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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Capitalism working as intended
Given your username and where it's registered, you will not like the answer, but: Socialists were also notorious for cooking the books to hide their failures, even more so than dirty capitalist pigs. It's one of the reasons why the system failed: Since everyone at every level was doing it, the already hopelessly out of their depth central planners had no reliable data to work with.
This doesn't make the AI bubble okay, of course. I'm only writing this, because your smug comment combined with your user name are particularly ironic.
Another thing: Had LLMs like we have them now been available in the '70s and '80s, the likes of East Germany and the Soviet Union would have been all over them in a desperate bid to save their economic system, just like they tried to with computerized planning and automation back then, wasting ridiculous and economically ruinous amounts of resources on extremely inefficient chip production before they collapsed. In a way, current-day tech giants and the corporate world in general are repeating this mistake in a desperate bid to take part in the "next big thing" in order to get out of the stagnation they found themselves in.
Call it history repeating itself or rhyming - either way, I'm noticing some patterns here.
I'm struggling to get the point of your comment. Let me try to squeeze some ideas from your post:
PS If you feel painful to read this, so did others who read your post.
I have a hunch you took this personally. Nah, I must be hallucinating.
Their historic record is considerably worse. I don't even need to bring up gulags, mass starvation and the abysmal living and human rights conditions of every Socialist regime throughout history to support this point (but it doesn't hurt).
This does not mean that pure capitalism is fine either (I used to consider myself a smug and enlightened centrist - can you tell?), but it tends to work the best with a fair bit of socialism injected in key areas (social safety net, high taxes on wealth, strong regulations and institutions, robust democratic decision making, lots of economic freedom and high social mobility), as in the Nordic model, which is arguably the best thing humans have come up with so far.
I didn't say that, but it was definitely a strongly contributing factor. I mentioned East Germany in particular, since it spent a fortune on setting up a competitive chip industry to achieve parity with Western and Japanese companies, but failed. The debacle that was their infamous 1 MBit chip, which cost 1 Billion Ostmark to develop (at a time when the country was struggling with high debts it owed to West Germany), but never achieved more than 20% yields in pre-production and was never production-ready illustrates just how hopeless the endeavor was. By the time the chip was in said pre-production state, Japan was already producing 4 MBit chips en masse, at economic yields, of course. I can't find the numbers on how much of the state budget went into this, but it was a considerable portion, at the cost of everything else. Literally their hail Mary.
Ironically, these investments did pay off in the long run, just not for them: The area where the East German government concentrated its chip production is now known as the German silicon valley. Investments into education and research in particular laid the groundwork for the current and very competitive market-driven chip industry and other IT companies that have settled there.
No. Current-day tech giants are in search of something that promises them more perpetual growth in a finite world, where almost all viable technological niches are already saturated. Smartphones are a solved issue: Everyone has settled on glass rectangles with high-res touchscreens, the hardware and software for them is so mature that even ten year old devices are still sufficient today. Gimmicks like foldables are expected to remain fringe. Same with conventional PCs and laptops: Times when a device was obsolete after four years or sooner are long over. Cloud services and virtualization have similarly reached their peak, to the point that there's a counter movement back towards local IT.
All of this means that easy avenues for more growth are already clogged up, so after some brief excursions into crypto and NFT, earlier and much smaller bubbles, it's AI with its promise to replace costly human white collar labor with cheaper software that doesn't talk back, doesn't form unions or have uppity ideas about redistributing wealth or getting rid of greedy CEOs. Digital slaves, if you will, ideally as intelligent or more intelligent than humans, but without any ability to shape its own destiny. It's not happening, of course, just as delusional as trying to automate yourself out of the inherent issues of centrally planned economies, but everyone needs to pretend that it might one day, because their livelihoods depend on it. They have invested too much, are in too deep to pull out, are afraid that if one of them does, the house of cards comes crashing down.
I will not pretend that any of this is particularly insightful, but since you appeared to have struggled with the historic parallels, I thought I'd elaborate on each point a little. I hope this doesn't cause you any additional pain, but if it does, you should be able to deal with it as a strong, rugged Socialist individual used to hardships in service of a better future. No pain, no glorious workers' and peasants' revolution, am I right?
Oh boi. Save some words for yourself, stop wasting them on me. Don’t have time to read it rn, maybe later
When he alluded to the Nordic model, ignoring the international division of labor, I rolled my eyes. A bonafide liberal.
Tldr as well, but I do find it funny that the discussion is now moving from ”communism bad” to ”socialism bad”. The Nordics have the highest life satisfaction recorded because all the socialist programs implemented after WW2.
You can talk to me directly instead of behind my back, you know?
I'm not ignoring the international division of labor. Every country is part of it and every country has been part of it in the past, including Socialist ones.
Aw, beehaw. As expected. Corruption is a cog in the machine. You pigs call it lobbying sometimes. You're almost there but still unable to grasp that embezzlements are bound to happen in every market economy, planned or not that happens in capitalist systems, what those economies really were although severely restricted by NATO.
How does a defensive alliance restrict economic systems?
Most countries should be all over LLMs
Whether people want to admit it or not. AI will be the thing that takes the next step in most areas of influence. It's literally the next industrial or atomic revolution. Just because there is an AI bubble and the companies around it are doing all they can to bail out the water of a sinking ship doesn't make the actual tech itself bad or stupid.
That said all systems are corrupt. This whole capitalism vs socialism shit just exposes anyone who thinks that way as an idiot. It's not red vs blue , it's not an is or isn't sort of thing.
/s?
Imagine thinking a breakthrough in protein folding is a joke.
Do you understand how computers work or why they were ever useful? Or just make pretty color box light change?
Protein folding isn't LLMs. You forgot to format your motte and bailey fallacy properly.
What does that first L in LLM stand for?
You realize math is exactly that right? A language?
I know you probably felt like a big gotcha cause you tried to move away from the term AI or AGI since they're not true artificial intelligence. But at it's core it is doing really really big math.
Large.
A large?
Protein folding is not done with an LLM.
No I was using your terms
Man you got me there.
If you can't understand how computers are used to create a model of something and doing big math makes that better nobody can help you.
We had that before AI. Where's this industrial revolution in concrete terms: specifically without having to say "if" or "when" or pointing out anywhere past a few weeks into the future for it
No we did not.
Computers gave us calculators and suddenly we had rockets. Then we made them smaller and went into space. They became prevalent and we got automation. They connected and we got the Internet.
All of that merged together and made something that became very good at making models of anything with strong predictive capabilities because it can now run massive computing sequences logging immense variables regular people and even advanced computers before could not. You get our ability to understand protein folding, human behavior, economics and aspects of geometry we couldn't.
Are you expecting AI and then suddenly a bunch of change? The industrial revolution started in the mid 1700s, it wasn't until over 100 years later did we have full on industrial style warfare and electricity use became more common in everyday use(still to this day not everywhere has electricity). The understanding of nuclear energy started at the break of the 20th century but it wasn't until 60/70 years later that it was common.
AI as a breakthrough tech only really started 16 years ago and already it's established itself as a fledgling key tech. I'll bet you $500 the majority of technological advancement ahead of us will be tied to AI - it has already impacted how we diagnose people, accelerating understanding of drugs through it's ability to understand protein folding and drug discovery. It's given scientists the ability to expand our visual understanding of the universe and weather with it's predictive capabilities, and it's also threatening to advance automation to an insane level where we might have actually decent robots to perform human tasks.
Look at the combine harvester for instance. Almost 200 years old, came from the industrial revolution, took teams of animals to pull, advancements allowed it to be fueled with oil, then the introduction of computers made it manage itself, satellites allowed more precise control, now it's reaching a point where it can even monitor the health of the field for you and require such a minor amount of human interaction compared to it's original introduction. That's fucking insane. We might have a means to grow food that require almost no human involvement.
You're being intentionally obtuse over this because I think you just don't like the tech.