NuclearDolphin

Codeberg (and Forgejo in general) is the nicest code forge I have ever used.

GitLab has horrible UI/UX. Is slow as hell and so heavy that self-hosting is a strain on compute resources. The layout of the sidebar makes finding what you care about slow.

Forgejo is slick as hell, very light on resources, and does virtually everything GitLab or GitHub does. Looks pretty much identical to GitHub with a clean coat of paint, but the UI runs so much faster in the browser.

The only downside to Codeberg and Forgejo is having to roll your own CI actions.

Forgejo makes migrating projects such a breeze too. You can transfer everything you have on GitHub in under 10 minutes. Forgejo is also working on implementing the ForgeFed spec, which will enable federated projects where people on other instances can create issues and otherwise interact with your project.

Seriously try out Forgejo with a couple projects, there is nothing you will miss about GitHub.

This is a subconscious thing, not an explicit belief.

The pressure to compete with the Soviet Union on improving the quality of life vanished.

This is the exact sentiment that prompted me to write the original post. Mastodon is full of these property brained dorks too.

Probably not. Only recently started doing formal reading beyond internet posts.

but I'm curious whether pensions and 401ks give labor aristocrats in the imperial core more of a material interest in empire than those on the periphery

This seems so trivially true that im left wondering if this question is sarcastic. Any interaction with engineers makes it super obvious that even the most "leftist" of them are invested in preserving the imperial status quo whether they are cognizant of it or not.

I think the distinction is that resources like steel and CPUs are constant capital and intrinsically tied to material costs, whereas training models transforms constant capital into a potentially autonomous replacement for variable capital, rather than just a productivity multiplier on your existing variable capital. This is compounded manyfold by the fact that models are infinitely reproducible and inference is cheap enough to run on non specialized hardware like consumer electronics. Feedback mechanisms allowing for self-improving capital feels like a novel development in the history of the relations of production.

Is this qualitatively different enough to be worthy of a distinction? I dunno.

I would file that under "the workers that built those models" but you're probably right that there is a meaningful distinction worth making here.

Only started reading Imperialism this week, but I vaguely know about the concept of superprofits. Would you consider the relationship between dataset labellers outside the imperial core and capital to be fundamentally different from the relationship between labor aristocratic engineers and capital? Obviously living standards are vastly different, but in terms of how they relate to the means of production?

You read correctly. Just wanted to clarify for posterity. :)

I haven't seen any comments here that adequately address the core of the issue from a leftist perspective, so I will indulge.

LLMs are fundamentally a tool to empower capital and stack the deck against workers. This is a structural problem, and as such, is one that community efforts like FOSS are ill-equipped to solve.

Given that training LLMs from scratch requires massive computational power, you must control some means of production. i.e. You must own a server farm to scrape publicly accessible data or collect data from hosting user services. Then you must also own a server farm equipped with large arrays of GPUs or TPUs to carry out the training and most types of inference.

So the proletariat cannot simply wield these tools for their own purposes, they must use the products that capital allows to be made available (i.e. proprietary services or pre-trained "open source" models)

Then comes the fact that the core market for these "AI" products is not end users; it is capitalists. Capitalists who hope their investments will massively pay off by cutting labor costs on the most expensive portion of the proletariat: engineers, creatives, and analysts.

Even if "AI" can never truly replace most of these workers, it can convince capitalists and their manager servants to lay off workers, and it can convince workers that their position is more precarious due to pressure from the threat of replacement, discouraging workers for fighting for increased pay and benefits and better working conditions.

As is the case with all private private property, profits made by "AI" and LLM models will never reach the workers that built those models, nor the users who provided the training data. It will be repackaged as a product owned by capital and resold to the workers, either through subscription fees, token pricing, or through forfeiture of private data.

Make no mistake, once the models are sufficiently advanced, tools sufficiently embedded into workflows, and the market sufficiently saturated, the rug will be pulled, and "enshittification" will begin. Forcing workers to pay exorbitant prices for these tools in a market where experience and skills are highly commoditized and increasingly difficult to acquire.

The cherry on top is that "AI" is the ultimate capital. The promise of "AI" is that capitalists will be able to use the stolen surplus value from workers to eliminate the need for variable capital (i.e. workers) entirely. The end goal is to convert the whole of the proletariat into maximally unskilled labor, i.e. a commodity, so they can be maximally exploited, with the only recourse being a product they control the distribution of. AI was never going to be our savior, as it is built with the intent of being our enslaver.

This is exactly the type of thing ZDL was criticizing. I don't think siphoning energy towards a Democratic Party PAC is what they had in mind when talking about doing something.

It steals from the copyright holders in order to make corporate AI money without giving back to the creators.

This is a liberal criticism, not a leftist one. Leftists do not believe in private property, let alone expanding private property to include ideas as "intellectual property"

A leftist framing of this critique is that one of the primary objectives of LLMs is to bring publicly accessible information, i.e. the commons, into the realm of private property, where one must exchange one's personal data (read: power) to access what already exists in the commons.

Namely, the scraping required for LLM training can be considered exploitation of workers for profit. Workers or volunteers created, wrote, organized, or edited the content. Content that is now used to generate a profit, profit that the workers never see a penny of. This content is repackaged and sold back to the workers.

but the plane did hit their church