PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. If you got a brick of text, don’t be alarmed; that’s normal.

No, I’m not interested in voting for your candidate.

  • 16 Posts
  • 895 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • IMO, other than to fight against establishment AI-powered projects, avoid LLMs and image generation for public facing anarchist orgs for now because it’s currently associated with and controlled by the capitalist class. There isn’t really a particularly great application area for LLMs and image generation where I would rather have a machine do the work than a human.

    Optimal control theory and reinforcement learning can be used for peaceful robotics applications. Classical machine learning is used all the time in the background without controversy. We can keep doing that. IMO the CEOs and business people don’t actually understand the mathematics behind the systems they work with, so if you like math and have the time to pore through research papers, you can make the business people look like jackasses who don’t know shit (even more than they already do).

    In the background, work to wrest control of AI from the capitalist class if you have the resources and time. We should periodically revisit the issue as the culture changes and people learn how to use (and misuse) AI tools. IMO it makes sense to introduce it into anarchist spaces only when we can run our own AI resources independently from capitalists. But before that, we’re also going to need some technically informed theory about the ethics and philosophy behind AI.

    This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think we need more technical training on how to use AI, both the training/testing workflow and the mathematics behind it. In general, I think that we need to learn more about the technical tools of the oppressors, like missiles, UAVs, LRADs, surveillance technology, etc., so we can properly combat against them.





  • You’ve described a period in history for every country, most of them today as well

    Yes, I’m literally an anarchist. All states are at least classist, racist, capitalist, and enslavers to some degree. Any one of those would make states worthy of abolition IMO. Of course I oppose nationalism in all its forms. For a more nuanced (and less “giddy”) perspective, please see Section D.6 of the Anarchist FAQ.

    You’re just giddy it’s the u. S this time.

    I’m extremely cautiously optimistic that ordinary people are coming out to protests. And considering how after Trump 1.0, Democrats turned a blind eye to ICE, police violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Gaza genocide once a Democrat was elected to office, all after showing up to Black Lives Matter protests during Trump 1.0…I’m more cautious than optimistic.

    I don’t think your in the best in headspace

    Please read my post/comment history. Yeah, life’s been a bit shit lately so I’m more upset about it, but I’ve been an open anarchist for as long as I’ve been on Lemmy.




  • Don’t

    Leftists get bogged down in being a fourth wave posadist and reading theory over doing praxis and working towards the change.

    This is true and I’m definitely guilty of reading too much into stuff and not doing enough stuff… hence why I’m laying in bed procrastinating on the stuff I’m supposed to be doing… but I do think that some theory is really important to have. Like, what are we aiming for, why did some projects fail and others succeed, what are the common pitfalls and how can we spot them, and how can we better refine our arguments for the rare times we do get a platform?


  • IMO the most important thing is to read theory, read the history of leftist movements, and use good research practices. Just keep reading critically, try to follow the authors’ arguments, and internalize the things you understand and like. Also, it’s more important to build up a coherent worldview than it is to fall into a specific ideological box.

    For anarchist literature, The Anarchist Library is an incredibly diverse resource of often contradicting viewpoints, whereas the Anarchist FAQ is (in my view) an excellent first place to look for detailed explanations for commonly asked questions. In my view, the Anarchist Library is an excellent example of how it is important to develop your own worldview. Because the most anarchist/communist/socialist/leftist thing anyone could possibly do is loudly and vehemently disagree about something with someone who otherwise agrees with you 99.99%.

    IMO, this is legitimately how progress is made, by exploring the space of ideas. And that means that every once in a while, there’s going to be some ridiculous take from someone who is otherwise on your team who’s trying to explore that space of anarchist possibilities. So even when drawing from resources you typically agree with, it is so important to think and read critically.

    For Marxist and state-socialist literature I’m honestly a lot less informed since…well…I’m an anarchist and I’m going to disagree with statist Marxists on a lot of issues. But when I do need to look up some non-anarchist literature, Marxists.org usually has what I need.


  • Probably reading too much into this meme again but agorists don’t want to eliminate money or the economy. Instead, they want to transition society into a free market where all relations are voluntary exchanges within a counter-establishment economy. In this framework, currencies other than state-controlled ones are fine to use.

    I.e., money is still in play, and the economy is basically moved out of established legal markets but still very much there and (in my view) otherwise not very different from existing economic conditions. So the meme can’t be about agorists.

    IMO, agorism is basically an attempt to make anarcho-capitalism appealing to left-wing anarchists, and simultaneously an attempt to make leftism palatable to anarcho-capitalists. Agorism is…kinda ass. It’s not really good at being anarcho-capitalist or anarchist. If you really need to keep your markets, look into mutualism IMO. Or just realize that even “free” markets naturally lead to the development of unjustifiable hierarchies 😉.

    Consider this my penance for being an “”“anarcho”“”-capitalist when I was in high school and I actually read all this crap 🤮.



  • Nah, I really need to keep careful track of time. When my meds are working and I’m actually happy for once despite the soul-crushing reality of capitalism, I’m kind of a busy-body. Like I have a pathological desire to solve problems, and timekeeping is a really excellent tool in problem solving.

    Like I’m an autistic person and I have a lot of specific special interests like differential equations, control theory, music production, acoustics…I really need to manage my time to accomplish even a fraction of what I want to do. I just have this perpetual desire to do deep dives and solve problems, and that requires a shitload of research, reading, and practicing new skills… which requires careful time management. (Which I’m still kinda trash at 😆.)

    There’s definitely a critique to be made about how restrictions on the management of time and scheduling are imposed on us, and I would never want to impose timekeeping on people who don’t care to use it, but I don’t think timekeeping itself imposes a hierarchy.


  • I don’t even know what instance I am on.

    You are on Lemm.ee. Unfortunately, this is the instance this post is about.

    and how this matters to be honest.

    In about 17 days, you will no longer be able to login with your lemm.ee account. You should sign up for an account on any other instance. Examples include lemmy.sdf.org (the one I’m on) or any of the sites listed here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances

    Lemmy (and PieFed and mBin, but I’m just going to talk about Lemmy for simplicity) attempts to provide an experience inspired by Reddit, but not controlled exclusively by one party. Loosely speaking, where Reddit is only one website and the whole social network belongs solely to Reddit, the social network spanned by Lemmy is actually a bunch of smaller websites that talk to each other. If the Reddit website goes down, the whole social network is down. If a Lemmy instance goes down, only that little part of network goes down.

    Unfortunately, the admins of your instance have politely posted that your instance is going down on June 30th. This applies to you and anyone whose username ends in @lemm.ee, but it does not apply to (for example) me because I am not a user on your instance. (I am on lemmy.sdf.org, which you can infer from my full username @PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org, which ends with @lemmy.sdf.org.)

    Which instance you pick depends on what you want to see, what kind of administration you want, your political beliefs and how important they are, and who you want to be allowed to talk to. For my use case, I use SDF Lemmy because we don’t defederate (roughly, cut off communication) from anyone, even people who unambiguously deserve to be cut off. Furthermore, the people here are pretty chill. And SDF.org has a history of public service literally much older than I am, so SDF Lemmy will probably be around for a while.

    Occasionally SDF Lemmy is out for like 24 hours and the SDF.org admins are a bit slow to respond, but that’s fine for me. But also, SDF is a pretty big instance now. In order to not concentrate too much power in the hands of SDF (or anyone else), you should probably choose a less crowded instance.



  • Yes. Imagine we meet at a train station or something and I say. “Hey, you look like a racist piece of shit, but we’re starting a campaign to end world hunger, would like to hear more about it?”.

    Yeah but we’re not at a train station. Particularly, we are communicating through text, where you can skim the entire body of the text. Maybe the upcoming text justifies why the author sees me as a racist piece of shit. Maybe I have a blind spot! Or, maybe the author is just a jackass. But now I want to find out.

    But like also I think you’re missing the forest for the trees? The point was not to say “you’re a liberal and you should feel bad about it”, it was to critique the point you started with. Namely, the “forest” is that the far right is not morally or materially equivalent to the far right, and to claim otherwise ignores history and the current reality. And I only used the “fellow liberal” framing because liberalism is the default ideology in the Western world, and because it is usually liberals who make points like this. Strike out any usages of the word “liberal” if you really can’t look past this point.

    And we’re on Lemmy. I’m pretty sure " liberal" is a generally acknowledged insult here.

    I mean we’re on Lemmy.world so I don’t know about that 😆. Lot of liberals around here.



  • Did you actually stop reading at the word “liberal”? Because the actual argument I made was, with only a little bit of sass, that even from a liberal perspective, based on the values that liberals claim to uphold, the far right should be evaluated to be much worse than the far left. And then I remarked that this is not how liberals think because most liberals are two-faced (even if unintentionally so!).

    And while there’s a small chance you’re not a liberal…well, you’re walking like a liberal, quacking like a liberal, posting and commenting like a liberal… and we’re on .world, so there’s gonna be lots of liberals here anyways.