My ebike battery is 720 watt hours. I can ride with like 60kg on the back for approximately 100km at 32kmh. That’s like 12.9km of riding per chatGPT response, and riding something good enough to replace a car for most needs.

Their candidate:

Super Furry Animals - Love Kraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0TLxJyY7-w&list=PLIB8rikvk8oiSfMll59UvVNs2SWDhxvHG

It’s a really dynamic neopsychedelia album which has good highs/lows/mixing. With surround sound the violin is intense.

Unlimited Stalin on Poland.

With every snake I’ve handled, maybe a dozen species of domestic pets and wild ones, they’ve always been more afraid of me than I am of them. Even the rattlesnakes on hiking trails. One small part of their body is a defensive weapon while I have four limbs and tools. They can’t see well, they’re pretty dumb, and their mouth might not even be large enough to bite me.

They don’t really have mammalian affection but snakes do seek warmth. My chainlink kingsnake was almost 2m long and he wanted nothing more than to hold onto me while I did things. He could have constricted but I wasn’t posing a threat and he was fed regularly on a predictable schedule. On feeding and shedding days I didn’t handle him to minimise that conflict. The reward of having that pet was peaceful coexistence with something I have a mild phobia of and being able to see the behaviours that humanise it. They’re all the fun of an aquarium but you can hold the fish.

Meanwhile my dog: :ecoterrorist:

Andor is probably the last Stars War that I’ll watch unless they come out with another one that learns from it. DS9 took Star Treks seriously and the result was a show that has relevant ideas 30 years later. Until Andor, none of the Stars Wars I’ve seen have taken the universe seriously. They’ve expanded on it in unnecessary detail and obsessed over that detail, but intellectually they’ve all felt flat and liberal. Andor spends three episodes showing the Death Star through Foucault and you get one brief shot of it after a full film-length of watching how a gear is made using slave labour. That dialectical materialist analysis of the empire is so much more interesting than any battle or Jedi scene across the whole canon.

“And I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”

An Andor-type film would be great but Reynolds seems like such a generic lib that I don’t think he’d make it compelling.

Betting is now open. Winner takes all:

6FingerJoe will survive-

<1 day

1 day

1 week

1 month

Custom: ___

:wholesome-shrug-outta-hecks:

An ex wanted to break up because she was still in love with her ex. Her ex is in prison for decades after going on a rampage against homeless people and critically wounding at least a few. Live happybadger reaction:

The same way Scooby used to have a penis. Woke changed everything.

edit: For the worse to be clear.

They dubbed over it on the VHS/DVD releases. If you watch the originals they get wild. Slurs even.

It does get kind of intense with Scooby Doo, especially in the old ones where the audience was drunk and screaming “fuck yeah! get his ass! kill him!”.

seed the habitat that attracts protected native species. In my seed bombs I always include our protected state wildflower and whatever the most productive pollinator plants for that setting are. The more bird species you support, the closer that space comes to being designated a bird sanctuary.

I knew a facebook mod who worked in San Francisco. They made $20/hr in like 2018, not enough to live on in most small cities. Every day they’d be rotated through different queues based on the type of content. A full day of sitting there in the animal abuse queue having to watch thousands of psychopathic videos to find the fraction which violate the terms of service. The next day they’d have to watch 8 hours of cartel executions or war footage or child abuse or Nazi propaganda. Their coworkers would openly use drugs throughout their shift to cope and their level of PTSD from it was comparable to mine working in paramedicine. It’s an absolutely demonic job.

Sure but I’ve read the original post and it you don’t make a Marxist case for it. Here’s what I take as the core of your case for AI:

Open-source AI models, when decoupled from profit motives, democratize creativity in unprecedented ways. They enable a nurse to visualize a protest poster, a factory worker to draft a union newsletter, or a tenant to simulate rent-strike scenarios.

The real anxiety over AI art is about the balance of power. When institutions equate skill with specific tools such as oil paint, Python, DSLR cameras, they privilege those with the time and resources to master them. Generative AI, for all its flaws, democratizes access. A factory worker can now illustrate their memoir and a teenager in Lagos can prototype a comic. Does this mean every output is “art”? No more than every Instagram snapshot is a Cartier-Bresson. But gatekeepers have always weaponized “authenticity” to exclude newcomers. The camera did not kill art. Assembly lines did not kill craftsmanship. And AI will not kill creativity. What it exposes is that much of what we associate with production of art is rooted in specific technical skills.

Part of creativity is what you don’t put on the canvas or write in the final draft. It’s a skill you refine through mistakes, self-reflection, and thinking really hard about the thing you’re making over the course of however many hours. The novella I’m writing now is nothing like its first draft because I’ve had to painstakingly go through it considering everything from the flow of the language to the nuances of the messaging to all the sources of that message. There’s a dialectic of hand and eye to it which has always and will always be centrally important. If you don’t want to judge art’s value by a monetary standard, that’s absolutely fine but whether you’re describing cave art or Star Trek replicator tech the art they value is based on humanistic craftsmanship.

That nurse makes a protest poster based on a prompt. They aren’t happy with its composition or imagery. They feed ten more prompts into the plagiarism machine until one looks right. That’s still a time investment of an hour at most even if they manually edit the 6th finger out of the raised fist. You can’t spend an hour on an idea in any medium and make something worthwhile. That’s your short-term impression of your own work in the same headspace, offloading all of the mental effort of really critiquing what you’re making. The factory worker who drafts their union newsletter with an LLM might be able to do so faster, but even CommunismGPT is going to regurgitate a database of averaged opinions it doesn’t actually understand. Theory is based on observation and AI doesn’t observe. The factory worker who illustrates their memoir is someone who is already capable of creative expression but who can’t afford an art class or nice paint. They won’t learn illustration from using AI for the same reason I haven’t learned physics from cheating with it, and their memoir is cheapened by weird hallucinations of what a machine looks like rather than their impression of it or a photo. The teenager in Lagos could be provided paper or image editing software to do the necessary work of thinking about each element of every frame. None of them are better off for using it.

If any of these use-cases were actually valid, they’d be observable in already communistic spaces like the fediverse. Hexbear doesn’t even give you karma points for posting so the only incentive is creative expression for its own sake and sociocultural roles. Most of us are stressed for time and would benefit from saving it. You should see our organisers, agitators, and creators celebrating deepseek and the other opensource models at least. You should see us using it in our posts and agitating for it in our subcommunities, but there isn’t a post in /c/labour calling for union stewards to download an LLM. There isn’t an AI-generated image being celebrated in reddit’s /r/nursing despite every other post being those same nurses organising while working 12 hour shifts. Our /c/art bans all AI images outright even from the most defensible models because that comic wouldn’t be worth reading and I don’t think you would read it either. Can you actually point to one AI-generated book you’d recommend? That music video would certainly distract my dog but one single creative product of length worth putting on your wall or spending time reading. It can be fiction, non-fiction, an article or a scientific study or political theory or an image of any kind. If the thing that separates theory from utopianism is observation, which of those use cases have you actually observed and would unironically recommend?

Because if you mean the intrinsic value of art then that’s refuted by the essay I originally linked. What other value do you think this would give communists? What about that music video you’re so impressed by couldn’t be done by animators who make a living from a creative product? And if that’s your standard for artistic quality, boy howdy. That’s absolute slop which I’d be embarrassed to show someone.

It could be the most sophisticated plagiarism machine possible, requiring the most amount of effort to make a coherent image of any of the models, but I challenge you to make the absolute best image on the absolute best model out there. Really pour your heart and soul into it for a sincere amount of time. Make a prompt 10,000 words long with every parameter precisely dialed in. It will take me 30 seconds and an acre of rainforest to make all of that for nothing in a way I can’t do if you snap a photograph out of your window. You sculpt a shitty cup and I can’t replicate it, you paint the most meaningless abstract expressionist piece and I can’t replicate it, you record a cover of Happy Birthday and I can’t replicate it. Not at the level you did without a technical background, not better than you did without significant capital investment or unique talent. If I can do that with AI images using a library computer or cheap smartphone, your investment in making the image is way more than its worth as an instantly genericised jpeg. I can’t feed your cup into a kiln and effortlessly make a better cup, but I’m four clicks away from making a better version of your AI image.

Even if we develop it as open source and community driven, that doesn’t make it gain value it doesn’t intrinsically have. It devalues human art by flooding the space with slop, like it did with Clarkesworld and Spotify. It would still be ideologically futurist and alienating to the artists whose skill comes from years of practice. There’s no communist future where plagiarism is meaningful art when communists now and in the 1930s already saw through it. Would you buy an AI image I make as a Marxist who knows a lot about art theory? Would you buy it for the same price as a napkin doodle I make? This one’s pretty good, reflects my communist values with two decades of studying art nouveau behind it, and I’ll sell it to you for the right price: