Lovecraft was impenetrable even in his time, but the principle works. For wiki work or places where it’s important to have a cohesive style across entries this could be great, I’d love to try it on prolewiki pages because style varies a lot depending on who wrote the page.

Yes, writing conventions were very different back then and texts are made much more difficult today because they’re archaic. You can see this in interview transcripts and Wage labour and capital. WLC was written from a series of conferences Marx gave to a workers union in 1847 - it may be that the speeches were rewritten for the book format, but even then, I have to assume he gave the lectures mostly the way they’ve been written.

I don’t have as much problem reading theory in French vs. the English editions, part of it could be a second language thing but I think it’s also that (written) French has practically not changed from 1850s. It’s how we learned to read and write it in school. I don’t have that problem reading more modern authors (20th century) in English.

One thing I’d like to develop on ProleWiki is an easy way (with a clear dropdown menu for example) to select different editions for the same book, and have them switch out instantly. That way we could also host new editions in the age of the internet, where everyone can make their own. It’s a far-off idea though, I have no idea how I’d achieve this yet.

As for how to achieve this… I do echo another comment that it might not be the most important factor when it comes to theory. There’s lots of videos too on youtube which people are probably more likely to search for first before a book. But I think the experiment is interesting and worthwhile, you could start with a shorter work, send both editions to a sample audience, and compare their impressions of the two.

In the practical the problem as always will be to correctly convey the material without (inadvertently or not) removing or rewording things. Older editions are not innocent of this btw (and neither are youtube videos! but people still open them first before reaching for the book), there have been terrible official translations in the past. Something that seemed innocuous to the translator and they decided to leave out or didn’t understand completely changes the meaning of what the author actually meant, and the error gets repeated centuries later lol.

Like just the way Oppose Book Worship starts with “you must investigate! You must not talk nonsense! It won’t do! It won’t do!” could be translated any which of 100 different ways and each paints a slightly different picture of Mao.

However yog is working on a project that I don’t want to divulge before he does, but it may be a usecase for something exactly like this. @[email protected]

edit: or perhaps just adding footnotes as a companion guide sort of thing?

Oh yeah in 2014 or so facebook was found to be toying with their users like this. They were running psychology experiments on them by showing a portion of users mostly negative news for 2 weeks in their feed, then recording the results on these users. Another subset of users got positive news.

All done without the users’ consent or even telling them they were in an experiment of course.

It was not illegal because since they are a private company they don’t have to have an ethics board. Or at least at the time they didn’t. In any other setting this would have been shut down for gross ethical violations before it even got drafted.

I find that yeah we basically have to consciously decide not to play by their rules. I notice for example when I link tweets to discord or telegram I get more of that topic on my feed later. Even with the plugins I have the website tracks URL clipboard copy events. Even just lingering the viewport on a certain tweet even if you never click on it is probably tracked.

Recommendations can work well if you are aware not to click or (potentially) even linger the cursor on one that you don’t want to watch. For a while I had cool science and engineering videos, the kind from smaller channels where you feel like you’ve learned something even if you don’t understand all of it. They seem to have gone as quickly as they came though.

Lol I have something like 5 different plugins to try and make YouTube bearable and custom again. If you have your language set to anything other than English it will do auto dubbing without asking you which is a good idea in theory but not when you don’t need it.

edit:

• ublock origin (for ads in general)
• disconnect (for trackers in general, though I’m honestly not sure if it actually does anything)
• Improve Youtube (For Youtube & Videos)
• Clickbait remover for youtube
• SponsorBlock for youtube (the must have. I set it to skip pretty much everything - your time is precious)
• Unhook
• Youtube no translation
• Youtube nonstop (stops the “Are you still watching” pop up - fuck your bandwidth youtube it’s not my problem)
• Youtube search fixer

Some of these overlap but the features from one don’t necessarily work, that’s why you need both. For example don’t use the ad blocker from Improve Youtube, you’ll only get a popup to disable your ad block. Use ublock.

Don’t hesitate to make a report under the three dots menu! We can’t see everything so we count on them.

I’m starting to think they did a kidnapping precisely because they could not do anything else. If everything was on their side why do strikes on other targets instead of doing a stealth operation? Why 12 helicopters with ~36 soldiers each capacity (360 troops total just for this op)? That seems like a lot of troops on the ground if this was a pinpoint, fullproof mission. Air strikes were done to confuse and pull attention away from the actual operation. Striking the mausoleum was part of the op to divert the public eye.

It’s very close to the historical US invasion of Panama in 1989. They also struck military targets to begin with naval reinforcements brought in over the past months and then flew in special forces to kidnap Noriega. Notably the invasion was much larger-scale at the time.

It doesn’t have to be an inside job btw. Lots of people jumping to this but forces committed (if those helicopters were not empty of course) suggests decapitation method - going through various locations where target is expected to be found. There was absolutely scrambling and cyberwarfare to bring air defenses down, and striking at 3AM to catch army off-guard. Escalating tensions in the last few months including the strikes on civilian boats tested Venezuelan response protocols and reaction times and helped create complacency in the army.

It still remains to be seen what exactly they expect this kidnapping will do. Like I said it’s possible they settled for taking Maduro because that’s the only thing they could do (at this time at least), but why did they still proceed with it?

Time will tell.

Practice proper discipline. Don’t share unsubstantiated news, don’t believe unconfirmed reports. 10 Twitter accounts reposting the exact same video is not confirmation of events.

Don’t trust the enemy to tell you what’s happening, wait for confirmation from blue side. In a revolutionary situation we carry on as usual and wait for our side to give the go-ahead on how to react. Practice it.

It’s a good exercise! The tough part in anything is always moving from theory to practice.

I always recommend Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy followed by Mao’s On Contradiction. Politzer/the students who put this together was wrong in a couple places with internal contradictions (like autodynamism you can ignore that part tbh) but it’s still a very solid entry overall.

We also have reworked pages on diamat on ProleWiki + the blue links but tbh I’m still not 100% happy with these pages.

The potential is the negation. A thing must contain the conditions for its negation (or opposite), and this is what forms a contradiction and why we talk about internal contradictions.

The bourgeoisie for example creates a proletariat by necessity of their existence. They need people that work in their factories and businesses to appropriate surplus value from. So as the bourgeoisie expands, so does the proletariat. As a business expands it will employ more people therefore require workers therefore requires a proletariat to employ from.

Proudhon’s idea was exactly ‘vulgar’ dialectics. He said, well, seems like it’s desirable to be bourgeois and not desirable to be proletariat. So let’s make everyone into a bourgeois - give everyone land, and let them work on it. then everyone will be rich and unalienated like the bourgeoisie!

But this isn’t solving the contradiction because (the potential for) the negation still exists: if you have a bourgeoisie, it will necessarily create a proletariat because it needs a negation somewhere. We can’t just pluck the negation out with tweezers.

So we have to find the actual contradiction taking these laws in mind, it may not be readily obvious and may not just be the ‘common sense’ answer, i.e. “oh dark is the contradiction to light obviously, because 1. they are diametrically opposed and 2. you can’t have a concept of ‘light’ if you don’t have concept for ‘dark’” – I believe this is a shortcut and also vulgar dialectics (but don’t really have a better answer myself for the contradiction to light). Which is why I like that balloon example, because it shows a process and negation of the negation (uninflated balloon contains the potential to become inflated and that inflated balloon contains the potential to pop).

And this is the hard part lol, going from examples and explanations we read in books and into our own practice of dialectics and finding contradictions for ourselves instead of being told. Very difficult.

A very important part of a contradiction Mao touches on in that selected quote is

1. a contradiction is formed by opposing forces (you can also think of it as a diametrical opposite),
2. one cannot exist without the other,
3. a contradiction is solved when it no longer fulfills rule 1 or rule 2 - because at this point the contradiction no longer exists.

You have to think of dialectics as like the engine of change. Change happens, we see it everywhere, but how does that change happen? How do we move from snapshot of instant A to snapshot of instant B? And why is change even possible in the first place? We take this for granted but a universe that is static and constant could just as well exist, we just wouldn’t live in it because life would be impossible. But it could still objectively exist without anyone to witness it (and this is the essence of the materialism vs idealism debate).

Part of this how and why is that a contradiction must contain a ‘little’ of its opposite (I prefer to say it as the potential for its opposite), otherwise change would logically not be able to happen. How can a flower turn into fruit, if it does not somehow contain what makes fruit? This is how we realize we live in an ‘interconnected’ universe, as the video said, which is basically the material world. Everything around us, including concepts such as the universe or outer space, exist as part of this material world and obey its same rules.

So in this way the flower and fruit form a contradiction, and from here we can think of the negation of the negation. This sounds like a difficult or paradoxical topic but it’s very simple. Before the fruit was a flower, the flower was a burgeoning bud on a branch. And yet this bud while not directly becoming fruit, becomes first a flower that then becomes fruit. The flower is the negation to the bud, and the fruit is the negation to the flower. This is the negation of the negation.

In the same way before the feudal nobility could create a proletariat there had to be created a bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie creates its own negation in the form of the proletariat.

Conversely we have to be careful of ‘common sense’ contradictions. We might easily say “well death is the contradiction to life since they are diametrically opposed (can’t be both at the same time) and one can’t exist without the other - otherwise we’d all be immortal!” but it is closer to say that while death is the negation of life, it doesn’t solve the contradiction. What solves the contradiction is:

To live, an organism must constantly negate the external world (consume it) and constantly negate its own current state (metabolize, grow, age). This process of self-negation is the presence of death within life. Death is not the end of the process; it is the negative force in the process.

Hegel also said something about the genus or reproduction apparently but mind you this part is me stepping out of my comfort zone - I’m not versed at all in Hegel (edit: but basically the idea is apparently that you negate death not through life because death is already the negation of life, you negate death through reproduction for Hegel).

However by placing dialectics back right side up as Marx said (by analyzing dialectics materially instead of idealistically) we can look at the social. For Marx the contradiction to life is the social.

The Real Internal Contradiction: Under capitalism, human life-activity (labor) immediately contradicts itself. The worker’s activity creates a product that becomes private property (capital), which then stands against the worker as an alien, hostile power. Life creates its own negation.

• Thesis: Living Labor (creative power).

• Negation/Contradiction: Dead Labor (capital, the frozen product of past labor) that dominates and exploits the living. This is the “living death” or alienation. The worker feels alive only in animal functions (eating, sleeping) and feels “dead” in their distinctly human function (creative work).

• Synthesis: The revolutionary negation of this negation—overthrowing the system where dead labor rules living labor—to achieve true, free life-activity (communism).

Of course materialist dialectics don’t contradict hegelian dialectics, they put it back “right side up on its feet” as Marx said. We can and should absolutely still apply dialectics outside of social production to fully understand them and avoid falling into the pitfall of “diamat only works in politics and nowhere else”. So in that regard I’m not fully behind the above quote that starts from the position that for Marx there is only labor and social (re)production, but I felt it was a good explanation nonetheless into how dialectics apply to labor and the economy.

Years ago I remember seeing this website that teaches dialectics to kids in classrooms, with simple examples such as blowing air into a balloon. Then he pops the balloon, and shows quantitative transformation to qualitative change (and vice versa btw, I’m not sure they mentioned that in the video - qualitative transformation turns to quantitative change as well bc dialectics, and progress happens in leaps and bounds: things look to be at a standstill for a long time and suddenly everything topples and changes at once, like how your cat might inch the glass closer to the edge of the table until it falls to the floor). The balloon has always contained within it the negation of the negation, i.e. the potential to be popped, otherwise it literally could not be popped. It’s just that you can’t pop a deflated balloon. You can pierce it, but you can’t really forcefully evacuate the overpressure within it before that overpressure has been realized, but the balloon still contains the potential to become a pressurized chamber.

Unfortunately don’t remember the website but if you dive deep on google and find it feel free to share the link.

Lol and the RCI (ex-IMT) changed their names because it was too toxic. Literally just changed the trench coat.

A lot of parties and orgs exist solely to collect dues from members and justify their own existence. Trots are the most brazen about it but far from the only ones. If you look at their recently unveiled socialism AI for example, they sell absolutely ludicrous paid tiers for it, like 20$ a month and you only get ~500 messages. Which is a lot to use in a month, but deepseek for example is completely free to use with no usage limits whatsoever and can also look at the wsws site or whatever other source you want.

The more important part is looking at who talks about their “AI” (it’s a RAG wrapper around chatGPT but I digress) and you see it’s mostly other WSWS members. Not even other trotskyists. And they have a whole spiel about “I asked socialism AI X question, here’s what it had to say”. It’s so blatant; they know they will only ever sell this AI to their own members to extract more money from them.

I think one marker of a red flag is a party that hypes itself up severely, and has excuses for all their dysfunctions. I remember someone telling me the CPC (Canada lol not the based one) doesn’t go too far in their program because they don’t want to be declared illegal or censored. I mean… isn’t that a good thing to be attacked by the enemy? If you’re made illegal then you just go underground and you use that censorship to agitate people. But no yeah it’s apparently better to be no different from socdems and not make too much noise because god forbid we do anything but electoralism and collecting dues. It’s true what she said, those who don’t move don’t notice their chains.

Another marker is “oh but the comrades on the ground are super revolutionary” but then there are no such revolutionary members in the central committee or in leadership positions. In fact it only ever seems to elect reformists and social-democrats. That’s not a red flag against the comrades on the ground, it means that the party has ossified leadership - and chalk another red flag up if the leadership is always the same or very similar. Third red flag: if they have ready-made answers to handwave criticism away and nobody wants to talk about it with you. Like how People’s World doesn’t belong to CPUSA or a CPUSA committee but to a private name. Technically it belongs to Long View Publishing Co., Inc and Long View [Inc meaning Incorporated meaning a private company structure of a certain type btw] belongs entirely to John Bachtell. He owns People’s World and can do whatever he wants with it.

But when you point that out the only response you get (drilled into members’ heads no doubt) is that by law they “can’t” have a party newspaper. Okay then find that law, cite it, assuage our doubts instead of entrenching yourselves further in “I must defend the party at any cost”. What do you owe them that they got you like this lol.

Frankly at this point a party needs to deserve me. I don’t mean to sound arrogant because I think every comrade should think like this. It’s not a given that you just join whatever party calls itself communist, they need to deserve you and offer something that makes you want to stay. If they only ever use you and your labor then that’s not a party that’s an employer.

With that said IRL organizing yields much practical experience and as someone else you can’t fully understand theory without practicing it. But we deserve to be discerning about who we give our time to.

You can be productive towards packaging potato chips, your job for which you receive a wage, or productive towards writing essays that teach new marxists. They’re two very different things (and no shade on chips packaging it’s just that I knew someone who did this job and hated it).

As marxists we recognize that capitalism does a lot of things well (but we can do them better). and Lenin recognized this too when he said the USSR had to learn from capitalists as soon as possible. In that moment they learned all about HR, productivity, management, etc. All very capitalist concepts and we could call it Labor resources instead of HR, quotas instead of productivity (I guess), and organization instead of managing, but that would just be semantics. We don’t change the nature of things by calling them a different name. Capitalists and liberals are not always wrong just on virtue of being liberals, but they are very tunnel-visioned and mistaken in the cause of things.

What they miss is rest time. You need to take care of yourself too and know your limits, and not only that but enforce them. There are techniques for this. And this goes for organizing too. What they want is to always produce more, but that’s not always so easy. One easy way to do this is to squeeze your workers more, but even then they run into limits, technological or otherwise. They want you to always do more at work but they don’t give you the (physical) tools to actually save time.

To me productivity is doing the best you can with what you have available. You will always have constraints, they’re not a capitalism thing. You don’t necessarily always have all the time in the world, or all the knowledge you need for a task. To do revolution you need thousands of people and you might only have 5 right now. Those are constraints and being productive/efficient in this context means to figure out what you can do with 5 people that would be most effective. When you have 10 people, what is the most effective thing you can do with 10 people? Etc. I’m kinda meeting up with the broad definition you gave here. You might like to read some of my design essays: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Comrade:CriticalResist#Design_essays.

The calculator was also a nuclear device when compared to what it replaced/came before it. so was the car, and yet today nobody would tell you you can’t afford not to own a horse (except Homer Simpson maybe).

Things change and if we want to criticize that from a marxist perspective we have to offer something better than “I don’t like change”. It’s not all greener pastures with neural networks, but we need to be clear about what it is we criticize, and for that we need to understand things deeply.

But it is clear that people are using AI or attempting to use AI as a means to outsource mental tasks, and decision making that is endemic to the human experience / cognitive growth.

But what is the ‘human experience’? I push for people to define their words when it comes to talking about neural networks because more often than not it shows more similarities with what already exists than a break. It’s not that different from what we already live with daily. The more you use, understand and work with LLMs the more you realize that it’s really not so dissimilar from what we already know. You’re worried about a Wargames situation, i.e. the artificial intelligence making the logical conclusion that to win a nuclear standoff you should dump your warheads on the enemy first. But this has always been the plan; as soon as this technology was going to be available people were going to rush for exactly that - it just happened to happen in 2022 instead of 2065 or 2093, and so we have to reckon with the reality of it now, not later. Complaining that this is now possible won’t change that it exists and that it’s being used, so instead I made the choice to find my own uses out of LLMs that could be useful to communists (and incidentally I think we could probably organize for socialism much more efficiently around “the army wants to offload targets to an AI” than “AI bad destroy it all”). I’m not saying this to be dismissive, but rather that again we need to offer a studied, marxist perspective on the matter.

But speaking on the human experience/cognition, I mean, there are plenty of neurodivergent people who may not fare well with typical peer-to-peer communication (speech or written) and they appreciate having LLMs to organize and make sense of their thoughts and feelings. Disabled people have found answers from LLMs. Human cognition is not universal, and we see that LLMs already offer assistance there. When walkmans first came out, there was a huge panic around what they actually meant for society, that the youth saw them as a form of escapism, that it was an identity thing – it went so far that even novels were written about kids turning into mind-zombies after getting a walkman and some people event went on TV to say that using a walkman was a gateway to committing crime. We’re talking about the iPod that reads CDs.

I’m not even convinced by these studies that supposedly find all sorts of ills with usage of LLMs because I bet in just a few years plenty of errors will be found with them. They are lab studies, not real world, and I remember studies saying the same thing about search engines when they came out. I talked in another comment about how search engines are a memory bank for us; instead of remembering everything, we offload it to the search engine – I don’t necessarily remember what each property in CSS’s box-shadow does, but I know how to look that up on a search engine and find the information. Likewise we stopped remembering phone numbers the moment we got mobile phones (although we should probably remember one or two emergency numbers).

Significantly how? Both LLMs and AlphaFold are transformer-based neural networks. The LLM chatbot is trained on sequences of words, and AlphaFold is trained on sequences of amino acids. Certainly training AlphaFold to make real amino acid chains was ‘easier’ because we know how they’re formed so it only has so many sequences it can produce and there’s a checklist to determine whether the sequence it produced is real or impossible, so it’s also easier to have it produce a reliable output and makes it very good at a specific task, but they both work the same under the hood. Word prediction LLMs can’t have that deterministic output because we use words for so many different things. It would be like asking a person to only ever communicate in poetry and no other way.

one clear scientific purpose

Computer scientists in academia are using Deepseek to solve new problems in new ways too. They especially like Deepseek and Chinese models because they’re open-weights and don’t obfuscate any of their inner workings (such as the reasoning chain), so they can fine-tune them to their specific needs.

I have to assume the purpose of amino acids wasn’t so clear when we first found out about them and before we set out to investigate and, through extensive research and testing found out how they work and what they actually do. It’s on us to discover the laws of the universe, they don’t come to us beamed from heaven straight into our brain.

I wrote a lengthy essay on some of this if you want to read it https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI

For outsourcing specifically, from the moment one uses a lighter to light a fire (instead of rubbing two sticks together) or opens a calculator app they are offloading tasks that require mental exercise, experience and wisdom. The abacus can also output a wrong number if you mess a step along the way - and yet people still used it extensively for centuries.

We outsource labor every day too. Not as in offshoring, but as in nobody lives in a vacuum outside of society. The food we eat is grown by others, packaged, shipped, and stocked on a shelf by a different person each step. The device we are writing and reading lemmygrad on was made by someone else. The LLM is not outsourcing human relationships because it’s not a human relationship; even people who use it as a stand-in for a human relationship know it’s not human. But, it solves problems.

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/on-war.pdf this one seems a bit more modern and easy to read. It starts at Book One.

Assuredly yes. Marx was already aware of Clausewitz and read him, but didn’t talk about him much in his writings (at least not that I remember or can find). He did mention him to Engels in a few letters, so we can assume Clausewitz was at one point part of his reading.

Lenin picked up on this and references Clausewitz quite openly in some books, e.g. State and Rev and Imperialism if I’m not mistaken (it’s been a while).

As for Mao it seems he learned of Clausewitz in the latter half of the 1930s in Yan’nan, so after the Long March, when he picked up a chinese edition of On War. This source is pretty fucking interesting because it’s written very factually, uses pinyin romanization in 1981, doesn’t demonize the communists and it comes from the US Army of all things - that’s doubly interesting. They study all generals incl. Mao, Che and Lenin, they don’t care about where they come from or who they were as long as there’s something to learn from them.

Marxists appreciate that Clausewitz was the first general to apply dialectics to the battlefield and war. I actually have a full copy printed in the 1960s of On War on my bedside table haha. It’s a difficult text, especially the first book, but I recommend everyone give it a read or two. You don’t actually have to read the entire encyclopedia because the latter chapters talk about tactics in certain situations and they seem kinda moot in the age of quadcopters on the battlefield…

It’s not just communists mind you, imperialist armies around the world read him too - I know for a fact the officer’s school in France makes first year students read the book 1.