moved to @neon-draws-sometimes
this blog is an archive
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.
* these fire monsters look interesting *
- They help a lot here, where the sun doesnt reach
But be careful, they can burn everything - river man.
If you put fresh in a microwave he would simply dodge all the microwave particles
Ian redesign ( to go with Amethyst)
Also the human version of him (before he died) explanation is linked
I MADE A SEAL!!! He will be coming with me everywhere now. I love him. I love him very much.
EDIT: Free pattern here! https://gumroad.com/l/sealplushpattern
neon-skeleton99
I finally finished!! This pattern was super cute and I’m very happy with how it turned out.
Some headcanons for Fresh with a bonus doodle. I was going for a autograph style, specifically like a cartoon character type autograph.
happy annoy squidward day
Actually, Annoy Squidward Day is January 15th. Although the calendar doesn’t have the month written on it, if you continue to watch the episode, they’re competing for January’s Employee of the Month.
I’ve been waiting all year to reblog this
Tumblr: *rolls out “best stuff first”*
My blog:
on the one hand this is a joke post because lol i have never made a good post in my life, but also, if i hadn’t made the connection between this update and my sudden nosedive in activity, i would have been really fucking discouraged about all the shit i’ve been working on lately. i guarantee there are people on tumblr right now who haven’t made that connection, and who are trying to figure out why suddenly no one likes anything they’ve made. and that fucking sucks.
Reminder to go into your settings and turn off ‘Best Stuff First’ because my activity’s tanked a couple days ago for no reason so this stuff IS happening.
You WILL miss content with that setting on.
i ain’t joking when i say that my activity looks JUST like this too and i wasn’t sure why
I can only find the option on the app under Settings > Dashboard Preferences.
To support content creators do us a favour and turn off “Best stuff first”. Open the tumblr app (Android or iOs) and go to “Settings > Dashboard Preferences. And please reblog this post, so that everybody will see this. Thank you very much!
I assumed I just wasn’t writing very well, but maybe it’s not just me.
Am I supposed to pay to get my writing in front of followers now?
We interrupt your regularly-scheduled sci-fi content because this is important for app users, and it sucks. We all follow blogs because we want to see their content, not to have a crappy algorithm decide what’s best.
This blog is down approximately 80%, which doesn’t affect me other than as an annoyance (as this is a hobby and @okayto is small-ish) but the issue undoubtedly hurts others.
Below are instructions for turning it off. You have to do it individually–it doesn’t matter if a blog you follow turns it off, you’ll still be affected unless you do the same.
kawaii-freshsans
oh btw @neon-draws-sometimes
what? /gen
