The cool thing is that if you believe in Marxism there never was room for change in that system because the base (what we can possibly make and who decides what to make) determines the superstructure (culture).
You're simply complaining about the change in strategy of selling cultural commodities, something that you never had a say in.
Farm House Modern with a Roman Statue core.
Yeah I love having to watch shows that basically called me the fslur otherwise I would have no friends.
This is such a nostalgia level argument. Monoculture was supremely fucked up in the hierarchies that it allowed people to form in schools and workplaces. If you think racism and homophobia and transphobia is bad now, you aren't ready for how they actually were in monoculture times. Not only that monoculture was in reality often anti-poor/assimilationist because monoculture is literally consumerism. So if you were poor (or an immigrant) and your parents couldn't afford (or understand the culture and why you needed these things) the cool new JNCO jeans or to take you to see a Starwar then you were fucked socially twice over once for being poor (or "weird") and once for not watching the latest thing.
Videogames weren't monoculture until like Xbox 360. You were considered a massive dork for being a gamer most of my childhood.
Also god forbid you had a different taste than other people and had opinions. When the first Iron Man came out and half way through the movie in theater I felt like I was at the Nuremberg rally. Y'all don't remember everyone pretending bad movies were good. The argument that there was "common ground to fight over" isn't real. Monoculture meant that the battles were settled before they started, everyone looked at you like a redditor when you started doing anything close to AKSHUALLY LUKE SKYWALKER AND THE REBELS ARE VIETKONG. All these nostalgia media analysis things feel cute and trite now but socially they weren't really welcome, they only became exposed to normie circles because the monoculture was dissolving.
Incredible that the "I promise to stop drinking if you let me manage the military" gamble worked. Sign me up for the Secretary of Defense rehab.
Posting the anhedonia king on a doomer comm is basically cheating.
Haha yeah. I remember the first one where it went from flat to skeuomorphic, that was OS/2 and System 6 to Windows 3 and System 7.
I just got a little fixated on the Dreamcast being representative of monoculture.
Yeah trap music is a good example shit was everywhere for a while.
Indie sleaze is another.
Mumblecore movies.
"Prestige TV" literally ongoing.
I agree that anti-intellectualism is bad, but I wouldn't necessarily consider being AI negative by default, a form of anti-intellectualism. It's the same thing as people who are negative on space exploration. It's a symptom where it seems that there is infinite money for things that are fad/scams/bets, things that have limited practical use in people's lives, and ultimately not enough to support people.
That's really where I see those arguments coming from. AI is quite honestly a frivolity in a society where housing is a luxury.
I think the need to have a shared monoculture is a deeply reactionary way of thinking that prevents us from developing human empathy. You don't need to say "Bazinga" at the same time as another person in order for you to relate to, care for, and understand strangers. I think the yearning for monoculture in people 25-40 is a mirror of boomers who complain that they cannot relate to kids anymore because nobody really believes in the pledge of alligence or some such other "things r different" nonsense. Yeah I haven't played Hoop and Stick 3, we don't need to play the same video games to relate to each other.
It's a crutch for a brutal culture where you are too scared to show a modicum of openness or vulnerability with other humans because deep down you need to be reassured that they won't scam/harm you simply because they believe in the magic words of Burgerstan. People are uncomfortable with change and things they don't know because we've built a society where change often begets material vulnerability in people, and information and even cultural media have become a weapon to be used against others.
Monoculture was never good, it simply was. Also despite this being a real aesthetic trend, you should also remember that the vast majority of consumer technology produced at the same time was not clear plastic tech. If anything the monoculture of tech products of that era was that gross beige that yellows in about a year or two. It's just not aesthetic enough to remember, and in 10 years everything just defaulted black. I've actually never seen a clear plastic Dreamcast/ Dreamcast controller IRL. I've been a tech guy forever and despite knowing about it, I only know of 1 person that had actually experienced the Dreamcast internet. This is very much nostalgia bait vs actual how things were.
To put it into perspective for one of those phones with clear plastic, there were 10,000 of these
I should have been more precise, but this is all in the context of news about a cutting-edge LLM using a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT, and comments calling it all "reactionary autocorrect" and "literally reactionary by design".
I disagree that it's "reactionary by design". I agree that it's usage is 90% reactionary. Many companies are effectively trying to use it in a way that attempts to reinforce their deteriorating status quo. I work in software so I always see people calling this shit a magic wand to problems of the falling rate of profit and the falling rate of production. I'll give you an extrememly common example that i've seen across multiple companies an industries.
Problem: Modern companies do not want to be responsible for the development and education of their employees. They do not want to pay for the development of well functioning specialized tools for the problems their company faces. They see it as a money and time sink. This often presents itself as:
I've seen the following be pitched as AI Bandaids:
Proposal: push all your documentation into a RAG LLM so that users simply ask the robot and get what they want
Reality: The robot hallucinates things that aren't there in technical processes. Attempts to get the robot to correct this involves the robot sticking to marketing style vagaries that aren't even grounded in the reality of how the company actually works (things as simple as the robot assuming how a process/team/division is organized rather than the reality). Attempts to simply use it as a semantic search index end up linking to the real documentation which is garbage to begin with and doesn't actually solve anyone's real problems.
Proposal: We have too many meetings and spend ~4 hours on zoom. Nobody remembers what happens in the meetings, nobody takes notes, it's almost like we didn't have them at all. We are simply not good at working meetings and it's just chat sessions where the topic is the project. We should use AI features to do AI summaries of our meetings.
Reality: The AI summaries cannot capture action items correctly if at all. The AI summaries are vague and mainly result in metadata rather than notes of important decisions and plans. We are still in meetings for 4 hours a day, but now we just copypasta useless AI summaries all over the place.
Don't even get me started on CoPilot and code generation garbage. Or making "developers productive". It all boils down to a million monkey problem.
These are very common scenarios that I've seen that ground the use of this technology in inherently reactionary patterns of social reproduction. By the way I do think DeepSeek and Duobao are an extremely important and necessary step because it destroys the status quo of Western AI development. AI in the West is made to be inefficient on purpose because it limits competition. The fact that you cannot run models locally due to their incredible size and compute demand is a vendor lock-in feature that ensures monetization channels for Western companies. The PayGo model bootstraps itself.
The problem that symbolic AI systems ran into in the 70s are precisely the ones that deep neural networks address.
Not in any meaningful way. A statistical model cannot address the Frame problem. Statistical models themselves exacerbate the problems of connectionist approaches. I think AI researchers aren't being honest with the causality here. We are simply fooling ourselves and willfully misinterpreting statistical correlation as causality.
You're right there are challenges, but there's absolutely no reason to think they're insurmountable.
Let me repeat myself for clarity. We do not have a valid general theory of mind. That means we do not have a valid explanation of the process of thinking itself. That is an insurmountable problem that isn't going to be fixed by technology itself because technology cannot explain things, technology is constructed processes. We can use technology to attempt to build a theory of mind, but we're building the plane while we're flying it here.
I'd argue that using symbolic logic to come up with solutions is very much what reasoning is actually.
Because you are a human doing it, you are not a machine that has been programmed. That is the difference. There is no algorithm that gives you correct reasoning every time. In fact using pure reasoning often leads to lulzy and practically incorrect ideas.
Somehow you have to take data from the senses and make sense of it. If you're claiming this is garbage in garbage out process, then the same would apply to human reasoning as well.
It does. Ben Shapiro is a perfect example. Any debate guy is. They're really good at reasoning and not much else. Like read the Curtis Yarvin interview in the NYT. You'll see he's really good at reasoning, so good that he accidentally makes some good points and owns the NYT at times. But more often than not the reasoning ends up in a horrifying place that isn't actually novel or unique simply a rehash of previous horriyfing things in new wrappers.
The models can create internal representations of the real world through reinforcement learning in the exact same way that humans do. We build up our internal world model through our interaction with environment, and the same process is already being applied in robotics today.
This is a really Western brained idea of how our biology works, because as complex systems we work on inscrutable ranges. For example lets take some abstract "features" of the human experience and understand how they apply to robots:
Strength. We cannot build a robot that can get stronger over time. Humans can do this, but we would never build a robot to do this. We see this as inefficient and difficult. This is a unique biological aspect of the human experience that allows us to reason about the physical world.
Pain. We would not build a robot that experiences pain in the same way as humans. You can classify pain inputs. But why would you build a machine that can "understand" pain. Where pain interrupts its processes? This is again another unique aspect of human biology that allows us to reason about the physical world.
It's a capitalist solution to a capitalist problem - the problem of accessing the wholesale pipeline. It's obviously not this anymore anyway, but that's what the membership is for. You're buying at the "convenience store" level, but without the volume that's what the membership makes up for. Using Costco as your distributer is still a thing in rural areas, esp in Washington. Last time I was near Mt. Rainer there was a convenience store in the town that was clearly breaking up Costco packs, but they were like 1 of 3 places you could actually buy stuff.