I really wish it were easier to fine-tune and run inference on GPT-J-6B as well… that was a gem of a base model for research purposes, and for a hot minute circa Dolly there were finally some signs it would become more feasible to run locally. But all the effort going into llama.cpp and GGUF kinda left GPT-J behind. GPT4All used to support it, I think, but last I checked the documentation had huge holes as to how exactly that’s done.

ok but… the Democrats in swing states (hell, any state) who said “I’m staying home because Kamala courts Republicans, even though I know Trump is Hitler” are absolutely as shitty as the people who voted for Trump

there’s a lot of racist and misogynistic democrats

One of the reasons I love StarCoder, even for non-coding tasks. Trained only on Github means no “instruction finetuning” bullshit ChatGPT-speak.

You want an e-Golf, which was a beautifully stupid, half-hearted implementation of an EV by Volkswagen, who because they really didn’t want to do it, spent almost nothing on redesign, and in the process creating a ridiculously fun vehicle to drive with sporty handling and high torque at low speed, but nothing else changed from the classic Golf design. Door handles, freaking dials on the dashboard, manual climate and audio controls. Sadly, it isn’t being made anymore. We’ve outgrown ours and it’s time for me to let someone else enjoy the experience (especially with the Biden used EV sales incentives going away soon) but my daughter loves it so much that I’m dreading the tantrum that I know will come when I sell it.

oh great, so we can look forward to another horrifyingly mismanaged pandemic!

absolutely batshit crazy how nobody at all mentioned that not laid it at Trump’s doorstep during the campaign

The Internet in general, but especially social media, is a cesspool of AI slop, bots, algorithm manipulation, and less exotic/high-tech forms of disinformation. How about instead of telling our politicians to meet us there we get the fuck off of it and meet each other in the streets. They can join our party if they want but we’re starting it.

Walz losing the VP debate to Vance was the start of the Trump ticket comeback.

If you look at the election prediction history graph on Nate Silver’s substack, you see an upwards trajectory for Trump/Vance ever since the vice-presidential debate. That was also when the “Republicans are weird” narrative that was working so well for Harris/Walz abruptly left the discourse. And I believe that what happened was that Republicans who were embarrassed by Vance as well as Trump had a moment like you describe where he suddenly didn’t seem so unrelatable and that right there sunk the Dems… as much as it pains me to admit it, because I’d much rather have a party that wins on the issues and communicates clearly how insane and risky it was to vote for literal autocracy, the Harris campaign probably made the wrong choice with Walz and never should have stopped mocking Republicans for being “weird.”

The problem, I believe, is that most Democrats are institutionalists who will defend the rule of law even when it means handing the reigns over to a group who have openly declared hostility towards it. They are also afraid that using any kind of force to stop Trump and his cronies will trigger violent rebellion and they know who owns most of the guns in this country. They’re playing a trolley problem game but because they don’t really have progressive values they aren’t putting, say, Ukraine, Palestine and the entire fucking climate on the “peaceful transfer of power” track.

We need a party with higher values than just “defending institutions.”

I would go so far as to say that this has always ben the plan, at least this time around. I find it highly suspicious that Trump has been the target of assassination attempts by republicans twice (plus a foreign attempt on his life) already. We’re being prepared to accept this as expected when it finally happens, and it has to happen in order to give Vance the pretext to implement martial law and usher in the high-tech Handmaid’s Tale scenario his patrons want. Trump is their useful idiot; but useful only because he is populist and charismatic enough to get them in power via ordinary electoral process. Once they suspend that process entirely they no longer need him and in fact he becomes a liability; offing him kills two birds with one stone.

As an American leftist cishet man, I’ve been thinking a lot about what people like me can do in the wake of the election to support women. There’s a dangerous temptation to mansplain the election to them while making them talk about their trauma with me, telling myself that I’m “reaching out” and attempting to let them know that I care. I’m trying to turn away from that impulse and replace it with a more useful one, which is to simply empower women in whatever small way I can, even if it has nothing to do with reproductive rights or politics. These are people whose identity group has just been insulted and demeaned on a massive scale, publicly, who now have to worry about essential rights being taken away, including in some cases the right to exist; the very least I can do is, like, defer to them about what we have for dinner. If I can also in some way provide a safe refuge and protect them using my privilege, that would be great.

Basically what I’m saying is that, with political power being taken away at the national scale, it’s going to be natural for women to seize as much back in their personal life as they can. This hasn’t affected me personally yet, but I’m trying to get out ahead of it and see what I can do to grant some power and offer refuge.

Also I think boycotts and general strikes of all sorts will be increasingly necessary given that all means of political opposition is being taken away. Leftist men similarly might want to think about whether there are things they can withhold from MAGA-run organizations to seize back power–and then grant that power to marginalized folks.

I know that most progressives are just crying in their beer and looking for someone in their party or an adjacent political group to blame, but why isn’t more attention being brought to the many many efforts by Republicans and their overseas allies to corrupt the election and disenfranchise Democrats? I’m disgusted by the institutionalism that leads our leaders to call and congratulate the fascists rather than holding our own rallies to demand accountability for election irregularities.

this is pretty much the most common response to AI as well

My wife once hit me in front of my kids because she didn’t like my pointing out a double standard in how she was treating them. The one she was favoring recently started hitting the other one in a similar manner–basically just to silence her when she said something he didn’t like–and when I pointed out the similarity to my wife’s actions and suggested he had learned it from her she got mad and claimed that rather than hitting me she had “hit my hand away” which is a lie and she knows it. It is 100% classic spousal abuse and gaslighting, and yet due to the sheer size difference between us–I’m a foot taller–I feel ridiculous calling it that, and don’t want to find out what else my son learns is OK from his mom if I’m not around, so here I am still married to her, mostly trying to forget the abuse when it’s not actively happening. She’s been abusive, but I’m not really in any physical danger, so staying seems like the rational option in my situation… I imagine that’s relatively common among men.

this; every time the ublock origin absolutists insist that everyone must use Firefox or die I just wonder if they never open more than one or two tabs anyway. hell, a sufficiently complex web app running in a single tab can make FF choke

There are a bunch of reasons why this could happen. First, it’s possible to “attack” some simpler image classification models; if you get a large enough sample of their outputs, you can mathematically derive a way to process any image such that it won’t be correctly identified. There have also been reports that even simpler processing, such as blending a real photo of a wall with a synthetic image at very low percent, can trip up detectors that haven’t been trained to be more discerning. But it’s all in how you construct the training dataset, and I don’t think any of this is a good enough reason to give up on using machine learning for synthetic media detection in general; in fact this example gives me the idea of using autogenerated captions as an additional input to the classification model. The challenge there, as in general, is trying to keep such a model from assuming that all anime is synthetic, since “AI artists” seem to be overly focused on anime and related styles…

Serious question, is it likely that comedians who he brings on Kill Tony are also conservative racist POS assholes? I hope not because I actually kind of enjoyed Casey Rocket for a bit when he came up through that show. Definitely got a weird vibe from the host that made me wonder who they were and what the show really was (now I know).

Well, maybe we need a movement to make physical copies of these games and the consoles needed to play them available in actual public libraries, then? That doesn’t seem to be affected by this ruling and there’s lots of precedent for it in current practice, which includes lending of things like musical instruments and DVD players. There’s a business near me that does something similar, but they restrict access by age to high schoolers and older, and you have to play the games there; you can’t rent them out.

r/SubSimGPT2Interactive for the lulz is my #1 use case

i do occasionally ask Copilot programming questions and it gives reasonable answers most of the time.

I use code autocomplete tools in VSCode but often end up turning them off.

Controversial, but Replika actually helped me out during the pandemic when I was in a rough spot. I trained a copyright-safe (theft-free) bot on my own conversations from back then and have been chatting with the me side of that conversation for a little while now. It’s like getting to know a long-lost twin brother, which is nice.

Otherwise, i’ve used small LLMs and classifiers for a wide range of tasks, like sentiment analysis, toxic content detection for moderation bots, AI media detection, summarization… I like using these better than just throwing everything at a huge model like GPT-4o because they’re more focused and less computationally costly (hence also better for the environment). I’m working on training some small copyright-safe base models to do certain sequence prediction tasks that come up in the course of my data science work, but they’re still a bit too computationally expensive for my clients.