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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I want to stop relying on 4chan for the latest AI news, currently searching for some better sources. I’m a long-time reader of Zvi and followed him to substack, and his summaries on AI are still excellent and information-dense, but (hedging) either his and my own points of view on AI drifted too far apart which colors my perception, or (honest opinion) the latest kerfuffle with Altman’s firing, reinstatement and everything in between finally broke his mind, and he is no longer able to keep back his obvious doomer bias, which is infecting his every post since. I still appreciate his writing, but disentangling the actual news from the incessant doom attached to them is quickly becoming tedious. Are there any other substacks or blogs which post on anything AI/LLM related in a similar manner? I’m mostly looking for technical insights and distillations of the current zeitgeist, I dropped out around the Altman incident due to RL things and am trying to get back in the saddle. Sources unaffiliated with the Yud cathedral are preferable but not necessary, I’m more or less a brainlet but I can read when I put my mind to it.

Twitter is the place to be - you won't get news and links quicker than that, and can fine-tune your timeline by picking who you follow. In your case, that would means filtering out the grifters and the people interested in the drama. I also often browse /r/LocalLLama, which is almost only about technical open-source stuffs.

I never was a 4chan user, but I've seen a few people saying they use it to get their AI news. How do you use it? Which board do you browse? Is there a way to filter AI-related content? How do you get used to the weird dated UI?

Forgot to mention Twitter, my bad. I'm aware (and mildly bewildered) that a lot of cutting-edge discussion happens on there, but I'm not keen on using it, and my great country provides a trivial inconvenience to not use it. My main reason for continuing to read Zvi is exactly because he gives Twitter links where needed so I don't have to actually use Twitter myself. Thanks for the subreddit pointer, I'll look for some more subs in this vein, they're bound to exist.

As for 4chan, most AI posting happens on /g/. Given it's a general technology board, there's no easy way to filter AI content - a lot of anons are clamoring for an /ai/ board, and e.g 2ch does have one - but there are almost always some scattered AI-related threads, as well as dedicated, continuously posted generals like /lmg/ for local models. You can search specific terms (OpenAI, Gemini, etc) from the search box in the catalog to find the OPs of threads containing them. Threads come and go, but general threads usually have a separate "tag" in the name which is always reposted, so you can search e.g /lmg/ to quickly find the current one. Their OPs also tend to link back to previous threads which get pushed off the board once they hit the bump limit. For deeper search, you can use desuarchive to trawl through archived threads.

Since this is still 4chan, you're not usually going to get cut and dry stuff and may have to sift through shitposting and NSFW, especially considering the posters' main use case for LLMs (spoiler: ERP). You also can't really use it as a content delivery pipeline like Twitter, you'll have to manually pick and read threads. Still, crowd-sourced autism is a helluva thing and the median poster has a lot of practical experience with wrangling LLMs, /lmg/ in particular is IMO unironically at the cutting edge of local model development. The format is also entertaining in general, though your mileage may vary.

I'm a dinosaur and use imageboards for a long time so dated UI was never an issue for me personally. 4chanX exists and reportedly improves the experience but I never tried it.

Also really interested in this? Have you found a good resource?

One Useful Thing seems to post on AI every now and then, from cursory reading posts seem to be much less exhaustive than Zvi's but still have a decent level of detail.

Other than that, I got nothin'. Reposted once in the new thread for good measure.

See my reply above.

Thank you!