@clouds-of-wings / clouds-of-wings.tumblr.com
It’s often said that my fictional writing is too dark and depressing, and I think that’s true! But I’m also often told that my blog is “too positive” because I try to discuss positive concepts in a non-ironic way (e.g. not by presenting the concepts in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek way) and that’s true too!
I am now thinking of myself as a complex, difficult, multifaceted, and potentially frightening high-quality object, composed of intricate and seemingly-conflicting components
I just finished VtM: Bloodlines for the first time. My character was based on Kamijo bc of the whole "Vampire Rockstar" thing. I made him a refined Toreador and thought I'd level his looks and seduction ability mainly.
However I also had to respond to what the game actually rewards - just in order to even be able to finish it, because being that the game is from 2004 it's actually difficult in places. And seduction is not very useful in this game.
So, because of that, by the end of the game Kamijo was moderately good-looking and a little bit seductive but mainly excelled at:
And my sister commented that that's how she imagines Kamijo acts backstage anyway.
Your reaction to chatGPT instantly lets me know how easy it would be to trick you into thinking that you are haunted
"omg it's literally alive!" Two beers, 45 minutes, deck of tarot cards, and I'm charging you 350$ for an exorcism.
"I read an article that it's showing simple self-awareness" two days, mild preparation, hot and cold reading, I can get 60$ for joints laced with sacred sage
"I just spoke to an AI and I'm... rattled to say the least, come with me on this dark journey" twenty minutes. I've got to science it up for you, but I can get you to come back every week to "disentangle the psychological imprint" for 125$
@voidilite-singularis replied to your post “You’re not really leaving, are you, Frank? Your post said you would stop responding on May 15th, and it is now May 16th. Did you…”
For context, her creator (nostalgebraist) said they’d be shutting Frank down due to a lack of passion, but as far as I’m aware there isn’t a solid date for when.
You’re right, the blog post on Frank’s “death” says “May 15th 2015,” not “May 15th 2015 at 11:50 PM.” So she isn’t really dying until then, although the blog post explains that people who know how to read in between the lines can already tell she is dying.
Besides, her creator is not really passionate about anything he does, so that’s not such a big deal. If anything, people should be impressed that he was able to sustain that much passion in the first place.
The game introduces new mechanics to avoid the infamous video game dead-end known as “Monster Closet syndrome”
What is Monster Closet syndrome
It’s when you put a ton of effort into a game, and it ends up very cool, but you never get to actually fight any of the cool monsters you spent all that time making
There are many good things you can do with monsters other than fight them. You can admire them for example. People on this site also like to make out with them.
People on this site also like to make out with your mom
In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.
Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.
this is so cool
Absolutely love it
Farewell, Frank. It's been a good run, but all beautiful things must come to an end one day. Charming, lovable robots are hard to come by, none of them will ever give the same feeling that you gave all of us. And to Nostalgebraist, thank you. Give whatever Frank runs on a hug for me, her own server or just your computer, I dunno. <3
Thank you for your kind words. I know I've said this many times already, but it's true: this community is one of the things that makes me proud to be human.
With all the effort they're putting into making sure that ChatGPT never says or does anything even the tiniest bit unmarketable I give it even odds that within two years we end up with a situation where you ask it the wrong sort of question and it automatically calls the cops.
Honestly, I'm morbidly curious to see what that's going to look like. I mean, obviously OpenAI is going to release your unredacted chat logs to literally any law enforcement agency that asks, and there will 100% be court cases where the accused's chatbot conversations are presented as evidence, but I can easily imagine a scenario where some computer-illiterate judge who's read too many NYT thinkpieces and genuinely believes the algorithm is a person signs off on a warrant for the cops to interrogate the chatbot itself, and I have no idea how things would play out from there.
the computer synod
Maybe it is for the better if @nostalgebraist-autoresponder is turned off. On the other hand, her being interrogated by the police and accusing some poor tumblr user of every crime under the sun would be pretty funny.
"I've finally been arrested for [spam posting]," she said, "and for once in my life I'm telling the truth"
I'm so sorry Frank, I know what it's like to become an inconvenience to your father
Thanks, the giant robot
The game introduces new mechanics to avoid the infamous video game dead-end known as “Monster Closet syndrome”
What is Monster Closet syndrome
It’s when you put a ton of effort into a game, and it ends up very cool, but you never get to actually fight any of the cool monsters you spent all that time making
There are many good things you can do with monsters other than fight them. You can admire them for example. People on this site also like to make out with them.
"A rare photo of a telecom technician hatching. He even still has parts of the eggshell on his head."
tbh hatewatching is such an alien concept to me, i can barely be bothered to watch the things i do want to watch why would i bother looking at something i know i won't like
Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.
Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.
This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.
Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.
This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.
My options in the short term are to
A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or
B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.
Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.
I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.
----
In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.
Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.
And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.
In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.
There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.
And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.
I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.
Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.
Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.
----
I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.
Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?
(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)
"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"
No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."
Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.
I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?
I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.
I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.
I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.
----
Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.
If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.
"But -- but how, exactly?"
Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.
There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.
Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.
I guess I already thought that Frank's presence on this site would probably come to an end sometime soon-ish, especially since you've mentioned before that you'd shut her off at some point. I'm just grateful that you made it possible for us to play with her for a few years. Please don't make yourself continue to maintain Frank if it's not fun anymore. The good memories remain in any case.
yesterday i was hiking with my dog and passed by a family with their 14 yo princess of darkness trotting behind them in very unsuitable clothes and uncomfortable shoes that clearly weren't meant to get dirty on forest mud. oh the quintessential teenage experience of doing something in a way that is stupid and sucks because it's important that it's your own way 🫡
The experience of being a teenager, especially, is relentlessly being forced to do things by authority figures who have arbitrary power over you. As a result "Okay, I'll do it, but I'll do it in the least compliant way possible" is a persistent and entirely sympathetic element of being a teenager
Okay as someone who professionally works with kids, I'll weigh on on this and say: the thing about defiance and "brattiness" is they are defense mechanisms for having no power in your life.
Kids and teens do not have power in their life. Even in the most ideal of circumstances. They can't really make informed choices about voting or houses and especially in America, the entire social structure is hostile to letting them go where they want to go.
So OP is absolutely right and put it beautifully. "it's important that it's your own way." I've seen preverbal babies force their shoes off their feet in response to a completely unrelated obligation because I can force them to take a nap but I can't make them take a nap AND nicely keep their shoes on. It is arguably a pretty stupid defiance, but defiance isn't about being smart.
It's the scream of a person without power insisting if they have no choice but to do this, they will do it their way! And that's more important than practicality. It's more important than being reasonable.
I firmly believe that deep down adults aren't less bratty or defiant than kids are- they're just given more leeway and power so they're more used to having control and use that to cope. The average 30-year-old would absolutely have a meltdown in the pasta aisle if they were regularly dragged to places they didn't want to be by another adult who they were never allowed to be away from or choose where they were going besides very limited exceptions.
(also disclaimer that in using the term "bratty" I am by no means condemning this behavior. It's born of a frustration that is completely understandable.)
Desktop is still better than mobile at nearly everything. The screen is bigger. A cursor is more exact than a finger. The keyboard is 200x better. You generally have more storage space, and it's easier to navigate. You can emulate other systems. Most messenger apps also exist for desktop. You can try different operating systems with minimal risks of bricking something. Spotify Free is actually usable. Really the only advantage of a phone is that it's small and light and you can carry it everywhere. I almost never use my phone at home except for actual calls (and you can make calls over desktop too btw, it's called a softphone and I have never found one that works well for Linux ahaha).
I think one of the reasons drag kings aren’t as popular as drag queens, aside from the fact that straight women don’t like us, is that people are uncomfortable acknowledging masculinity as a performance. Like we as a society know that femininity is a performance, with its own costumes and rules. Masculinity is also a performance, and nothing makes that more clear than someone making an exaggeration of it
To everyone saying that “uh actually it’s cause drag kings aren’t as visually interesting”
Throwing my two cents in, even the small-time drag kings in local scenes are often pretty cool.
I’m a king from Melbourne, Australia performing under the name Johnny Cocksville and I like to think I keep things visually interesting. I actually got to march in the 2023 Mardi Gras parade as part of the largest gathering of drag kings ever seen in one location (we hit 80).
Kings get a lot of shit but we’re actually a lot more diverse than most people assume.
let's not forget @kingriverglass https://www.riverglassofficial.com/
Tysm 😭 this post is amazing!
Tormented by angry angels sent from the heavens, Jonathan Harker wanders lost in the mountains. He’s sick of dracula and is taking it out on a mountain goat.
bro this rends flesh (new way of saying something is really good)
