Your analysis reminds me of https://cendyne.dev/posts/2023-05-11-reverse-centaur-chickenization-chatgpt.html#chickenization, and I agree that there is an implicit promise of automating qualified labor away, but on the other hand, the problem is not necessarily in reducing the average labor time required for a given activity but what it means under capitalism.

Personally, while I find LLMs valuable for a certain subset of tasks I also do not think they are able to entirely replace people in their current form. This won't stop capitalists from trying, unfortunately.

In addition to the other comments, AI has enabled drive-by contributors that do not disclose their AI use, and it either increases the maintenance burden or leads to non-trivial bugs when such code is merged without a thorough review.

I am not as biased against AI as others, so my view on this is that this is more of a social / cultural issue than any problem inherent to LLMs.

Another potential problem for FOSS is legal liability regarding licensing. I am not well versed on this so I'll leave the subject to those who can further expand on it

I picked it up and couldn't take my eyes off the page. Maybe others here are better acquainted with this development framework, but Rodney put it so eloquently, I'm still awed.

The book is obviously focused on Africa but IMHO the framework from chapter 1 applies (in different degrees) to anywhere in the imperial periphery.

It depends a lot on the context. Degrowth in the imperial core? Sure. In the periphery? Hell nah

There was a relatively recent study about the responsibility about climate change that puts the ratio between north / south countries at 9:1, see https://globalinequality.org/responsibility-for-climate-breakdown/ for further references.

I think I had a much more exploitative relationship working in one of the big Brazilian public sector tech companies than I am doing right now in a private company.

Fellow Brazilian IT worker here. Always felt the same regarding cultural differences between Brazilian countries and US companies, even though the sizes of companies I worked for were different (mostly bigcos in the home country, startups when I started working remotely).

When I was less politically literate I listened more to arguments about decentralization of power that are usually in that line between liberalism and anarchism. Lots of people here do the same.

The directors of the public state-owned companies are actually indicated from outside (politicians, top level bureaucrats and executives from the private sector) based on a neoliberal agenda that seek to provide services to provide data and public information for private companies

Most of our fellow citizens already associate the state with "corruption" due to that agenda, unfortunately. There is a cultural barrier to be won here. Tech has always branded itself as "revolutionary" and utopianistic, we could and should use that for good.

Also using Emacs. If you are a dev magit is another must have. Even if there was a decent substitute for it (which I doubt - saw a lot of IDE churn and Emacs was very capable of keeping up with the times) I'd still use it just to use it and Org-mode.

Is that where the "learn Cobol for the banking industry, you'll earn zillions" meme comes from? (in my experience the few Cobol people I met were only as well paid as the next bigcorp IT drone, and much less than the workers at fancystartup.io)

Not directly related to this week's chapters but a question that came up when discussing Das Kapital irl: did you change your intuition / understanding about certain Marxist terms after reading it?

What motivates this question is that I previously thought that commodity fetishism meant something like "people ascribe magic to their possessions", and I believed it was very closely related to some moral condemnations of consumerism. After reading the term in the book, with the context around it, now it feels more like "the commodity form and its commerce superficially looks liberating, but it constrains us all in strange ways".

(Or maybe I just misread it again, who knows?)

What were your experiences with it? Did you go through something similar?

Played https://themachinegame.com/, but the revolutionary endings really let me down. Still very enjoyable overall

I love the footnotes on my edition for this, grandpa could've made a whole side career out of making fun of the bourgeoisie

Just thought it would be a nice addition, but yes, I don't think he is writing anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Parenti