hex_m_hell

To be clear, there's a bit of nuance here. It's an argument against organizing focused primarily on insurrection, and against insurrectionist tendencies. But this does propose something that could be described as a latent insurgency, which would explicitly have the capability to evolve into an Insurrection (if necessary).

I don't remember if I made that totally clear in that specific essay.

I'm just going to leave this here: https://llm-attacks.org/

There are plenty more. But there are infinitely many paths. It's non-deterministic code. That just can't be tested reliably. But since there are potentially infinitely many paths to a bad state, it doesn't matter how much you test because the attack surface is infinite.

I think part of what we're seeing is schismogenesis. Corporate ghouls are forcing people to use LLMs (I'm not going to legitimize the use of the marketing term "AI," because I assume we're having an honest conversation) in order to de-skill them and replace them. All of the arguments against these models are valid (energy consumption, data colonialism, etc). Some of these remain valid for FOSS models. Some of those ghouls are literally exterminationists who are basically trying to create an evil god.

Normal people were told that the corporations created a magic tool that can replace all human labor, and then they tried it. The thing is, this stuff doesn't work. It makes shit up all the time. It writes fragile code that's absolutely unmaintainable. It makes pictures and videos that are creepy. It fills the world with garbage... And people are being forced to use it. The natural response is, "fuck no."

If people had a choice, if they were actually told what it was, then people would probably be making more nuanced decisions. But they don't have a choice. Now they're being told that people are getting fired over it. While that's clearly a lie, it doesn't change anything. People are mad.

I'm against LLMs for writing because it's wasteful and it annihilates your voice. I'd consider it for business technical writing where you want to erase your voice, but even then I'd worry about lowering comprehension. When I'm writing a report, some of what I may say when answering questions after a readout is stuff I deleted from the report. If I never wrote it, it's harder for me to answer. Having an LLM write for you means you're presenting someone else's content, and that's always harder than presenting your own. Also, you still have to very carefully check everything because it is impossible to make sure it doesn't hallucinate. It's basically worthless.

I'm against LLMs for code for a bunch of reasons, one being that their code is garbage. Another being that they can't architect. I actually think the entire paradigm of LLM code is completely backwards. Code is not for the computer. Code is for people. Why make something human readable if it's not supposed to be read by humans? You've added ambiguity and complexity for no reason. That said, I've written frameworks with the intention of making the framework so easy code can be generated. I do think that can be useful, but it's really about specific use cases. But people are just being sold this "AI can code anything and will replace all SDEs" line, and its obviously garbage.

GenAI art is trash because LLMs don't have an ontology. They aren't drawing things, they're generating statistical translations of tokens into pixels. You will never fix visual glitching because it just doesn't work the same way as a human does. They're not compatible models. Now, there are some use cases where that doesn't matter. I think it could be fun, as long as you're not using a corporate model.

GenAI for self-driving cars and robots is absolutely bat shit insane. Cars are bad. GenAI can only be as good as humans, which is bad. It's bad. LLM controlled robots is just a security nightmare.

LLMs don't belong anywhere in anyone's stack because they're impossible to secure.

But like, I can see some use cases. I've used LLMs for NLP, as long as you don't need things to be perfect (I've gotten 90% accuracy). They're pretty good for shotgun social engineering attacks. But that's not how people are using LLMs. They're using LLMs as though they were search engines. Someone in a class my partner went to pointed an LLM at a bunch of public comments and asked how many times something was mentioned, and it lied... because LLMs can't count.

And they're using LLMs for mental health support, or to replace friends. Normal people do not understand enough to use LLMs, but ghouls were too obsessed with their evil god and their profits to see how horrible it would be to unleash this technology on people. They're trying to get everyone addicted to something that is absolutely harmful when used incorrectly.

So yeah. People are big mad. They should be. I don't feel any need to defend LLMs to people who probably shouldn't use them. The people who are mad about it and can't articulate why, are mad for legitimate reasons. They should never have been exposed to it, and these corporate ghouls are to blame for the reaction against the technology.

Edit: to be 100% clear, your argument is that there are a group of people poisoning normal folks against "AI." My argument is that the ghouls that are pushing "AI" right now are so obviously evil that any technology they supported would probably be tainted by their support of it. They are trying to use LLMs to do evil shit.

People see them and want to be the opposite. There are some legitimate criticisms of LLMs (though only a small number of those apply to FOSS). People hate the ghouls, they hate how the ghouls are trying to leverage LLMs, they hate the excuses they're using, they hate the reality it's creating, and so they hate the technology. I personally don't think that LLMs are inherently bad, but I think it's important to understand why other people might think they are.

And car drivers will never going to be minority, because it's impossible to replace flexibility of the car.

Helicopters are far more flexible, but you wouldn't make the same argument because it would be absurd. Cars will not be dominant because we will either replace them or society will collapse and destroy the vast logistic network they need to exist.

I haven't owned a car in years. I have two kids, and I'm able to take care of all my needs with a bakfiets and a longtail bike. There are things that would make bikes far more flexible, like more bike cars on trains and metros.

But it's honestly good enough. Sometimes you just don't do things, or things are a bit harder. I accept that trade because I'm not literally destroying my children's future.

It would be easy to ban cars from Amsterdam or Utrecht. They aren't banned in Amsterdam because there are too many people who are too rich to walk. It's not about flexibility there, it's about keeping the ultra rich safe.

Cars are only affordable and flexible because they have been made that way. Roads are massive investments that take away funds from other infrastructure. They are supported by massive subsidies: fuel, infrastructure, military, etc.

The moment you stop dumping money in to maintaining the status quo, even as it kills us, is the moment that cars and planes stop being the best option.

Car drivers are already the minority in Amsterdam. In the core metro area, there's less than .6 cars per household, while there are more bikes than people. If cars "will never be the minority," how are they literally the minority rights now?

Which ones? Personal transport can be fixed with better urban design and EVs for the edge cases. Logistics can be largely replaced by rail, bike, and small EV. That leaves container shipping, which actually mostly moves fossil fuels, interestingly enough. A good amount of aircraft can be replaced with high speed rail or sleeper trains.

"Oh, but what about flights over the water?" Have you ever heard of a "ground effect aircraft?" This isn't even new tech. Google Project 903.

"Oh, but I have to be at a meeting in Beijing TOMORROW!" Yeah, fuck you, you don't. Business has unreasonable expectations that can be brought in to line with reality. Like, is it really worth killing us all to force the world to move this fast? No. This is fucking nonsense.

Between downshifting, designing things more efficiently, and using alternatives, a whole lot of this problem is solved.

And that's literally what "phase out" means. It means you replace a bunch of stuff and then work on figuring out anything that's left. So yeah. You're wrong.

Unless you'd like to explain why you're not.

Yeah.... There's some really awful shit in there.

https://immerautonom.noblogs.org/the-elephant-in-the-room/

I wrote more around this here, but the primary awfulness is in the above link.

But rape apologies and such are a constant problem. That's part of what broke Redneck Revolt, and part of what broke the IWW GDC (though there were a bunch of other things). With the organizing I did, we were pretty intentional but even then misogyny caused a lot of problems (though not through informants, just shitty dudes being such). The problems were mostly the standard things like not leaving space, interrupting, restating femme ideas as one's own, etc. It definitely gets more complex when you're having to mediate conflict across race and gender, etc. Personally, as I mentioned, I think the framing of conversations can be pretty problematic and can erase people before there's even room to be more overtly discriminatory.

But the fact that there's such blatantly misogynistic content even in the anarchist library today, without any kind of contextualization, is a solid indicator of the problem we're facing. But if you're an organizer, then you end up being a lot more familiar with the regular drama of abuse allegations around some person or another. Shit was bad 5 or 6 years ago, and I don't assume it's magically all gotten a bunch better.

Is it the only way though?

Totally, but "abolishing parking lots" just means they don't get used for cars anymore. I am curious what we could use them for though.

Could we just abolish parking lots?

I'm just going to leave this here, for no reason in particular. https://youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA

Unrelated, but there needs to be a "Mr Choppy" gif for replies to this meme in particular.

I don't believe in prisons. I want them to have to answer to their victims directly. All of us, and especially those they have harmed the most. I want them to have to explain themselves.

Here's a longer form answer if you need to understand more: https://hexmhell.writeas.com/wake-me-up-when-the-guillotines-come-out

To get to guillotines, you have to change society. By the time you've changed society, you don't need the guillotines. If you focus on the guillotines instead of building that society, you will end up with a more brutal and repressive system than the one you started in. See the history of the French Revolution and the USSR.

The South of France is literally the place billionaires go to hang out on their Yachts and Russia is literally the most oppressive and exploitative oligarchy in history. Like... That shit didn't work. Not only did it not work in the long run, but it almost immediately became way worse.

If you build a society that is just and equitable, then the billionaires will starve to death because they can't exploit anyone. They will starve to death while watching the world for literally everyone else become immeasurably better.

Build a world where they have no power. And no, that doesn't mean "let's keep having rallies and hoping they'll listen." I want the billionaires to die, but I want them to die because they can't possibly integrate into a just society.

I'm not a reformist. Literally every time people talk about NoKings I write a big post about how it needs to go way fucking harder. But I am saying that focusing on vengeance doesn't built community, and community is what actually eliminates billionaires for good.

Go learn the actual history. They just come back, but worse. They also murder the entire left.

Thank you. As much as I am talking about my shit, everything we did was a team effort. A lot of our early organizing I was in the hospital. It's worth keeping that frame in mind while reading it.

I hope some of the older folks put something like this out and put me in my place, because I was new to organizing when I came in to all this... and some of my comrades had already been doing working hard for years before. Twin Cities folks are the really crazy ones. Some of their organizers go back to the 80's, and draw on some shit that goes back much further.