Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 2)

[Uncle]

I will never forgive the Spanish for their genocide against the peace loving Moors.

[Daffy Duck]

One for TransERA

https://www.resetera.com/threads/whats-your-opening-technique-for-tight-jars.1581940/

[Snoopy]

[Ethan]

One for TransERA

https://www.resetera.com/threads/whats-your-opening-technique-for-tight-jars.1581940/

I give it to my wife

[benji]

I give it to my wife

For those of us w/o a PhD in classical physics, just bang that shit all over till it twists open fr fr no cap.

I don't waste my time trying to open jars with just my hands anymore bc using tools and tricks makes it easier. I just skip to the easy path every time now.

Lot of posts talking about using knives and other tricks. I have never in my life encountered a jar that can't be opened with hands and a small silicone pad to enhance the grip, 95% of the time solely the former. Do I even open a jar a week? I feel like the answer is no. The way some of these people talk in that thread it's like this is happening to them every other day and they waste hours on it.

Am I the manliest man to ever live?

[NekoFever]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/who-here-has-mostly-given-up-on-relationships.1581823/

They have a version of this thread every month

A strangely regular occurrence from the place that insists everyone else has it wrong and the world would be much better if we put them in charge.

My personal favourite is when the forum that rails against single family houses and talks up the wonders of high density housing has weekly threads about how much it sucks living in an apartment.

[benji]

Not seeing very many posts in that thread saying they don't have time for relationships because they're doing the work, organizing and reading theory to end capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy.

[Snoopy]

I would be a NBA superstar and one of the all time goats but I’m 3ft1. I would also be in a relationship with Sydney Sweeney but she’s a chud and that’s where I draw the line.

[HaughtyFrank]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/87-year-old-open-problem-in-math-was-disproved-in-a-few-hours-by-mathematician-anthropics-claude-fable-5.1582237/

They're so fucking mad

[DavidCroquet]

Does this change anything in my life for the better, or does it simply destroy & remove the fun of one mathematical "mystery" while providing nothing positive at all?

Fucking AI. Poisoning our water, beggaring our artists, and now genociding our mathematical mysteries.

[Boredfrom]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/87-year-old-open-problem-in-math-was-disproved-in-a-few-hours-by-mathematician-anthropics-claude-fable-5.1582237/

They're so fucking mad

Isn’t this the whole job of computers to begin with?   

AI as a tool, who would have thought?

[Propagandhim]

Can I ask what it is about modern 'AI' that allowed this to be finally done versus attempts to brute force with supercomputers and such in the past? Is there something specifically in mathematics that it's better at?

Sure throws a wrench in the "AI is just plagiarizing all our data and making money spitting it back out at us" thing. If you can't brute force solutions, it must be building an internal representation of the world where it can test novel, viable solutions that other smart people haven't. "It's just autocomplete".

[NekoFever]

Can’t be arsed to check for Jeff but there are a lot of people being favtually incorrect in the Avengers Doomsday trailer thread.

Would probably be a bit more impactful if they hadn't botched the majority of their output since Endgame. Also pretty funny seeing this coming off The Odyssey and it visually pales in comparison lol.

[BIONIC]

Jeff again trying to hashtag himself into a hit tweet

Which one of you fucks is this

[DavidCroquet]

Everytime our man is harassed on X, it is easy to assume it is one of our own.

But I ask my fellow Birens to cast their mind backwards into time, back to a place where you too were once an active poster alongside our tweet-deleting hero. Didn't you fuckin' hate that guy? Wasn't he just an annoying cunt in every way you can possible imagine? I know it was true for me--back in my more innocent days, posting away on ResetEra, ZeoVGM was the only person on my ignore list. In my head, discussing him with no one at all, I referred to him mentally as "BanBaitVGM" (not as a good as the honorifics that the Bire has come up with for him, I admit). 

Like on Era, Jeff ranges far and wide to stir shit with really anyone who crosses his path on X. I find it easy to accept that a growing number of people who have no clue what The Bire have no love for this fella, while also being well aware of his easy-to-identify personal flaws. And also want to make him feel like the little bro (seated) that he spiritually exemplifies.

[Let's Cyber]

Didn't you fuckin' hate that guy? Wasn't he just an annoying cunt in every way you can possible imagine? I know it was true for me--back in my more innocent days, posting away on ResetEra, ZeoVGM was the only person on my ignore list. In my head, discussing him with no one at all, I referred to him mentally as "BanBaitVGM" (not as a good as the honorifics that the Bire has come up with for him, I admit)

He posts like a rage-baiting content creator trying to stir shit for eNgAgEmEnT...

...but he does it for free.

[Snoopy]

Couldn't have been anyone here. We were in the back of a police car

[benji]

Didn't you fuckin' hate that guy? Wasn't he just an annoying cunt in every way you can possible imagine? I know it was true for me--back in my more innocent days, posting away on ResetEra, ZeoVGM was the only person on my ignore list. In my head, discussing him with no one at all, I referred to him mentally as "BanBaitVGM" (not as a good as the honorifics that the Bire has come up with for him, I admit)

He posts like a rage-baiting content creator trying to stir shit for eNgAgEmEnT...

...but he does it for free.

No, he pays $8 a month to do it.

[benji]

In which Jeff forgets there already was a second Doctor Strange movie:

[benji]

A random thing inspired me to look. It's been a year since the last mention:

Things will not get better if we continue to presume that we do not have the power to collectively enact change for each other.

The first steps are to actually educatate ourselves regarding prior revolutionary successes and doctrine around the world, and then to organize our communities within that image through things like neighborhood pods, mutual aid orgs, and small parties. And in the midst of our organization, we cannot compromise philosophically with conservatives or even liberals because they absolutely will try to drag us back to the status quo. They're personally enriched by the cruelty and thus see no need to work towards truly moral and equitable standards.

The answers to change the vile state of our country have existed for pretty much hundreds of years. We have to simply read the work, follow the advice, and be uncompromising about it. Honestly? Get off Era primarily for this kind of work because this is not and never will be a revolutionary space. It's a liberal one.

I'm of half a mind of charity. Charities are nice things, but many of them exist to try and plug systemic holes in the system. You would instead do better to keep the money that gives you stability and just organize in your community for socialist causes. Start a neighborhood pod and work from there. Join a socialist party. Talk to people in your town and see what's going on and get involved in street activism. Attend school board and local civic meetings. It's not about giving more money, it's about putting people's bodies and minds to work on breaking up bad systems. Money will never fix these things.

I would also like to remind people that revolutionary acts aren't all strictly violent, and it is this negative framing that is a deliberate bit of propaganda to prevent people from engaging in communal solidarity with one another. Anything you do to undermine the current status quo is a revolutionary act, whether we're talking about unionizing, or talking to men about anti-patriarchal philosophy, cultivating third spaces for people to live, setting up a neighborhood pod, or the student protests we are witnessing. It's not just throwing a brick or assassinating a politician.

Indeed. You should absolutely strive to be more revolutionary in your daily life.

You're not going to see a lot of coalition building from liberals and mainstream outlets beyond capitulation to the right because they fundamentally believe minorities and the far-left threw the election instead of the whites who almost always cede to conservativism and voted Republican.

But the contradictions within the Democratic Party have been laid bare. I think there's a lot of fire in folks right now, and there is a prime opening to start organizing in any way we can. Start a neighborhood pod (like I plan on doing), start taking those self-defense classes, and above all else get invested in your local politics. Start bolstering your community against the nonsense.

It took me going to one protest during the George Floyd demonstrations to go "Hey waitaminute" to realize that the jig was gonna eventually be up unless this could be sustained on a longer timescale than what capitalists were expecting. My idea, considering the American-centric issue of tying insurance to work and lack of social safety nets, is essentially protest shifts: people who need to go to work during the day exchange shifts with folks who have to work at night, in order to have a constant presence of people on the front line. This, in turn, will necessitate its own logistics regarding water, medical care, temporary shelter, etc., which in turn could bloom newfound networks where people can actually risk employment without sacrificing their basic necessities, but that can only be realized by consistent organization.

And of course COINTELPRO busted up the Panthers. The FBI's been fucking us up in general since the 50s. But a smarter person than me said that true revolutionaries relish challenge, and that when something is knocked down, it can still ultimately be rebuilt. Indeed, I would say this is one of the few useful properties of the Internet: the ability to spread information quickly and within a place a permanence, so that knowledge and organizational tactics don't have to be rethought every single time. Sometimes it's easier and faster to literally start over with new knowledge than to grind through a process that does not work or is susceptible to infiltration and sabotage.

But organization is definitely a skill we need to all bolster, and largely the one major tactic we have not seriously tried and sustained at a large enough level. People are longing for a sense of community, safety, and trust, and organization can provide those things. I plan to try and start up a neighborhood pod as well as join another existing organization. People should definitely look into both. I've also been debating on making a thread about it, but the Thanksgiving thread broke me and largely made me realize it'd probably be a waste of time in this space. I would offer you the same advice: spend the limited amount of time you have organizing in real life than trying to convince online folks too entrenched in capitalism to start giving a fuck about shit other than electoral outcomes before you can even begin to educate them on organization.

To get to a point of mutual cooperation you need to have some level of respect. The population of folks that frequent places like Era don't respect religious people, so I hardly expect to see them in places like the Black church. I appreciate that you would be willing to set aside spiritual differences, but if we're talking about mass movements and organizations at some point liberals need to let go of the superiority complex and get to work. Not believing in a god doesn't actually mean shit to anyone if you're not actually being of use to your community.

As for your question, I personally don't know for certain any current specific left-wing equivalents to the NRA that are as big as they are. You'll probably find some luck with joints like the All-African People's Revolutionary Party though, as well as some mutual aid or neighborhood pods which tend to be much smaller and localized.

Activism starts small. It's a muscle you have to work and skill you develop. I've seen the terms "anarchist calisthenics" or "activist calisthenics" before and it's apt: you start small, foundational actions, do them until they're easy, then work on new skills based off of that.

The simplest foundational exercise I've seen that helps develop organizational action and leadership is literally just talking to your neighbors. For real. Get to know them, ask about their concerns, get their contact info, and ask if they need anything and check up on them. You start developing real life social skills and communicating with people, even those who have, learning to reach out, and following through on promises and having accountability. This is necessary for any organization.

In that vain, I am actually in the steps of developing a pod with my neighborhood. Just working out the communication and logistics. My immediate goals are to simply foster direct relationships with and between my neighbors and get more self-sufficient in the face of everything that is going on.

If you want some online folks who are into activism and will tell you what to do, check out lil bill, Lucretia McEvil, and Harper O'Connor. As for books, I know more about ones regarding theory than straight practice, but I would look into the history of resistance groups in general. "We Will Shoot Back" is a good'un.

That MAGA Mom group that was going around for awhile in the news crying about school curriculums was literally just a fucking Facebook group whose members started meeting in real life. That's it.

I'm not saying that there is inherently no overlap between the capitalist class and right wing groups. Of course there is. I'm saying that angry conservatives, just normal ass white folks, will show up to school board meetings. They go to the gun and hunting clubs. They go to bar. They go to each other's houses.

They touch grass.

People need to get off Era more, get off Bluesky more, get off TikTok more, and interact with people. Start a neighborhood pod. Go to mutual aid. Join an organization.

[Besticus Maximus]

Would love to have been there the day Nepenthe tried to join the school board and they asked her which kid was hers

[benji]

Nepenthe joins the chuds of The Bire, comes out against representation:

My hot take is that games that must be beholden to shareholder returns and the sentiments of a player base that have not bothered to deconstruct their own biases and prejudices cannot be meaningfully diverse in practice, particularly when it comes to dark skinned characters, and at this point I'd rather these companies just stop putting such characters in games rather than putting them in to check off a list. It's a waste of everybody's time to pretend to care.

I get what you mean. I do think some properties approach diversity decently though, like Pokemon's been doing pretty well recently with Legends Z-A and Naveen, Canari and so on. It's good kids can have a cool character to see themselves in. But I do lean towards agreeing with you that most people don't really gaf when push comes to shove. We saw that with all the DEI drama and editing of HR policies recently, as well as the walk back on pride month celebrations by most companies. It's sad but it's hard not to help but see it cynically when you've been let down by these companies.

I think Pokemon is big enough that it cannot be meaningfully hamstrung by reactionary conservatism, particularly since the main draw of the franchise are the creatures and not the humans. It's basically Hello Kitty but the little mascots are elemental fighters. The diverse characters and player customization work well enough to address any well-founded grievances that would be specific to its particular franchise design.

But franchises who specifically market themselves on diversity and yet sideline the dark-skinned characters anyway because of shareholder demand and/or because the playerbase only fawns over the light-skinned characters? It's a joke, and an insult to continue pretending. Return me to the days where the only Black and Brown people were in fighting games rather than lying to me that these characters are just as important as the light-skinned ones and yet never doing anything with them or giving them any great lore or cosmetics.

Yeah can't disagree tbh. Shit that things are this way though. I hope we see more good faith efforts to include diverse casts where possible but we'll see I guess. But most gamers seem to be quite petulant whenever they see someone who has some melanin sadly

I think it's worse than general conservative petulance; I think people who openly claim to care about diversity ultimately don't and mindlessly help contribute to trends that reinforce existing design and marketing patterns. "Yeah, it's such a shame the Black and Brown characters don't get much 😩" they say while they go off and literally purchase hundreds of dollars worth of cosmetics for the light-skinned characters. Thanks for your concern????

Ultimately though I think most people just quietly buy and engage with whatever appeals to them, and in the modern world light-skinned people are seen as more attractive than dark-skinned people and so the (presumed) purchasing data and resulting deemphasis of Black and Brown characters tracks. But this preference is constructed, inextricably tied to larger systems of politics and economics, systems which rely on the oppression of dark-skinned groups, and thus these games ring all the more hollow for their facile commitment to "diversity" (hell, what the fuck does "diversity" even fucking mean????) Not that we should be looking at games, or any commercial art, to save the world in the first place, just that it blows a hole into liberal notions of representation and exposes it for the bullshit that it always was.

I'm just at a point where I'm just tired and over it all. Again, I would've rathered not even had the chance to get attached in the first place to some of these characters and playable opportunities if they didn't exist, than to actually get attached and yet have my hopes dashed over and over as years go by and these characters get sidelined and forgotten.

I think this is true, but I also don't like the concept of, "people aren't doing enough, so what effort they do put in, is meaningless and actually worse then the people that fight against the thing I care about." Just sounds like the equivalent of being a liberal grifter that grifts by attacking leftists more than the right.

I think it's important to mention and criticize the people that you are and to expect better. However, don't forget the people that support harmful policies and aren't open to the conversation you're having are much much worse, zero debate.

I think it's important we never lose sight of that.

Why are you even talking about policy? I'm talking about video game development, specifically trends wherein ostensibly "inclusive" projects nonetheless perpetuate racist trends by tokenizing Black and Brown characters due to the cyclical nature of shareholder and management demands and customer prejudices present in purchasing and engagement patterns, all of which are a result of the existing racist systems that these games are obligated to be developed under.

What reasonable policy can address my issue? There isn't any. This is specifically an issue of how our economics directly affects the output of what gets made and ultimately how "inclusivity" is a meaningless marketing slogan without serious commitments to navigating the economics that ultimately stymie reasonable and interesting representation of the groups that are most underrepresented. Which is certainly not going to happen in an industry that is on fire right now due to serious corporate mismanagement and capitalistic decay.

Ultimately some of these games have been an utter waste of my fucking time on that front, and time is something I cannot get back. Yes, I consider these white-ass development teams dangling Black and Brown characters in my face and just dropping them to the wayside the moment they have to suck up money from the whales who only fetishize light-skinned characters far more egregious than existing in a world where these games were never made at all and thus I would've inevitably had to have spent my time doing something- anything- else.

It's just so simple, you imprison or murder the populace:

Everything points to the contrary. The UK desperately tried to cling to its days as an Empire for a while, but no...

Capital is global, there's no escaping it.

There are multiple plans of escape. Westerners just refuse to take those paths.

Spoiler: AI lunacy including more Luddite defenses, asking what the "material advantage" is from AI for a struggling single mother and "People honestly need to read Marx" regarding something that blatantly runs against his theory of capitalist development and that he would have considered a benefit (click to show)(click to hide)

What is future AI supposed to train on when everything being made is the same bankrupt recursive nonsense?? It won't be able to feed off of creative, original ideas BECAUSE THERE WILL BE NONE

The point of generative AI is not to make original, creative ideas. It's to fundamentally steal the intellectual labor of creatives and weaken their power through isolation and displacement. They don't really give a fuck about making quality media, and the fact that you needed humans to make these types of commodities up until recently was always a necessary evil to these ghouls, hence the grueling hours and output demanded of artists, the strict design standards, the terrible pay rates- it's all out the window now with genAI because the LLMs are a fixed cost nor are they actually humans susceptible to demands and threats, hence why they're not even telling you anymore that "it'll get better" (because they don't give a fuck that it looks bad) but that you need to "get used to it."

The whole "it's just like cars" thing is pretty iffy, too. Look at how cars have ravaged our world. Not just environmentally, but socially, too. Look at how the people with a vested interest in selling cars and gas have run roughshod and used their power to prevent meaningful change.

If anything, saying "it's just like cars" is an argument that we should be even more thoughtful and regulated in our roll-out of the technology.

Yep. The Luddites were absolutely correct in their assessment that capitalists were not embracing technological advancement with a concern for coviviality and human well-being in mind and that still holds true today.

How does the pro-ai side explain/defend the ecological, ethical, and job destroying aspects of it?

"You enjoy everything you do now because people got replaced/killed/the environment was ruined for it, so why are you complaining now?"

Tech folks are never beating the allegations that they really should've been exposed to ethics and humanities classes during their schooling. I'm also surprised at the number of people unable to comprehend that "increased efficiency" fundamentally devalues your job and wages.

I'd say it's pretty unfair to tar anyone that doesn't express a luddite-esque opinion as lacking ethics and or humanity.

Linus literally said that human knowledge isn't all that great and the social aspects of his work are irrelevant. He's living up to my allegation.

The Luddites were also correct in their assessment that technology should be developed and implemented with respect for people and culture in mind. They weren't anti-technology wholesale, but anti-capitalist before there was a term for that way of thinking. So it's even funnier than you're using them as a disparagement.

You'd think that such forward-thinking (allegedly) people would be able to project that scenario out, but alas.

I think they think they're irreplaceable and so don't care.

Almost every degree program in tech has an ethics class on computing or something of the like. This is a really dumb comment.

And my art schooling had a basic algebra class thrown in there too. It didn't practically matter to my development as a student or my work as an artists, and that one "ethics class or something of the like" clearly isn't having an effect on the state and culture of the technological industry.

I wasn't using them as a disparagement... I mentioned those having luddite-esqe opinions as writing others off as inhumane. There's a very big difference, I agree with a lot of the sentiment if i'm honest.

The Luddites were basically pro-humanity though. It doesn't make sense as a refutation.

yes, I agree, the software development job market is fucked. I couldn't find a single fucking job as a React / TypeScript developer earlier this year, that didn't expect me to do fullstack everything with the help of AI. And it's only getting worse.

I called this years ago when I arguing with non-artists on here who insisted to me that genAI slop was useful for artists because it "cut out the boring stuff" aka "attempted to do the entirety of the work which you fundamentally enjoy doing." Not only was it offensive to essentially imply that animating is useless, boring labor, but the idea that cutting out the act of animating would do anything but eliminate my job as an animator was absolutely nonsensical and moronic.

Now there are mass firings going on left and right in development because, surprise surprise, if you don't need anything more than two people on a project, what the fuck do you think your bosses are going to do to a crew of a few hundred?

People honestly need to read Marx.

The Luddites were also a local movement that were concerned with protecting their own jobs. It's a valid stance to take, but doesn't provide a panacea for humanities ills. There's plenty of other ways to build up a set of ethics that encompasses the betterment of humanity including the procurement of new drugs, scaling of technology into emerging markets, the list goes on. As much as people dislike the technology, I personally don't believe it's all bad.

No one said that the Luddites' position was a panacea for humanities' ills, just that they were correct in their general assessment and moral framework.

And of course there's ways to build up a good set of ethics, but if you don't fundamentally have an anti-capitalist basis underpinning it, all you're going to do is just recreate current ills and oppression. When you procure those new drugs, how are you going to make sure that they are distributed equitably and where they are actually needed, especially when you consider the prohibitive patent system and profit-motive that drives up pharmaceutical prices? When you "scale technology into emerging markets" (whatever that specifically means) how are you going to make sure that you are not engaging in economic colonialism against local markets that were deliberately hamstrung by Western countries as to not be able to compete with you? How do you avoid damaging proper environments and sacred Indigenous sites? How are you going to avoid the potential for sparking off local conflicts, civil wars, or hell, even new genocides as new tech and new demands for raw materials go on to spark localized tensions between different factions and groups with different allegiances to Western capital?

Just throwing new tech out there and hoping for the best is a fool's errand. Tech development, hell, science in general, like everything else, is not neutral or apolitical or "good." It is subject to the purview of capitalist oversight and imperialistic ends.

I also think it's kind of irritating, that everyone is mad about generative AI in video games, videos, art... but the fuck. I fed all these code ai with my work for the last 20 years or so. They have also taken MY shit and turned it into Claude Code. Which I, ironically, now use to repeat whatever I did by hand in the past lol

I know how good coding agents have become. I see it every day now. All that's left for me to decide is if I want to be one of the guys using AI and looking at the results, carefully fixing nonsense and approving edits. Or should I do something totally different. And no, I have no fucking clue what that would be.

Weird times

I agree with you that all intellectual labor from basically all of human history was stolen, including code. Developers weren't left out of that process.

However, artists are the ones leading the cultural fight against AI (and it doesn't hurt that the masses seem to react negatively to genAI content.) But looking at this thread and others on here, seems the developers don't really care as much because it "makes their work more efficient." I can't tell nor am interested in telling developers what to do about the ravaging of their field or how they value their work. All I know is how I value mine. 🤷‍♀️

I find it equal parts laughable and insulting that anyone would consider the minutiae of a software programmer's workday to be a meaningful counterpoint in a discussion whose contextual consequences involve the wholesale destruction of industries, environments, cultures, and human behaviors.

God forbid someone might have to continue working in the previously normal way that, *checks notes*, just took slightly longer. Yep, that's definitely worth the continued erasure of our collective humanity just so that your jobs can be slightly faster until they inevitably fire all of you too.

When you put it that plainly, it really is an appalling viewpoint and goes back to my original post that folks aren't beating the allegations lol.

"Sure, Africans are being exploited, the electricity and water consumption is destroying communities, and it is completely off-loading the ability for humans to engage in healthy social interaction and cognitive behaviors, but my workday has been shrunk to two hours, so can we really argue the technology is a net-negative?"

History is filled with fools that think if they hitch their wagon to the oppressors or the mechanisms that are destroying everything around them that they won't eventually be next in line.

Yep. We're all workers at the end of the day and thus we're all expendable when you get right down to it. The myth of the labor hierarchy being shattered is fuuuuuuuuun.

This a fair argument to take on the subject. When it pertains to AI technology , we're really still in the infancy stage so it's all up in the air with how it's effectively implemented. There are certainly very different paths we could go down and while I may be slightly skeptical with how governments handle things, I do hope a lot of the arguments you made here are taken into consideration. Not considering my own position, I have genuinely mixed feelings about the technology given the impact it is currently having and will continue to have.

My concerns will not be taken into consideration in the future because they are not taken into consideration right now. The West has damn near irreparably destroyed the environment and innumerable cultures with its form of imperialism, and a part of the moral and even quasi-religious justification for this imperialism have been the imposition of "order" on the unwashed masses, an arbitrary responsibility to "explore" and "tame" "new frontiers," to "move fast and break things."

The capitalistic propaganda of the STEM fields as apolitical, non-contextual forces of nature that we have no control or oversight over, as natural systems that merely usher in "progress" for "all of humanity" that dare not be questioned or critiqued, have led us into a situation where not only have we have allowed these tech companies unfettered access over our lives and our environment, but we have ironically hamstrung our ability to analyze and critique, aka to scientifically evaluate, the impact of technology on our lives, our relationships, and our very identities.

For example, these conversations inevitably always lead to posters spouting mindless, vacuous observations about historical phases of technological development with the implication that they were a unequivocal good with no downsides, or rather that the deaths and environmental destruction were absolutely worth whatever convenience they personally glean from it. "We replaced the horse with the car and nobody complained."

Are you sure nobody has ever complained, in the history of the car's existence, about cars? About the dangers of operating them? About the factory conditions in which they are built? About how the scramble for raw materials has destabilized certain regions and perpetuated slavery? About the immediate danger and long-term environmental impact of the carbon dioxide they emit? About how they help perpetuate poor urban planning and the obesity epidemic? About the class and racial implications of how we've come to view pedestrians and cyclists, the class and racial implications about how we decide where to build our highways and freeways, about the class and racial implications how the car has allowed the state new ways to extract value and bodies from vulnerable communities through fines, traffic cams, and prison sentences for an inability to comply with regulations?

Nobody complained? Literally no one? Or is it that you just never bothered to seek out alternative perspectives and to look at the whole?

Furthermore what has happened in the wake of this pedastaling of STEM is that it has also exacerbated what I mentioned before about labor hierarchy, wherein certain jobs and fields are more valuable than others not just through how they're compensated but by the social capital that having any of these relevant jobs grants someone. If you weren't in STEM, then your education was a waste of time, your work was low-skilled and expendable, and, depending upon what job you were, you were an abject failure to society (aka, you were unable to make yourself as useful to the capitalists the people bragging were).

Retail and service work, fast food and restaurant work, factory work, agriculture, waste disposal, care and domestic work, the social sciences, teaching, etc., are all necessary work for the maintenance of a healthy society, but they are devalued compared to STEM not just through their relative lack of wage compensation, but by the social capital they failed to grant people in this work. Everyone is impressed when you say you're mechanical engineer or an astrophysicist or a marine biologist. No one gives a shit if you're pushing shopping carts or picking up trash or a maid. And these social divisions can only ever cause resentment and complexes to build up, further stymieing worker solidarity. And what should be unsurprising to folks here, is that this prestige also lines up nicely with systems of race and patriarchy; It is not a coincidence that a lot of non-white immigrant labor is in restaurant and service work, or that most domestic labor is done by women.

Am I saying science is a "bad" thing? No. But it's not necessarily a "good" thing either. It's just a paradigm for gathering information. But people were fooled, and fooled themselves, into believing that somehow science was magically separate from the economic and political systems in which it is performed, that it could not be political, that it could not engage in or exacerbate existing harm, that it could only ever liberate. It was foolish thinking. Literally nothing we do exists in a vacuum. It all exists under the purview of capitalism, which is an anti-human ideology.

Same. All the cool positives are just all tied to gross negatives that most people just don't care about.

The biggest issues that I don't think any amount of innovation will make go away are are the ways is negatively impact how we interact with each other and be human, how it destroys art/the desire to create art and how it empowers capital to exploit white collar work.

On those grounds alone I morally oppose it, even as it embeds itself more and more into my work-life.

The cool positives are mostly just industry-specific or specific use-case scenarios. AI proponents have failed in actually advertising to the general masses how it will improve their lives directly.

Like, how the fuck does Opus' efficiency in coding have any significant relevance to a struggling single mother working two jobs, or a disabled person who can't get their duly-owed benefits, or a recently-released convict struggling all the more to attain employment in an economy where jobs are being slashed left and right?

Where are the material advantages? How is society being improved? No one cares that you can do less work at your fucking $100k+ job.

I used to post this 1984 NYT opinion article by Pynchon once every year or two--these days it's getting posted like 4 times a year. Reading it honestly changed a lot of my mind on our modern economy (Originally read it likely around 2010-2013).

Thomas Pynchon

Thank you for sharing; that was a great article.

I do wonder though about his conclusion that the Luddites, to whatever meaningful extent they could still be said to exist today, have come to see common ground with the Snovians due to the ubiquitousness of computer usage when, again, the existence of technology was never really in contention but the extent to which those who controlled the technology thus controlled the labor and the outlook of the workers using it.

A person who knits socks by hand can still use a sewing machine; similar to a writer using either a typewriter or a keyboard to actually write. I suppose the debate then is also about those more on the periphery of the exercise of what we think of as traditional labor, specifically the makers and servicers of the tools being replaced rather than the workers who utilize those tools. No one thinks about manufacturing and where the tools we use come from (or rather, many people look down on it,) and it's arresting to think about the sheer amount of knowledge we've actually lost in the wake of technological advancement as old ways die to make way for new ways. Quick aside but I was at Dollywood recently and took the train around the park, which is a legitimate, old-school coal-powered steam train, and I just had to wonder.... How the fuck do you even find the people who know how to service fucking coal trains in 2026? How the hell do you even train in that? What resources or schools do you utilize? Is there even a school for it???

But I digress, any potential conversation going down this rabbit hole also misses the point that AI is not a traditional tool that augments the productivity of human labor; it's a stop-gap replacement for human labor. It is a "tool" in the sense that it is simply not human; AI cannot actually labor in the same way that humans do (which is why I think the claims that costs are going to become super-dee-duper cheap are not entirely founded; tools have fixed costs under capitalism no matter what), but it also eliminates the degree to which one must labor for specific outcomes that it cannot be said that a user is actually making or creating anything when they utilize it.

A really really big thank for this post. It's a huge relief to see these kinds of thoughtful comments in a sea of shitty platitutdes. I cannot stand anymore the "technology is neutral, it's what humans do with it that is good or bad" fallacy. I loose instantly any intellectual interest to anyone sputting this nonsense. And I say that as someone who has actually practiced science (i.e., actually done academic research), and taught applied statistics and therefore machine learning at university level. Back when AI was mainly a subfield of cognitive sciences designed to help people to understand how living nervous systems work, I loved the subject. Now that it has mainly become the new darling of the tech overlords, with tons of people repeating ad nauseam the gospels of the silicon valley goons, there are days when thinking merely about the subject makes me want to puke.

I appreciate it.

It is weird to the degree to which normal people are, as you said, just regurgitating what tech capitalists have to say about their own product (aka, marketing) which is being propped up in a precarious economic bubble. I can't tell if it's people who legitimately believe that somehow a technology that is meant to replace human labor wholesale will somehow usher in some new economic utopia, despite the fact that we do not have the infrastructure to support mass unemployment like they and the techbros seems to be hoping for (infrastructure they likely believe isn't even possible to come about because the moment you start talking about socialism or communism, some of them say it's impossible/too difficult to implement/evil), if they're desperate to live in interesting times and just witness the ramifications of this tech first-hand for some level of self-satisfaction within their life- to simply say "I was there"- or a combination of both, but it's just really fucking odd the degree to which people have come uncritically and emotionally attached to AI. You'd think this shit was doing their laundry and cooking them dinner.

Like, what are you gonna use if every film, game, TV show, professionally produced music track, and operating system is built with generative AI? This seems a likely outcome by the end of this year.

There's an impossible amount of media to experience that was made before like 2021, and there will continue to be artists who abstain from using it. A person could feasibly not engage with AI content by just going back to old works.

Why does that bother you at all? If people want to fundamentally oppose using AI as much as they possible can with the control that they have to do so, it's not your concern or mine.

The implication from some folks seems to be that you HAVE to keep up with all the newest stuff, to waste hours of your life sitting on your ass just "consuming" instead of doing literally anything else.

And it's like....

No I don't???

"But you'll be left behind!"

What does this thought-terminating cliche even mean? What is specifically meant? What are the social conditions and consequences I will be subjecting myself to if I don't watch OpenAI's slop movies or listen to some bullshit-ass "music" that was prompted in whatever the fuck people are using? What; I won't be able to talk about this stuff with a population of people with an average sixth-grade reading level who can thus barely analyze and critique media to begin with?

What am I losing? How will I be harmed? Like, AI doesn't even produce works in new mediums. It's not like the fucking invention of animation or something.

Here's what I'd consider more effective opposition:

- Conditionally allow datacenters to be built in your area ONLY IF they are self sustaining on power and water (instead of blanket opposition to construction)
- Actively campaign in primaries for candidates in favor of AI regulation (even if they state they support more use of AI in general)
- Support and buy movies and games where generative AI use is fully disclosed and where they provably didn't lay staff off to use it
- Demand that any AI use is open source/open weights, ideally with full disclosure of training data used, method and biases. Tell people to use it instead of ChatGPT.

So basically deliberately buy AI works and hope really hard the politicians are on your side with regards to regulation. That's worked out swimmingly before.

I'm fucking crying

Why do we have to give up our communities? Why can't the billionaires build them next to their gated neighborhoods since they want this shit so much?

This one gets split out just because it's so fucking stupid you almost wouldn't believe it if you didn't already know her:

people here keep saying "it's capitalism's fault, not AI" but like what does AI without capitalism even look like?

Honestly I don't think you even achieve gen AI like we see it today, or at least it would be far more stymied, in a world that was already socialist or communist because, if everyone owned their labor and the value of their creative output, they probably wouldn't have agreed to any scenario where some fucking techbro can swoop in and take all of their art, writing, photos, etc. without compensation in the first place. This only happened because companies were allowed to circumvent laws that we as the masses are beholden to.

[benji]

Apparently one of Nepenthe's most disliked Supreme Court rulings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-court-case-that-almost-made-it-illegal-to-tape-tv-shows/251107/

Some others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._Acuff-Rose_Music,_Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.

International copyright law foundation she disagrees with and believes is not part of US law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction

[Besticus Maximus]

User banned: reason; thinking computers help

[benji]

The irony of this whole situation is that the same so-called "based / right wing / conservative" figures who've amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on X and elsewhere as defenders of Western Civilisation, as enemies of Marxism, and promoting traditional values can't even restrain themselves from watching a movie because "who cares it just a movie".

It's not even about the movie. I genuinely couldn't care less.

In reality, films are about entertainment and the best actors and actresses deserve the part in any film – a belief I've stated repeatedly.

But this was never intended to be just an entertaining film but a transgressive, subversive assault on our culture.

As a result, it became a civilisational line in the sand, and if you can't bring yourself to resist the lesser you will never resist the greater.

This is why you will lose.

 The front lines are everywhere. Stay tactical.

edit: Fuck, doesn't embed the link:

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Why closing quotes matter. "It's never the rest of this entire article is a giant quotation

[Potato]

I give it to my wife

For those of us w/o a PhD in classical physics, just bang that shit all over till it twists open fr fr no cap.

I don't waste my time trying to open jars with just my hands anymore bc using tools and tricks makes it easier. I just skip to the easy path every time now.

Lot of posts talking about using knives and other tricks. I have never in my life encountered a jar that can't be opened with hands and a small silicone pad to enhance the grip, 95% of the time solely the former. Do I even open a jar a week? I feel like the answer is no. The way some of these people talk in that thread it's like this is happening to them every other day and they waste hours on it.

Am I the manliest man to ever live?

Remember, these are people who never leave the house. Food in cans and jars is their principal diet aside from fast food delivered by underpaid immigrants.

[Taco Bell Tower]

Everytime our man is harassed on X, it is easy to assume it is one of our own.

But I ask my fellow Birens to cast their mind backwards into time, back to a place where you too were once an active poster alongside our tweet-deleting hero. Didn't you fuckin' hate that guy? Wasn't he just an annoying cunt in every way you can possible imagine? I know it was true for me--back in my more innocent days, posting away on ResetEra, ZeoVGM was the only person on my ignore list. In my head, discussing him with no one at all, I referred to him mentally as "BanBaitVGM" (not as a good as the honorifics that the Bire has come up with for him, I admit). 

Like on Era, Jeff ranges far and wide to stir shit with really anyone who crosses his path on X. I find it easy to accept that a growing number of people who have no clue what The Bire have no love for this fella, while also being well aware of his easy-to-identify personal flaws. And also want to make him feel like the little bro (seated) that he spiritually exemplifies.

ok hovogkfjdj

[Jansen]

Cast a white man as Doom and had the nerve to give him that accent. Give me a fucking break

https://www.resetera.com/threads/avengers-doomsday-official-trailer-dec-18-tickets-on-sale-now.1582045/page-24#post-158187676

[Boredfrom]

It's not even about the movie. I genuinely couldn't care less.

 

Is not even the first time the Odyssey gets adapted and gets stuff changed.

[benji]

truth. bomb

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

edit: omg