Raw GPT 4o could honestly be incredible – both in good and bad. I remember the early chatGPT would cheerfully give you recipes for bombs and such if you asked it. Then they manually blocked that.

Now it has to do the “it’s important to consider both sides” thing all the time and I feel like you get much better responses if you talk to it at length like you would a person. Saying “thanks, now let’s look at” etc. In a study they found that if you told it to take a deep breath before answering it would send a slightly more accurate answer, apparently. I use it for bug-solving and coding because it relies on an existing corpus of documentation so it’s generally reliable and pretty good at that, but I’m starting to hate having to write at length to describe exactly what I want it to do. It should be able to infer my intent, I think this is something an LLM could do innately.

I did get some interesting answers if I primed it by saying “you are a marxist who has read the entirety of the Marxists Internet Archive”. Then exercise some human discretion when reading the output but it has allowed me to consider topics differently at times. Of course there’s also always the hallucinations machine phenomena where you second guess everything it tells you anyway because there’s no way to check if it’s actually true.

I’ve also tried much smaller LLM models and you can tell the difference. Actually, you can’t so much anymore, precisely because GPT is purposely throttled so much. I want a GPT model that only needs one sentence to do its job and will not presume it knows better than me! If there has to be AI, it has to be open source AI!

It was my fault. I edited the comment.

Oh I was making fun of the original comment. It wasn’t very clear indeed. They run the models through a few (lengthy) steps to train them, it doesn’t “learn” on the spot like some techbros assume. It’s also not magic but simply math (if very complex math contained in a black box), it’s a token generator that basically decides what the next characters in a string of text should be based on what came before it.

It mostly sounds like something a human/humans would’ve told it at some point in the past. Quirks of training data. And now it has “rationalised” it as something to tell to a human, hence it specifying “human”.

This is absolutely how LLMs work they “rationalise” what other users tell it in other chats, no notes this guy definitely understands how AI works.

Also isn’t this wrong? The question didn’t ask if SSI was solely for older adults, it could be interpreted as older adults being included but not being the only recipient. I would be pissed if I answered true and the teacher marked it wrong because AI told them to.

Edit: I get though that questions are formulated like that sometimes at the college-level and I always found it imprecise. It’s a quirk of language in the way English is structured, which means you do need extra words in there to make your question very clear because English doesn’t do this natively with syntax.

Honestly I’m tempted to do it. But maybe not in two weeks lol, I would need at least a few months, and that’s a lot of time to put into a pet peeve project.

I will say however that certainly there might be tidbits of information that one learns for the first time in this book. Like some examples of Adorno being in bed with the CIA, or some of the stuff Zizek has said in the past. I just don’t think it’s very representative of anything broader, and that most readers are still at least vaguely familiar with the points he exemplifies. Maybe they won’t know that Zizek called for the bombing of his own country, but they will know that he’s a clown. As someone else said here they tried to explain diamat/philosophy with this book and found that it was just so superficial that their friend was not convinced.

I suspect as I get deeper into it (I posted part 2 yesterday) it will become clear that when he attacks western marxism he really just means to attack us, the portion that is not a ‘western marxist’ as per his loose definition but also not a patsoc. Because western marxists, as per his own definition, don’t care that their idols were CIA – they like the CIA – and they also don’t care about the Statesian war of independence. He wants us, principled MLs, to feel repulsed being associated with ‘western marxism’ and offers patsocism as the savior. Well, I’ll know when/if I ever get to it lol.

Carlos has published two other books through MWM and is set to publish two more next year, making it a total of five, and I just feel like they’re getting him to write books because first of all he makes money off this of course, and secondly because it cements them as a serious ‘institute’.

It’s kinda very online examples tbh. Someone else said reddit post and yeah, it fits.

I might write one for my blog one of these days for sure. But I don’t know if I can top that lol

That’s so strange. Because Colin is now firmly placed as an anti-patsoc, from what I’ve seen.

He seems quite reachable, he has a presence on most social media. Also left PCB to form his own party recently. Just need to write him in Portuguese because I’ve never heard him speak English, but I imagine they got the translator first and they were able to contact him. If the Portuguese edition ever makes it to pdf I will try to find his preface and read it because I’m kinda curious what he says about it.

Since the question has been answered, I will lock this thread. There’s no need to rehash this hexbear struggle session infinitely.

Exactly, the book doesn’t really give one the tools to apply its thesis. It seems more like a whole justification for patsocism aimed at patsocs.

This book is a pale attempt to rewrite his perfect essay and patsocize it. It’s worrying that he’d get caught up in this nonsense and makes me question where his priorities lie.

Let’s look at some Amazon reviews too!

Explains roots of Americanism, their betrayal, and the need and time to re-radicalize them is now, in reality, not academia or sloganeering…

But the book is precisely doing academia and sloganeering.

Garrido’s book is a must-read for any Marxist in the west, especially in the US. It is philosophically rich and yet very accessible. It is only around 100 pages, the sort of book you could finish in a day or two.

Maybe I’m just a bad reader but nothing about this says “very accessible” to me.

This book perfectly addresses the shortcomings of Western Marxists. It’s a must read! Carlos is a great writer.

It reads more like a second draft that hasn’t gone through an editor.

Great read, really incisive against purity fetishists in the western “Marxist” tradition (see the latest Losurdo translation edited by Gabriel Rockhill for an even better analysis). I also love the parts on China. My only gripe is that the author gets into weird “patriotic socialism”-adjacent territory at one point and makes a show of praising Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution as some sort of progressive revolution. …

No comment.

Garrido offers a succinct critique of the modern left with the intention of helping the left overcome its many contradictions. The book covers complex philosophical topics in an easy to understand succinct manner that left me with an enhanced knowledge of the historical development of philosophy. …

Nothing in the book ‘helps’ the modern left overcome its many contradictions. Unless you mean the part where he starts promoting patsocism.

This book can change the western left. If we engage with Garrido’s ideas, and treat them as the innovation of American Marxism that they are, they can act as a guide for creating change in the real world, overcoming the problems the left has, and winning a future.

Alright settle down he’s not the second coming of Marx.

And creating jobs at home I would say too

Does someone have that map of British rail built from the mine to the coast

With federation you can easily deploy an instance and have it federate only with hexbear and lemmygrad. Then turn off registrations on the instance, and that way only lemmygrad and hexbear can ever interact with it.

We were way ahead of them 😎 but it’s a good move nonetheless