Yes yes yes its our future but i sigh when vaush tunes into french neolib #23 who explains that things are good but possibly bad, feels like the same bit everyday

I've noticed over the years that Vaush has constantly referred to his position on the 2022 Canadian truckers' protests. The impression I've gotten from this is that he really sees his position on that issue important enough so as to refer to it in the future many times. Which makes sense. He, after all, sees the ability for labor to protest to be very important as a socialist.

That makes me wonder, what are some other segments/videos from over the years that are important for us to watch? I feel like like I learned a lot about the state and labor power after rewatching a video about his position on those protests. What are some other segments/videos that would also be helpful to watch/rewatch?

Vaush (and most of the left’s) main argument against AI is that it has no intentionality, so everything it makes is soulless.

However, that does not mean it shouldn’t be used at all to make art. For example, the musician Cuco hired a small team of artists to make a music video, and they used image generation models fine tuned on their own art to help them make more assets, which they say would have been impossible otherwise given their limited budget: https://vimeo.com/1062934927

Similarly, a former Pixar animator did the same with Google’s Veo video generation model to make an animated short that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-deepmind/dear-upstairs-neighbors/

None of these were lazy text to image generation. They all had a specific vision in mind and combined traditional animation tools and gen AI to make creative projects with actual effort.

Oh, and before anyone brings it up, AI training is far less like theft than piracy and no one gives a damn about piracy. If we were “morally consistent,” then Nintendo would be in the right for taking down fan games and unauthorized fan art would be immoral (especially if it’s being sold on Patreon or as a commission).

The environmental concerns arent huge either.

• Projections indicate that by 2030, data centers will account for less than 3% of global electricity use, increasing to 935 Terawatt-hours, with AI (generative and non generative) driving only 40% of this demand (so 1.2% of global use). https://letsdatascience.com/news/un-report-projects-ai-could-use-3-electricity-c1e0874e
• A study (https://www.allianz-trade.com/en_global/news-insights/economic-insights/Code-carbon-kilowatts.html) projects nearly 643 million tons of CO2 from data centers by 2030, with all forms of AI (generative and non generative) making up half of the total, or about 321.5 million tons. In 2024, the world emitted 38.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide and rising, or about 120x as much as all forms of AI will emit by 2030. And according to the same article, “deployed across the economy, AI could cut global CO₂ emissions by around 1.4 Gt a year by 2035, more than offsetting the emissions generated by its own infrastructure and creating net savings of roughly 750 MtCO₂.” https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
• It also estimates that cooling will consume roughly 338 billion gallons of water by 2030. Assuming AI is also using up 40% of that, that would be 135.2 billion gallons. In 2014, the world consumed 4 QUADRILLION gallons of water, about 30,000 times as much. https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress

I feel like a lot of the hate against AI is motivated by anti corporatism, which makes sense because big tech companies are destroying civilization and supporting Trump. But just because the companies suck doesn’t mean the tech does. We all use the Internet even though Comcast suck. We all use YouTube even though Google sucks. We use Reddit even though spez suck. If we reject tech just because we don’t like the people who own it, we might as well go back to living in caves.

Lastly, I want to discuss how rejecting AI fundamentally hurts the effectiveness of the left. EVERY professional software developer is using LLMs to code now. LLMs have solved math problems that have stumped mathematicians for centuries. LLMs have discovered countless security vulnerabilities in software. Billions of people use LLMs each week (and no, it’s not just AI search overview). It is undeniably useful tech. If we position ourselves against it, we are shooting ourselves in the foot in the same way being anti Internet back in the 90s would have been a laughable position, especially in hindsight. We do not want to cede all of this to the right and let them control the discourse.

Honestly I see a big overlap between Dungeon Crawler Carl references, themes (anticapitalist and antiestablishment) and humour with Vaush.

If Vaush could read, he would really feel embarrassed for his judgement of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

EDIT: let me try without all the weird things where it is just like describing still images from Rick and Morty m, south park or Breaking Bad.

"DCC s about feeling isolated because of masking, playing a role in a social structure you are forced into and cant escape from, the absurdity of a completely fucked system where we, mostly, unwillingly play our part and even when we try to be good the outcomes are inevitable bad. And despite it all what makes us go on are the meaningful relations around us and the morale values we try to adhere to and fight for"

Seriously, if EVER there was a time for the mantra

You will not break me

Is it not this?

And the more reddit approach: (that will turn people away from the book series)

Maybe someone should pitch the Mantuars build to him or even the two half mantuars...

Honestly, it has a stripbar called The Penis Parade with Dong Quixote and Damascus Steel.

Not to forget the quote from book 9 (from memory): ... his lover. Yes they are lovers, I don't know why we have all been pussy footing around that. They used to fuck like the gayest gays that ever gayed. And then on to the nastiest description of how to have sex with a half mantaur in a gimp suit with zippers and the risk of spillage...

Hmm.. I see that I don't sell it well... I considered going in to the goblin with that stole the dick of a god, but that is also too difficult. Uzi Jesus from texas? no...

It is hard explaining how well written and engaging the book is because all you can remember about it is how fucked up and confusing and surprising it is. Being truly affected and sad by the vampire lady dying in front of her frozen know-it-all goat... It is so hard not sounding like a lunatic explaining the books... They should not work. But they do.

EDIT: i realized that the AI is an asshole. I am guessing that would be right up Vaush alley...

Seriously, if EVER there was a time for the mantra

You will not break me

Is it not this?

The mind virus point in the video about the destructive capacity of AI really stuck with me.The goal of MKUltra was to produce a drug that could control minds. It failed. The format of drugs is too expensive and inefficient. But a memetic hazard like AI disinformation slop on Facebook is cheap and self-perpetuating. It's not difficult for an oligarch to command a bot farm to act in their interests and manufacture consent.

Vaush says he would ban a drug that does essentially this, putting someone into a trance state of delusion, that also applies to anyone who breathes in the fumes and the fumes travel very far and are very potent. One person's breath infects thousands. Their breaths then infect thousands more.

Does the same logic follow for these evangelical fundamentalist Christian churches that also exist to facilitate the interests of global capital through dismantling anti-capitalist belief systems? He brought up Bolsonaro briefly, and this religious aspect is a highly potent feature of Brazil's likely turn back to hard-right subjugation to capital interests. In this way, I don't think this AI phenomenon is new, it's an upgraded, scaled-up to its logical extreme version of what Christian evangelicalism has been doing throughout the American South and the developing world.

Vaush often says there are no “real liberals” anymore, pointing to crackdowns in France or politicians caving to capital. But I don’t think liberals have changed much. Today’s liberals act almost exactly like those of 80 or 100 years ago.

Look at the liberals people admire. Wilson passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, Eugene Debs was jailed for an anti-war speech, and the Palmer Raids followed. FDR interned over 100,000 Japanese Americans, and the Smith Act passed under him was used against unionists and Communists. Under LBJ, COINTELPRO targeted the civil rights movement and the left. By today’s standards, would any of them count as “real liberals”?

These weren’t bad liberals betraying good ones. Even John Locke, a founder of liberal political theory, gave executives the “prerogative” to act outside the law for the “public good.” Liberal freedoms have always been conditional on the stability of the existing order.

The reason is structural. Liberal states depend on profitable capital accumulation for jobs, revenue, and credit. When crises threaten that, governments prioritize stabilizing the system, liberal or not.

What’s changed is visibility. Today we watch crackdowns unfold in real time, while those of the past are forgotten or softened in memory. So earlier liberals seem better.

And sure, you can call yourself the last “real liberal.” I bet many politicians today genuinely believe in liberal principles and see themselves that way too. But sincerely believing in those principles and actually upholding them when you’re governing through a crisis are two very different things.

So I’d argue liberalism exists today just as it always has. “Real liberals” have always existed, but only as long as the system allowed them to.

Saw this and immediately thought of Vaush and his (valid) hatred of the speculative economy. It truly is so evil how this system works. The point of AI is not to produce meaningful impacts for our world, it’s to produce incredible speculative value based on the companies selling promises of what it could be. After they profit off of the speculative gains, they can sell the debt and socialize the losses while crashing the global economy. This system is truly demonic.

Anyways, buy rice and beans. 2008 is going to look like a joke.

As an avid fan of both Yanis and vaush, I feel it necessary to explain his stance cause everyone on the sub thinks he's a pro-russia campist.

His disdain for Russia is clear to anyone that has listened, he despises the oligarchy but sees the European leadership (especially the banks and heavy industry) as merely constrained oligarchs in waiting, not intrinsically different. He is a marxist after all.

He unequivocally supports Ukrainian sovereignty but is also highly cynical about the EUs, NATO and ukrainian leaderships incentives in the war.

He believes they are highly incentivized to prolong the war. As he sees it there are 3 options victory, peace and defeat. He believes the EU and US (NATO by extension) is neither vying for peace or victory. If they wanted peace they would be serious about security guarantees, it they wanted victory for Ukraine they would be serious about military aid.

He believes all leaders are financially and politically incentivized to prolong the war.

Defeat: Ukraine loses

Peace: Russia keeps land, Ukraine gets security guarantees. Noone leaves happy.

Victory: Ukraine takes back all it's land and Russia backs off.

Dude was the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this

Vaush doubted Varoufakis was a campist, but well, he's been doing this stupid "both sides" thing about the war in Ukraine for a while now, blaming NATO imperialism for it, repeating Russian talking points about "ethnic cleansing" in Donbass and "CIA coup" in Kiev. Seems like a typical campist trying to hide being a campist to me.
For the record, I'm not a huge fan of NATO too but I don't trust anybody who both-sides the Ukraine conflict.

Here's a tweet of his on the subject:
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/2008592055350743490

EDIT: Because people think I'm a liberal or imply that "some people" (I guess they include me in this category) are "hypocritical" because supposedly I don't criticize liberals for pro-Israel sentiments, I must state that 1) I fully agree with Varoufakis and Vaush on economical issues and the EU policies being a tool to impoverish countries outside imperial core; 2) I don't trust liberals/"progressives" who both-side the Israel genocide also and I am as much critical of, let's say, AOC, Ro Khanna and Bernie because of this (Melenchon, for example, changed his mind on Ukraine and now I am much more positive about him); 3) I simply don't trust Varoufakis because of his both-siding

I listened to Vaush’s latest criticism of AI yesterday and was annoyed. Today I thought I’d share my opinion here but found that someone else had already started such a thread and was predictably dog-piled. So instead of writing some tedious, long-winded lecture filled with a bunch of points that tasks a readers patience, I’ll leave it up to you to ask questions. Please keep it civil and in good faith.

All I can provide is my own perspective as an artist and answer questions. I don’t use AI to write Reddit posts. Nor will I use it for my replies. My mother was an English teacher who also had a masters in theater. Go figure.

I’ve been an artist for more than a half century and I’ve used the computer to assist with art creation for almost as long. From my dad’s printer/modem terminal that accessed his lab’s mainframe, an Atari 800, Amiga 500, SGIs, Macs, to PCs I build myself. I received BFA Computer Art degree in the mid 90s. I used to work in professional digital art industries such as video games, web page content, photo processing, and so on. I got a good dose of how artists are paid peanuts in order to line the pockets of CEOs who make hundreds of times my salary. Working freelance was, is, and will remain extremely difficult for me when I have to compete with the cheap alternatives of soulless corporations.

These days I paint. I haven’t achieved international acclaim (yet) but the paintings I manage to occasionally sell go for hundreds of dollars. Before art school, I painted in a conventional manner. Ever since I returned to fine art more than a decade ago, I paint and sell work that I create using a combination of photography, image processing, and hand-painted pixel art on wood panels I build myself. I also build my own PCs to do digital image processing as well as use tablets for work that requires a stylus.

I endured a time before the turn of the century when all digital art was met with scorn by much of the art academia and professional art communities. There are many differences in discourse between then and now such as social media and the general political culture.

I could go on and on about how I currently use AI to create art. Given the current attitudes about AI among liberal Americans, this would be pointless. Instead, I leave it to you to ask questions. I will answer them honestly, agree with some points, politely disagree with others, and give respectful replies.

UPDATE: Thanks to some of you who actually asked good questions. I had expected nothing but insults and down-votes. But I ended up spending my good morning writing responses. I have to get back to work on artwork right now. But I'll check in later if there are any more questions.

All these AI rants from Vaush because he indeed turns into an evangelical condemning OnlyFans due to "high" moral convictions with no substance aside from his personal morality and refusal to engage with it... Love the guy but he becomes the ultimate boomer everytime the subject comes out

He claims no one engages with his argument but there is no argument from his part aside from a bunch of bad analogies and falacies so indeed there is nothing to engage with his ending conversation arguments

First he demands from chat what has improved what has become eficient yet the second a few chatters do mention it then he switches to claim efficiency its bad for social interaction

However the same was said the moment internet was born, same how people now spend all day reading books instead of working, that people spend all day reading news paper instead of thinking for themselves, that people listend to much to the radio instead of reading books or the newspaper.... And so on

He mentions the creation of machines to thread clothes but forgets that the first 20 years of the creation of threading machines people were against them and how all of them lost the sould of creation and how people are losing their lives their jobs their whole lives.

The reason why the right wing wins so many of the youth is not because AI is inherently reactionary but because leftist fail to harness the power of it so it ends all alone to the right wing side and due to sometimes just mere novelty then interaction then memes then even more joyful engagement neutral people get sided with the people who bring then joy entertainment and a comunity instead of social condemnation with no substance

If you remember the OG vaush he started streaming and debating because he saw how before him hasan and molestiny came to prominance, the whole field was just right wing pundits debating unorepared students or people who NEVER ONCE pushed hard any discussion since lefties and liberals were adverce to rising their voice or trash talking like the right wing love to do it on blood sports

It was not until those 3 outdid out debated the right wing usual shitposters that people finally understood that the left was not the caricature someone did on themselves, I know in my IT job at least +70 people who think of themselves as apolitical but hardcore gamers internet users so they just shitpost IRL what they seen "cool" people doing online/meming online, and when the left finally found its balls and started pushing back agresively my IRL enviroment did follow up 2-3 yrs latter.

Just like that AI is more about social engagement and a new field for any type of ideas to float there, by been a puritist Vaush and others like him are handling right wing retards another whole ass field with a growing audience left alone due to unwarranted self moralism with no real base aside from jacking your moral ego

Video related, people online dont want people to moralize them they want to have fun and in the middle of that fun they open themselves to listend to ideas which the left is no harnessing

https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/191026/nous-demande-d-ecrire-que-lfi-est-derriere-le-mouvement-autour-du-17-octobre-la-fabrique-d-un-bouc-emissai I tried searching for other candidates and TikTok didn't censor them. They are doing similar things to Lula, which is a shame.

Cowboys and Indians was a children’s game that renacted frontier conflict. It isn’t played nearly as much as it was decades ago due to changing tastes and awareness. And obvious reasons that it’s racist.
However I’m curious if Israeli children play something similar. Given the fact that American children once played it:
What does Vaush think, what do you think?

i swear my eyes roll to the back of my head everytime i see someone say "well ai is bad generally BUUT there are a few things it helps with efficiency wise!" so seeing him concede nothing while describing advancing of life as working with the texture of processes is a breath of fresh air

Edit: After reading the majority of the comments, all I can say is what a based community.

I've been dickriding Zohran the-God-Damn-Giga-Chad Mamdani since that Cuomo debate, and I don't need to tell you all what his position has been on Israel. But he recently got a lot of anger for attending a vigil for the Oct 7th victims. People have been calling him a traitor, saying that he's turning his back on the Palestinian people. And I wanted to take the temperature here because, surprise surprise, I think Vaush and his community are better than a lot of other leftist spaces.

But from what I've seen, I think that Mamdani has walked the line perfectly on this. To my knowledge he wasn't attending a pro-Israel thing, it was just a vigil to mourn the civilians who were killed on Oct 7. And like, I don't know what is going on inside Mamdani's head, but he gave what I felt was a very genuine and empathetic response when asked how he felt about being called a traitor. He said something like "There has to be room to mourn every person who has been killed." Which like, not even as an optics statement, I just really like the humanity and the care for humanity that Mamdani is showing here.

Like yes, what the IDF has done to Palestinians is worse than what Hamas has done to Israel, but also like, this shit that happened on Oct 7 was ghastly. Lives and families were shattered. And I know it's a settler colonial nation, but I also don't think that those civilians deserved that. Don't get me wrong, in Nazi Germany I think it's a shame that we didn't line up thousands of government/party/Wehrmacht members against the wall, but I also think it's okay to mourn all the civilians who burned alive in Dresden. If you were an anti-Hitler German living in the US and you heard about Dresden, you would deserve to be able to mourn like that without being accosted as an 'actual Hitlerite!'

I've heard Vaush give similar nuance when talking about the 9/11 victims, or the guys in the submarine of Oceangate.

Idk, call me a bad leftist but I think if you read what happened to people on Oct 7, going "Holy shit. Okay let's like, mourn these people and make a space for their friends and family to mourn and try to not minimize their pain" without then going "We must cleanse the Palestinian people from the face of the earth to secure a free Israel."

i’m having a very hard time finding any media explaining the history of the DPRK that isn’t either from a western bias or from a tankie bias. i’ve found some good stuff describing contemporary DPRK, but it’s history and especially it’s conception has been more difficult. any suggestions?