I’m only scared of how much bosses can be convinced to fire workers (even if they rehire later, which has happened a few times already); how self-driving vehicles are being allowed on our public roads and sidewalks when they are not proven safe; how they get used for critical info gathering and treatment in medicine with very little regulation; how they get used to track and surveil us; their uses in war; and of course the impact on the planet.

In a society after capitalism and other hierarchies, I think some amount of AI could be used much more responsibly, consciously, safely, and for the public good.

3/4 of the board will be working for anthropic. that doesn’t mean zulip will be integrated with anthropic or anything, but I’d like to see a new board soon

Voting is definitely not enough on its own, you’ll feel better if your main political engagement is local: mutual aid, volunteering, community or labor organizing. You can see the impact you’re having and the good vibes among neighbors will be palpable.

When the elections come around, I still suggest doing it. The difference between your local mayor or governor actually trying to accomplish things vs. just being a roadblock can energize your local political scene.

I vote for DSA candidates every time because there is essentially never a better option. If none are running, I vote as far left as I can. I vote in primaries and generals. Here are some current DSA candidates to check out if you’re in any of those districts: https://thedigradio.com/podcast/primary-struggle-w-abdul-el-sayed-and-other-insurgent-candidates/

I am to the left of social democrats, but even DSA has full-on socialist caucuses within it (varying by state/national DSA), see: https://dsa-lsc.org/2025/01/31/a-guide-to-dsa-politics/

I would never vote for the right. It’s a terrible plan because (1) it’s not gonna spark “a revolution”, it’s just going to create a more and more oppressive society without building any power on the left – that’s just some apocalyptic savior narrative that sounds more like anime than real life; (2) it sacrifices others, starting with the most marginalized and vulnerable, in a vain hope of improving my own future, which means I’d be just as much a right winger as any “true believer” would be.

Voting isn’t enough. Act and organize locally. But also vote, especially in local elections.

if you are experiencing depersonalization or similar dissociative symptoms, psychologists and psychiatrists can be helpful

it sounds like an Australian accent. there are tons of accents that have their own history and context. it’s shitty to call them weird, bizarre, or bastardized and makes you seem narrowminded.

this is the kind of thing that makes me want to never post or comment anywhere on the internet

It’s very well written. This is just AI affecting how people view well-organized, nicely-formatted, and clear writing these days. Thanks for keeping us updated on the progress of the fediverse and for doing it so thoroughly!

don’t explain the tech, talk about the community

Well, why does it have to be one single government covering all of China? “China” refers to a state, a centralized government made of a small number of people who command and control a huge territory and its peoples. It doesn’t make sense to define a future communist society by the criteria of a state. Instead, take all the land and people that are currently within the state of China. If we tried to set up a communist society there, how can we do that? People can have different answers (especially when it comes to details), and I’m certainly open to ideas.

Disclaimer: the following is not “the answer”, it’s a set of ideas that I believe are compatible with a communist society and can be one example of how such a society could look.

I’d imagine that power that the state usually has would need to be dispersed among directly democratic assemblies and unions. This would create a federation of communist societies that work together on bigger issues.

• Geographical Organization : Since government is something everyone participates in and since everyone affected by a decision gets a say in it, we can have federated layers of assemblies of the people. So, at the most local level, a single neighborhood in a city or a single village or a single other municipal unit (e.g., “the people who live along this 2km stretch of river”) can have an assembly. Neighboring assemblies can talk to/cooperate with each other to solve issues that affect all of them. Local assemblies can regularly send delegates (who can be instantly recalled, don’t serve timed terms, have no power of their own, they just communicate their assembly’s position) to meetings and create citywide, regional, etc medium-level assemblies to handle bigger projects. That could include rail lines, ecological issues like forest management, anything that needs to be produced at a larger scale, etc. Then, for those few questions that really and truly affect a territory and people the size of China (e.g., coordinating defense vs a large national army; dealing with climate change; coordinating specialized, high-tech production of medicines, and so on), there can be “national” assemblies. Again, the power would need to be held at the lowest level, or else you risk forming a state when a few greedy people use their position to accumulate power.

• Membership Organization: Parallel to the geographic assemblies I mentioned above, you can also have unions and associations of workers who are in the same workplace and industry. Everyone who works in a local cafe has a say in how that cafe is run. Then the Cafe Workers Union can make presentations/have an additional say (beyond what the members already have in the geographic assembly) in any local or regional decisions involving, say, food service and safety, disposal of food scraps and cooking oils, and whatever else is relevant. This would go for any union: an agricultural workers union, a research physicists’ union, a students’ union, and so on. Also, since people can split their time how they like, maybe some minimum amount of commitment to a job would be needed for union membership? Not sure.

Where do these ideas come from? The Next Revolution by Blair Taylor and Debbie Bookchin (discussing the ideas of Murray Bookchin and others). Also check out council communism and, more broadly, Libertarian Socialism as a tendency. Communism is really interesting! There are many different ideas about how we can get there. Whatever you believe, even if you think we need to capture the state, we are at a point in history in which we need to work together to build the power of workers and ordinary people vs. capitalists and the state.

socialism: workers control the means of production (the factories, the farms, the freight trains, etc). there is no separate owner. this is usually considered a key step on the way to communism.

communism: a society without any classes (no capitalists, no working class, no one in poverty, everyone is on the same level of society); without money (everything ppl need is provided for free and fairly, there are no capitalist markets); and without a state (government is not a separate group of people who command others, the people make decisions on things that affect them).

Even those communists who believe the right strategy to reach a communist society requires them to take control of the state first believe that the ultimate goal is for the state to “wither away” as it becomes less necessary over time. other communists disagree that it is a possible to reach a communist society by taking control of the state, rather the people have to build their own non-state power that eventually defeats it.

yeah, I mean I can’t say I consider an oil exec picking new places to exploit to be on the same level as the local car salesperson. Still, the question was ultimately about socialists’ positions on middle class insurance salesmen as a category.

at most, such things are an expression of frustration and desperation. there only resistance is organized resistance. also you have to build the alternative you want to see, otherwise it’s just destruction

we are all forced to do unethical jobs to survive because capitalism itself is unethical

preppy, Ivy League, business-casual style

these aesthetics come from early & mid 20th century style worn by wealthy “aristocratic” (not literally, they weren’t nobles) American families. they rode horses, played tennis, rugby, and polo, wore school uniforms, etc. and their clothing reflected that.

that style was pushed into the mass market by Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilifiger, and other brands. this meant everyone could afford those aesthetics. the old cars used to be much more expensive because they were imported and hand made, but modern production and shipping has changed that.

rich people now differentiate themselves in other ways.

because then they would be punished by the trump administration. he would have govt agencies cone up with reasons to investigate them, take away their tax breaks, etc.

the point of a company is to make money, that’s it.

if you haven’t heard people from other places complain about those places, you haven’t been listening much. everyone complains!

im not arguing sapience, im examining your definition of sentience, which was self-awareness. my question was how we distinguish between mimicry of a sentient being and actually being sentient, with an analogy that a recording of a sentient being is a perfect mimicry but isn’t the same as having sentience.

similarly, how do we know that an llm is self aware and not merely a machine that returns clever combinations of recorded sentient beings? what is the equivalent of a red dot mirror test for an llm?

“sufficiently adaptive” is doing a lot of work there. i can “mimic” a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn’t mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview

your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don’t say the record is the same as the musician.

it’s a tv show, it was written to be that way because it’s part of a copaganda machine