Everyone reblog with your most unemployable traits
Bronkhurst, M. (1994). Young scientist: The age of computers. Chicago, IL: World Book International.
They’re putting that floppy in backwards
Computers were new. Cut them some slack
I'm always kind of wary of narratives of autistic interaction that are like "well, autistic people just aren't interested in relationships, they don't like meaningless social interactions"
Because I think there is a mix of trauma, alexithymia, and false narratives being pushed by literally everyone else that leads to this being the narrative that even autistic people tell when it might not actually be the whole story
Because, like, my mum remembers me being excluded from play by other kids before I have my first memories
We know that allistic kids can tell something is "off" about an autistic kid in seconds and not want to play with them
And we know that some of the methods used by neurotypical kids to bully neurodivergent kids is winding them up - deliberately setting off sensory issues or using frustration triggers that they've identified - and that leads to autistic kids being told "that's not bullying, that's you over reacting"
And this treatment begins very young
So now you've got an autistic kid who's, say, nine or ten, and they don't play with their peers - they sit with a book or on their Nintendo or whatever
And when people (parents/clinitions/etc) ask them "why don't you want to play with the other kids?", you get the combo of knowing that "other kids bully me" isn't believed and alexithymia meaning that they know that the idea of playing with other kids feels Bad but they can't quite put their finger on Why
And when they try to rationally look for an answer, the first one that's likely to come up it's all of the technical aspects of playing with other kids, like not liking small talk because it's "pointless", that come up instead of the trauma
And yeah, I'm wary of perpetuating this narrative as autistic adults that "autistic kids just don't like that kind of play and autistic people prefer to be alone, actually" because it just kind of reeks of the "the other kids only pick on you because you're smart" narrative that absolutely did nothing to help me deal with the trauma of being bullied or lead to healthy relationships in my adult life
It's funny cause now as an autistic thirty-something a lot of my interactions with other autistic people are playfully, extravagantly, gloriously meaningless
why does he both look and sound like weed
There’s a teaching in Judaism that one should carry two notes, one in each pocket. One should say “I am but dust and ashes,” and the other should say “the whole world was created for me.” They are seen as opposites; you check one when you’re feeling down on yourself and the other when you’re feeling especially full of yourself. The idea is to maintain balance, but I think the way to achieve full harmony is to realize how they are saying the same thing.
That’s why I have imagined them as a carbon atom. Carbon is a main component of dust (and ashes), but also one of the main building blocks of life. Carbon simultaneously encompasses all. It’s in us, it’s in the stars, the planets, the trees. We are built to exist, yet we are also the building blocks of existence. If we keep both in mind, we can live in balance all the time.
This is the standard winged nightjar and it has one singular stupidly big feather on each wing... if you even care.
Love this guy
this tweet hasn't left my mind once in the two years since it's been posted
the impulse to hide what I'm doing at my computer still sits so deep even tho I'm literally never looking at anything objectionable , the door will open and I'll hurry to close the page like oh fuck no one can know I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for the Balkans
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, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 made 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 am glad to see things end in a way that isn't A: cancelled for lack of resources or B: was ground into the dust ten years ago but makes enough money to still continue.
If discontinued reasonably, it is a piece, and it is done.
File under: even more blatant proof cis people can joke about trans people without it being at their expense
You know we only ever really "learn" how to bathe in our youth as it is taught to us by our parents and from then on most people kinda just bathe the same way right. And like barring actively deciding to do it the only way most people change their bathing habits is if they bathe with a loved one and get convinced to do somethi g different in the bath bc its cleaner/faster/whatever bc of them. Ok heres the thesis statement. The lack of communal bathing in society is holding us back from discovering The Ultimate Bathing