Oh this is super frustrating for me too. I've only been really considered a communist for like 6 months. So all my friends and family and everyone around me had the exact same opinions as me more than 6 months ago. But now that my opinion has changed on a bunch of topics, all of the sudden they need to explain things like I'm 5 years old. I'm a full grown adult and we've known each other for years! You don't need to explain your perspective to me! I already know it!
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I am not the original commenter, but this comment is two hours old, so I figured I'd at least respond with what I use.
The kagi summarizer, which has both a very short paragraph description of a video or website, and a more detailed "key moments" breakdown that is in list form.
The kagi summarizer just takes a URL and it will summarize whatever it's pointing to. A video, a PDF, a blog post, whatever. Although Kagi does have a context window, it's quite large. I've never seen it miss major details.
It has a free version, although you only get so many summaries per month. The paid version isn't super expensive and you get unlimited summaries.
That five-minute section breakdown looks like it might be done by a person? I've never seen an AI do anything like that.
Yeah, this was a quick and dirty thought, but effectively that's exactly what I mean. An application built from scratch today using modern high-level programming libraries will take more RAM and more CPU to do the same thing than an app written in 2005 does, generally speaking.
Of course, for those people who still write C, C++, or choose to write Rust or Go, or some of the other low-level languages, or even Java, but without major frameworks, can still achieve the type of performance an app written in 2005 could. But for people coming out of college and/or code schools nowadays, you just reach for a big fat framework like spring or use a high level language like JavaScript or Python or Ruby with big frameworks, and your application will by default use more resources.
Though the application might still be fast enough, I'm not even saying that an application written in Python will be slow, but I will say that an application written in Python will by default use about 10x more CPU in RAM than a similar application written in Rust. I mean, maybe the application only uses 10 megabytes of RAM. When the equivalent efficient application would use 1 megabyte of RAM, both of those are very efficient and very fast and would be just fine. But when the difference is between 10 gigabytes of RAM and 1 gigabyte of RAM, yeah, at that point in time, you're pretty much just taking advantage of RAM being cheap.
And it's not even necessarily a bad thing that we do this. There's just a balance to be had. It's okay to write in higher level language if it means you can get some stuff done faster. But major applications nowadays choose to ship an entire browser to be the base layer of their Application. Just because it's more convenient to write cross-platform code that way. That's too much and there's already a lot of work going towards fixing this problem as well. We're just sort of seeing the worst of it right now.
More high level in that, think really deeply embedded JavaScript frameworks. In this situation, even Java is comparatively low level. Although a lot of people just rely on spring and spring boot, and don't understand how it works.
Yeah, I'm not one to use insulting terms, it's more of a natural process of an industry lowering the bar to entry.
But there really is something to be said for those old applications that were built rock solid, even if they only came out with a new version once every four years.
More frequent releases of a smaller feature set isn't wrong. I'd be happy getting high quality application updates every month or so.
But as with all things, the analysis falls on the side that capitalism just doesn't incentivize the right things. Quarterly profit drives lots of features delivered poorly instead of a few good features delivered occasionally. Of course the developers get blamed for this when really they are just a product of a broken system. We invent insulting terms for them instead of going after the real problem, Because, of course, we don't have an understanding of materialism in the west.
Oh well.
Without giving anything specific away, I am a software developer and a consultant, and mostly work on web stuff.
I'll try to keep this short, but in general, yes. Basically, computers keep getting faster, which allows software developers to use higher-level libraries, which are actually less efficient, and thus your average piece of software actually takes more processing power and RAM than back in the day.
As well, because of those high-level libraries, programming is a lot easier than it used to be. Unfortunately, that means that we just hire cheaper developers that aren't as skilled, and they have a harder time tracking down and fixing bugs. Which is doubly worse because those higher-level libraries are black boxes, and you can't always fix things that arise inside of them easily.
But software development companies have basically figured out that shitty software doesn't really hurt their bottom line in the end. For the most part, people will use it if it's a name brand piece of software, like Google or Apple or Microsoft. They don't need to build high quality software because it's basically going to be used by default. The money will come in if you corner a market or if you build something unique, or contract with another business. It doesn't actually have to be high quality.
As well, websites make more money the more ads you put on them. So it doesn't matter how efficient you build it, it's going to be slow. And it doesn't matter how slow it is, because you're going to make more money the more ads and tracking you have. All you need is good search engine optimization and you will get traffic by default. SEO Is easier said than done, but the point is nobody really focuses on performance when it's more profitable to focus on search engines.
I'm not in a place to give a thorough response with high quality sources, so I apologize ahead of time for this. But let me break down my thoughts in a quick manner.
I'm not sure where you live, but regular people in the US do not feel what supposedly is on paper the positive economic effects that are taking shape currently. I'm not sure where those numbers exactly come from, but the vast majority of people have had raises, but their expenses have gone up further than their raises. On average, people are not feeling the bounce-back effects of the economy yet.
Unemployment is still high because they fudge the numbers with gig economy stuff. As well, unemployment only counts the people who are looking for work, and a bunch of people have just straight up stopped looking. I've never really trusted those numbers anyway. That being said, if unemployment is low, that's actually bad for capitalism. If unemployment is high, that means that they can drive down salaries. Trust me, as of right now, people are still competing for the same jobs.
I'll also make a general note here. All you're talking about is economic factors. But economic factors is just GDP and stock prices, and shit for rich people. None of this really affects normal people, except for the unemployment rate.
No notes on energy, but the United States is pretty powerful and has a lot of control over energy anyway, so that's not surprising.
Regarding infrastructure, I believe according to experts, and this is where I don't have sources, sorry about that. We only funded the infrastructure needs by about 25%. We barely stopped the bleeding. The infrastructure costs are going to rear their ugly head in less than 10 years again. At that point in time, they'll be twice as bad. This is literally the definition of short term gain, but long term loss. We aren't doing anything to fundamentally change our system.
The United States does not put a lot of money into foreign wars like Ukraine or Israel. So I agree it's not a good indicator of the United States Being weak or anything. But it's also not news. This isn't anything different or significant.
China's economy is not stumbling. That's pretty much just propaganda. Their unemployment rate is not high. They actually pay kids to stay at home and take care of families. In situations that the United States does not recognize as employment, and so they count that as unemployment. China's unemployment is actually way lower than it looks to the United States propagandists.
I've also never seen anybody spin lower interest rates to be a bad thing, so I guess congratulations?
In terms of foreign trade, this is the thing I'm the least knowledgeable about. So I don't have any specific notes here except to say that short-term gain and long-term loss is probably added again.
I'll tell you who actually does care about the United States handling of COVID. All those people that lost their family members. Also, even people in China can recognize that they probably held on to the new COVID policy for too long. But it beats losing a million people. Again, short term gain and long term loss. In the end, what China did is way better than what the US did, Even if there were some compromises that were reasonable on both sides.
Also, I don't entirely understand people only comparing the United States to China. I mean, the fact of the matter is that the United States is absorbing the economic output of many other countries as well. You kind of want to look at how those countries are faring as well as the United States in order to understand the full economic output. And although they get a lot of stuff from China, the other countries they're going from are not doing so well. The fact of the matter is that China makes most of the stuff that it uses and so their economic system is a lot more. How do you say full circle? So, in theory, if any one part of their economy is doing bad, it shows. Whereas, if some country that the United States oppresses is doing poorly, that doesn't actually reflect on the United States. Think of it this way. There's only 330 million people in the United States, and they're pretty much the richest people on earth. So don't compare the 330 million people and the United States to the 1.4 billion people in China. Compare the 330 million people in the United States to the richest 330 million people in China. China is doing much better than the United States if you compare it that way.
But even then, why are we constantly comparing the economic output of the United States to China? The fact of the matter is that material condition matters much more for the longevity of a country than anything else. Who the fuck cares what the interest rate is this year? Who the fuck cares whether or not China has lower unemployment this month? The United States is a time bomb waiting to explode. China is at least a lot more stable than that.
Gotcha, Yeah, I think some others were saying that it's incomplete, I think they said they were open to adding more if they could get some help with it.
https://open.spotify.com/show/0xKKAAcZUgnlg88k1KXKee
Like this?
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/576737
Funny enough, I think it was a lemmeygrader that made this, I saw the original post linked just earlier today.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
It's hilarious to me that the liberals that I know that complain about all the garbage being made in China don't realize that their favorite stuff is also made in China.
You see these online reviewers spreading signophobia by being like "hey this item is made in China just letting you know". As if it means anything.
Then they cope so hard when their favorite stuff says "designed in America" or "made in America with global parts" which in reality just means that 99% of it was manufactured offshore and it was only assembled here or they just slapped a label on it. Such bullshit.
Then again most people don't care. I just know a bunch of liberal douchebags.
If the churches were full, it was a sign of the citizen's defiance against the state. If the churches were empty, it was a sign of their oppression.
- Michael Perenti (loosely quoted)
Huh, looks like all these links are dead. Does anyone know if these sites work since the Reddit changes? maybe this bot needs to be fixed, or the reddit part removed if these sites don't work anymore.
Literally the first time I ever tried to honestly refer someone to a video of socialism, just to educate them on terms, not even try to convert them, I got a death threat.
A fucking death threat.
I mean, yes we need to try to do better than them, but man, that's just hard when you are up against someone who thinks you're a terrorist when you try to clarify terms.
Yes we need to do better, but don't feel like you can't take a break, take a break from the internet, from the terrible people calling for genocide.
Edit: I forgot to mention that internally here, yes we need to be less dogmatic, more unified, and be more willing to simply explain things and preech less, even to each other. In real life I try to do more explaining and less arguing, but even then that's mostly to family.
I'm going to be honest about this topic. I think the Democrats are actually better at passing the worst of the Republican legislation, but without getting caught or protested against as badly.
What was some of the biggest things that people were complaining about under Republican leadership? Building the wall.. Anit-Abortion.. Both of these things are coming true under Democratic leadership and with far less public outcry than under the Republican leadership.
Make no mistake, Trump is a moron and a fascist and deserves to be treated as such. However, the more competent Democrats have been able to bring forward the worst of the Republican policies and effectively become Democratic policies of their own.
Something else to consider though, is all of the stuff that was not publicized that happened under the Trump leadership. continued deregulation of corporations, continued corporate welfare and a myriad of other anti-democracy policies. Trump made so many presidential declarations that the news just couldn't even handle every stupid thing he was doing.
And the vast majority of those stupid things have not been rolled back, have not been touched since Biden has been in office.
So long as things aren't publicized, so they aren't criticized so heavily, the Democrats are very willing to let the fascist policies of the Republican Party pass and even help push them along if they can convince their body of constituents that it's only because they're compromising.
After all of that, you may be surprised to hear that I still think that a Republican president would be worse. After all, they are the ones that are creating these policies. The Democrats just help soften the blows when they come into office and don't undo them, or even push them along further.
But all of the insane liberals out there that believe that if you don't vote Democrat, that that means that you're voting for Republicans, are just blinded to the fact that there really is no democracy in the United States. If you have to vote for one of the two parties, and both parties basically have the same policies, then there really isn't a choice. This is the illusion of choice. And in reality, we have a one-party system that disagrees on only a few aspects of governance. And they only disagree in so far as the Democrats have to save face a little bit more often than the Republicans do, since at this point in time, the Republicans are basically masks off about being fascists.
A third party vote is symbolic. And it also pisses off the liberals. Revolution is the only thing that will change anything in this fucking country anyway.
Damn, I bet that pretty much applies to what YouTube is doing right now too. They've basically saturated the market and have very little room to grow. So they need to start making money as soon as they can, by ramping up advertisements and blocking ad blockers.
I completely understand your perspective, finding places like lemmygrad help me see that there are other people in the world who feel the same way. And take it from me, a liberal-left convert to communism, people can change, but they need to see the error of their ways themselves. I hate talking to libs at the mement, all they wanna do is talk petty bourgeois crap. But I hope it gets better.
Yes and no. I think most people on lemmygrad have at least gone though a doom and gloom phase at one point, at least for us converts (Came from left liberalism, found communism, made a lot of sense to me when I broke through the propaganda bullshit, but felt like I hit a wall because anti-communism is so effective in the west).
If you stick around you will find a lot of good discussion with nuance, thought provoking ideas, and possibilities for positive change. But yeah, it's harder to do that than to just look at the world with disgust.
Yes, one the local level your voice (in my opinion) typically matters. For national elections, meh. I think I'm going to go third party this year. Even though I like the other comment about "diet fascism" (I think I'll use that to describe dems from now on) in my state there's 0 chance of anything other than a dem taking the vote, so I'd rather show who I actually prefer, than just toe the line.
Fair enough! Good to know this isn't ageism at least.