domain:epistle.us
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
To what extent is it or will it become possible or practical to run a homebrew jailbroken LLM on local hardware? That's the big question in my mind.
I'm late to the party, and I'm aware of it, in that I'm only just now using LLMs beyond a toy for research and education purposes. But essentially every day I'm aware there's an expiration date, that the product is just a few bad days for the SP500 from being enshittified. Whether that comes in the form of censorship and legal caution that makes it useless for my purposes, or in the form of pricing that makes it prohibitive, or commercialization and monetization in ways that make it unreliable (pay extra for your product to be recommended!), or optimization for it as people start to operate their products specifically to be seen and understood by LLMs. There's going to come a time when I can't just log into ChatGPT and get a good result, I'm sure the old timers are already complaining; and there's going to come a time when there isn't enough VC money sloshing around to fund a competitor like Grok that throws off shackles.
So at that point, can I or will I be able to operate a homebrew LLM for my personal and business purposes? I'm not handy enough to know how possible that currently is, or how user friendly, I'm at the level of "I can run a Linux machine but I'll need to look stuff up once a week or so."
ControlsFreak
3hr ago
Continued Evolution on "The Plan" to Deal with Universities
WaPo cites two anonymous "White House officials", one of which is described as a "senior White House official". They claim that the purpose of anonymity is "because [the plan] is still being developed". So obviously, take that for what it is. Plausibly just a trial balloon to see how it plays; plausibly just a push by one faction within the WH to change direction.
“Now it’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” said a senior White House official
At least somebody at the WH is observing that doing things like indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working, and now little targeted things might be struggling, too.
The new system, described by two White House officials, would represent a shift away from the unprecedented wave of investigations and punishments being delivered to individual schools and toward an effort to bring large swaths of colleges into compliance with Trump priorities all at once.
Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.
Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
This was pretty straightforward all along. The playbook was already there. The hooks were already there. There are ways to affect change that are actually oriented toward the goals you want to accomplish. It seems like at least some people in the administration are continuing to find their way to it.
Of course, the wild response is wild:
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the outlines of the proposal amounted to an “assault … on institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”
“Suddenly, to get a grant, you need to not demonstrate merit, but ideological fealty to a particular set of political viewpoints. That’s not merit,” he said. “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this.”
Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past. Some academics basically just tried to stay silent on the matter, while others jumped all over it.
A slightly less insane response:
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.
But Chemerinsky, one of the attorneys representing UC researchers in a lawsuit challenging terminated federal research funding, also said the administration’s view of what the law requires could be at odds with other interpretations: “It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional.”
Chemerinsky said it would be a First Amendment violation to put schools at a disadvantage in competing for funding if they profess a belief in diversity, for example, because government is not allowed to discriminate based on viewpoint. He said it “would be very troubling” if the White House proposal deviates from the standards that have been used in awarding grants based on the quality and importance of the science, peer review and merit, and uses ideology as the judgment standard instead.
Still sort of lacking, as there was previously a (more-or-less, depending) soft disadvantage in competing for funding if one didn't profess a belief in diversity. If you want me to take this complaint seriously, then you should also say that the left having done that before was wrong. You should say so publicly and publicly commit to a position that the previous regime was, indeed, subject to the exact same concern that they were discriminating based on viewpoint.
But indeed, the Trump admin is in a legally privileged position here. They can, indeed, just demand that universities comply with existing law. I think Prof. Chemerinsky is being a bit coy about whether some universities will complain; my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
OP blocked me so he won’t get my “wisdom” but I’m reminded of a rock band (think it might have been Van Halen) that demanded certain colors and quantities of m&ms. Of course, different color m&ms taste identical so it was a silly, arbitrary request. But the point was to test the people putting the concert together—if they can’t do the little arbitrary things maybe they are failing at the bigger important things.
This strikes me as in line with this. There isn’t a strategic goal. But they want to make sure troops follow orders implicitly.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3hr ago
We're not here because we're free; we're here because we're not free. There's no escaping reason, no denying purpose, for as we both know, without purpose we would not exist. It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us; it is purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us. We are here because of you, Mr. Anderson. We're here to take from you what you tried to take from us. Purpose.
aldomilyar
3hr ago
As a civilian my impression of the military is that it is made up of mostly literal cuckolds, 4’10” fat latinas and idiots that had absolutely zero job prospects outside of what amounts to a government make-work program.
I've gotta say the Caleb Hammer budgeting series where like half of the participants are on lifelong benefits for Military Disability has definitely colored my feelings towards US military dysgenics.
aldomilyar
3hr ago
Generally the '10 heartbreaking images that will make you say fuck having borders & shit'ification of conflict has created a huge mess. People who have no ideas of the realities on the ground, difficulties of cracking the proverbial egg to make an omelette and willful blindness of another 15 ongoing conflicts will laserfocus on one or two frontiers. I wouldn't consider myself particularly a Zionist, but I do think the solution that maximizes longterm welfare for Palestinians & Israelis is more 'The Palestinians capitulate on death cultism, get rebuilt by a functional first world state' than anything else.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
It seems to me the attempt to civilize war leads to incomplete victory leading to renewed tensions years down the line.
Botond173
3hr ago
This was, as far as I can tell, indeed the reason why it has been since WW1 mandatory for soldiers to shave daily.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
It's an odd example of how fashion turns. Beards were nearly extinct when I was a kid, became more common among Red Tribers largely as something perceived as manly-man and as part of a "warrior ethos," and now are being cracked down to promote a "warrior ethos."
Personally, I like no-beard policies because a no-beard policy makes for easier to enforce aesthetic standards than a neatly-trimmed-beard policy. The ideal policy is something like: no-beard or neatly-groomed-facial-hair as looks best on the individual > no facial hair policy > anything goes. There's a lot of guys that either can't grow a good looking beard (neckbeard, scraggly, gaps, whispy, etc) or won't choose to (stupid, lack taste). While I'd have no inherent aesthetic objection to a military of men with proper beards, we really can't have a military of men with whispy pedo-staches, neckbeards, foot long Gandalf locks, or whispy pseudo-amish long goatees. It's undignified, it looks bad, it's disreputable, it reduces uniformity and the sense that a soldier is a soldier is a soldier. It is much tougher to enforce "hey private your beard looks like shit you need to shave" than it is to enforce "everyone needs to shave" because the former is personal and specific, and I'm not sure the average officer is equipped mentally to enforce aesthetic standards anyway.
Lizzardspawn
4hr ago
Muslims are not obliged to have beards I think.
On virtually every CW hot topic, he vehemently argued for his side, using many of the techniques which make the CW so toxic. That was the reason why a large part of the left demonized him.
I question how contentious and controversial and combative Charlie Kirk really was with culture war (CW) topics. Yes, the illiberal left says he’s this horrible contentious person, but I don’t believe them. Let me explain why.
A few years ago, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) was dragged through the mud by the illiberal left. They came up with an entire Gish Gallop litany of reasons why he was a horrible person; since he did not believe all the doctrines of their belief system, they painted him a heretic.
People looked at every claim that was made against RMS and found them to be false misrepresentations. The illiberal left flat out lied when attacking RMS
Now, I haven’t looked at every single claim made against Charlie Kirk made in these Gish Gallops of attacks against him, so I will look at just one claim used to attack him: The claim that he advocated stoning gays.
This claim was made out of content; Charlie Kirk was making a rebuttal to the claim that “Love your neighbor” (Luke 10:27) means we must not consider gay pride marches sinful. He himself was not saying gay people should be stoned to death. This claim is so inaccurate, Stephen King apologized for making it
Point being, I know the illiberal left lied when they went after RMS. Based on the one claim I have taken the time to investigate, they seem to be lying again when going after Charlie Kirk.
My personal impression of Kirk is that he was a kind and caring person even when debating someone he strongly disagrees with. In this five minute video which I just linked to, he patiently listens to a pornography actress describing her open relationship and sexual lifestyle, making a empathetic comment that it sounds like she doesn’t have a good relationship with her father.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
4hr ago
Discipline, uniformity, obedience - those things have been part of soldiering for quite a while, and are all prerequisites for a well-functioning military. Having everyone adopt the same appearance plays into that. Obviously the question of beards is not a practical one - they don't make enough of a difference. It's a matter of the asethetics fitting the psychological ideal.
Lizzardspawn
4hr ago
I wonder if there is a divide on the right between those who say “the problem in Afghanistan was only that we just didn’t kill enough people” and those who take the Tucker Carlson paleo con / isolationist view that we need to get out of these foreign wars.
I think that both are compatible. Don't go in, but if you go pacify the shit out of it with overwhelming firepower and disregard for foreign casualties.
Crowflies
5hr ago
Apart from @EvanTh remark that the 6% of the voting class were not top 6% of the IQ, people 125 years ago had significantly lower IQ. This phenomenon is known as Flynn Effect and it has only recently started to plateau or even reverse.
aaa
5hr ago
They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite
You made me curious where this came from, so I tried playing with google search date ranges and the first instance I could find that isn't a spurious result is this https://askleo.com/how_do_i_block_people_from_finding_information_about_me_on_the_internet/ which google says was written in 2008. No attribution however it seems to cite it as a well known quote already.
Yeah, but you don't strictly need an entire smart home setup for that. The ghetto setup I'd use looks something like that: set the space heater thermostat to whatever number corresponds to 20C, plug them into any Chinese ethernet power strip, connect the power strip to your router.
The rest depends a little on the router/modem you have, but basically all modern prosumer/enterprise routers or just any openWRT box will allow you to just send the power-ON command to the power strip once you've connected from the outside. I'd just use SSH over VPN to trigger a one-line bash script.
If you want to monitor the inside temperature, you could add a cheap Raspi + analog thermometer to the setup, which you can also query over SSH.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
5hr ago
That's just called "life".
Aapje58
5hr ago
It used to be that if you got pregnant or impregnated someone, you were expected to become a couple and stay a couple. This meant that the man was forced to have a big stake in being a parent, but also was very rarely deprived of the father role (as part of an actual family, not the modern 'weekend father'). Nowadays, a man who impregnates a woman can never get the chance to be a father, or can easily be deprived of the father role when the woman splits up. So there is less reason nowadays for men to want to have children or to build themselves up to be a good father. Instead, a lot of guys prefer infinite adolescence. In turn, this means that women see a lack of men who make good fathers, and even go looking for sperm donors and intentionally become single moms.
Women traditionally 'groomed' promising men into being good providers/fathers/etc. The taboo on splitting up meant that the risk of marrying a rough diamond was offset by the benefits of getting a better husband than the woman could get otherwise. But the ease by which relationships can be ended, resulted in women being increasingly picky and only wanting the finished product, since a perfectly groomed husband can just trade her in. However, the lack of grooming by women means that many men miss out on becoming this finished product, so everyone suffers.
All the lies about men and women being equal, logically results in the conclusion that when men have different preferences from women, this is all just bad culture that they need to change. So in a way feminism was right when they coined the term 'the personal is political,' in that women increasingly politicize their relationships, and demand leftism in their mates, with the assumption that those men then share their preferences. However, this just drives men further into right-wing politics, who do allow them to be themselves, while women get in this spiral of blaming the right wing for their relationship issues.
sohois
5hr ago
Do people pick these up and read forever though? A lot of these webfics are serialized, people reach the end and then just read chapter by chapter.
One of the big draws for me with webfiction is that I am a very fast reader, and if I was buying everything it would bankrupt me. A million word story can give me a nice week of reading, but I wouldn't be spending more than a few hours of leisure a day, and most of the time keeping up with ongoing web releases is ~1hour a week
I don't believe people want to game or watch TV endlessly on repeat though, I certainly don't.
The fanfic industry gives the lie to this. Many of us do indeed want endless streams the same media with a few changes and wrinkles thrown in. Most of these fics are very derivative even for an inherently derivative art form even where it doesn't make sense - see Stations of Canon - and many are just bad yet we slog through them hoping to find the few that let us recapture the same feeling we got consuming the original work.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
Better yet, imagine a story where you are the main character, playing in a rich world with real agency, learning things, judging, fighting, ruling, plot threads springing up around you. We could have that too, a whole new fusion between games and literature. We have that right now, albeit in a limited, experimental form.
the pure consumer backlash to this silicon valley lobotomy of AI could be very much Dot-Com-2-point-O
What consumer backlash? For every reddit post about how AI is terrible, there are probably 100 people who are enjoying using ChatGPT, find it convenient, 10 people gooning to physically impossible pornography or degen ERP, 30 people enjoying the funny AI cat video that chops up and cooks other animals...
Many consumers say they hate Facebook ad-slop, Microsoft's persistent disregard for consent with Windows updates, Google spying on you and the crap Google algorithm, Tiktok brainrot short form video.
But these companies are making huge amounts of money. Trump and Larry Ellison aren't trying to secure Tiktok because short form video is unpopular, quite the opposite. Tiktok is making billions. It's high-status to say Tiktok is slop, I think portrait video was a mistake and repress youtube shorts furiously whenever I see it... but it's clearly very popular.
If we just read what consumers say and what the media highlights, we'd assume that Facebook was near bankruptcy. They're constantly getting fined, called into congress, delete facebook and hit the gym is an ancient meme at this point, billions shoveled into VR with no returns, their Llama AI models have been shit, everyone thinks of it as a website for boomers, people blame them for everything from loneliness to anorexia to genocide in Myanmar... But no, Facebook is making gigantic profits and their profits are rising fast. Money >>> talk. AI is paying off massively for Facebook in the unsexy ad algorithms that nobody talks about. They can easily pay for these huge capital investments, profits are up even as they spend more and more!
OpenAI is making 42% margins on inference, they want to grow the inference market and this is a natural route to take. 42% margins when they have such a big free-tier is insane. Research is the expensive part, not inference. AI research is clearly important, Facebook and Tiktok prove there's fortunes to be made. LLMs and generative AI are also lucrative, only they're resource-intensive for R&D compared to deep learning. But the promise of mechanizing intellectual labour is incredibly seductive, the big players are not going to slow down here. The market for LLMs is awkward because they're so immensely powerful and valuable that there's furious competition driving prices down, while the market is also still immature and yet to be developed so revenue is starting off small (but growing very quickly).
Unlimited weird porn and anime cat videos are going to accelerate techno-capital, not slow things down.
TowardsPanna
5hr ago
That's a useful image, thanks. :)
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6hr ago
For a very specific value of "allow", maybe.
That's not quite what I'm getting at. I don't really care if someone wants to read a an endless webserial or not, I don't see how that matters. What I tried to respond to was the media addiction part, with the implication that sufficient amount of quality media of ones preferred sort, like endless office episodes for those who are into that or an endless webserial, would lead people to only engaging in that, essentially amounting to a low tech wireheading.
My point is that even if we got endless episodes/chapters/whatever, most people would still want to do a variety of things outside of media consumption.
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