grym [she/her, comrade/them]

yea, it’s data transformation but there is zero intelligence, context or anything “new”.

The tool itself is fine when used clearly and purposefully, and those kinds of tools have been used for a long time in various fields, the problem I have with the current hype trends of ““AI”” is that literally nothing fundamentally new was made. People aren’t being informed on how these things really work and what they do, there’s a lot of dangerous practices and psychological manipulation, and above all these new large models are enormous labor-obfuscating machines. I don’t give a shit about private property, IP laws, etc (because I know that’s a common response), the problem is that these things are another layer of illusions, an enormous curtain hiding entire industries of data-scraping and theft, of countless people and hours of manual tagging, filtering, training, moderating and mechanical turks, in purely profit-seeking and reckless ways. And not only is all this labor not valued, people aren’t even aware it exists, people never have to interact directly with anyone along that production chain. Entire industries becoming ghosts, non-existent, and even more unable to organize and struggle for what they create.

Beyond that, class consciousness is ever harder to teach and agitate for in these domains, because shit like this is purposefully built to hide and disguise exploited labor (often from the labour force of the colonized and victims of imperialism) and privatization.

It’s not the stealing that’s the problem it’s the sneaky, rapid disruption and destruction of existing productions and jobs that it entails, and the privatization of colossal amounts of public data and user-generated data that nobody ever intended to be privatized and extracted for profits. It was always happening in the background of course, but i don’t think people realize the impact this will have, to me it’s like a closure of the internet-commons. Colossal explotation of Free Labour, the expansion of exploitation in every sphere of “content production” that was previously unreachable.

Drives me fucking insane.

Not only is the summary kinda light or missing the deeper points, the LLM did not “break down” the plot by “reading” the provided PDF. House of Leaves is impossible to fucking parse correctly as a PDF, the text is all over the place, visually placed in very complex ways, you have a whole labyrinth chapter where you have to follow footnotes across multiple pages with the text being difficult to find and follow, anything “reading” the PDF in the regular order of characters would have no fucking clue.

As always, there is no intelligence or any breaking down, the only reason the LLM is able to provide the summary is because it was trained on a dataset that included summaries and reviews of House of Leaves, and it simply detected the PDF was House of Leaves.

The LLM is, YET AGAIN, just regurgitating things that are already written elsewhere, nothing is created, it’s all obfuscation of labour.

Yea these are mainstream and so mostly bourgeois sources

I think mainstream média sources in France are limited and will not want to admit that its because people hate macron or the Olympics. So those few sources are what gets translated

That’s not at all why people are talking about it what the fuck? It has nothing to do with seeing the clean-up of the river as “wasteful spending”, it’s because everyone fucking hates Macron lmao.

The “clean-up of the Seine” is a recurring joke, multiple presidents and mayors of Paris have promised it over the decades and it never ends up happening, and this time as well everyone laughed and said “if we actually see him swim in it, I’ll eat my hat”.

It’s because we hate macron, and it’s because people really dislike the Olympics as well. The olympics are wasteful spending, very badly organized, and they’re going to a complete shit show to the delight of everyone outside Paris, myself included.

Hey so macron just announced he’s dissolving the assembly, snap elections the 30th of this month

Lmao

Edit: this came as an announcement right after the european election results in france where the far right had a huge victory, i’m not really sure what his plan/strategy is, with this timing it feels like it’s going be very easy for the far-right to organize and the left is a clusterfuck right now.

Huh i thought that was genuinely very interesting, and adds a little bit of nuance to a few points of Marx in capital where “charactermaske” was translated into something else.

Hard to say which specific branch the author belongs to, most of this looks to be a pretty good analysis and explanation of the concept and its usage and evolution, doea a good job at providing different interpretations, responses and critiques while still defending the original concept in some ways.

Where it gets dodgy is towards the end, the inclusion of modern or post “Marxists” that apply it to the USSR in (what looks to to me like) unproductive ways, and fucking zizek at the end, but that might have been a more recent edit

This 100% reads like AI-generated text, extremely formulaic and predictable with very surface-level facts. Lots of comparisons/analogies like “He did X, that’s like doing Y !” also. Absolutely no doubt in my mind, once you’ve seen enough GPT-like text you can spot it pretty quick.

Hell yea

Also, the labels attached to gender and how they are defined are also in a context. They change and are in relation with everything else. People also constantly push and shift what Gender is more broadly in their group, community, country, world, whenever they do anything with it. Like a language, its living. And as a living thing different groups and interests might want to control it or affect it more directly.

You’re right, I meant that all those are different ways to change gender, they can be used alone or together, combined or not. And affecting your Gender doesn’t mean changing which is your perceived or declared label, like everything else quantitative change then qualitative change.

BIG RAMBLING THOUGHTS AHEAD. Thanks for starting this convo, I felt like writing my thoughts on this.

It’s interesting to me how often materialism and idealism seem to be misunderstood. I think it’s because people’s thinking, and the bourgeois sciences, are so inherently idealistic in their framework that people end up interpreting materialism vs idealism in an idealistic way.

To me, both materialism and idealism have the same start and context, they see the world and what happens inside it, they try to understand and describe things. Neither denies the real world, or the immaterial, they are different frameworks of how you abstract things, how you organize your understanding, which leads to different insights and conclusions.

Idealism accepts the material reality of things, but it is fundamentally Dualist and categorizing in a linear, hierarchical and context-less way.

Things are or are not, A is defined in this way, B is defined in another, there is a clear distinction between A and B.

A can be described with this finite and timeless list of attributes. etc etc. It tries to apply a framework that abstracts everything into discrete and distinct “things”, separate from each other. If you were to try and draw it or visualize this abstraction (not the real world of idealists, but how they abstract. They are superficially aware that their abstractions aren’t the real world), you would see separate things floating in a void, sometimes interacting or touching each other.

It tends to be context-less, blindingly linear, and binary.

A “thing” can be defined without including its history or future trajectory, the essence of a thing is timeless.

A thing happens, then another: Even when things are complicated, this method of abstraction leads to very linear understanding of causes and effects, everything needs to have a primary cause and primary effect, there is an almost constant work to reframe things in a hierarchy of cause and effect. If an idealist sees two things interacting with each other equally, they will abstract 2 little drawings, process 1 which goes from A to B, process 2 which goes from B to A.

I could go on but i’m getting a little lost. Basically, idealism to me is a limited framework of abstraction that sees things too linearly, discrete and distinct, context-less, hierarchical and ultimately essentializing. Their abstractions become traps, they can’t help but apply them to the real world beyond simply abstracting. Their method of abstraction becomes a lens through which everything is reframed, and they become blind.

Going more into the mind (which idealism separates from the body/material), this framework can give you the impression that YOU are this discrete, distinct, context-less, linear thing. You are an individual, floating in the void, interacting with other separate things. In this view, you can easily imagine how someone could decide to just change things. A big void with floating things, doesn’t seem very hard to just decide to push one or another, and you can do your interacting without being affected directly. This is obviously nonsense.

In contract, materialism in a very basic way would reject this and focus on observation from the real world, empiricism at least. But if you still function within the broader idealistic framework of abstraction, this is useless. You will keep the idealistic basis but simply “reverse” things. The “material” is now at the top of hierarchy, everything is still linear, so everything simply derives from it in this grand mechanical way. You still have things floating in the void, you simply put the “material” ones at the top as the largest things with the most gravity, and the “individual” and their “ideas” at the bottom, as illusions, fake. How could they be anything else when nothing they do can change anything? This becomes a very crude and mechanistic (sometimes called metaphysical) materialism, which sees everything as machine. Life is a mechanical process, living beings are basically robots, we are all automaton slaves to the material reality driving everything we do and think. Also nonsense.

Dialectical thinking is the important part, combined with materialism. The philosophy of Internal Relations is the key part. Things aren’t distinct and discrete, defining a thing always includes it’s context, history, trajectory and ALL relations. Everything is very messy, there are no clear borders, everything is always changing, and every interaction between 2 parts goes both ways. There is no hierarchy of cause/effect in the real world, everything interacts both ways. This is very difficult to get right as a system of abstraction, it’s part of the reason Marx can be difficult to understand because he seems to constantly shift the way he uses or defines certain words or concepts, but it’s always consistent.

The advantage of it is that it is a much better way of abstracting that doesn’t become blind, doesn’t distort how you view the world too much. And it doesn’t separate “material” from" ideas", “real” from “unreal”. Everything that is and that we do and think is “material”, whether it’s corporeal or incorporeal. What that means is that you can change things, because you refuse the illusory hierarchy of the idealistic framework. You understand how everything affects everything else, in different ways, changing over time. You can change things in a multitude of ways, including through ideas. A great change of ideas and thinking for a sufficient number of people is a huge material change, it will drive physical changes as well.

A great change of physical conditions that affects many people will also be a huge material change in the incorporeal, it will drive psychological and philosophical changes in everyone it affects. The world changes people as much as people change the world. But for every situation and thing you attempt to abstract, it has its specific context, it has its own contradictions and processes, and some are stronger or more “important” than others, but always within your lens of abstraction, always depending on how you decide to look at it, always with biases and dependent on what you are trying to understand and change.

A person is their body and mind, there is no reason to separate them except in the context of abstractions, but those abstractions should be self-aware and controlled so as not to distort how you view reality. A person is also all of their context, their environment, their social relations, their past, their trajectory towards the future. Gender as a concept is very useful in the way it has been redefined and explored in the past decades, because it acknowledges that your “gender”, which is as much a part of who you are, is both inside and outside of you. It exists as relation, relation to your system, your country, your culture, your language, social norms, your relationship to society, family, friends. Gender defines the two-way process within which you perform a certain set of social behaviors and signifiers.

Gender is itself the two-way process of performing gender. It includes the actor, audience and stage in that performance. And Gender can be changed like everything else, in both ways. Gender changes when your relations change, when your environment sees you or treats you differently, where the physical conditions of the world, or your body, are changed. Gender also changes when your thinking changes, when your relation with yourself, how you see yourself, how you perform and present yourself to the world.

Anyone who claims to be marxist or dialectician and cannot reconcile gender with their framework is an idiot or a liar. They’re revealing how idealistic their abstractions are.

Why did we say that? They’re a circle of people who broke away from a very small group which you may know, called the RCG. This circle wrote a blog called ‘Red Fightback’, and the bottom line is, their position is that there’s no such thing as gender.

Rather, gender, they claim, is some kind of medical conspiracy where, at birth, the doctors go away and huddle together and they ‘assign a gender role’ to you. So, pregnant mothers: when you have your 20-week ultrasound scan, you’re not having a scan to see whether your baby is a boy or a girl (say ‘Red Fightback’). No; that’s all medical conspiracy! And when the baby is born, they inspect the baby to say it’s a boy or a girl – well that’s all medical conspiracy, too! These things (boys and girls, men and women) aren’t real – don’t you see??

Absolute clowns. Of course you’re going to be able to say completely braindead and ignorant things like this strawman, when you refused to address the topic on its own terms and refused the distinction of sex vs gender.

Not enough working women are involved in our movement. Why is it that all of our YouTube videos have 80 to 90 percent hits from men? Young women don’t think politics has got anything to say to them. They’ve been pushed into this blind dead-end of bourgeois feminism.

lmao. i WONDER WHY.

Also way to show how utterly useless and small you are, that you are nothing more than a little larping committee. Stats about members, specific struggles you’re involved with? Nope, Your Youtube videos are not having good numbers, wow, great revolutionary work.

Excited for 0.5.0, there’s some much needed upgrades I need like the proper bluetooth headset mode switching. Hope wireplumber can really grow in the years to come, the linux sound stack has always been utter shit and a nightmare to deal with, my biggest problem with linux still.

Keep going dude, I think you should try to be a little more insufferable and smarmy, you’ve almost reached a new record

oOoooh this looks rad!

Musicbee with wine! I have never been able to find something that does it all as well as musicbee, and I’ve tried almost every single linux music player. I have a huge music library, I add a ton of music regularly. I need auto-tagging, i need to be able to sort, filter and search, a very customizable interface, all of the mp3 tags including obscure ones, gapless playback, configurable fade-in/fade-out, etc etc. With the exception of a few little nitpicks like not integrating well with the KDE media widget, and some occasional annoyances with pipewire, everything works great.

Look I don’t know how useful or “good” is it to be extremely aggro on twitter/nitter like Roderic usually is, but he’s right.

I can never really fault him for it, it’s a dumb social media and there’s not much point to it if you don’t actually engage with people and are able to criticize what they say, especially when talking about influencial people with a platform. And yea, he’s very aggro, but his original response is not really directed at JP as a person, just angry and critical at the ideas he’s peddling, and for good reason.

JP’s reponse is a pretty typical one for western leftists. Criticism is seen as an attack, it is always reinterpreted in an individualistic lens. Attacking someone’s really dumb or dangerous idea is immediately rolled back with “woah there calm down maybe you could be civil” as if the person criticizing is being mean, rude, or violent, when often (as is the case here) that’s not the case. If you’re going to talk about political things and ideas like there, and someone tells you publically “This is completely wrong and dangerous what the fuck”, your response shouldn’t be “Why are you attacking me?”. Criticism is not a conflict, it’s not a fight, it’s not personal, and it is extremely important and necessary.

I have a main hook in the campaign that’s kind of a large background problem that impacts almost everything in some way, something that brings a lot of change. I had a ton of rough ideas for what would be in different regions of my campaign setting/map and conceptualized those as “quests”, just a name to put on one cool idea/mystery and tease it players. At the start of the campaign there’s an immediate hook and thing that happens which ties into the main large problem and teases a lot of its mystery, brings a lot of change and danger but they players don’t really understand it full yet, and forces the players to want to do something or go somewhere. Then depending on which “quests” they seem to take an interest in, what hooks they bite into, that’s where they go and I can detail the place they’ll go to more.

For example, my current campaign :

• At the start, for one reason or another the players are present near a clash between two armies, a war has broken out between two minor kingdoms in a vast, wild and untamed region full of history and mystery (doesn’t really matter why or how they are here, as usual the players understand that they need to bite into the original hook or there’s no way to even bring their characters together). As the armies charge, the players have a strange kind of vision, on both sides stands a strange knight in golden, shiny armor, standing on a diseased horse. A golden mask covers his face, but flies betray the decay hiding under it. The knight screams of glory and victory, and charges. The armies clash. It’s a bloodbath, and suddenly a sort of necrotic storm is felt, a sickening feeling felt by every living thing. The fallen start to rise, and both armies have to retreat as they start being massacred by a rising undead horde. This becomes known as the butchery of Iar’Limb. I’m skipping some bits but basically there’s a bit of setup for things around them that have been and are happening, the kingdoms, the war, some history, etc. A big thing happens, the golden knight, the undead storm and the new army of the dead. The players attempt to help in whatever way they can but they know they have to run away too, they can’t face this threat yet.

It’s quickly clear that the entire region is affected in some way, everywhere rumors of magic acting up, spirits angered, planar rifts or undead energies, and somehow it all seems to be related. The general idea now is: explore and find stuff out. Some people might know more, some mysteries can be investigated to reveal a piece of the larger whole, some people might help. A lot of different factions and NPCs roam around and deal with their stuff, the local problems, the conflicts, their own goals, etc.

For example the place they start has a few “quests” I tease from the start : the old caravan that one of the players knows has a mystic that could know more about shadow plane/undead stuff. One of the players was a soldier of one of the two armies and has now effectively deserted, so they want to leave the area quickly, they head to a nearby town where a lot of refugees are already gathering, the whole region seems in turmoil. In the town they learn of demons on a nearby hill that are haunting and corrupting local inhabitants, a fisherwoman talks of dead or diseased fish from upriver, a mad and rambling man runs in the town square shouting about the town in the forest appearing and disappearing in-and-out of reality, and hands the players a weird piece of some broken clockwork machine, etc etc.

The only thing I had ahead of time was a rough idea of what the main hook is about, but even that not entirely. Some details and fun encounters to quick off the first session, a quick map of the nearby down and some NPCs. My hexmap at this point is just my campaign map with the hex grid, maybe a couple ideas jotted down here or there, or large groups of hexes like “this region is all about fey stuff” and “this region will be witches and spooky forest creatures”, etc. Then I had a bunch of rumors, cool ideas and quests to tease, and maybe a little note about how it could tie back to the main plot, but nothing more, don’t want to prep for nothing.

After that first session, since one of the NPCs they met is an old sailor that one of the players knew from a previous adventure, they chose to spend more time with him and look into his hooks/quests, which tied to the demon hill, so they went and did that. I then detailed the hexes between where they were and the demon hill, I don’t like filler and the point of them is not to spend an eternity in each hex but to represent a fun voyage with interesting things to encounter and stumble upon. Even mundane things will always tell them a bit about the region, its history, tie to some local problem or quest, etc.

Next session they traveled in that direction to find the demon hill, found a few things here and there in the hexes that built up the world around them more, some colorful NPCs, some places that developed the history of the area a little more, or just cool fun stuff. I especially like stuff that they can make their own and not things that are “depleted” once encountered. Like a magical stone that seems to be able to absorb curses, which is tied to some settlements around it, has a little bit of history and lore and NPCs which could have quests about it, but most importantly the players mark that down on the map and say “we’ll know to come back here if we have curse problems”, and of course on demons hills they find cursed items.

This is getting really long so I’ll stop, but basically I frontloaded a rough map, rough regions of hexes with a few cool ideas scattered around, a bunch of smaller plots and mysteries that tie back to a big long-term mystery that the players want to resolve, and then I just improvise and “zoom-in” a little bit on a specific region or patch of hexes when I know the players are going to go there.

The hexmap itself isn’t a major dungeon in every hex, those are scattered evenly with a few per region which all tie together in some way. The hexes in between are a sort of “area of influence” around those major hexes, they tease the plot of the big hex, add some detail, immersion, color, or cool stuff to find. If they know they want to go from A to B and they know where B is, then the “exploring” part is less important and can become tedious, so I don’t put much effort in it, I emphasize the wonders and tribulations of travel. Where it really shines is when they know something important is nearby but not exactly where, and they have to look around, interact with everything to learn more, and will thoroughly explore a small patch of hexes.

The hexmap serves as knowing where the players are, there’s usually only one or a few “sites”/things per hex. It’s also how I track where the factions and roaming NPCs are over time, or how the big problems roll through the region (like the army of undead slowly spreading through the region as the days advance, and the players hear rumors and news about it, and how it impacts the rest of the region), and when they travel or explore I have a simplified routine like how long it takes to cross a hex/why, what they automatically find or have to search for, or some check I roll to see if they have an encounter and what kind (not necessarily a fighty one), etc. It’s more a prep and tracking tool, and helps to keep it all straight in my head. It seems to be working wonders because the players at this point fully assume that everywhere around them is coherent and prepared and there’ll be cool stuff to find, they’ve very immersed and are eager to learn more about the places they explore or the mysteries they are trying to unravel.

Thanks for your response :)

I agree with most of what you said, I think my case is not entirely applicable however, since I’m playing hexcrawl in PF2e. I understand your dislike of hexcrawl and it is a difficult type of game to run, you can’t really run it in a traditional way with a prepared plot, even though the plot will emerge gradually. My hexmap doesn’t really have any filler, but playing a hexcrawl does require the players be invested and interested in exploring and discovering things, and learning about the land around them in detail, even if it’s not directly important for the plot. It’s a very different kind of tone and not suitable for all plots and types of players.

It’s less about “forcing” encounters or having boring contents, it’s simply that when there is a large level-range in a region where players might go in any direction and explore anywhere, even your map is full of interesting stuff like mine, I can’t really set/prepare the levels ahead of time too much or a lot of the stuff prepared will have to be adjusted or thrown out because it doesn’t match the level of the players. So I don’t really include levels in the stuff I do prepare long-term, I just setup a web of interesting interconnected stuff all over the place, and the precise level of encounters/stuff to do is prepared just ahead of the players. I can still say something like “those mountains are very dangerous for your level” and if they do go there, I’ll set it at higher level than them in a way that makes sense and where it’s clear it’s going to be very difficult, but if I set it up long before they ever go there and arbitrarily decide “this mountain is a level 10 area” then it won’t just be difficult they’ll be killed in seconds, so It’s better to adjust as I go I think while keeping a relative safe/dangerous vibe to places.

Anyway it’s not that important, just a pretty common frustration of the hexcrawls I like to do which focus on exploration is that systems where levels matter a lot (like PF2e) make it harder to run and you kinda have to scale things relative to the players at least a little bit. All of what you said still applies!