I don’t know about you, but when I took classes on this stuff we weren’t like, staring at the pictures of the authors. We were talking about the material. The faces I picture in my head when I think of this stuff aren’t the people who wrote the books we read and discussed, it’s my professors and the people who were in my classes.

How dare I disagree with Lenin! Oh no!

You misspelled tankies.

I don’t disagree with you on a lot of people getting their information from memes, but the idea that if you don’t know what some arbitrary number of authors look like you have nothing meaningful to say about the subject they write about reminds me of the 90s era “Oh you like the band you have a tshirt of? Name five of their songs or you’re s poser.”

Like, presumably Marx and Engels also didn’t know what most of the people in that picture looked like, because they weren’t aware of their existence at all, but one would imagine they have plenty of substance to say about socioeconomic theory.

Knowing what some people look like isn’t a proxy for understanding communism or capitalism.

I definitely didn’t get my understanding of socioeconomics from Mao or militaristic dictators in general. Marx? Sure. Engels? Sure. Lenin? I mean, as an example of how to use workers’ rights as a veil for the promotion of authoritarianism I guess. Reading the State and Revolution is an exercise in seeing how someone can take a good idea and use it to justify terrible shit.

Personally, I take a view of Marx and Engels as descriptivists. Reading works like the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, my takeaway is that these are describing a natural process whereby hoarding of wealth and influence inevitably leads to an overthrowing of power in a cycle that culminates in capitalism and the eventual seizing of the means of production in response by workers. When I read Lenin I see an accelerationist who wants to jump start this process and doesn’t care how many people suffer and die in the interem.

To me, that’s a form of interference that slows progress in the long run. If you start burning rocket fuel as soon as possible before acquiring enough to reach escape velocity, all you do is cause your rocket to crash back down to Earth if it gets moving at all. Do it hard enough or enough times without a controlled landing, hitting cities full of people with the wreckage, and you’re just going to make people skeptical of rocketry.

That’s not to say no one should do anything to bolster workers’ rights, we absolutely should. It’s a natural part of the process for people to be informed by theory and try to advance things. But that’s far different from purging large portions of the population in order to shift the system in the span of a single generation before there’s widespread support. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is, to me, about the most anti-proletarian measure you can take. It slows things down and harms a lot of people with poor results. For evidence, literally look at Russia today. Look at the reputation communism has in Eastern Europe. Lenin and Stalin forestalled any possibility of a worker’s uprising by at least a couple of generations. The same can be said of Mao.

And the reactions this post is going to get? I’m guessing many will be much more in line with the knee-jerk thoughtless mockery of South Park and Rick Sanchez than the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels. That also functions as a sort of steam valve letting off the required pressure to achieve meaningful results in favor of mindless posturing, which is why I often question its motivation. It serves the bourgeoisie, not the people.

WSL is great. I get to do my weird little niche Linux stuff and also have working drivers for my mouse, use decent audio mixing software with a well designed GUI, run FL Studio, and decide based on my needs what the best software for any given task would be. I can also run any game without worrying about whether the score on ProtonDB is actually accurate or not.

If Linux had the same functionality as Windows I’d be all about it, but I have an actual workflow I need to be able to perform and I can’t be bothered troubleshooting random shit at a moment’s notice. Nothing breaks my flow more than realizing that a piece of software I need to operate flawlessly is missing some fundamental functionality. I literally can’t even draw as effectively in Linux because my precision mode doesn’t work properly. And there’s no way in hell I’m going to spend the hours or days or whatever fucking around with JACK to try to get it to do half of what Voicemeeter does.

WSL is awesome because it enables me to do everything I want at the same time from the same operating system. I use Linux for functionality, not to be in a club. High school was a looong time ago. Who has time to center their lives around trying to be cool enough for some internet people?

Also like, way to pick the incel fuckboy rapist murderer to represent you in this meme. Bravo.

This is such a weird model of journalism. Like, let’s find a problem with a simple solution to report on. Okay, now put as many words as possible between the problem and the solution in order to make a longer article that nobody wants to read and then hide it behind a paywall. And people wonder why people are getting stupider. No wonder attention spans are decreasing and short form brain rot content is on the rise when this is presented as the alternative.

This kind of garbage must be opening up a market for high-signal content with less meaningless digression. It would not only be more stimulating and interesting for readers, but for journalists. It must be incredibly dull to spend hours writing an article obfuscating the very simple concept that birds are smart enough to realize dots mean a surface isn’t actually just the sky. Wouldn’t it be more engaging and enjoyable to write four short and to the point articles that are actually informative in that time? Or one article that covers a few similar phenomenon without burying the lead?

Elaborating is great when you have something to say. But when it’s just fluff? Get to the point!

How would that be the case if the source code isn’t readily available? FOSS software is less susceptible to surveillance and bad actors in general because anyone can typically go look at the source code. If there’s something shady, it’s much easier to find it when the entire open source community has access. With proprietary software it may be possible to get some of the code, but it’s not made readily available to a community of people who are about to vett its security.

How thin would their profits be if their c level employees were making even only twice as much as their managers?

Ugh there’s so much of this obnoxious shit on YouTube. “Person A DEMOLISHES Trump in front of Setting B!” And then the video is literally just someone saying the same shit everyone is saying and Trump isn’t even there. Or like “Watch Republican mortified as they realize they screwed themselves by electing Trump” and there’s literally zero self reflection or regret.

There are so many videos and headlines that are literally just feeding on the clickbait potential of people waiting for a substantial response to this complete mess. Hypothetical dunking on people who aren’t even in the room or don’t react at all isn’t the victory people seem to like to advertise it as.

And then they like fully miss an actual town hall in a Republican district booing the shit out of some MAGA toolbox.

You’re on a roll this week!

Watch this lead to inventive new ways to store energy.

Yaaay! Arm! <3

AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.

It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.

I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.

Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.

But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.

Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.

Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.

It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.