[–] 17 points 1 year ago

90% of threads are pretty boring. Most of the memes posted on Lemmy are the kinds of things I would expect from /r/memes. On the political threads people often make claims that are simply false (i.e. claiming that Marxists or 'tankies' love the Russian Federation) so naturally Hexbear will show up to contradict that stuff. You'd be hard pressed to find us organizing "brigades," we literally just have a unified ideological line that we're experienced in defending so when we see something that's easily disproven we disprove it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Yeah we talk about it all the time! And it's ok to be skeptical. All this stuff is just a model to see the world through and no model is perfect. Sometimes models are very good at making predictions though, and it's worth trying to understand the logic behind something different so you spot concepts and functions that you hadn't considered.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I'm not the other poster, but there's at least 3 reasons.

    1. Competition doesn't just happen for consumer goods, it happens for every single commodity traded on the market. Labor is a commodity. Because of the immense supply of labor, and the capitalist class' deliberate decision to maintain an unemployed section of the population which deflates wages by adding more desperate people willing to work for less. Generally, you can think of a market as a battle between 2 armies who also have internal battles. If the attacking army is better at organizing itself and doesn't get mired in the internal conflict, while the defending army is divided and has constant mutinies, the attacking army is bound to have a better chance in the battle. The capitalist class is smaller and has a much easier time coordinating, most workers don't have large enough unions to contend with that.

    2. Competition only goes on for so long, and eventually the whole point of a competition is that someone wins. If you have several companies competing to set the price of a commodity in a market, odds are one of them has enough capital to starve out the other ones. That happens in the real world all the time. What's worse, the more times you capture parts of the market, the easier it is to capture more. That's one of the fundamental tendencies in capitalism, the centralization of capital under fewer and fewer hands. Of course, once this process has run its course the result is monopoly, but even if the companies step short of monopolizing the market entirely to avoid anti trust regulations they are still likely to draw agreements between themselves to keep prices at a certain level to maintain profits. Recall the armies analogy above.

    3. Even if nobody won in a competition and there was some permanent state of lowering the price of goods, while this is "good" for consumers, it's still bad for the workers producing the goods, which most consumers are. Capitalists have no problem investing more fixed costs in the process of production if it leads to larger profits in the short term, but the issue comes down to the way profit is made in the first place. In a capitalist system, a cycle of production takes place when a capitalist exchanges money for commodities, pays a wage to workers who improve the commodities through their labor, then sells the commodities for more money than they spent during the cycle. The difference in the selling price and the fixed cost (capital) plus the variable cost (wages) is profit. Since the fixed cost is paid for at the same rate everywhere, i.e. no one should be buying the same commodities for significantly different prices at least locally, the only place where the difference could come from is the wages being smaller than the value added to the commodities through labor. Therefore, profit comes as a result of using labor that the capitalist bought at a discount. That discount we call exploitation. Now consider what happens if more capital is invested: the fixed costs grow in relation to the variable costs, but profit only grows if more labor is exploited. That means that the only way to keep commodities cheaper and cheaper still, while generating more profit relative to investment, is to ramp up exploitation. Practically we see this in reality in the way the production of some goods take place once competition runs its course; factories close down and capital moves abroad to where there are fewer regulations, sweatshops replace the factories and production can keep taking place because exploitation was increased.

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    Been around since the old subreddit, always loved this community's humor and the relentless dunking. In fact I credit the aggressive posting with radicalizing me (I remember randomly clicking a thread from CTH and seeing people confidently saying communism will win, lambasting libs for not having anything close to a rational method for analysis, etc, and thinking that much confidence cannot be unearned so I got reading more). Ideologically I don't really label myself beyond socialist. I guess I lean more toward the ML side of things because I've read more Marxist theory than anything else, but I think Anarchists have a lot of great ideas too.

    I'm a fairly young guy, about to graduate college. I'm not from the US but live somewhere that culturally may as well be the US sadly. I love thinking of plans for software, coding it for 3 days, and then deciding to play minecraft instead. Other than that I like a lot of games, I'm one of Hexbear's Path of Exile players which is itself a full time commitment. I've dipped my toes in 3d modelling and rendering, think it's pretty cool but it gets stressful quick. Same for music production, but that's extra hopeless because music has rules and theory behind it data-laughing.

    [–] 39 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    The main thing I learned about the 20th century that made it all make sense, is that the leadership of the Western Allied countries all believe their countries fought on the wrong side of WW2. You don't need to look any further than their actions in Latin America to support that claim.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    It won't be long (maybe 3 years max) before industry adopts some technique for automatically prompting a LLM to generate code to fulfill a certain requirement, then iteratively improve it using test data to get it to pass all test cases. And I'm pretty sure there already are ways to get LLM's to generate test cases. So this could go nightmarishly wrong very very fast if industry adopts that technology and starts integrating hundreds of unnecessary libraries or pieces of code that the AI just learned to "spam" everywhere so to speak. These things are way dumber than we give them credit for.

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