[Knarf]

It seems that humans have become what they are ( that distinguishes them from "animals" ) by the use of tools. Most of the purpose of the inner dialogue is to scrounge for the means ( tool ) to make our labor to survive more efficent...to accomplish our goals. There has always been problems in the society when new tools are invented. Now we have invented tools that are destroying our environment in about everything we do. AI represents a tool that will slowly cull the overpopulation problem. As the means of production takes away the contracts for labor, people will die earlier, and will quit having as many children. We are in an era of collapse. Big collapse. AI will speed the process exponentially.

It was so cool when a Microsoft update crashed the system for millions of people here lately. Microsoft is a powerful symbol for the development of the computing tool. It was conceived in a war with Apple. The programming involved to compete with Apple, using the DOS system has been a nightmare, and yet it is the go to programming language. I wonder if we had chose Unix to build the internet and other computing tools, with using open source, if we would have such a cluster fuck? The accumulation of material wealth has driven the development of this tool, not the excellence it could be used to benefit humankind. Like most all structures of modern society AI is a mess that will constantly be a problem. I see AI as running parallel with other means of collapse. It was inevitable that it would manifest. The scale of it's influence is huge so it will have huge implications of collapsing a functioning society.

Until/If mankind evolves to understand that the tools that are made are to be in harmony with nature then there is a chance that this specie will continue. If not, it will go extinct.

[K-Dog]

The chance of something dramatic happening makes AI interesting.

'Video Game Takes Over Universe.'  Now we will have full on automatic space communism.  Whoopie!

AI  grabs your attention, but actually AI is only a tool.  At first glance a tool to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  From that point of view, just another tool in a long line of many.  Is that a good thing?  Or have the rich been selfish and kept productivity improvements to themselves? 

Yes they have.  In America since 1979 wages have been flat while productivity improvements increase owner income every year. 

Uncle Karl sez:  The value of a commodity is the median amount of labor that is socially necessary to produce a commodity. The first order effect of a productivity improvement is to increase physical productivity and profits, but as demand does not change, a second order effect will, (as the improvement becomes the universal way to do things), reduce profit.  What goes up later comes down.  Profit goes back to where it was with workers getting a smaller slice of pie.

In America workers were getting a piece of the ever bigger pie from 1948 to 1980 until this:

Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers' wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.

Then all the extra pie went elsewhere.

Capitalism has serious flaws, second order effects which offset any benefit it gives.  As a force in society capitalism must be regulated or eliminated.  Technology is not the problem.  People are.  AI is another means of production, and really that is all AI is.  Who owns it.  That is what counts.

* Carbon fee and dividend would give ownership of oil and gas to the American people making the oil companies employees of us.  But so complete is the brainwashing of America, few people understand how this could be a good idea and change the game everything.

Consequently nothing will change.  America has a religious commitment to being owned.

[K-Dog]

I wonder if we had chose Unix to build the internet and other computing tools, with using open source

Actually that is what we have.  The issue becomes who owns it.  My opinion is that Google and Amazon owns it by proxy for the deep state.  I have strong opinions on the subject.  Personal experience.

The F.S.O.A.loves monopoly ownership.  Monopolies are a means of control one step away from accountability.  Fascism merges the state with capitalism, it is a defining characteristic.

Did Amazon or the White House ban Caleb's book.  You have to take a deep breath to answer the question.  That is the point.

You know the answer, but you can't bet on it.

[RE]

Technology is not the problem.

Technology always has blowback. Extending the lifespan with modern medicine has helped create the overshoot and a population of geriatrics.  Fertilizers and the "green revolution" also led to overshoot.  Cars and planes brought climate change.  Nuclear energy brought the atom bomb and Chernobyl.  Chemistry brought us "forever chemicals" and microplastics in the food chain.  The computer enabled increased surveillance and control of the population even without AI.

There is no technology that is free of negative consequences, and the more powerful the tech, the worse the consequences.  You can postulate "if Homo Saps had the WISDOM to use it correctly, it would be good", but fact is HS does not possess that wisdom.  Beyond just being stupid and shortsighted, there are always truly EVIL people who find nefarious uses for technology.

Even just the invention of Agriculture had negative blowback.  It led to the stratification of society, the development of a military caste and millenia of perpetual state sponsored war.

Tecchnology may not be "the" problem, but it definitely is A problem.  As a species, we did way better with basic technology and simple tools.  We have the intelligence to invent cool stuff, we do not posess the wisdom to use it without causing worse problems than it was meant to fix.

RE

[K-Dog]

Yes, consequences are not considered.  People use technology first and ask questions later sometimes maybe.

It is a vicious circle.  New tech to replace old tech in a spiral to death when consequences of old tech can no longer be solved by new tech.

[RE]

Tough times for Code Jockeys.  Thank God for Door Dash & Uber.

https://fortune.com/2025/05/14/software-engineer-replaced-by-ai-lost-six-figure-salary-800-job-applications-doordash-living-in-rv-trailer/

Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he's been rejected from 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet

RE

[K-Dog]

Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI

RE

I constructed a query and asked a public llm (recently updated), how many people are there doing AI as a hobby in the United States.

The answer is 10,000, to know the number was not a llm hallucination, I asked it to explain the reasoning behind that number.  It made sense.

As one of the 10,000 I have something to say about this.  There is no A.I. without software engineers and there are plenty of businesses who would like their private data put into a local llm for security reasons.  They want it done now.  It seems to me a guy could make serious bank right now doing that.  Businesses do not know how to do it themselves.

It is easy to blame AI for what capitalism does.  Technology never has been the problem.  The problem is how technology is used and capitalism uses technology in the service of money.  Capitalism has no other consideration.

So as a loyal servant of the matrix, when you get tired of blaming immigrants for stealing your jobs, say AI did it.  And then after your monkey mind gets tired of blaming AI, switch back.

AI can help a software engineer write code, if they know how to use it.  But the software engineer turns into a supervisor who has to watch AI like a hawk to keep it on task, or AI will start doing some really stupid shit, and ruin everything.  The gains are not as great as commonly believed.  Once a project gets into territory that a llm is not familiar with, there are no gains.

AI hype is way overblown.  If a company really thinks they can replace skilled technical staff with AI then they will deserve what they get, just like Tesla will get what it deserves as consequence for the behavior of Tesla's private owner.  Out of bizness.

*llm - large language model

[RE]

It seems to me a guy could make serious bank right now doing that.  Businesses do not know how to do it themselves.

Well then, make a biz card and drop in on some local biz you could write some AI app to improve their biz, explain how it will improve proffits and bill them @ $200/hr.  Call it K9-AI.  You can quit stocking shelves.

RE

[K-Dog]

It seems to me a guy could make serious bank right now doing that.  Businesses do not know how to do it themselves.

Well then, make a biz card and drop in on some local biz you could write some AI app to improve their biz, explain how it will improve proffits and bill them @ $200/hr.  Call it K9-AI.  You can quit stocking shelves.

RE

Yeahhhhhhh,



This is an image, it runs in another window on my browser.

I just accomplished this within the last hour,  It is the result of so much effort I won't get into it.  But it mixes python php javascript code on a local web page that talks to a local server which runs a large language model.  I can switch the running model in and out.  Interesting to watch the personality of the responses change.  Nothing uses the web, (but I could not have built this without the web).

The leading edge of tech is referred to by those who actually are involved in the work as the bleeding edge.  I said I won't get into it, but it is like Columbus landing on Hispaniola for me.  The concept is simple.  The language model is considered to be a bad student who has a cheat sheet.  In this case the entire Doomstead codebase has been placed into a vector database.  The Question is first sent to this database where semantic matches are made and returned.  This data becomes the cheat sheet which is then presented to the llm along with the original question, and like a cheating student the llm which knows nothing of the Doomstead codebase can answer the question. 

Easy as pie.

Not so easy to actually do,  The number of software pieces that have to dance together to make this all work is huge.  Gigabytes of library code are used, and the webpage has about 1000 lines of code, most of it fancy-assed.  Getting all the software to all dance together for the first time is a major accomplishment.  And the vector database is written essentially from scratch using the fancy-assed code.  The buttons at the top do not do anything yet but are ready to wire up.  The send button sends and the toolbar text reports connection to the the LLM.  Essential operation achieved after days of wheel spinning.



* RAG  -- Retrieval Augmented Generation

A demo I ran across (and ran) uses a text 2000 lines long which is nothing but random facts about cats.  A simple chat LLM uses this text to be an expert on cats.  It may be fun to make an expert on doom and have people ask the doomstead questions.  We be an oracle!

[RE]

It seems cool, but how will you use it to get going on the new K9-AI Consulting Biz?

RE

[K-Dog]

It seems cool, but how will you use it to get going on the new K9-AI Consulting Biz?

RE

It is cool and I am using it.  To be a consultant on this I will have to ride the horse for a while.  Learn how to integrate raw text, pdf docs, a database, images, all the options. On top of that the simple formula of exposing a question to the vector database and then exposing the results of that search with the raw question to the llm needs refinement to be useful.  Commands like 'format the results into a list in .md format' have to be injected in along with the question.  Prompt engineering is a thing.   

Adding the buttons to the top is going to be useful.

[RE]

Here's the key quote in this article:

"What we've then got to make sure is that that increase in labour productivity flows through to higher wages. Otherwise, the benefits of that higher productivity are going to be absorbed by profit."

Who is going to make sure this happens?  Given the fact that with a downsizing of the workforce you'll have a surplus of qualified labor, supply-demand economics will drive DOWN the cost of labor.  Since the goal of any corporation is to MAXIMIZE profit, what they will MAKE SURE of is that the profit flows to the stockholders and the Board of Directors.  The only thing they will make sure of is that the grunt code jockeys will do more work for less money.  That's capitalism.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-21/ai-job-fears-accelerate-white-collar-grad-roles-threatened/105440772

AI threatens entry-level jobs as university grads struggle to get hired

RE

[K-Dog]

What we've then got to make sure is that that increase in labour productivity flows through to higher wages. Otherwise, the benefits of that higher productivity are going to be absorbed by profit.

This statement is deluded and childish.  The author is ignorant.  There is nothing in capitalism that will guarantee any fair outcome.  In fact the capitalist system is designed to make sure fair outcomes do not happen.  Markets destroy fair outcomes.  Capitalists divvy up the profit pie without any restraint.  Capitalists hate restraint.  Capitalists kill to be unrestrained.  But the author expects fairness.  Not on this planet.  Not for more than ten minutes before a grifter comes by and smells opportunity.  The author likely thinks bitcoin is great too.  That shit smells fine.

Anything to take the focus off the system.  A.I. is blamed by capitalism for taking advantage of workers the way fascists blamed Jews.

The machinery itself is innocent of the misery it brings. The same steam loom that throws the English weaver out of work could be freeing them from drudgery - if only it weren't private property. - Uncle Karl

Marx's Distinction Between Living and Dead Labor

Living labor refers to the active, creative work performed by humans, which Uncle Karl considered to be the sole source of new value.
Dead labor embodies value congealed within tools, machines, and raw materials.  Including modern AI.

AI is just another form of dead labor.  Like a hammer or spreadsheet AI merely transfers it's existing value and does not generate new value.

As long as the system operates without sufficient checks and balances, all increases in productivity regardless of the source (human effort. advanced technology, hocus pocus, eye of newt, whatever), will benefit capital owners and not the broader working class.

When the trickle-down theory was first promoted, trickle-down stopped.  The theory was a purposeful lie.  The growing divergence between productivity growth and worker compensation since the late 1970s precisely coincides with the decline in private sector union power, and the start of trickle down blabber.

[RE]

As is the case with most technologies, AI isn't inherently bad, it's how it can bee  used to turbocharge bad and turn it into deep evil.  In the hands of bad actors like Peter Thiel and Trumpolini AI becomes the ultimate tool for Fascist repression.  Will Der Trumpher use it to identify and target his "enemies"?  Is the Pope Catholic?  Does a Bear shit in the woods?

You can forget the comparisons with Nazi Germany.  The AI fueled Fascism we are faced with growing in 2925 Amerika is a Stage 4 Cancer eating up the body politic beyond the reach of any cure.  The death of democracy is a forgone conclusion now.  As a nation state, the FSoA is the Walking Dead.  The Zombification is unstoppable and irreversinle.

Peter Thiel's Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/30/peter-thiel-palantir-threat-to-americans

Peter Thiel's Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans

RE

[K-Dog]

Sweet someone with a private website like ours who lets his stuff get embedded.


100% About what Luke Smith says about AI.  The massive quantities of power is another question.  What it is and what it is good for it the question for today.

And my fooling around with it consumes as much power as a 100 watt old school light bulb while the program runs.

My python AI project  <--- I format a continuous un-formatted string of text into a properly formatted string of text with punctuated and identified sentences.  Fragments remaining un-formatted.  It is a work in progress and quite a nut to crack.  To the technically curious - It is complicated task to make a large text file flow through a small context window.

I have made enough progress to know I am going to wind up with something useful.  And repeating Luke's point of view. 100% AI is a tool and useless without humans in the loop.