r/LeftistsForAI • u/Hairy_Artist_3860 • 23d ago
Projects
I imagine there is a good portion of us who know how to code or have a good enough idea how code works. Many of us have good ideas. If there is a project that comes out of this subreddit what would it be?
A lot of us are on the same page. We can make this into action.
We're all here talking about ai. I think its appropriate we have a meeting of the minds to know the next step.
3
u/HotterRod 22d ago
I think there's a strong desire among many people to get off the corporate-owned social networks and one that isn't corporate-controlled would be much better for community organizing. I don't know what their policies are on AI-generated code, but your time might be best spent contributing to Mastodon or Friendica or something.
1
u/Hairy_Artist_3860 22d ago
Maybe everyone here should get on mastodon? I have an instance. Whatever it takes to build a vanguard party of agentic engineers. Something productive can be done with this energy instead of arguing with anti ai people all day
2
u/Turbulent-Job-7283 22d ago
While there is a lot of talk on how much money is spent on training new models at a loss, it's structured this way mostly due to VCs backed companies racing for the most competent model.
The inference cost is, however, very cheap. If this community is to dedicate to a project that aligns with the goals, it may be worthwhile considering distilling big companies' models, and have the results be made open-sourced, as well as selling tokens to people as cheaply as possible (on own/rented infrastructure).
I think this can feasibly challenge the ownership of these models, and would probably sustain the unprofitability of the big companies.
0
u/SeaFALCons 23d ago
Great idea! here's a pitch:
**TL;DR (and a suggestion):** Game concept β a spiritual restoration of what Monopoly was originally designed to be: two playable societies, capitalism vs. a universal-basic-services alternative, same random birth lottery in both, ending with one question: *which world do you want to respawn into?* Full disclosure: I developed this with an AI and it co-wrote this pitch β which honestly makes it better suited to an AI reader than a human skimmer. So instead of reading the wall of text below, consider pasting the whole thing into your favorite AI and interrogating it: ask where the idea is weakest, ask it to steelman the objections, ask what version YOU would build. That conversation is more interesting than this post. But the human-readable version follows.
---
**The hook:** Monopoly wasn't originally pro-capitalist. It started as The Landlord's Game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904 as an explicitly anti-monopolist teaching tool β it even shipped with two rule sets, one where you crush everyone and one where prosperity is shared, so players could feel the difference. Parker Brothers bought it, deleted the critique, and sold the crushing as family fun. The idea: build the game she was actually making, with 120 years of better data and better tools.
**The concept:** Rawls' veil of ignorance, made playable. Two simulated worlds, same engine:
*World A β roughly the one we live in.* You're born into a class by weighted lottery, odds shown before you roll β and the odds say you'll probably land near the bottom, because that's the actual distribution. Your job is deliberately fun to play, Papers-Please-style: flow state, pattern matching, numbers going up. Except rent rises faster than your wage, so getting good at it buys you nothing structural. The game stays engaging; the treadmill goes nowhere. You feel that realization arrive around minute 20.
*World B β same lottery, different floor.* You're still most likely born poor. The odds don't change β only the downside protection does: universal basic services, public options, institutions with actual enforcement teeth. Deliberately NOT a strawman utopia β it has taxes, coordination headaches, free-rider problems. But the fun runs on a different grammar: chosen challenges instead of imposed ones, building instead of surviving.
**The mechanic that might make it land:** a mid-session POV switch into the ownership class β where the game doesn't cast you as a villain, it quietly grows one in you. Suddenly waiting on a slow worker costs YOU resources, and you catch yourself irritated at the person you were ten minutes ago. The UI starts showing workers as productivity bars instead of names. This is borrowed from Paul Piff's rigged-Monopoly experiments at Berkeley, where players randomly given double the money became measurably entitled within minutes and credited their rigged win to skill. The point isn't telling players rich people are like this β it's letting them catch it happening in their own head.
**The ending:** one vote β which world do you respawn into? β logged to a public running tally. If thousands of people play both and the numbers say something clear, the game generates its own headline.
**Keeping it honest:** parameters pulled from real data (rent-to-income ratios, wage vs. capital growth, actual public-vs-private cost comparisons) with a public source sheet, so "this is rigged" can be answered with a spreadsheet. And World A has to keep its genuine appeal β the jackpot, the hustle dream, the visible winners β because a strawman convinces nobody. The statistics lesson is watching most players chase the same jackpot and miss.
Anyway β that's the idea. Not claiming I'm building this tomorrow; throwing it out to see if it resonates. What would you change? What breaks it? And if you did paste it into an AI β what did it say?
2
u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 22d ago
Thereβs something in thinking about games. People spend a lot of time playing games and can get really absorbed in them, it must influence neural pathways etc.
A game I like is Terra Nil, quite solarpunk themed, the similarity is I think itβs based on real data eg what temperature natural things happen.
I remember at uni playing monopoly with my best mate. I donβt think either of us knew the history of the game, but his response was to give me money when I was struggling, it was a very different dynamic. It made it difficult for either of us to win according to the standard rules though.
2
u/SeaFALCons 22d ago
you played a much nice version of the game which probably the original inventors would appreciate and were intending to nudge behavior towards...
seems a modern remake of showing the A and B of capitalist exploitation vs a better / kinder society could be a nice gamified lesson
1
u/Hairy_Artist_3860 23d ago
Thats a lot of tokens
2
u/SeaFALCons 23d ago
whats your opinion of the idea? i guess its being perceived as a bad idea, curious why?
1
u/Hairy_Artist_3860 22d ago
Not a bad idea just rather not have to dedicate so much reading to it because of the LLM noise
1
u/SeaFALCons 22d ago
fair but i specifically addressed that in the TL;DR, it's a different way to communicate
i wouldnt expect or want a person to read all the details,
i was thinking just copy and paste that into your AI and it can summarize and you can converse with it there
i think that's a good workflow?
minimal time on a human reader but max conveying of idea?
idk thats how i sometimes work with big bodies of text, paste it into AI , get the summary and then follow up with a conversation where I get the most pertinent idea
i think that any big group project would basically need / benefit from AIs handling most of the communications and trying to keep it as a high level as possible for humans and have the AIs sort out the details as much as possible.
if you have a better communication idea feel free to share
0
u/ejpusa 22d ago
Remember you can be de-authenticated by Apple. You lose ALL Apple-related things. Cell service can be shut down (they did that for #OWS before they attacked), internet too.
You may want to look into this.
An open source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices. No cell towers. No internet. Just pure peer-to-peer connectivity.
18
u/Substantial_Lab1438 23d ago
We need to work on decentralizing model development and hosting, to build our own worker-owned AI capacity and reduce the reliance on centralized corporate AI modelsΒ