SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
No bio...
User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4hr ago
I love downer endings
I, along with probably the vast majority of readers, dislike / outright hate downer endings. I hate writers killing off characters I care about just "because the emotional conclusion needs main character to suffer loss" and other such bullshit (see eg. Harry Potter). That's just lazy and sloppy and feels like the writer pulling out the rug from under the reader in an intentional "hah, hah, fooled you, idiot!"-middle finger gesture instead of proper plotting and writing.
What I have no problem with and even like is the A Song of Ice and Fire type thing where it's made clear that this is the type of book where People Die (or even Anyone Can Die). The book sets proper expectations and then the "will they survive or not?" question becomes a part of the enjoyment when reading.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
I've been trying the free tier Sonnet 5 for some LLM prompt template writing / storyboarding help and it's been surprisingly helpful (A bit like an improved pre-enshittification-era Google but nothing groundbreaking - I still need to hold its hand constantly and hate that I can't remove individual messages from the current chat). I found this anecdote from Reddit quite amusing given I haven't noticed anything whatsoever like that.
Acts very rude, assertive and feels like its dragging its feet when trying to do any task.
It once said I was just "rambling" when I was asking it about foreign legislations, and complained that I wasn't working on my main project, for example.
As well as the next comment in the same thread
sonnet 5 is way to much like chatgpt 5.2, it's the first Claude I've used that is unfriendly.
Perhaps my expectations for an LLM are just calibrated to be properly low or the fact that I told it to "avoid em-dashes" silently fixes that "unfriendliness". If anything, I have to be careful against its fairly regular glazing, lest I start to think my ideas are too good.
During the same week I also grabbed the Chatgpt offer of Plus subscription for $0 for the first month (cancel any time), but I find I just can't tolerate its "words words words more words a bit of actual information fucking more words words words"-tendency.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
I was expecting a bit different kind of Mr Fox.
y = mx + b.
This is heresy! It's obviously y = ax + b.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
What did the Mr Fox say?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
That's a completely different claim. Is it the drag queens who are the initiators or is it the activists around them, the ones arranging the event and the library staff?
There's a big difference between
"Hey, you really should come to read in this event. I've reserved the space, done the arrangements and convinced the staff." "Oh, ok, I guess I'll come, it might be fun."
vs
"Hey, I really want to do this thing. Is there any way I can make it happen?"
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
If the drag queens would keep it there, there'd be no problem (and most of us wouldn't even know that it exists). But they want to move it into public spaces
Do they?
Are drag queens themselves pushing to be in public places or some other adjacent but still different set of people who are doing that?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
TBF, it's unfortunate that crusade failed. Not because of the lyrical content but because of the unmusicality of 99.99% of such music.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Instead, they do a ridiculously exagerated caricature of women.
How is that any different from a significant amount of all theatre performances, other than concentrating on a specific large and unhomogenous group?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Agreed. I see data centers more as something between commercial and very light industrial sites, something like warehouses but with more electricity / telecoms / capital investment need.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
I freely admit I may be biased by how Finland is, but I just don't see that happening to any meaningful extent. Perhaps this is due to planning differences or simply population distribution, but at least over here the union of "old industrial area", "not enough space nearby for expansion" and "cheap enough lot to make building a datacenter from scratch attractive in the first place" is roughly a null set. Any such old industrial areas near (more than a few individual) residential homes that would be at all attractive to datacenter operators are already economically unattractive due to either being valued higher for residential expansion or having abundant vacant land in other nearby sites.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Yes, the state of tooling seems to be absolutely abysmal for what appears to be no good reason. I've found several open source tools that could be used (with some understandable restrictions) but they are all some combination of at least two of overly complex structure, buggy to the extent that they can't be used at all or have a UI that makes a complete novice's first vi experience look outright positive compared to them.
I'd try to fix some of them myself but when every one of them seems to require having significant experience with at least two large language ecosystems and they are completely undocumented, it isn't really a relevant option.
Current status is very cautiously optimistic when it comes to the models themselves (with a lot of handholding which I don't mind at all) and "Who are these morons? They should all be shot for being unbelievably incompetent idiots" when it comes to more or less all of the (non-programming related) tooling above inference layer itself. I have a particular hate for the LLM enthusiast userbase who seem go to great lengths to say "just vibe it, it's impossible to give any detailed examples whatsoever" while simultaneously accusing you of having a "skill issue".
Seriously, a not-particularly-competent Visual Basic 6 developer in the late 90s would have written better tools with even half-assed effort.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Is that "can be built, tested, certified and be fully ready for commercial operation in three years at some future point when the design has become commonplace and any kinks of practical implementations have been worked out" or "can be ready for use in three years starting right now"?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love SMRs to become common but currently building nuclear power has so many steps and hurdles on the way (that are in no way related to the fundamental reactor technology) that I don't see it being a short term solution for the current upcoming datacenter powering issues.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
There of course is an obvious solution to this, but I am not sure we're allowed yet to say it aloud. It beings with "nu"...
Unfortunately nuclear power (which IMO should have been built massively more worldwide) is not a solution because building a plant and getting it fully operable takes so many years.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
I mean yes, they consume electricity/water/space/whatever, so do many industrial sites and nobody (excepting hippie Gaia lovers which are entirely different crowd) cares.
This depends heavily on the localtion. Here in Finland electricity currently a big issue. Not because people hate AI (honestly not that many do in the real world) but because it will likely lead to real and significant electricity price increases while providing very limited economic benefits (due to data centers requiring minimal long term workforce and 90% of the cost being GPUs bought from abroad). This isn't helped by the utterly braindead increase of wind power without requiring similar investment in base or adjustable electricity generation (with many coal plants having even been mothballed due to being uneconomic when spare capacity is ignored by the market and regulations).
OTOH nobody sane considers water or space any sort of problems here given we have both in abundance and data centers don't even have any mechanisms that could pollute local waters.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
Do you require specifically modern music?
If not, 80s has a lot of music with happier and more energetic vibes. Even many songs about nuclear war are total bangers (like Iron Maiden’s 2 Minutes to Midnight). The era was also musically and lyrically much more complex compared to today even in mainstream pop.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
Dude, just fuck off. For good.
Who are you to gatekeep what other people are allowed to enjoy? Who made you the thought police who gets to decide what someone else can do on their computer?
I've never even hinted at publishing or posting the results anywhere. All I want is to do some AI assisted writing experiments in a way that suits my brain. Something which apparently you are allowed to do but others like me are not, for some vague reason.
Your input is not appreciated in the slightest and you should feel bad for being one of the worst gatekeepers I've ever come across here. Go beat up small kids or something like that if you're so desperate to cause misery because you certainly aren't contributing anything positive here.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
Have you tried doing that a couple times manually to see if it returns what you want, and can work with?
Yes, the method actually does seem to work reasonably well for my purposes based on initial tests. The UIs that I know of are just very poorly suited to it, making it more laborous than it should be. It's unlikely to win any awards but that's not the purpose and it's doubtful I'll even post such stories anywhere in the end.
It's similar to the highly succesful method we used on a bunch of group projects in my university days where I paired up with a friend. I would dictate the outline and throw out a whole bunch of ideas, points and individual sentences. My friend would write the draft based on those and we'd edit it together. It was a very fast way of working, easier than the normal way for both of us and we reliably got top grades doing it.
Another analogy would be that I'm taking the part of a script writer, director and film editor while the LLM handles the acting and camera work. Which is in fact what a bunch of people on /r/StableDiffusion/ are doing with the new Minimax H3 video model (second part). Only, I want to do that with story text instead of video.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
it sucks as an editor. It's ideas suck, it's criticisms are better, but very hit or miss, and in the event it's a hit, the proposed fix sucks
Good thing I'm not looking to use it for any of these.
write the thing yourself, no matter how cringe.
This is not an option and that's not negotiable.
I'm explicitly not looking for AI to edit or polish my writing. I'm looking for AI to do the bulk writing (multiple variants of it) based on my detailed notes. I have the ideas, pacing and plot points and I also intend to do the editing myself (I have no problems handling either of those parts). All I need is something to help with the bulk writing process (which is where I've always had major problems - the only way I was able to get my masters thesis text written was with the help of prescription amphetamines and dedicating a month to literally nothing else than writing the remaining 25 pages of loosely spaced text based on work and theory that had long been finished).
It's capable of coming up with decent lines, but I wouldn't trust it with anything bigger than that.
This is pretty much all I'm asking it to do. "Here's the contents of a paragraph or two. Turn them into a draft that I will edit and rewrite into final text." Consider it the text writing equivalent of telling LLM to write a function that does exactly X and then cleaning it up by hand.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
11d ago
This seems to equate Europe with Greater Germany.
This is a very common failure mode on The Motte. Many people think that all of Europe is like the worst aspects of UK and Germany combined. You can see this in any thread that even mentions censorship in Europe and threads that talk about energy politics.
Oil is funny. Europe just needs to stop burning it.
A similar situation applies to LNG. Reduction of cheap LNG supply is a local problem specific to certain countries. Most uses of it for energy production can be replaced with just plain electricity produced by other methods. LNG isn't even particularly important as transportation fuel the way oil is.
I want to experiment with LLM assisted story writing and given how many folks here are LLM advocates, maybe someone can help me there. My main problem is that I absolutely suck at writing, so I need something that takes character, setting and (detailed) plot point descriptions for a scene and can expand that to text using my chosen LLM model (via any OpenAI api compatible provider).
More specifically, I want a free local app (preferably native Windows but a local webui will do in a pinch) that lets me write the overall style guide, character / setting notes, "previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the last chapter" condensed history notes and then the notes for the scene (and the beginning of the next scene to help flow). The scene notes would be a combination of "A does X, B mentions Y" and occasional inserted sentences like "The silence was interrupted by a doorbell ring" (that are more ideas for the LLM and don't need to be preserved as-is). It should let me generate multiple variations, manually edit the previous prompts and generated results for continuation and crucially never delete unused generations so I can later steal sentences and ideas from them (but I don't need explicit branching from every response).
Does something that does all this exist as a local app? And one that has a usable UI without ridiculously small text and non-existent contrast?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
13d ago
I assumed perhaps overly optimistically that most of the remaining 10% would use AI for something other than generating text for humans to read.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
14d ago
Replace local firm with LLM provider and Caterpillar Inc with Nvidia. All you're telling is the local firm which rock to move where / the LLM provider what sort of text to generate.
Huh. That'd suck.
FWIW, the free tier ChatGPT translated your comment to Finnish while keeping the structure reasonably close to the original (keeping in mind that Finnish grammar is completely different from English).
Doing the same to the OG comment results in stilted sounding text that nobody would write and some obvious translated grammar issues, but still no obvious LLMisms that I notice. Perhaps those depend on the used language?
Yes, that's my point. It gets established for almost five books that no one the readers truly care about is harmed, then Sirius gets offed at the end of book 5 and in the final battle of the entire series in book 7 more people get offed with no preparation and with nothing left of the book for their deaths to even influence. Those deaths just feel like a poor writer going "the tropes say I should kill some characters, so I'll just off them right like that".
In contrast Dumbledore's death is long foreshadowed and provides good progression for the story and thus feels like natural instead of being an ass-pull just to piss of the reader.
So it's not that character deaths or loss for the main characters are bad as such but many times they're poorly done and just make the reader feel bad.
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