What’s changed now though is that material conditions have deteriorated significantly from 15 years go. People didn’t really have a reason to question the system as long as they could make ends meet and have some hope for the future. Today, a huge chunk of population has been pushed to the brink, and young people have nothing to look forward to. And that creates disillusionment in the system which makes people a lot more aware of what’s happening.
the joy of open source
I mean once China starts pumping stuff in volume, then it has translated into cheap consumer goods historically. I don’t see why this would be different.
it’s really nice to have a decent and user friendly open source app
lol no, I’m simply dismissing you
yeah, seems like getting a daily summary would make more sense
Plenty of tools can be dangerous when used improperly. For example, bleach is very useful for cleaning, but I would advice against drinking it.
What part of my argument is flawed, nothing I said is contrary to your statement.
Reddit does have the advantage of being a single site where search is easy to do in a shared db. Since Mastodon is federated, discoverability is going to be inherently worse as requests have to propagate through the network. But I think that for blogs it’s less of an issue since you tend to follow people for their writing.
In my opinion, Lemmy is already a great replacement for Reddit. So, it makes sense for Mastodon to focus on its core functionality which is blogging, while Lemmy can fill the Reddit niche in the fediverse.
I actually think substack format would be a better fit. It’s already a blogging platform at its core with good discoverability. That’s exactly what sites like substack provide and why they’re popular for blogging. Reddit/Lemmy is more of a news aggregator where people post links and discuss them.
Yeah, I think that’s exactly what happened as well. He was too big of a figure and that created an environment where there were no other strong leaders within the party. So, once he was gone, it created a huge power vacuum and squabbling.
China is actually quite independent from the US, and we have recent conclusive proof of that when Trump tried doing a trade war. Turns out, exports to the US are a tiny part of Chinese economy now. And I don’t know why you think China needs microchips from Taiwan when they have chip production entirely on the mainland. I think you need to spend a bit of time to actually research this subject because you’re very much misinformed here. https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/5/ieee-iscas-tau-scaling
by the way https://xcancel.com/upholdreality/status/2067629274765394368
I don’t think anybody takes what Trump says seriously at this point. He’ll say one thing than another, it literally changes day to day. What matters is that the US is exhausted now. They just lost a major war against Iran, their weapons stocks are depleted, and China has them by the balls. So, Trump is doing a bit of posturing right now, but it’s not going to translate into anything material because the coffers are empty.
And I can’t see Russia taking out the bridges because it’s almost certain they plan to use them. The goal of the Europeans is to provoke a big reaction right now so they can rally their public. The support for the war is at all time low in Europe right now, so they’re trying to put pressure on Putin to do something big to start scaring people how Russians are coming for them.
Artemov explains everything correctly, and reading his book really helped me see how American propaganda machine works a lot more clearly. The direct inspiration from the nazis and the evolution of the narrative was very interesting to read about as well.
Something becomes a tool through usage though. So, LLMs can be a tool just as anything else when we put out mind to it.
when you definitely know how tools work
At the end of the day technology is going to advance, and the rational thing to do is to figure out how to use it effectively. Yes, a lot of technology gets abused all the time, our society as a whole is incredibly wasteful. But I see technological progress as a net positive, if anything I think the problem is with our social structures and broken incentives. And that’s what we should focus on fixing.
For me, these tools have unarguably save a ton of time and frustration every single day. For example, I had to work on a Js project recently for work. I haven’t touched Js seriously in at least a decade and I’m not familiar with the ecosystem, libraries, language quirks, and so on. If I had to figure all of that out from scratch previously, I simply would not have been able to take on this project. LLM completely papered over all that for me. I know how to structure programs, I can read Js just fine, but I didn’t have to spend the time searching and internalizing all these little details of how to run tests, which npm modules I’d need to use, what React lifecycle hooks I’d need, etc. It made the project far more enjoyable to work on, and I was able to deliver it as fast as using languages I’m intimately familiar with.
The thing is that I did have to spend the time to actually use the tool effectively, to develop intuition for tasks it can do well and those it can’t. How to get it to write code in a way I can understand and review effectively, how to see when it’s not doing what I want and correct that. Just like any tool, you have to spend the time to actually learn it to get value out of it. If you start with the premise that you dislike the idea of the tool, then it’s guaranteed that you’re not going to have a good time using it. But it’s a mistake to extrapolate that other people aren’t getting actual value out of it based on that.
Meanwhile, the whole context of this discussion is running local models which are tools that are available to the common person, and do not result in any capture of labor that I can see. You could make this argument with using proprietary models that you rent from a vendor, but it simply does not hold with ones you run locally.
O7