gattsuru
1d ago
Grok's... weird, performance-wise, especially compared to ChatGPT. It (and especially 4) are heavy thinkers, and from local use with Qwen I'd expect it to have a bigger beneficial impact, but there's something weird going on with whatever RAG-like they're using that makes it go wonky at times.
It's very prone to math errors, even by the low standards of LLMs, both 3 (free) and 4 (paid) still hallucinate and gaslight pretty badly, especially when you get even slightly off the beaten path (compare this to this on the IMU implementation: Viture does actually hide their documentation in a bad pdf, so it's not surprising that neither could find it, but it is disappointing that Grok hallucinates a non-existent class).
On the other hand, Grok's been surprisingly good at handling 'real'-world questions, where others at best seem to give okay answers. There's a risk of landmines because it does still hallucinate and it's (ime) more persuasive than ChatGPT or Claude when it does, and it doesn't stop you when you ask a stupid question (ie, dollar/GB is a really misleading metric for almost all use cases), but my experience is that you need to keep that in mind for pretty much every LLM. It's been a much stronger tool for helping teach, if a bit verbose, even for coding questions.
I dunno if I'll stick with it, and especially for coding-focused use cases I can't really recommend it. But if you don't mind how verbose it gets, there are some types of questions it does better.
gattsuru
1d ago
It depends on the exact implementation, but most frontends have to provide the LLM all or a large subset of the previous conversation as an input for a conversation to meaningfully continue. Where context windows are small, they'll have to truncate early portions, use summarization tricks, or use tricks like rag. Even using those techniques, or for LLMs with very long context windows, an LLM given both 'forks' as an input will usually seem very incoherent very quickly, as it will put information, requests, or status from the 'other' branch -- even the best-case scenario would be much more similar to asking the LLM option A and then option B in sequence, rather than separate branching options.
That said, even LMStudio supports just branching a conversation with a single click. I think you can technically do it with ChatGPT/Grok by abusing the Share function and just using that linked conversation as a separate branch, though it's a little more annoying.
gattsuru
4d ago
Trump will have one of his more shameless toadies in Congress (looking especially at Andy Ogles, who’s already happily floating this) propose some kind of legislation to allow Trump specifically to serve additional terms. If the GOP manages to retain any kind of majority, I expect that legislation to get put to a vote, and ultimately pass along party lines despite initial token unease from more ‘moderate’ Republicans.
I'm curious what you'd be willing to bet on the condition that such a bill never makes it to the House and Senate floor for a final vote, conditional on Trump surviving (and not being comatose, Biden-esque, yada) to January 2029? Because at 80% confidence... well, I won't call it free money, but I'd be willing to bet at greater odds the opposite direction.
gattsuru
4d ago
Noita is a fun roguelike with a ton of deep exploration component, and regularly invites you to jump in well over your head. Very much a game for masochists, though, even compared to Dark Souls: I think I was in the low hundreds of deaths before I 'finished' the game, every death puts you back at the start,
gattsuru
4d ago
The adjustment screws on those controllers are almost always simple multi-turn potentiometers, so it's a little weird to see voltage wobble even if one breaks off entirely. Lower-end buck converters can sometimes act up if you try to calibrate them without a load. Putting a 2.5-5k ohm resistor (for 12v, this should keep under 1/8th watt) on the output side may be worth a shot.
gattsuru
6d ago
Itch is still majority non-smut. With, admittedly, its own issues: they owe the Vintage Story people six figures worth. But they’re no more a smut peddler than Steam or Patreon.
Since one itch processor is/was Stripe, the rules there have also changed: itch signed onto them back before Stripe went category no on smut.
gattsuru
6d ago
I can't find records of any associated prosecutions.
Tbf, one of the CHAZ murderers was prosecuted and convicted, total sentence 14 years. Most of the others don't seem to have been prosecuted or seriously investigated. Nor were the various efforts to block police and medical first responders, or to destroy evidence, punished.
gattsuru
6d ago
One of the possible explanations for the timeline here is the UK's Online Safety Act implementation and related age-gating, which would actually explain why the hammers came down for itchio in the way that they did, and which the administration is actually pushing on (if for unrelated and kinda stupid reasons).
These rules also get applied where chargeback rates are very low, and related rules get applied by Mastercard against the high-risk payment processors that are supposedly the market niche for managing higher levels of chargeback fraud.
(And these rules are less reasonable than they look at first glance: "non-con" here is not talking about just or even primarily real-world rape, but is so broad as to include hypnosis kink.)
gattsuru
6d ago
Visa and Mastercard have always been happy to have payments for mainstream smut on their networks.
gattsuru
6d ago
They exist, but a good deal of the problem is that many are also pinch points, here. Stripe, for example, once would proudly proclaim their happiness working with adult product merchants until WellsFargo teabagged them; today, their policy completely bans all adult content and services.
CCBill used to be the transaction provider of last resort for a lot of adult businesses on the edge -- and you'd pay a pretty sizable penny for the privilege -- but they've had the screws turned on them, too. Not tied into that ecosystem enough to know if there's a new meta; most modern stuff in the circles I move have found it more effective to work in gray-compliance for more 'mainstream' sellers that are too big to notice them.
gattsuru
6d ago
There's also a D) of "it's really, really hard, and if you fuck up in the slightest amount, you don't just lose your business account, you get blacklisted from every mainstream credit card processor and bank in your personal capacity".
gattsuru
6d ago
The wounding is the key part, imo, and the resulting reverse expression of concern. I remember conversations when I was younger where the boys all agreed that the ideal dream was for a woman to gently touch the scars/wounds you'd heroically earned and dramatically gasp. I feel like I've seen that moment in a hundred action movies, and it's the pivotal one for establishing the relationship between the love interest and male protagonist. It a moment where a man is allowed to be vulnerable without it ever counting against him.
Yeah, that sounds right. There's a lot of that out there, but it's kinda hard to separate from women-coded hurt/comfort, especially when trying to find examples that aren't aggressively porn-brained (or, alternatively, so sexless than the trans guy is just A Dude, or buried behind a few hundred hours of lore in a gatcha game/mmo). Will see if I can find any better examples.
Altogether, it makes this code as a female fantasy to me, because the locus of concern is on her...
That's interesting; I'd assume that the locus of concern falls on her because she's a goal for the fantasy, rather than the target of it.
I might post those three images together without any explanation, and just ask the boys what they make of it.
If you do, I would be interested to see the results.
I don't have enough personal experience to say anything particularly relevant aboout their internal states. I'll just say this: observed from a distance, though clips and articles and the one "boy" my daughter was friends with, the way they approach masculinity/manliness does not seem congruent with my own experience (which I often find to be broadly applicable when conversing with other cis men).
Yeah, that seems more reasonable. Even trans guys who were very tomboyish before transitioning do have to work at it in ways cis guys don't, and many either intentionally aren't aiming the same place as standard guys (either 'nonbinary', or coming across as a tomboy-with-a-masectomy), and many of the remainder are either aiming at presentations that they're not going to get (tbf: me neither) or they're not really interested in doing or learning about the necessary steps to achieve.
Honestly, I figured this was a lot of it. The few transmen I've encountered IRL had a strong tendency to an unfortunate "It's Pat!" type of presentation. I assumed there was a fair bit of "You can't fire me, femininity, I quit!".
Huh. Pre-transition, or post? I've seen a decent number who struggled to get out of Pat-mode post- and especially mid-transition, but less so beforehand, and I wouldn't expect the transition to be motivated by something that only showed up after the transition did.
I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like.
Fair. I think some of that's because (especially younger and coastal) people have a more limited framework of what's 'acceptable' masculinity rather than douche masculinity, and I think an unfortunate number of cis men have reframed or had reframed for them 'being a foundation' into this sort of more passive literal man-of-stone thing. But it is a far way from the patriarch or trailblazer mold.
I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?
I'm a bit male-leaning in my interests, fair. But I've been in a real-world relationship with women, I'm not exactly bisexual-in-theory, either.
I'm more trying to motion around how the mouse character is pointedly and almost stereotypically feminine -- not just the pregnancy, but the homeraising and the dress and the shoes and how she moves around. At the risk of improperly channeling erwgv3g34, it's not even the doth-refuse-too-much of tomboy breaking or similar genres. And she's clearly attractive to the artist, and to no small number of transmen.
That's not really compatible with a general retreat from femininity. Even if they were just cripplingly attracted to women sexually, there's ways to do that without this level of feminine stuff showing up.
my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.
Ah... off by a good bit. Even when I was younger I wasn't able to pull off twink, and while I try to keep myself to some exercise regimen, the years have taken their toll in a good few ways.
((I do own a pair of programmer socks, but I haven't worn them and don't even spend that much time programming in Rust; I'm afraid I'm a basic bitch C++/C#/Java/Python/Shell Script guy when it comes to my workday operations.))
The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay?
My apologies, I mean that more in a) the sense that regardless of what framework you treat trans men as 'really' being, there's going to be some FtM/F or FtM/M that's either so stereotypically 'gay' or 'lesbian' that it's going to overwhelm any other useful understanding available from the media for people not used to the conventions of those genres, and b) the sense that most of the examples are likely to be unsettling or unappealing to straight men (which I expect most people in this discusison thread here are), regardless of how prurient they might be.
For an example, I would expect few straight men that think FtM/M is just "straight with extra steps" would find Pantheggon's Vermuda character being in the middle of what's pretty intentionally drawn to parallel a conventional gay orgy as interesting, and that's still pretty far on the feminine side ('misgendering' kink, breeding kink) of things as it goes that direction. There's what I think is information here, but it's not really going to be accessible because everything else layered on top of it being either very loud or very offputting or both.
You're right to say that many of these cases are often feminine, especially by male standards and sometimes even by female standards. But I'm not arguing that these people are flying from femininity in general; I'm disagreeing with primaprimaprima's framework where that's the "key issue".
It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.
Yeah, that's true. It's still portrayed as uncomfortable (cfe the 'voicemail'), and I don't have a good understanding for how much so it'd be for typical straight men, but I can give a rough guess about it.
In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.
The strap-on probably makes a bit more sense in context; the rat's moving back in town after a trying to move to the city didn't work out. The condom, fair. It's probably meant more to be joking, but I've seen a few transguys who treat it like a 'guys ritual', and there's definitely a 'glass trying harder to shine than real gems would' issue.
Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.
Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down.
Eh... this might be a cultural thing, rather than just a gender one, but I've seen a number of guys who think women's sexual enjoyment is important, but that it's Wrong to not take the lead and pick up what your partner wants or enjoys from body language. At the risk of TMI, it's something I struggled with a decent amount at first (uh, with both genders).
But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo... I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?
Fair and fair. I'll admit I've seen that sorta thing in a lot of porn written or drawn by (cis) men for men, but there's definitely some humor to it. I still think "perform proper maleness for women" is probably a better description, if still incomplete, of what's going on with trans men who like FtM/F than "rejection of and flight from femininity", but it's reasonable to say that it's not achieving the same thing.
Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her.
Hm. It's possible I'm reading it in a pretty different perspective than you are, but I'm pretty used to porn where the person who's in focus for the camera is the one viewers are supposed to be attracted to, where the person who's reacting to them is the person the viewer (or creator) wants to be. In 'conventional' porn this goes to the extreme of PoV or gonzo works, or in hentai the mysterious floating dicks syndrome, where only the characters the viewers are presumed to be attracted to appear in the camera's lens.
But that's admittedly not universal, and something hard to discuss in detail further without linking a ton of porn (tbf, mostly straight: ruaidri and dont_jinxit have some pretty good examples of the differences between 'standard' male and female frameworks), so dunno.
gattsuru
8d ago
Being a protector and provider, a rock and the firmament. Do transmen dream of defeating villains and being dashingly wounded in an act of heroism?
Yes? Specifically for mouseworld the nearest example doesn't involve being dashingly wounded, but even ignoring outright hurt/comfort, it's a pretty common thing in RP and fanwriting circles (to the point where no few FFXIV groups have jokes about it). I don't think it's going to be a good argument against the 'was driven by an urge to "self annihilation"', but it's present.
Whether many trans guys actually do it, to the extent achieving anything so much more a process than a single event, is a more complicated question.
I gave at least a token effort to reading the trans-mouse erotica comics and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. Consider my comment to be a fully general take that does not relate to those specific pieces of media at all.
Fair, and my apologies.
To give the more general argument: if you believe "FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity", how does this explain the presence of transman who present (perhaps depressed) masculinity, but like femininity in others around them, such as by having (cis, femme) female romantic and/or sexual partners, close female platonic friends, or (if sexually attracted to men) liking feminine men? Is there an explanation that can separate itself from the trans-internal claim of just not liking being/being seen as feminine?
gattsuru
8d ago
Are those six kids from the past partner? Or from several past partners?
The backstory is one past partner, but I think it's intentionally a little ambiguous about whether the set that show up are from that litter or from a timeskip after a second more-intentionally-'donated' litter.
To be fair, I do not get furrydom at all.
That's fair.
And it doesn't help that a lot of the most visible stuff is yiff, and things like "snake women with breasts" which just makes me go "no!" If you're going to be an animal, why be unrealistic?
Uh, a lot of it's just 'if you're giving them hands...', but if you want a serious answer for that very specific example:
But, for instance, in what I suppose we can call classic 'anthropomorphised animal literature', there is no sense that Mole and Mrs. Otter can get together and have cute hybrid babies, because species are not cross-fertile like that.
Yeah. I think a lot of it's come from comedy works, with The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) as one of the better-known examples, but it's definitely a newer convention where present. Barring really old mythology-style stuff where mainstream belief supported a lot of bizarre cross-fertility, I don't think there are many examples pre-1900s. There are a pretty sizable number of modern furry settings that go with the more convention, either to explain all of the consequence-free sex, or for other kinks (eg 'full-service sperm donor' as a kink can range from threesome to mild mdom to extremely cuckoldy).
I guess I'm curious what you'd say "being a man" means, then. I know transguys who fantasize about having a harem of their preferred gender, or for not-bedroom examples who spend massive levels of focus on code (though I guess they do mostly like Rust...) or woodworking or car stuff or small aircraft. But if literally wanting to become a father doesn't at least give something to update around, I'm not sure there's any information that could serve as information to the gender-critical side.
EDIT: and, conversely, I'm not sure it makes sense to say someone's rejecting femininity while literally screwing as feminine MILF-to-be as possible.
gattsuru
11d ago
The problem with those comics is that they left me wondering "but can rats and mice be interfertile?" which is probably not what the creator was getting at.
Part of the second comic has the two treating a squirrel as if he'd 'perfect' donor, until the problem comes up that he's survived testicular cancer, not that he's from a different suborder. There's furry conventions where interspecies relationships are treated as their own type of birth control, but they don't really mesh with the 'return to small town' vibe here, so you're just not supposed to think about it much.
how many kids? how many does she want? does she have kids with each new partner? how many kids can they support, we're talking mice and rats here who have litters...
It's kinda cute. I think the theme is supposed to be more 'crushed on a girl, her baby-daddy/boyfriend is a jerk, and woo she's into me', which... uh, is not an unusual fantasy, nor is its distaff counterpart.
(Also also, who the hell wants to be a rat? But I guess these are lab rats, not ordinary dump, harbour, and other wild spaces, rats).
Rodents in general are a surprisingly common furry species, if not up there with the stereotypical dogs, cats, and dragons. FFIX's Freya (tbf, a white rat species) had a big impact on people. I'd say anthrofying them gets away from some of the real-world equivalent's grosser behaviors, but there's also a Skaven-specific fandom, so maybe it just doesn't matter.
gattsuru
12d ago
Tradeoff is that the gym membership model is a lot more reliable for cashflow; if you court whales, even a small economic downturn can have buyers you've put a ton of time and effort into become much more wallet-aware.
Of course, both.jpg is an option, too. FFXIV is one of the 'healthier' options down that path, but there's definitely people who forget about their subscription for months or only do the story on one hand, and those who want every single unlock including the paid ones on the other. Probably a decent number of players who've gone from one category to the other and back again!
In the furry world, the meta seems to have fallen this way, such that old or gratis (especially free-to-view comics) work is advertising, patreon or subscribestar funding acts as a base income stream, and personalized commissions or your-characters-here handle sudden expenses and otherwise act as an adjustable way to turn time into funding. But the incentives and forces in the furry fandom are pretty different from OF.
FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine. I think both components are present, but to provide a pretty straightforward (hur hur) example, this and this comic (cw: furry, NSFW, FtM/F) says a lot of things about how the ftm character reacts to someone he's penetrating touching there... and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am, and a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad, and not just (or even primarily) in the breeding kink sense.
Now, tbf, I haven't stalked the writer's twitter/bluesky enough to be sure they're specifically transmale... but a lot of transmale people in tumblr space found it pretty resonant. And it's not exactly an uncommon framework: most of the other good examples just look like M/M or M/F, are really gay, and/or just a lot kinkier than bedupolker's, but I can provide links if requested. Not always or even often a plausible one in every way -- very few transguys are going to get six-foot-three with a Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice -- but if we're talking about what people want or are attracted toward or fantasize about, it's kinda relevant that you can just look at people's fantasies, these days, and find at least existence proofs.
gattsuru
13d ago
I'm not sure I'm calling for it now: the above post is a steelman, and one with a number of caveats, qualifications, and carveouts.
There are valid counterarguments, like what extent smaller competitors licensing ARM chips might be able to pull an underdog reversal in a big hurry, or how much a lot of central infrastructure needs modern processing power rather than just having grown like a goldfish to fill it, or whether a failing IBM might fracture such that its foundry side survived rather than got pulled down with the rest. There are some less credible but at least plausible ones: maybe China's Not That Bad after all, or going to collapse under its own inertia before any of this could be relevant, or military/economic considerations are a lot less important than social ones.
But these aren't new considerations, either; they're the sort of thing people were bringing up in response to the CHIPS Act itself, too. It's long been a point of controversy in even libertarian circles what tradeoffs exist between private and public management of matters like disaster response, military readiness, telecommunications, and core public welfare. I'd like if there were simple, easy, Big Head Press-style answers, but if they exist they're not self-demonstrating.
gattsuru
13d ago
Fair; it's definitely not that they were trying to be the next desktop infrastructure, and it's not like what they're doing instead is easy. It makes sense for them to focus where they've focused. If I ever have the free time, I'd love to get some experience working with the IMX8 stuff as an embedded linux tool.
But even compared to where Freescale was in 2002 versus the market segment NXP is aiming for in 2025, the difference seems bigger. Some of that's just the top of the market has gotten much higher -- Razr mattered, but it mattered pre-smartphone; some of the network equipment goes in a similar boat -- but it's something that separates the business from being meaningful competition for most of Intel's most important stuff.
gattsuru
13d ago
And NXP is definitely not even close to a tier-one fab these days; I think they've capped out in the >50nm range. Thanks for the catch, not sure why I thought they still had a telecom branch.
... there's not really any good 'if you squints' left, then. TI have got the process tech to leave 'guy in shed' fully in the dust, but their ARM stuff is more at the embedded systems level from my understanding, in addition to the TI tax. BAE is heavily focused on defense sector, unsurprisingly, which good for them but not helpful for the rest of us. Tower, I guess? I dunno much about their production outputs beyond some cmos stuff.
gattsuru
14d ago
This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?
Uh... technically it's Intel's Flex for the server side, and this is extrapolation rather than anything I know first-hand so it's probably wrong, but :
At the higher confidence level, these boards can run inference comparable to mid-tier nVidia cards, and could potentially be made in Arizona, rather than in TMSC. That's not going to get you massive AGI from LLMs, if such a thing is possible, but there's a lot of video and image data, signals analysis, and more esoteric stuff (HMDs!) that needs realtime or near realtime processing. Yes, most applications would prefer a Jetson over either a normal nVidia card or an Intel one, but since even the Thor-sized Jetsons can't keep up with realtime efforts, they get to compromise. The nVidia boards aren't currently irreplaceable, but military procurement does consider whether there are alternative sources, and Intel is the only even potential alternative.
The... more speculative bit is that Intel's got a number of design opportunities that they were starting to build around. Optimizing data transfer from network card to CPU to GPU is a boring and unsexy thing, but it's actually a big deal for extremely realtime behaviors like streaming video operations, and something where nVidia's offerings (an ARM 'superchip' call Grace) were far behind the competitors... before Intel killed their better solution. There's also some weird messiness with nVidia's solutions for licensing and for chip-to-chip interconnects that are navigable for datacenters for a nightmare for US military procurement.
This isn't readily available to consumers (or even prosumers) yet, because the vast majority of extent AI/ML workloads don't work in Intel ARC environments to start with; those that do seldom even get the full benefit from the GPU's hardware, and even fewer get any serious benefit from GPU/CPU integration. But it's at least a space that would be interesting if Intel could get its core crap together.
This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.
Officially, they're just doubling down on the 1.4nm stuff. But I don't think I'm the only person reading it that way. For motive, it's hard to tell. He could even be playing chicken with buyers, trying to pressure them to step up early rather than wait until after engineering samples have already gotten off the floor. But I'm not optimistic given the amount and variety of other cuts.
For imagegen, you've got two generalist options:
There are some specialty cases (eg, Wan2GP is like Automatic1111, but only for running video models on mere-mortal-level GPUs; a big stack of options for 3d model generation), but those are the big ones.
For classification and categorization, there's a lot of options, but most of them are intended to run on servers with less powerful graphics cards passively, rather than on-demand from a desktop client. The three I've tried are PhotoPrism, Immich, NextCloud Memories. All worked well enough for my purposes, but the user experience and setup difficulty is wildly different from one to the other -- I'd probably point to immich if you are okay with Docker now, and NCM if you absolutely won't, but there's a bunch of tradeoffs to each.
I'd assume there's some desktop tools for this, but I haven't found any that were good and turnkey. You do have the VRAM necessary to train your own AI classifier (I'd recommend YOLOV4 using WANB) pretty quickly if you've got the training data, but it does take a lot of preclassified photos to train it (>200 per category minimum, imo), and you'll need to do some (high-school-level, simple CSV munging) code to actually do the sorting or tagging.
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