I love playing around with this stuff. Since llama 2 just recently dropped it seems like nearly every day there is a new and improved uncensored finetune to play with. Add to that the rapid improvements in the inference engines, techniques to increase context size, etc and it's like you can watch things improve practically in real time. I don't think I've ever seen a field advance so quickly. I suppose it's just that we're in the 'low hanging fruit' phase of the development curve, but still, it's amazing to watch.
Thank you for sharing your experience. It breaks my heart to see young people sucked into the trans black hole by sophists whose motivations are largely political gain or feeling batter about their own bad decisions. It's good to hear that you were advised by someone without those ulterior motives.
As for preventing people from making such a terrible decision I think that your experience was exactly right: young people questioning their (gender) identity should be gently reminded that sex is an immutable biological trait and that feelings of body dysmorphia (especially around puberty) are not uncommon and nearly always pass with time.
Really? I've always had sort of a baseline level of sympathy for the ones that actually go through with hacking up their own bodies because they were either duped by evil propaganda or are truly mentally ill. This data showing how awful post-op life can be for them kind of reinforces that feeling for me.
The evil ones are the ones out there creating the pro-trans propaganda that spreads gender confusion like a plague in their effort to create more trans.people. The ones that tell little children if they don't feel 'right' in their body or they happen to like things associated with the opposite sex they are trans and should start sterilizing themselves and hacking off their body parts. The ones that use the phrase 'gender affirming care' without the scare quotes that it deserves. The ones that use phrases like 'trans women are women'. The ones that smear anyone who doesn't go along with their evil propaganda as bigots.
Now, I'll grant you that there are plenty of post-ops that engage in that stuff, and if they do, well, they lose my sympathy real fast.
It's configurable in power options. Here ya go: https://www.howtogeek.com/412876/how-to-keep-your-laptop-on-with-the-lid-closed-on-windows-10/
The warning about shutting it down they give on there is important. I once closed mine up and put it under a pillow but it was still awake. It got so hot I could barely touch it and I was sure it was going to be bricked. Fortunately it hadn't been under there for too long so it was still alive and I was hella relieved (it was new at the time). I'm sure it would have been dead if it stayed under there for much longer.
Why use your laptop keyboard? Plug in a decent external keyboard and monitor, close your laptop up, and never touch it when you're in 'desktop' mode. I've been using a laptop as my primary PC for a few years and that's pretty much what I do.
These new leftist commissars came into vogue as a reactionary response to the George Floyd summer of love bullshit. The Floyd riots were (ostensibly) based upon the notion that institutional racism was rampant in America -- a flat out lie. How ironic it is that that lie was used as the justification to install these officers whose job it is to enforce institutional racism.
These people need to go, and if they're falling out of power that is very good news indeed.
I get where you're coming from; it's frustrating to watch the media and fact checkers let leftist lies and misleading arguments fester unscathed while they attack any minor infringement (like this article) or even wholly truthful assertions by the right on technicalities.
I just don't think cranking up the lying, however much it may be justified in a tit for tat sense, is a good idea strategically speaking. Because the left holds the institutional power in the west right now they would just love for the right to really start cranking out misinformation. They'd fact check every lie and, more importantly, they'd heavily publicize every lie. And then they'd use that publicity as the basis for more censorship and more intrusive surveillance, which is exactly what they want to do anyway. It would be playing right into their hands.
I have mixed feelings about this one. The title of the Daily Sceptic article that Reuters fact checked is "Climate Crisis Shock: No Change in Average U.K. Temperatures for More Than Two Decades" (here: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/20/climate-crisis-shock-no-change-in-average-u-k-temperatures-for-more-than-two-decades/).
That article shows that the 10 year average UK temperatures are equal to the 10 year average temperatures from a decade ago and concludes "No change in average temperatures" in the title. Now, there isn't anything wrong with that analysis; DS is technically correct in their specific statement about a 10 year averaging window but if they had chosen another window, eg, 5, 15, 20 years or whatever those averages would have shown warming.
My beef with the DS article is that the running average length they chose for their analysis absolutely should have been in the title especially since most other commonly chosen averages would have shown warming. That is, the title of the DS article needed to be "Climate Crisis Shock: No Change in the 10 year Average U.K. Temperatures for More Than Two Decades"
That said, I've got to reiterate that I'm pretty much the opposite of a climate change alarmist. There's a lot to be said about the accuracy of these temperature records in the first place, and in my view that actual threat of increased CO2 / increasing temperature is wildly overblown. However, when we combat these claims it's important to do so with precision, and it's cleat that the title of the DS article left them open to a "misleading" claim from Reuters.
Hey I'm also a local LLM enthusiast and I must say that you've provided a very good overview.
I'd like to add that it really isn't too hard to start playing around with them nowadays; usability has improved quite a bit even over the last few months. I like to recommend koboldcpp because I feel like it's much more newbie friendly than ooba (plus I really enjoy its story mode).
Once you have kobold you only need a GGML model and you're good to go, but I guess picking the right model might still be a hurdle for many folks. Myself I have an 8GB card and I like TheBloke's finetunes, so his 4bit quantization of 13B Wizarrd-Vicuna-Uncensored (https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Wizard-Vicuna-13B-Uncensored-GGML) works pretty well for me. Looking forward to his finetunes of LLama2 which are just now starting to drop!
"Well we know that crack cocaine is bad for fetuses but if a pregnant person who's used to getting crack doesn't get it they feel awful bad about themselves. Obviously a pregnant person feeling bad about their body is the worst possible imaginable outcome. Therefore our recommendation is that physicians should give crack cocaine to any pregnant person who says that they need it."
But seriously, how long until they start attacking physicians who don't want to prescribe testosterone to "pregnant persons" as bigots and trying to destroy their lives?
Yep, and if you broke these charts out by age and sex you'd see that the effect is worst among people who are a) young and b) female, that is, the people most likely to use the worst kinds of social media.
Hell if you sat down with the explicit intention of designing something that would damage the mental health of young women you'd probably come up with something like instagram or tiktok.
If I had a daughter I would never let her anywhere near social media.
I believe that social media is playing a large role in the decline of mental health as shown by this polling. From the data it looks like both groups are trending in the wrong direction, with "liberals" (I would call them leftists) more affected. That isn't surprising as liberals are more likely to be young and young people are more likely to use (especially the most pernicious) social media regularly.
Many of the poll questions relate directly to perceived self worth or ability. It isn't hard to see how social media attacks those directly. Just as an example let's say you play a musical instrument. Prior to social media you would likely gauge your proficiency based on your immediate peer group, school, church, or maybe local bands. And that measurement would be against real performances including all of the many takes, foibles, and failures those entail. If you were any good at all you were likely to compare at least a little favorably in those situations and thus derive a sense of self worth and competence from your instrument.
However, the advent of social media has dramatically altered this dynamic. It has blown up our perception of talent and worth. Now, we're constantly exposed to a highlight reel of curated performances, beauty, and success. Social media shows individuals who appear similar to use but seem to effortlessly do whatever we're trying to do infinitely better than we do it.
The curated nature of posts and the exceptional talent routinely displayed distort our understanding of what is truly remarkable and rare. As a result, our perception of what it actually is to be talented or successful at anything is skyrocketing and, by comparison, our view of our own talents or success must diminish. Social media has inadvertently created an environment where we constantly measure ourselves against a distorted reality, leading to feelings of inadequacy and diminished self-esteem.
Yep. God only knows how many deaths the sugar industries lobbying* back in the 60s caused from diabetes, heart disease, etc. Not to mention making us a nation of land whales. One of the worst public health debacles of all time IMHO.
I think South Park had the right idea about the idiotic food pyramid lol:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIGXkh6S8Zw
- I'm loathe to link NPR but they're pretty on point here: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat
Yes, something can be "a possible cancer cause" and still be "considered safe". That really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. As with all things, the dose makes the poison.
People have been fearmongering about aspartame for nearly 50 years now. Whenever I see the next batch of FUD like this I just lol. This is one of the most studied chemicals ever and an entire generation has consumed it for their entire lives. Even if you didn't believe any of the MANY studies that have been done (which would be foolish), wouldn't you expect to see a real uptick of cancer over the period? There has been none... cancer rates continue to be flat to slightly down.
And that fact alone should be heartening. Over the past half century humanity has been exposed to any number of chemicals, drugs, and environmental factors. And yet, those cancer incidence rates have stayed flat to slightly down. To me that means that, at least a far as cancer is concerned, we've been doing a pretty good job of getting rid of things that are actually dangerous.
It was an incredibly stupid move by Musk to lock down public access. That's like their #1 selling point. Incidentally I still can't access it without an account...
I wish I could give you more than +1 for your description of true believers. Wonderfully written, and something more people need to understand. When your belief becomes your identity you become incapable of acting in good faith.
We probably agree that there's quite a good chance that a person trotting out these kind of phrases in response to a cogent argument is just being dismissive or doesn't want to engage. It wouldn't surprise me if there's been an uptick in this kind of bad faith tactic since the left has recently become more insular and unwilling to even engage people or ideas that don't fit their preferred narrative.
That said, however, this kind of thing can happen even to intelligent people arguing in good faith especially if their when their world view is very different from the person they're talking to. Very different world views means different views on fundamental truths which they are going to hold as axiomatic. Unless the argument is rigorous (which, let's be real, it ain't gonna be in an internet forum) there's a good chance the each side won't properly communicate truths they hold as axiomatic. When the other side reads the argument it could look nonsensical to them because the premises do not follow from their own axiomatic truths. This sort of good faith misunderstanding could certainly be on the uptick as western society becomes more fractured regarding the truths it holds to be self evident..
I'm a huge Jokic fan (he's just fun to watch) and his domination of the playoffs this year was nothing short of historic. It's worth remembering that the league MVP is a regular season award, though.
Even so, he deserved to win that this year, too. And he would have probably gotten it too... if he hadn't won it the prior two years. MVP voters seem to be really allergic to giving out the three-peat. It hasn't happened since Larry Bird in the early eighties and only 3 times in league history (Russell, Chamberlain, Bird). That's right, not even Jorden, Magic, Kobe or Lebron were 3-peat MVPs.
Oh, my god. Are you telling me that characters who are intended to be villainous, evil, or abusive... actually behave and speak like they are? On a site called character.ai? The horror!
Anyway character.ai is just about obsolete at this point. If you've got a decent GPU the uncensored opensource models will provide a pretty much equivalent experience locally with, eg, koboldcpp + Silly Tavern + characters of your choice from a site like chub.ai
That typo gave me a good laugh. Couldn't help but think of something like this:
And lo, when the lamb opened the fourth seal ... there was a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death ... and as Death descended upon the Earth all heard and trembled as the pale horse announced in a thunderous whinny 'The end is Neigh!"
This had better be a very temporary measure or Twitter is screwed. Universal visibility is pretty much the most important thing they offer their users.
Are they insane? Universal visibility is pretty much the most important thing Twitter offers its users. Seriously, so many of the people who post there do so because it's the easiest way to reach large audiences.
This is an incredibly stupid. It'd better be a (very) temporary emergency measure like they claim or they are in real trouble.
Yes, I agree that both parties are fundamentally invested in the perpetuation of the two party system. And yeah, I do think that's bad for America as we're often left with a couple of crappy candidates to choose from. We desperately need something like proportional voting.
That said, just because both parties agree on this particular bad policy hardly makes them a Uniparty. Go and look at their platforms. Vastly different. Go and look at the congressional voting records. Vastly different, and usually along party lines.
Hell, just contrast the current administration with the previous one. Very, VERY different priorities and very VERY different impacts on your liberty and the eventual fate of this country.
You're right to criticize Republicans. They deserve it, and I'm sure we could both sit around and come up with plenty of reasons why.
But I just don't know how you get from there to 'they're just as bad as the dems', which is what you seem to be saying. I mean, sure they share some of the same pathologies, like ever increasing funding to entitlements like social security, medicare, etc, but much of that is realpolitik.
Just go and compare the official party platforms. They are VERY different, and representatives tend to vote along the lines of the party platform in most cases. You say that it's all unanimous voting for more govt. program funding and taking rights, but that just isn't the case. Go and review the congressional voting records on the "Inflation Reduction Act" or any major bill that deals with any of those issues and you will find a stark division along party lines in most cases.
But that's a bit abstract. For a nice, concrete examples just look at the current administration as a whole. They have been a disaster for this country on so many issues that are important to me and (i would imagine) to you as well. Now, contrast that with the last Republican administration. Yeah, the Reps. weren't great, but are you really here to tell me that you wouldn't rather have them in power right now?
I can't for the life of me figure out why Musk would want to do this -- brands are hella valuable. For a company like Twitter that little blue bird might have been their most tangible asset. I'd say it was worth. .. 10 billion? maybe more. And he just wants to light that on fire? Bizarre.