I don't think this post reads as AI at all. It has none of the tell-tale signs either (em dashes, common constructions like 'not just ____ but ____, bullet points, headers, etc.)
The images are AI-generated. This makes them automatically bad in some people's view, but I think they're reasonably fitting here. With a little bit of work (e.g. attention to consistency between frames, blending into the site background) they could even be good.
The art’s aesthetic, which resembles Calvin and Hobbes, is disrespectful to its creator, Bill Watterson’s.
Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.
You did do pretty well! I don't think the final result was ruined at all. Not many people will notice things like his pants only being brown in the first image, or their eyes only having whites in the third image, or his jacket sometimes having a hood and sometimes not.
Compared to what we see on most blogs, even patio11's, this is capital-A Art.
So the art isn't AI generated either? Idk why people trust these "AI checker" sites when they have been shown time and again to be inaccurate at best, often defamatory at worst.
I too am skeptical we’ll really be able to catch everyone. By making public tools we just create evals to beat the tools etc.
Still, right now I think we can tell, so I focused on making sure they were my words, but I let an llm help edit and I think it honestly made it much more readable
You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.
Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete. THE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again. (or at least, only pay a comparatively tiny amount of people for producing the data)
> Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete
I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete". Most jobs are like this. If you work for yourself, you're trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. If you work for a company, the company will be trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. Any value captured in the arbitrage of product price and employee pay is seen as the value of management.
>I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete".
That's how it builds to making a market cost obsolete. Especially when the explicit goal is near 100% removal of human labor.
It's like fishing, do it slowly enough (like the dozens of millenia of humanity before the industrial revolution) and fish will repopulate just fine. Do it too fast and you drive fish to extinction. They want to make labor extinct.
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.
Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own.
And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.
At this point it really seems like your taking bread too literally here.
To put it more simply, you won't keep a roof over your head by only selling baskets to your local village these days. You can scale it up, but by that point you need much more than a craftman to maintain a business and keep up with a minimum wage lifestyle.
Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.
All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord!
Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.
This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.
Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.
As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.
The "feudal" part implies the productive assets of the 21st century are monopolized and owned by Big Tech, and even the capital class has to pay rent for access to this.
It doesn't mean people are literally serfs on their lords manor growing substance crops. Are you serious?
This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.
I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.
I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.
Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!
If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?
Why is every service considered a “rent”? These services basically depend on commodity production—bell may have had a monopoly on phone service but not on the phones themselves. Or the copper used to manufacture their cables, or the housing which their employees slept in or the food they consumed. Service monopoly =! Neofeudalism, just because it is a more recent phenomenon does not mean its unique, JP Morgan had a rail monopoly, nobody considered his business “Neofeudalism.”
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