hex

Economically, kids cost so much money and are so much work. The majority of that work benefits society, not the parents. The emotional rewards all exist outside of capitalism, and parallel the emotional rewards of other pro-social behaviors, like mutual aid, that capitalism can't quantify (and thus can't comprehend).

Some old white dude decided to jump all over yelling "Ackchyually, no one forced you to buy a car!!", and I'm just blocking. This shit is so easy to research. Like, yeah, people were forced to buy a car by minimum parking zoning that spread out cities, mass transit being (very intentionally) destroyed, and giant cars that murder people. There are actual laws that very intentionally made things worse, and then there's the intentionally created prisoner's dilemma of ever expanding car sizes. This shit is extremely easy to research. At this point I'm just assuming it's trolls or the type of people who would be like "but no one has *proved* smoking causes cancer" back in the 90's. Yeah, that was a thing, and they sounded *just fucking like these people today.*

Move slow and fix things.

And the answer will be "fine" as long as "the military" is thought of as a block that is treated as an enemy of the left. In the Russian case, leftists intentionally joined the military to radicalize units. In the German case, conscription meant that leftists ended up in the military radicalizing people. The US is different, intentionally. Vietnam changed a lot. While some people resisted the draft, others rolled hand grenades into their officers' tents. Fragging commanders was a huge problem. After the end of the war, the US military adapted by ending the draft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging The US military works hard to brain wash recruits, yes. There are *a lot* of controls in place to minimize the probability of the type of revolt that has been part of other revolutions. One of those is "merit based" promotion. But, as we know from the Vietnam War, evrn that breaks down. And it's easy to forget, or ignore, but the military *does* sometimes radicalize people or people radicalize themselves in response to their experiences in service. Smedley Butler is perhaps one of the more interesting examples, but there have been plenty. Aaron Bushnell should be at the top of your mind, as should Chelsea Manning (and perhaps others like Reality Winner). Lots of people join the military for reasons other than patriotism, and some of those who join because of patriotism see what the US really is as part of their service. Support our vet comrades. Support those doing the work of trying to radicalize service members. Keep an open mind when talking to folks in the military today. Welcome comrades who are still in the military and have come to realize what's happened. And, most importantly, listen to those who have served to understand other things you can do to support service members who are in the process of rejecting their indoctrination.

Nuclear take: Americans should #TaxStrike, then take all of the money they would pay to taxes, buy Euros or Canadian dollars to crash the USD, and then put all that money in a Fragger Support Fund to end the war as fast as possible. Like and boost for a trip to the top of the watchlist. (Do not take this seriously... Or do... I don't control you.)

Orwell's dystopia was walkable. He could not have imagined anything as bad as a society built for cars instead of people. And, FFS, oil literally funds global fascism. It is the lifeblood of the movement. Hitler's obsession with making every German a driver and getting rid of bikes was not a coincidence. He *hated* bikes. Fascists almost universally hate bikes and mass transit while praising cars. This shit is actually extremely bad and makes for a society that's easier to control. And people still seem to think Elon Musk's mobile surveillance boxes will save the world. Cars are fascism all the way down. Bikes and bike infrastructure makes for a society where you see and interact with other humans *all the time.* Cars and car infrastructure makes for a society where you interact with machines instead of humans. Cars make people more isolated, which makes people easier to control.

We've reached some kind of dystopia singularity, where you can't write dystopian fiction anymore because things are worse than the society you had imagined by the time you finish fleshing out the idea.

Alright, I fucking wrote the first draft. Now I'm tired. Something something #FuckCarshttps://hexmhell.writeas.com/transitliberationism-a-bicycle-anarchist-manifesto Edit: also the usual. Editing is welcome, feedback, fact checks, typo call-outs, are all greatly appreciated.

It's interesting to know about some of the historical strategies for preventing revolution. There were basically two strategies to protect the institution of monarchy. Metternich believed that brutal repression was the only answer: censor the press, monitor communication, create a coalition of kings and persecute revolutionaries wherever they could be found. Giving even an inch, he believed, would open the door to revolution. But there was another approach: concession. By giving a little bit - create a constitution (even if it's meaningless), allow people to vote (even if the people they vote for have no power), etc - could offer a release and prevent revolution. There are still monarchies in Europe. They're no longer absolute, but they still hold a lot of power (even if people *think* of them as being decorative). They held that power by giving up a little bit at a time to slow down progress. The fact is, they were both right. The US has kept their regressive oligarchy stable by oscillating between the two. We are in the brutal repression phase, where concessions are stripped away and radicals are suppressed. This phase breaks up the progress made and pushes back the clock. The next phase, if the US makes it that far, if the fascists are smart enough to let go, will be concession. They will give a few inches to keep everything from collapsing. They'll give just enough room to get people back to brunch. While they're at brunch, the next phase will be planned. This is not really conscious, but an emergent behavior of the two party system. It's just kind of how the dichotomy of liberalism and conservatism works. Government is a fundamentally oppressive entity. The question is really, how long will we let the pendulum swing? How small of a concession will we accept, or will we demand everything now?

And maybe it's time to really think about Sean Swain's proposal for a Fragger Support Fund (which, by the way, is now only in the way back machine): https://web.archive.org/web/20260910070413/https://seanswain.noblogs.org/2017/04/proposal-for-a-fragger-support-fund/

Like, actually fuck cars. They have always been bad for everyone. They have been Orwellian shit for a long time, but it's always the rest of us that suffer. I actually think this is a good wake up call. These things will *always* be a problem. Cars being perfect for controlling people is a geometry problem. The technical element just makes the rest easier.

Holy shit, I'm in the anarchist library! This is cool! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hex-m-hell-transitliberationism

Humans should not operate cars. They are too dangerous. But it's been so normalized that everyone thinks they just have the inalienable right to fling their murder box around everyone else.

Sealioning cultists are swarming like muggen and earn the same treatment.

RE: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/116913952636548872 When this specific phase of history is over, and, perhaps, we've turned NWDC into some artist space like Seattle's Inscape, we'll put a statue of Willem in the center of the garden where those buses once were. It's not something he'd probably have liked much, but memorials aren't for the dead. They're for the living, to help us remember what to aspire to.

RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116866547547121657 In general, if you're championing the rights of states, especially over the rights of people, you're probably on the wrong side of history.

Oh look, someone wrote the "cars are fascist" essay I wanted to write and it's pretty good: https://brockpress.com/editorial-is-the-automobile-fascist/

The good side of this is that there's a hijack-able data stream that anyone can use to poison LLM training sets, and they can't do shit because it's on *your* network.

If you want to know what Rubio is trying to do, go listen to the Revolutions podcast on 1848. Metternich built a conspiracy of kings that persecuted Liberals in order to protect European empires against revolution. It failed, of course, but he was able to hold things down (right until it all blew up in his face). The strategy was essentially mass surveillance, censorship, and general Draconian repressieve bullshit. Rubio is trying to slap together an actual international conspiracy of governments to stomp on the face of humanity forever, and his opening offer is off-brand 70's fear mongering that no one takes seriously. He may well be right, in some ways. The thing he calls "civilization" is white supremacist patriarchal Christian nationalism, modeled loosely on Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, and Putin's Russia. Yeah, "the left" is a *huge* threat to that type of shit. In fact, we always win. But Rubio is Dollar Tree Metternich, and he's not trying to stop a liberal revolution near the birth of liberalism. He's trying to stop a leftist revolution that's been refining itself now against these same tactics for hundreds of years. We already have the playbook he's using (poorly). It's just funny that the famous Marx quote about history repeating, "the first as tragedy, then as farce," is so applicable to this Rubio as he rails against the laughable boogyman of "Marxism."

And they will become more brutal, more repressive, as support shrinks. They know their window is closing. They will destroy everything and everyone they can, because their primary goal is to set things back as far as possible. https://kolektiva.social/@igd_news/117010615067527771

@orange_lux@eldritch.cafe @saxnot@chaos.social @dibi58@this.mouse.rocks @karl@infosec.exchange llms are useful for NLP. Inference is actually relatively cheap, it's the training that's really expensive and resource intensive. We've probably already maxed out LLM capabilities, so most of this training is not useful. Companies keep training because they need to convince investors that infinite growth is possible. What actual gains are being made are coming from architectural changes, not from training. Basically, "AI data centers" should not exist. Local models can do everything that's needed. If we need to train new models, those need to be balanced against climate goals (basically, don't fucking do it). And LLMs should be removed from basically everything they've been shoved into recently. If you don't know why LLMs are useful, you shouldn't have to interact with LLMs. Even some of the places where they are useful, they can be used to construct cheaper models. There are a few things, like correlation across huge data sets, that they're useful for. But even then, simple encoding can give you semantic search, where inference is not necessary or only provides minimal additional benefit. Yeah, basically, 95-99% reduction in cars and AI. It's basically the same thing.

The thing is that fuzzers have basically always been able to rain bugs. This isn't really anything new, other than it's hypothetically easier. Not necessarily cheaper though.

I've always just really hated the framing of LLMs "stealing" culture. That's such a capitalist framing. But maybe I'm making a connection that's too abstract or doesn't feel aligned for people who have more direct experience. So if you have a more direct experience and this feels off, please let me know.

The murders will continue until Police and ICE are abolished. https://wisconsinexaminer.com/briefs/madison-police-kill-man-in-broad-daylight-in-front-of-witnesses/

@akareilly@hachyderm.io why not motorcycles?

@karl@infosec.exchange @sherbang@chaos.social @orange_lux@eldritch.cafe @saxnot@chaos.social @dibi58@this.mouse.rocks I know how much it takes to run at least basic models because I'm running local models for experiments. I won't use hosted models because I'm not giving them money or training data. But yeah, capitalists are trying to sell something that doesn't exist and that they don't understand. I would be entirely unsurprised to find out that even inference on corporate models can't cover costs. To sell "AI" it has to be a thing that just works for everything all the time. It must take no thought. That's incredibly wasteful. It needs to stop being subsidized, just like cars.

It's worth re-reading this old interview with him about organizing to understand why the state sees him as dangerous, and to find ways to fight back by emulating those things. https://itsgoingdown.org/building-working-class-defense-organizations-interview-twin-cities-gdc/

Popular Front recently did a piece on the current conflicts in Ethiopia: https://popularfront.substack.com/p/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the It's a good primer for anyone who's unfamiliar, but is definitely lacking if you know any Ethiopian folks or pay attention to much news out of the Horn of Africa. The interplay between authoritarian liberal nationalism, as represented by Abiy Ahmed and his government, and tribal federalism , represented by various tribal factions, reads to me very similarly to the liberalization of Europe (enclosure of the commons, a push to sacrifice ethnic identities for nationalist ones, etc). Like the liberalization of, say, France, it's a lot more complicated than "old thing bad, new thing good." Liberalism was violent and authoritarian. It often sacrificed leftists. Liberalism's focus on borders and national identity led directly to pogroms and Nazism. Similarly, liberalization of Ethiopia has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing. People think of "the terror" in France as a leftist thing, but it wasn't. It was a Liberal thing, centrist extremism, carried out against right and left. I understand that tribal federalism is also not a good system, but I don't have a ton of depth so I'm not going to try to explain it. During the European Liberal revolutionary period of 1848, ethnic minorities would often side with some monarch or emperor against liberalism out of fear of liberal nationalism. It makes sense to support a system that's bad if your other option is a nationalism that erases your identity. But even in Europe at that time, anarchism offered an alternative but that alternative often also drew from simply a different branch of liberalism that also suppressed culture and identity. Today the world is different. Democratic Confederalism offers a solution to *exactly* this problem, tested for more than a decade in Syria and developing now in Myanmar. But the cross pollination between Syria and Myanmar in terms of fighters really made the ideological cross pollination possible. I don't think anything like that is happening now in Ethiopia. Eurocentrism makes it easy to ignore what's happening now, but Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union Commission. Ethiopia is a major military power in the region, so these developments carry a lot of weight. Especially as the US collapses and the world becomes more multipolar, the development of regional powers like Ethiopia will have a big impact on how that part of the continent develops. If any folks are more familiar with Ethiopia than I am (which shouldn't be hard since I'm basically not), please correct me or add context if anything is missing or wrong.

If you're trying to learn Dutch in the Netherlands, eventually someone will mention "the Nuns." "Oh yeah," someone will say, "You should go to 'the nuns.' It's expensive, but you'll definitely learn." Several hundred years ago, the Nuns of Vught started a school for girls. They spread all over and were teaching in multiple counties. As a side effect, they got really good at learning languages. So they made a specific language school. Some law or other required them to separate the language school from the Church, so they ended up creating a special type of non profit: “Fiscaal Fondswervende Instelling.” The English translation is "Fiscal Fundraising Institution." Basically, there's an organization that does business and then sends the majority of profits (like, 90%) to a non-profit. In their case, the school funded the religious order. But it doesn't necessarily have to be religious. Radically Open Security actually follows exactly this model, but it sends it's profits to nlNet (a non-profit that supports open source software development)...

@whathappened@c.im I love the idea of this project.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116818040311334534 This is all in my mind because the white liberal promise (lie) has continued to shift more and more obviously. That original promise that "if you comply, your children will do better than you" was long ago replaced with "so long as you comply, you will do better than you did before." Anyone who bothered to check their much touted raises against inflation debunked that for themselves. But even the pretense of that promise has been abandoned and replaced. The "invisible hand" of late-stage/climate collapse capitalism begins to resemble an elder god: "if you do not comply, you will die now. If you comply, you will die later." But, I hope by now the heat waves have woken a few more people up to the truth that "compliance is death." If we want *any* future, we have to do things radically different. We have to destroy this system because we cannot survive within it.

@woozle@toot.cat I mean, most people just don't need an LLM for anything. The people for whom LLMs actually are useful can use open weight models locally for a fraction of the electricity and those models only need to run while inference is happening. Meanwhile, the "AI" companies can only make money if people can't do that. So they're trying to push everyone to use models that need a terabyte of vram and can do maybe 1% more than a model that needs less than 1/10 of that. It's really close to car companies pushing everyone into SUVs when what we need are walkable cities, bikes, and microcars. Literally no one needs frontier models, but datacenter builds are basically making consumer silicon inaccessible. It's the same strategy as bulldozing neighborhoods and building highways through them so you can't walk or bike. It's a resource denial to force you behind their unnecessary society-destroying paywall. The parallels just grow more and more the closer you look.

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116908308620011433 Though the DOJ clearly says that it would not prosecute this type of action, as it doesn't align with their objectives, this is a pretty clear violation of the CFAA (18 U.S.C. §§ 1030). It otherwise qualifies in every way as a federal crime. I'm not a big fan of laws but I do think it's worth noticing that some people end up in prison for decades doing shit like this while other people face no consequences at all. (Which, I guess, actually illustrates why I'm not a fan of laws.)

@saxnot@chaos.social @kkarhan@mastodon.social @groxx@hachyderm.io @silberfuchs@social.edist.ro I would literally pay more for a TV that isn't smart. Unfortunately, that's almost impossible to find because vendors figured out they could make more money selling surveillance than hardware.

@dalias@hachyderm.io I worked at a company that did fuzzing. If we had AI money, omfg... I do think there are some use cases for LLMs in fuzzing, but you don't need a model that can do voice to text or do image processing for that.

@rae_knowler@swiss.social wow, this is a whole level of gross...

@kkarhan@mastodon.social @silberfuchs@social.edist.ro I mean, my solution a while back was to get a projector instead. Unfortunately that doesn't really work in every scenario.

@timixretroplays@digipres.club the author you're looking for is Kim Stanley Robinson, and he did write that book. Unfortunately it was a bit too optimistic.

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social I feel like someone linked me to something at one point but I'm not sure. I feel like there needs to be a history of that time written.