Incidentally, Asimov wrote a great review of 1984 basically calling Orwell an emotionally stunted manchild who wrote a tantrum disguised as a novel. Orwell was a guilt ridden rich kid who played hippie in the slums then got his feelings hurt in Spain and spent the rest of his life writing revenge fantasies against Stalin instead of actually trying to understand how the world works.

1984 was just boring and lifeless rant where nothing happens, and the technology is nonsensical like having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient. Orwell couldn’t imagine women as anything but brainless sex objects or proles as anything but subhuman animals and he thought ballpoint pens were worse than actual scratching steel nibs. The guy was a technophobic elitist with zero forward vision who projected his personal grudge onto the future and millions of people treat his little hissy fit like prophecy. It’s frankly incredible that his shallow writing became a cultural icon in the west.

https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

Literally nobody here says that China is perfect or that there aren’t bad things about China. The reality is that no human society is perfect, but ones not run by pedo kleptocrats are objectively better than ones that are.

Just a day ago, a senior Anthropic executive claimed the U.S. still held a 6 to 9 month lead in frontier AI models, while calling Chinese model distillation adversarial. One day later, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 beat Claude Fable 5 on Frontend Code Arena. And the funniest part is that it is an open weight model.

So the whole 6 to9 month lead lasted about 24 hours. 🤣

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report

Oh yeah forgot about limewire. :) And I’ve been noticing the same trend, a lot of people don’t really know how to torrent things anymore. It really is a strictly superior user experience. Once you have a file then nobody can take it away from you, it doesn’t expire, you can play it on whatever device you want whenever you want. The fact that people accept streaming along with all the limitations is really crazy to me. Even outside the question of cost, it’s just a shittier overall experience.

I am talking about interrogating the implications of the present world we live in. What I was pointing out is that the author makes a shallow analysis of the symptoms without following the threads to identify the root causes. You don’t need to be a philosopher to do that.

I’m also not talking about an alternative history where AI might’ve emerged in a different form. I was pointing out the underlying causes of the negative effects associated with how this technology is used, and we need to be clear on that in order to do anything about the problem. The issue is capitalist control, and the solution is to develop this technology under public ownership the same way other open source technology is developed. Open alternatives from China are already the biggest threat to the whole model, so this is already starting to happen.

I think people who are opposed to the way this tech is used should be thinking of how to wrestle it away from corporations, and to build it in the open. This is the whole concept behind having ownership of the means of production. In my opinion, that’s the only realistic solution to the problem in the long term.

Napster and Gnutella were the ones I used back in the day. All my music is still in mp3s today, and I’ve never had a single reason to regret not using streaming services so far.

Thanks, glad these posts brighten up your day. I find reading Chinese news is just such a huge contrast because it tends to be very positive in nature. You just keep seeing all these amazing developments happening, and you realize everything’s not so bad in the grand scheme of things. Also hopeful that the empire doesn’t start a nuclear holocaust and just fades away into obscurity.

truly the the best possible outcomes on both accounts

The analysis in the post remains firmly at the level of phenomena, failing to address the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. The blog post correctly points out that tools are not neutral since they shape people and social relations. All tools are material manifestations of specific production relations. However, the blog post treats AI as a tool or technology itself, failing to question why AI exists in this specific form at the current historical stage. The reason there is a tendency towards large scale models which are centralized and commercialized is that they are an inevitable product of the logic of capitalist accumulation.

From the perspective of the base and the superstructure, after the highly developed capitalist productive forces, capital urgently needs a new means to accelerate circulation, reduce labor costs, and open up new areas of accumulation. So, the inefficiency and high energy consumption of AI are not technological defects, but rather a price that capital is forced to pay under specific historical conditions because true efficiency in form of distributed, open-source, and democratized AI cannot serve the maximization of monopoly profits. The waste, environmental damage, and ethical crisis of the AI ​​industry are essentially inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The problem stems directly from the contradiction between social production and private ownership.

The post also discusses the idea of tools shaping people, but fails to clearly distinguish the different shaping forces of use value and exchange value on technological development. Under capitalism, AI primarily serves the needs of capital accumulation rather than the comprehensive development of a society. The whole AI makes humans stop thinking and stop creating argument is just describing the deepening of capitalist labor alienation in the digital age where workers are alienated from creative labour. The push to replace rather than enhance human capabilities is driven by the need for replaceable, standardized labor, rather than independent thinking subjects.

Merely demanding rational use or ethical norms without addressing the private ownership of the means of production can only alleviate symptoms while doing nothing to address the root cause. The laws and ethics of capitalist society are themselves part of the superstructure and their fundamental function is to safeguard the interests of the bourgeoisie. As long as the means of production remain in the hands of a few monopolistic capitalists, any calls for ethical use are just empty moralizing.

Finally, it’s worth noting that there is little room for letting us do what machines cannot do like appreciating predecessors and fighting for policy within the capitalist framework because such behaviors are systematically marginalized. True liberation lies in breaking down the social relations that determine the direction of technological development. The goal has to be to move the development of AI from serving capital accumulation to serving the free and comprehensive development of humanity.

The core problem with the critique in the blog post is that while it is emotionally charged, it fails to rise to the level of a systematic analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Merely calling for critical use or humanistic concern is insufficient because it is essential to understand the relations of production in order to see past the illusion of tools controlling people.

We’re basically in the mainframe era of this tech, but if you have used local models then you know that progress has been absolutely breathtaking in the past year. Qwen 3.6 27b that you can run on a laptop is straight up better than frontier models that were available just a couple of years ago and required a data centre to run. Also, you don’t have to use American models. You can use open models from China, they’re very capable.

exactly, pretty much every serious argument against this tech boils down to capitalist relations rather than the tech itself

I’d argue it’s more than 10% checking. You really do have to be engaged in the process, and you can’t farm out thinking to the LLM. It’s a great tool for generating code, but you have to be making conscious decisions at the developer. My process has been to come up with a step by step plan, where there are clear and focused deliverables at each stage, and then do commits for each one and review the diff. This way I have a clear context of what the task is doing, and a reasonable amount of code I can read through to do a proper code review. And it’s easy to actually test the functionality out to see that it’s working. If you take this approach, then the tool really can save you a lot of time.

seems like it’s failing on that front as well though

I mean they should block it purely on safety grounds.

love to see the reverse brain drain

and also makes all the stuff you use day to day

That’s an amazing counter point, peak .world intellect on display as always.

Obviously people like Scam Altman are just too principled to stoop to the level of these savage Chinese companies.

It’s worth noting that the whole China is distilling our glorious models narrative is largely nonsense. First of all, everybody distills, so it’s not like it’s unique to Chinese companies. Second, most of actual research that’s published is now coming out of China.