I understand your sentiment, but I'm curious if you'll actually commit to the principle you are espousing. Would you actually vote for a candidate that wants to bomb "only" 6 billion people over 7 billion, instead of "throwing away" your vote for someone who doesn't want to nuke the planet?

Agreed on the trolley scenario, but that's not exactly analogous. I'll try to make an analogy that extrapolates the principle of our current scenario to illustrate what I'm getting at.

Imagine there are 3 candidates, two major parties and a third party. Both candidates in the major parties want to nuke the planet to establish an American world government. Our guy wants to nuke 6 billion people, their guy wants to nuke 7 billion people. Polls show that the third party candidate has the same chance of winning as polls in the 2024 U.S election show. The third party candidate is against dropping nukes on the planet to establish a global America.

Do you vote for the one who wants to nuke 6 billion people as a form of harm reduction? Or is there some line that a candidate/party can cross that makes voting third party the best option, despite how unlikely they'll win?

I'm genuinely curious, would you vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Obviously the genocide he did was bad, but say he was running against someone else who was also planning on committing a genocide.

The Nazis put money into infrastructure development, education (granted in this context it was also indoctrination, but there was genuine education being done too), expansion of welfare; better access to healthcare, public works programs, public health policies (though again, muddied with ideas about "racial purity").

Imagine he was running against another pro-genocide antisemite, but who was against all the welfare/public spending mentioned above, and instead wanted to deregulate the economy, causing even more material harm than the Nazis.

Would you be telling people to go out and vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Is there literally no line a person/party can cross that makes them not worthy of a vote; no line that makes the system illegitimate and participation in it/implicit endorsement problematic?

"they can't learn anything" is too reductive. Try feeding GPT4 a language specification for a language that didn't exist at the time of its training, and then tell it to program in that language given a library that you give it.

It won't do well, but neither would a junior developer in raw vim/nano without compiler/linter feedback. It will roughly construct something that looks like that new language you fed it that it wasn't trained on. This is something that in theory LLMs can do well, so GPT5/6/etc. will do better, perhaps as well as any professional human programmer.

Their context windows have increased many times over. We're no longer operating in the 4/8k range, but instead 128k->1024k range. That's enough context to, from the perspective of an observer, learn an entirely new language, framework, and then write something almost usable in it. And 2024 isn't the end for context window size.

With the right tools (e.g input compiler errors and have the LLM reflect on how to fix said compiler errors), you'd get even more reliability, with just modern day LLMs. Get something more reliable, and effectively it'll do what we can do by learning.

So much work in programming isn't novel. You're not making something really new, but instead piecing together work other people did. Even when you make an entirely new library, it's using a language someone else wrote, libraries other people wrote, in an editor someone else wrote, on an O.S someone else wrote. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

18 months ago, chatgpt didn't exist. GPT3.5 wasn't publicly available.

At that same point 18 months ago, iPhone 14 was available. Now we have the iPhone 15.

People are used to LLMs/AI developing much faster, but you really have to keep in perspective how different this tech was 18 months ago. Comparing LLM and smartphone plateaus is just silly at the moment.

Yes they've been refining the GPT4 model for about a year now, but we've also got major competitors in the space that didn't exist 12 months ago. We got multimodality that didn't exist 12 months ago. Sora is mind bogglingly realistic; didn't exist 12 months ago.

GPT5 is just a few months away. If 4->5 is anything like 3->4, my career as a programmer will be over in the next 5 years. GPT4 already consistently outperforms college students that I help, and can often match junior developers in terms of reliability (though with far more confidence, which is problematic obviously). I don't think people realize how big of a deal that is.

I like your comment, but there's an important note that needs to be made, I'm not the one who invented the conflation of organizational and electoral politics. Putting all that under the sphere of "politics; not to be discussed at work" was a convenient tactic by capitalists to delegitimize important political discussions under the guise of the important considerations you bring up.

Conflation is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Capitalists do it with other things too (legitimizing private property by putting personal property under that umbrella, somehow making you owning your own home the same "kind" of ownership as Elon Musk/Tesla owning a factory on the other side of the planet that he's never stepped foot into).

The dual to conflation here is intersectionalism, which is important to consider too. It's not always relevant (e.g foreign trade policy often won't intersect with organizational politics), but it sometimes is. "right to work" ideals in electoral politics directly impacts organizational politics, so if we legitimize and normalize the latter, it'd be hard to unilaterally ban the former as well. The line gets muddy, and it's better to stray too far on the side of allowing too much discussion so organizing can actually take place, than too much restriction.

I get some people have immense faith in capitalist rule, that you genuinely believe that the reason it's normalized to not discuss salaries or politics is for your own good. Some people don't believe in class antagonisms. This used to be a purely fascist position, but liberals adopted it in the mid 20th century because of how effective it is at driving complacency.

Politics used to be common in the workplace. Not necessarily electoral politics, but organizational politics, which is far more important and impactful, and also much more regulated by capitalists and the petite bourgeoise. I've talked to my boss about electoral politics before, and it didn't cause issues. If I brought up unions with him I'd be fired within a month (based on how other union organizers were let go).

Yup, just like it's employment 101 to not discuss salaries.

Lack of communication and organization is a fantastic way to keep workers in line. Genuinely all it takes are a handful of socialists in an environment of heavily exploited workers to get a union going. They can all feel the material harm capitalism is causing, but lack the language and means to express and resist that harm.

When socialists provide it (via politics in the workplace), that harms companies. When communication takes place (salary sharing, organization tactics, etc.) you place a strain on the bourgeoise to behave more inline with worker expectations. This isn't what capitalists want.

Yeah, that was my point. I can't believe I didn't see what my own point was until you cleared it up for me. It wasn't about how "terrorist was a loaded word" even though that's what I said.

I'm glad you're here to clear up the difference between what I said and what I meant, otherwise I'd be genuinely lost.

Keep it coming.

Oh wow, I didn't get it until this message, fuck I'm an idiot. All comparisons are always fallacious. Thanks for helping me out, friend.

Yup, you can also make comparisons to irrelevant things. Not all comparisons are fallacious.

The way the CIA/IDF behave compared to other "terrorist" organizations is relevant to the etymology of the word. I don't see how the Grand Canyon relates to any point you or I made.

Exactly. And saying "what about" isn't always a fallacy. That's like thinking anyone says a natural fact they're committing a naturalistic fallacy.

Yeah no need to get this hostile.

The word "terrorist" was used, and getting into the etymology of the word is best exemplified by how large "non-terrorist" organizations operate exactly like large terrorist organizations.

Calling this whataboutism is like responding to the claim "people have a biological urge to reproduce" as a naturalistic fallacy.

You're using the word in sorta the right ballpark (I did make a comparison, e.g a "what about"), however not every time someone says "what about X" are they committing a fallacy.

My entire point was how terrorist is a loaded word, that we only use it to describe one side (the side not in power), even though the technical definition obviously fits organizations in power. Making a comparison to demonstrate my literal only point isn't fallacious.

There were native american terror groups, yet the U.S government that literally genocided millions of native Americans isn't a terror organization, despite their use of terror and violence to achieve political goals. It's a word with clear problematic etymology.

This misses the point. If we're being technical, Hamas/MOVE is obviously a terrorist organization. Trying to convince me that they are isn't going to change my position, because I already believe that.

It's just that in-so-far as Hamas/MOVE etc. are terrorist organizations, the CIA/IDF are far larger ones. They inflict terror and use violence for political gain, the only difference is they're the ones in power so they decide who is a terrorist.

That's the problem with the word. The IDF and Hamas are both violent terror groups that shouldn't exist, but Hamas only exists as a result of the IDF's genocidal campaign, and yet we only call Hamas a terror group. It's deeply problematic.

Terrorist is just a loaded word. Like Hamas is a "terrorist organization" but the state of Israel isn't.

Terrorism often boils down to "enacting violence against systems of oppression". Is the IDF a terrorist organization? What about the DoD? These organizations use violence to perpetuate existing systems of oppression, causing vastly more harm than any domestic "terrorist" organization ever will.

While these 11 people were being killed by the state for being "terrorists", the CIA was backing fascists (contras) to overthrow democratically elected socialists in Nicaragua. Is the CIA a terrorist organization?

Are you making a descriptive or normative claim in your first paragraph?

my point is that those “external forces” are simply the result of human nature, which is why capitalism as come out on top time and time again

Those "external forces" are literally violent fascists murdering workers and seizing the means of production on behalf of private enterprise. Even in the case of the U.S, Britian, France, etc. Enclosure was a violent process by capitalists to seize the commons. They often used liberal framings like "the tragedy of the commons" to justify seizing common land and handing it off the private enterprise. In Europe this was done with some physical violence, but not nearly as much as the U.S. The U.S literally genocided the native americans over hundreds of years to seize the commons here and sell it off to private enterprise.

Either your position is:

1. Capitalism is ahead because it effectively uses violence to enclose the commons or suppress any socialist government or revolution time and time again
2. Capitalism should be ahead because it effectively uses violence to enclose the commons or suppress any socialist government or revolution time and time again

If it's 1, that's obviously correct, that's just a recount of history. If it's 2, that's ridiculous, and we can go into it, but I honestly have no idea which one of these is your position. At first you made it seem like you were defending capitalism, but you've repeatedly rejected any framing of your positions as one towards "justification", so I honestly have no idea if you're even defending capitalism, or if you just think I don't understand that the world is capitalist, and you're trying to teach me that the world is capitalist.

I can assure you, I understand violent capitalism dominates the international stage. I don't know what would give you the impression that I don't see this

You’ve pointed out multiple cases where socialist experiments have failed, and none that have succeeded.

Each example I illustrated was a success. They were just conquered. Having a worse military is not a failure of a system, it's a result of capitalist interests having the backing of the state, and said states having trained military forces, while workers are untrained in how to use violence to achieve the means they want, so they're generally less effective at it. Being effective at using violence is not the mark of a good system, usually the opposite actually.

Again, putting words in my mouth.

I said "if you can", that's not putting words in your mouth. The other example of me "putting words in your mouth" I already addressed in two other comments.