models are only 4.5 months behind closed weight ones.

The fact that US considers propping its flagship technology by blacklisting competitors demonstrates how small the US competitive advantage really is.

The poor capitalists with all the money and power, making the decisions at the highest levels, guiding society's direction... can you imagine they might be responsible for the shittier and shittier turns our world is taking?

Class is the shape of power and exploitation under capitalism. Some own, others work to enrich those that own. That's all class is. Being frank about the real power differences in our society and our world isn't an ism.

Georgia acceding to NATO was viewed no differently than Ukraine by Russia and Russia clearly stated that this would cause a war, which it did. It's strange to me that you think that the US had nothing to do with expanding NATO to these countries despite Russia's threats of war if this happened. What do you think the US' role was?

Regarding Asia, look at US' vying to have unfettered access for its Air Force over the Strait of Malacca, despite popular disfavor by Indonesians, after a $15 billion energy deal with their government. The US having command over the South Korean military - in what world is that in South Korea's interest? Vietnam's new dependence on US LNG as a result of the attack on Iran. Look at the disputes in the South China Sea despite the disputants having China as their biggest trading partner, and the disputes rising exactly at the time of the US' pivot to Asia. Same pattern with Taiwan - a plan that has been in place for decades but which has become a political token coinciding with the pivot to Asia.

Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it? Why would they pick a fight with their biggest trading partner, who also appears much stronger than them militarily? Surely it's not in their interest right? Yet that's exactly what we've been seeing (belligerence from Japan's PM over Taiwan is a case in point). Does rising belligerence against a key trading partner/US geopolitical rival sound familiar?

Meanwhile Russia can't defeat Ukraine but Europe is convinced it has to arm itself and join the proxy war. This aligns with the 2026 National Defense Strategy - feeding proxies into wars against US rivals, what the US euphemistically refers to as "'burden sharing".

It also harms US' Asian allies, which makes them more dependent on US energy, increasing US leverage to push them toward proxy war with China. Very similar to the situation in Europe!

In fact the commenter’s point is quite relevant. A central characteristic of the information war is to dismiss the “other side”’s POV as propaganda. This works to prop up one’s own propaganda.

The article makes this quite clear:

Those words — foreign digital interference — are very important.

The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet.

It’s remarkable that the author thinks this is true. The issue is the foreign source of the propaganda, not the propaganda itself, and in fact the solution is more propaganda, according to them.

By limiting our focus to pro-Russia edits, and refusing to acknowledge the larger context, we let ourselves become unwitting dupes, casualties in this information war.

The US installs dictatorships, overthrows democracies, supports genocide, mass targets civilians in its bombing campaigns. It doesn't care about human rights or democracy except as an excuse to start new wars which only harm the people it claims to want to help with its wars.

Human rights are a pretext of US controlled media to advocate for expanding US imperial interests. Notice how US support of Israel, Gulf state dictatorships, South American dictatorships are glossed over whenever warmongering toward China or Iran is advocated with the thin excuse being human rights.

Anyone who claims a one sided information war has let themself become a casualty of that war.

There's a lot of money in genocide.

There is a giant capital outlay required to produce a competitive model. Joe Schmo can’t jump into this market. Best he could do would be to ingratiate himself to an existing funding cartel. The moat surrounding a handful of market participants is billions of dollars wide.

There’s competition now among the American companies (who have a head start in this space) as always happens as the professional oligopolists try to manufacture their footholds in the new market.

Nor is it cynical to objectively appraise the interests and economics at play. People aren’t playing circular financing games out of the goodness of their hearts.

The tech industry goes through investment phases to produce oligopolies it turns around and enshittifies, parasitizing income off what it has built. Venture capital, acquisitions, acquihires, circular investments - It’s been incestuous for years. The question is whether competition from China’s sophisticated tech sector, which already surpasses the US in many areas, will put a pin in these plans this time round.

CPI is an aggregate measure which munges a bunch of things together under a single statistic.

In fact, the cost of necessities has overall risen faster than the cost of discretionary goods. This has been generally true since the mid-1990s; prior to that, inflation differences were much smaller across income groups despite lower income groups spending more of their income on necessities. In some periods like the post-COVID housing and energy price shocks, the differential effect of real inflation on basic necessities has been even greater.

Even "small" effects compound over time. For example, when someone in a low bracket loses 10% purchasing power after many years, the net economic stress they experience is much greater than for someone at a high bracket. Differential inflation of necessities vs discretionary goods magnifies this.

inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term

Inflation is a tool for monetary policy. It doesn't track cost of living. For example, if luxury items become more affordable, but housing prices rise, inflation-adjusted pay doesn't capture this kind of negative effect on the working class.

They’re shooting themselves in the foot with these dumb restrictions.

I clearly said he deserves expropriation not violence. Reread my comment.

The US defense industry profits off the mass murder of civilians including literally burning families alive as we bomb their homes. That’s mass murder at scale, not a single Molotov cocktail bouncing ineffectually off someone’s house. This is precisely the double standard I’m talking about.

The oligarchs control our political process and our laws. They bend it to their will for profit. What’s legal is not moral - they own the lawmakers and have endless budgets for the courts.

The only way to put an end to this is to expropriate them. Their extreme and disproportionate wealth gives them extreme and disproportionate power. Oligarchy is not some alternate/flawed form of democracy; these two systems are antithetical.

In those cases those dictators were US proxies. In this case it seems the relationship is reversed.

Friend, they choose our legislators. They control the political process. They own the mass media and the social media companies. Denial isn’t a strategy.

Who is going to lobby to make it illegal? Our system is broken and won’t fix itself.

Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.

As I see it the underlying issue for many ITT is the hypocrisy of condemning violence against Altman while while looking the other way from his role as an oligarch and as a Defense contractor. This is a human being with an awful destructive effect on the world he shares with us. Such people don't deserve violence but expropriation.

An oligarch who promotes “democracy”. Is trying to cynically ingratiate himself, or is he really that deaf to the irony?

no moat

I'd like to think the superior product wins. But Windows still thrives despite widespread Linux availability. I think sometimes we can underestimate the resilience of the tech oligopolies, particularly when they're VC-funded.

Joe Kent (the director of counterterrorism who recently resigned to protest the war) stated that US intelligence gathering in the Middle East is lacking, that the US has extensive intelligence sharing agreements with Israel, that the US relies on Israel’s superior intelligence in the Middle East, and Israel uses its position to bias US foreign policy in the region to further Israel’s geopolitical aims in the region - in this case attacking Israel’s adversary, Iran, even though it’s not in the US interest to do so. It seems that Trump really has thought this would be an open and shut war. The US does not gain by the war; nor does most of the world; nor do the Iranian citizens being bombed. Israel furthers its geopolitical strategy of destroying its neighbors, because that’s how its leadership defines security (and stays out of jail). One of the most obvious stupidities propagated in all this is the notion that Iran has been a regime waiting to be toppled by dropping bombs on its citizens, its schools, universities and hospitals.

Trump would also have to navigate the loyalty the US state apparatus has to Israel. Iran has made it clear that the ceasefire option is off the table this time round. So I just don’t see the US extricating itself from this quagmire barring some extreme political upheaval.

But who knows, if you take Trump’s incompetence, plus the possibility of global economic collapse, plus the possibility of global food shortages, we just might see it.

In the fog of war, it is hard to tell what's exaggerated and what's not.

Honestly it's more than that. Propaganda and lies put out by ALL actors in this conflict. If you want to understand what's going on I think you have the expose yourself to as many competing sources as you can find. And still you're going to end up with a very shoddy picture. The term for this is epistemic collapse.

Funny how 401ks can make members of the American public think the stock market is really about them. In capitalism, assets follow a Pareto distribution. A small minority hold the majority of assets.

Our government is captured by oligarchs. I realize it's a democracy on paper..

"Our" adversaries, huh? There are more people in our country than pedophile billionaires, but it's this group starting the wars, murdering civilians, and producing generations of "adversaries".

I work on 1M LOC 15 yr old repo. Like you it's across the full stack. Bugs in certain pieces of complex business logic would have catastrophic consequences for my employer. Basically I peel poorly-specific work items off my queue into its own worktree and session at high reasoning/effort and provide a well-specified prompt.

These things eat into my supervision budget:

* LLM loses the plot and I have to nudge (like you) * Thinking hard to better specify prompts (like you) * Reviewing all changes (I do not vibe code except for spikes or other low-risk areas) * Manual thing I have to do (for things I have not yet automated with a agent-authored scripts) * Meetings * etc

So, yes, my supervision budget is a bottleneck. I can only run 5-8 agents at a time because I have only so much time in the day.

Compare that vs a single agent at high reasoning/effort: I am sitting waiting for it to think. Waiting for it to find the code area I'm talking about takes time. Compiling, running tests, fixing compile errors. A million other things.

Any time I find myself sitting and waiting, this is a signal to me to switch to a different session.

A person has a supervision budget. They can supervise one agent in a hands-on way or many mostly-hands-off agents. Even though theres some thrashing assistants still get farther as a team than a single micromanaged agent. At least that’s my experience.

Capital is a commodity, just like a business' product. It does not produce value. Labor does. This is a central point of LTV!

We witnessed the same thing with looms and other automation in the Industrial Revolution. Capital that helps you produce more. But owners faced with increased competition under commoditized production see their profit margins fall. Thus they will turn to squeezing workers - the source of value - for profit in the newly commoditized landscape - exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution. It was only when workers got their act together and organized that this decline was stopped and reversed.