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LLMs were also a nice example of this before 2018 or so, so I wouldn't necessarily count on quantum computing being a disappointment forever.

Right, they also seem to have hidden it from the Australian government a month after learning about it. That feels like it should qualify as conspiracy in any reasonable legal system

In my view, it's not that socialism with a lowercase s as defined by worker ownership of the means of production has gotten way more popular, it's that "Socialist" has shifted to mean New Deal Democrat as the Democratic party has shifted towards being the party of business interests.

If you look at what Mamdani, arguably the face of American Socialism, is doing in NYC, it's basically deciding to hold businesses accountable for breaking laws and noticing where markets have failed to provide core needs in the city.


> it's not that socialism with a lowercase s as defined by worker ownership of the means of production has gotten way more popular,

That's not the definition of socialism in any case.


That is a perfectly workable definition of socialism. Literally textbook. I would expect any red-blooded Leftist to agree with the statement "The means of production belong in the hands of the proletariat", or they're just fucking posers.

Please, Mister or Missues Vanguard of Leftist Vocabulary, enlighten us on what "Socialism" really means.


I think you fell for the typical right wing propaganda trope where socialism=marxism=communism. You presented the textbook definition of that propaganda and of communism.

How would you define and distinguish them, then?

This is the “propaganda” sponsored by most leftists, though?

Except not equality - stepping stones. Socialism is supposed to lead to communism, per Marx. That’s not a right wing take, unless you consider Karl Marx a conservative.


Communists call leftists "reformists", that think you can reform capitalism into a stable state (like i do). If you rest there, you are not a communist but a socialist, so its not a stepping stone.

Communism is a statist implementation of socialism.

Not all socialism is communism, but all communism is socialism.


I mean, those of us with Marxian biases define it that way -- not right wingers -- and see "social democrats" in the 21st century as being the people who successively turned the term to mean instead anything-where-government-does-stuff. That's effectively what it came to mean in the US.

Notably, the definition given by Marx and other 19th century socialists (worker controlled production) is doesn't even have to involve government or the state at all. It just came to mean that once proximity to power came into play. The "soviet" word merely meant local worker councils, not a state form, for example. But once the Bolsheviks took state power, the power of the actual soviets was successively demolished in favour of a centralized one party state.

So, notably: Self-called "Marxist-Leninists" in the USSR, and Social Democrats (or "democratic socialists" in the US), and Right-wingers all far prefer the term to mean "government controls things." The latter because they can then point fingers and call things authoritarian (but somehow exempt corporate power from critique).

But it is not at all clear that 19th century socialists .. from Proudhon through Marx etc -- who coined the term -- meant this at all.

Also this hard line between "communism" and "socialism" is fictitious and very schematic. All communists call themselves socialists, and almost none of them agree on what that means.

Social democrats trying desperately to sound respectable clearly want a nice hard line there. But they also have no intention of bringing about socialism.


Finally! Someone that actually understands the nuances and complexities of the terminology.

You are a rare person.

Leninism ≠ Stalinism ≠ Maoism ≠ Socialism ≠ Communism.

These are overloaded terms at this point which is part of the reason so few actually comprehend.

Even Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism can mean different things depending on the context and interpretation which is another part of the collective confusion.

If we had clear definitions, it *might* irradicate the confusion, but I don't see that happening in the forseeable future.

There's too much at stake for every involved party to clear things up.


> These are overloaded terms at this point which is part of the reason so few actually comprehend.

this is perhaps the smallest of all possible reasons that "few actually comprehend" :) yes, the left is good at eating itself, but that self-destruction is not without a lot of external assistance!


What is your definition?

That's not the definition of socialism in any case.

In many cases it very much is the definition of socialism.


> socialism defined by worker ownership of the means of production

Thats not socialism. It's vaguely a redistribution layer on top of capitalism. The article contrasts S. with C. which is also wrong.

Eg. inheritance tax does not restrict free enterprise, but the devil is in the details.


Please explain what you consider these terms to mean?

>> socialism defined by worker ownership of the means of production

>Thats not socialism

That is literally the most bare and core definition of socialism.


I jist checked the "bare definition" of socialism and a shiver went down my back when i saw the first eng wiki paragraph

> characterized by social ownership of the means of production

... incorrect propaganda on the wikipedia.

In the german article, its more accurate "there is not clear definition".

Its a familiy of ideas around wealth distribution with many degrees of freedom. Its not incompatible to capitalism, like communism is. I gues the eng wiki article is meant trigger stereotypes with "means of production".


Ah, you are one of those.

Please define or explain how socialism is compatible with capitalism

I already gave one, inheritance tax, since its not tied to economic activity.

When you think the "survival of the fittest" nature analogy of capitalism further, then there should be no inheritance. All value that you have accumulated over your life (nutrition) is redistributed on your death into the environment, so in that analogy, capitalism shouldnt allow inheritance at all.

There are many more options of wealth distribution, which effect more wealthy people than the working class and in small-ish quantitiea, all of them are compatible with capitalism. Again, the devil is in the details.


OK, are you providing inheritance tax as an example of socialism? I'm sorry but your comments are not easy to understand, I want to understand what you're trying to say but it's unclear because your argument is split over several comments that I can't seem to parse.

I want to understand what you're saying if you'd give me a few moments of further explanation of your claim/argument


It was my GP comment, i was referring to with the inheritance tax. In socialism, taxation has, besides its state funding and steering function (punishment of undesired behavior, like a CO2 tax), the function of wealth redistribution to narrow the gap. Maybe you can achieve this goal without taxation but regulation alone, but this would require smart governmental intervention too.

Today, it is self evident, that regulation and taxation policies in many (all?) capitalistic countries had the opposite effect than narrowing the wealth gap. In the past years of crisis and even before, the rich were getting overproportionally richer than poorer milieus, leading to even more "democratic" represetation (money in politics) and them shaping the system even further to their advantage.

Today, it is more lucrative to put your money into the stock market than to start a business, eg. a small restaurant. This is undesireable and a result of a lack of taxation/regulation. I think, the US suffers the most of a financialized economy, where dilluted economists can point to GDP and say, "look, its all good". Its like a hypothermic body reaction, where blood gets stripped from the limbs to keep the organs going and the doctor says, "look, the heart still beats fine". The lack of public funding everywhere and the widening wealth gap are self evident and related.

You might think now, what does this have to do with socialism. The inheritance tax, naturalistic decomposition and the blood examples were about access, or redistribution of a resource that is currently elsewhere. I feel strange explaining this obvious imbalance and broad socialistic solutions to US americans and get hit with so much weird feedback. Socialism is kind of the vague middle ground in a capitalism-communism spectrum, but its also not only in the economic domain (inheritance tax), which means it is obviously compatible with capitalism. And yes, the english wiki article is factually incorrect, socialism is a family of ideas with a common goal but without a clear definition. With that angle, even the US is a socialist country, but this might never penetrate some red-voting veteran check receivers. This internalized propaganda of "socialism is bad and anti-capitalistic" combined with the obliviousness towards current problems of capitalism is frightening. I shouldnt be texting that much about obvious and basic facts.


Cooperatives are certainly an implementation of socialism.

What makes you think that they aren't?


Cooperatives are a capitalist mimicry of communism but not quite identical, but thats irrelevant.

Socialism is a broad collection of ideas around wealth distribution with alot of degrees of freedom, which leaves enough room to confuse ot with communism, i guess.


Cooperatives have nothing to do with capitalism. It is a democratic process for workers to control the organisation. Which may or may not have to fit into a capitalist society, but it is very much a socialist institution by definition.

Are you sure you understand what you are arguing?

https://www.uk.coop/understanding-co-operatives


> In my experience, the docs for something like setting up a dev env are typically greatly improved by the second person who sets up the dev env, not the personal who originally wrote the docs.

In my experience, this is also true of a lot of code as well. Your dev scripts should probably have much more relaxed standards than your service source or CI/CD. Ideally I could define merge requirements by directory without doing some weird shenanigans with the CODEOWNERS file and a bot.


I don't think anyone is saying it's poisonous here? The people were hired to do a job and they didn't do it. Feels like you're being disingenuous, if there's one thing i know about AI employees, it's that they use LLMs, like, all the time.

Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.

(I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)


Nope, not having trouble following it, but the metaphor leaves out an important link between AI output and the AI itself. The question is, did the AI gain anything from this training? And the answer is, it did not, since the training used it's own answer with no other input. There's nothing in the water metaphor that draws this line.

Maybe a better metaphor is something involving drinking your own piss, but I don't feel the need to flesh that one out


So you’re saying LLMs are feeding us their piss instead of water

Well dang. That’s a problem ain’t it.

GPT-5 came and went, and we’re still here adding decimals to the model numbers hoping this fundamental fuckup will go away

Feels like everyone, including you and the guy you’re arguing with, and the researchers at openAI, knows this is a problem. Is it laziness? Lack of creativity? Are we seriously all out of ideas other than scaling compute?

When are we planning on figuring this one out boys. Who’s actually working on this today


Religions are an example of a system feeding back into itself and going off the rails. This is not an AI problem, this is the problem of any evolving system.

In humans this problem is solved by dying. If you get too stoooopid, well you get culled by your own stupidity. Luckily we run in a massively parallel fashion and those that aren't fatally dumb carry on.

This is also why human civilization fundamentally changed (not humans, our civilization) after wide adoption of the scientific method. Humanities growth in relation to our potential intelligence level was horrifically slow. It's really easy to say "hur hur, machine dumb" when we could have had rockets 10,000 years ago if we weren't dumb ourselves.


Lmao, adding death maximalism to the solution matrix

It’s a good metaphor, your point is valid

He’s being too literal


> those who need done a small set of narrowly defined tasks with existing clear guardrails: repetitive physical labor in a controlled environment, call center and customer service chat work, etc.

I have no idea how people can so confidently say that call center work is a “controlled environment” or “repetitive”. It’s almost by definition not repetitive or controlled. Customer support is what I go to when the controlled environment has failed


Depends on what customer support means.

Typically it means knowledge retrieval from a KB or manipulating a control surface not visible to you.


It's repetitive and controlled if you don't care about the outcome, which monopoly companies don't.

sure, but then why be bearish on LLMs? You don't even need to care about the code just check the boxes.

I assume because the market for crappy customer service isn't big enough to justify current AI company valuations.

Let's repeat the same circle. Why is customer service fundamentally a more controlled environment than anything else the author deems "outside of an LLMs capabilities"?

came here to say exactly this. in fact, this is probably why we are not seeing a lot of AI application on customer service use case, and when we see one, it's almost always frustrating.

> If Jev is skipping generation entirely for a narrow structured task, of course it's faster

I think this is reasonable if people are actually using LLMs to solve this type of narrow structured task, which they are. The evidence is that every LLM provider has some method of forcing the output to conform to a json schema in their documentation.


> You mean they are Jewish

No you, the commenter said what they said. I honestly think this reply merits a ban or at least a warning from moderators


Literally no person on earth can beat a computer in chess. Practically no person on earth can really teach a computer anything about chess. For some crazy reason, people keep playing

Sure, but play is different from work.

Oh wow, that’s a lovely way to say it!

Purpose rebirth is the re-finding of play in the thing we choose to partner with AI (likely with a paycheck attached) to do N hours a week.


> Take Software engineering for example, I can't believe there is a class of software engineers who wake up everyday and tell themselves, "today is the day I am going to automate the rest of my job".

And here I thought this was the whole point…


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