domain:archive.ph
ControlsFreak
29m ago
I slightly worry that if and when we do get one of those folks, it's not going to be good for me. Not because I think it's going to be someone who you think is in your image. It's probably not going to be that either. But it will likely be the forever boot in the face that @The_Nybbler is always concerned about.
roystgnr
36m ago
Thanks! If you haven't already read Flatland, you might enjoy it. It lacks some of the mathematical sophistication (when it was written, general curved manifolds were still a cutting-edge idea) and brevity (though it is only 100 pages, and a fast read) of my ripoff here, but it does retain some attributes I had to drop like "social satire" and "literary quality".
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
37m ago
Have you ever tried to coax, say, an elderly Chinese man though a non-standard use of their phone, with all the text in Mandarin? It is sufficiently advanced technology, and it is indistinguishable from magic.
No, but I have used Google Translate as part of an effort to help an elderly Chinese man communicate with a somewhat belligerent and unpleasant customer in his shop, and I have rarely appreciated the magic more.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
38m ago
But if you consider the primary value of universities to be to validating your worldview and political ideology, then, depending on your ideology, it substantially increased the value.
This is like measuring labor productivity by what comes out of the hind end of the laborers. Sure, if I use a totally worthless measuring stick the statement could be "true", but by using such a measure the point that it's BS is already conceded.
Botond173
42m ago
I wonder about the extent to which all this is driving the 'black fatigue' phenomenon popularized on certain segments of US social media.
zoink
42m ago
I would never lead that operation. But, if you are evil enough to think the US military should be used for such a thing I want you to shout from the rooftops "I am willing to kill every single Iraqi if that's what it takes to get the oil."
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
42m ago
How about "Life 2.0"? With adventure, romance, high-speed chases, daredevil stunts, whatever you want.
gattsuru
44m ago
I've run a few 4-byte quantized 70B models on a small home gaming machine pretty easily (Intel i3-13100, nVidia 3060, 48GB RAM). It's a little slow -- non-MoE models can go into a couple tokens-per-second, and MoE seldom go higher than 10 tps -- but there are some set-and-forget use cases where the difference isn't a big deal, and you're just a couple GPU generations away from it going faster.
Both ollama and lmstudio work pretty easy 'out-of-the-box'. You can dive down the deep end if you want, and start moving to vllm or others, but it's far from necessary for most use cases.
Scaling up without waiting can get expensive, though. Used server GPUs aren't ludicrously expensive and buy you more RAM (and thus more context/bigger models), but they're slower than current-gen (or even two-gens-old) gaming cards. Trying to break past 24GB VRAM gets into the kilobucks range, and while nVidia says that they're dropping a card that will change that in a few months, it'll probably be seconds before it get scalped. For LLMs, processing power is lower priority than total memory bandwidth, so you can get away with some goofy options like the Ryzen Max series and run 128 GB ""VRAM"" with a CPU, but setup is more annoying and throughput suffers a lot, and it's still not cheap.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
45m ago
It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
Which is best solved by an Augustus or Bonaparte, who can then go full Henry VIII (with maybe a little Qin Shi Huangdi) on academia.
HereAndGone
46m ago
Yes, the conclusion (whenever he gets to it) is going to be interesting, let's say. I suppose I'm irritated because "Tidus" isn't even a figleaf, oh the Race of Kings all live on a cold island in the far North and the Tropicals are all dark-skinned and live in the hot lands around the equator? You don't say? Gosh where have I heard that before?
Plus extra irritation at the use of Earendil as a pen-name, when he's writing this guff. A quote from a 1941 letter of Tolkien to his son Michael:
I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the 'Classics'. You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to 'broadcast', or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this 'Nordic' nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized.
07mk
50m ago
the woke parasitism reduced the value of their output (by diluting it with nonsense)
Depends on what you mean by "value," doesn't it? If you consider the primary value of universities to be truth discovery/generation, then yes, woke parasitism reduced the value of the output to arguably negative (even the good stuff is no longer credible, because the ability to discriminate between the good stuff and the bad stuff has been corrupted). But if you consider the primary value of universities to be to validating your worldview and political ideology, then, depending on your ideology, it substantially increased the value. In fact, in that case, it took it from negative to positive, since truth discovery was an existential threat to your ideology.
HereAndGone
51m ago
I don't think Trump is aware of doctrinal differences between denominations, and he was just throwing red meat out there in the wake of the Kirk assassination.
Well, whatever the reason as to why the guy attacked the church, it was a terrible thing to happen.
ControlsFreak
51m ago
Slight correction: You've never seen it before. Some of us have.
This is a more correct reading, but I was being bombastic and did reference nukes and killing "everyone". I completely deny the comparisons to disciplining children. The military breaks things until whatever the state wants to happen happens. Deploying the military should involve wailing and gnashing of teeth as we beg God for forgiveness for what we feel we must do.
Sunshine
53m ago
Lying in applications for federal funding comes with significant institutional and personal penalties.
It never has before, why would it start now? Any punishment that isn't felt keenly before Trump leaves office in 3 years is no punishment at all. I don't think that's enough time for the court case and ten appeals that would follow any attempt to punish liars.
ControlsFreak
55m ago
Fair enough as a description of your preferences. I think the right, in general, is debating to what extent to engage in a similar strategy, due to the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic (which I think folks who are somewhat aligned with you in this question would say the country already was). Nevertheless, there's nearly nothing in here about universities. I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".
07mk
58m ago
This is what I don't understand. If I'm a cynical conflict theorist who wants nothing more than to utterly crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, then I have a great motivation to become as strong as possible. In order to become as strong as possible, I need to train myself against adversity - true adversity, not a strawman adversity that just sits there while I pepper it with punches and my buddies all slap me on the back for what a badass I'm being. For that, I need both challenges to my ideas and criticism of my arguments. True challenges, true criticism, the sort that is motivated by a genuine desire to crush me and my ideas and the sort that actually has a real chance of changing my mind (this, of course, requires me to keep an open mind - so as to better improve myself to better crush my enemies and erase them from history).
I don't see how one accomplishes this without free speech. Without critics feeling free to yell their most malicious criticisms towards me without a single fear of consequence, I can't trust that my ideas or I have been properly tested, and so I have less confidence in my ability to crush my enemies, and I'm more vulnerable to being crushed by my enemies instead. I don't want that. So I want free speech.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
Well, during the Obama administration, their plan to harden the policy objectives against a hostile government was multi pronged.
Slightly in bounds, but still corrupt as hell, they began suing companies and structuring the settlements such that Democratic aligned NGOs were paid out exorbitant warchest. It was a naked shake down, and Bill Barr ended the practice, but then the Biden admin brought it right back. It allowed NGOs to have deep, deep pockets to fight in court everything Trump ever did.
Of course, they didn't stop there. They also fabricated a criminal conspiracy that the Trump administration had to spend virtually their entire presidency fighting in court.
The Biden administration of course emptied the government coffers, throwing money to NGOs as quickly as they could and left the incoming Trump administration right up against the debt ceiling. I think the Trump admin was able to claw some of this back, but it's also being used by leftist organizations to fight them in court.
Since these tactics are just so damned effective, I think Republicans should adopt them. I want to see more political prosecutions, and I want to see more naked corruption between republican governments and their aligned NGOs. Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office. It's a strategy that clearly works since the D's have run it successfully for over 10 years now.
aldomilyar
1hr ago
Yeah but it's a bit all over the place. I'm not claiming that the Moonies are a conventional Christian denomination but they do profess some interest in JC and Shinzo Abe's assassination was largely due to his affiliation with the group. Was it an anti-Christian assassination or an anti-cultist assassination?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
I don't know how they're done, except it's not phishing. Bizarro charges appear on the card, I call the credit card company (or their fraud detection unit calls me) and it's taken care of. In one case the source was obvious because I had happened to use two different cards at the same vendor, and both got hit while no others did.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
If that's your worry, then I'm all ears for your plan on how to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon for partisan purposes against universities. Or, well, anything else for that matter. This isn't even a university problem. It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1hr ago
In my estimation, in my country you'd have to do something like visiting a blatant phishing website to get scammed out of your money. I've heard of no cases where a physical vendor could do that. What are some typical cases in the US?
07mk
1hr ago
Main thing about running LLMs locally is that GPU VRAM is probably the limiting factor in most cases. 3090/4090 with 24GB of VRAM or 5090 with 32GB are OK, but for hobbyists really into it, they've made custom GPUs like soldering 24GB more VRAM to a 3090, or using dual-3090 for 48GB of VRAM (spreading it out over multiple GPUs works for LLMs). The speed differences matter, of course, but 3090 with 48GB of VRAM will likely enable more than 5090 with 32GB due to being able to fit bigger models.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
The EU may be a crime-free paradise, but there's still plenty of credit card fraud in the US. And not all of it from online transactions.
Ok, but then all you need is smart plugs with remote activation.
Set the space heater's thermostat to 20C, turn the smart plug off when you leave, turn it on when you head there. You don't need to know the temperature; if it's already hotter than 20C turning on the smart plug won't do anything, if it's colder it will run until it reaches 20C.
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