did u know you are an official not-self-published published author now? to be found in a jail library near you! (if you happen to live in the county where ive been sending an inmate yr books after they voiced interest)
Honestly I’m pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.
Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.
This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it’s just in maintenance mode.
Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.
This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven’t figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.
My options in the short term are to
A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or
B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the “smartness” of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.
Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.
I don’t want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don’t want to be doing it at all.
—-
In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.
Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn’t the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn’t do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.
And it was fun to watch the bot “pretend to be me” while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.
In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of “gen AI” app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.
There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.
And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.
I’ve tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I’m doing, without any maps.
Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They’ll make maps, and share them. They’ll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They’ll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I’ll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.
Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.
—-
I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don’t think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.
Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone’s doing 4-bit quantization now?
(Are they? I can’t keep track anymore – the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It’ll be running in your phone’s browser. And it’ll be using RLHF, except no, it’ll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone’s hyping up at the time…)
“You have a GPT chatbot?” someone will ask me. “I assume you’re using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?”
No, no, I’m not. I’m trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like “PENIS PENIS PENIS.”
Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the “PENIS PENIS PENIS” askers the responses they crave. (“Which is … what, exactly?”, one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.
I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?
I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.
I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.
I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.
—-
Even in 2023, there isn’t really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.
If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.
“But – but how, exactly?”
Don’t ask me. I don’t know. This isn’t my area anymore.
There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot – for everyone except me, that is.
Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.
It really does encapsulate so much of the fuckedness of the 2010s culture wars that this “mediocre white men, the world owes you nothing” listincle ppl fucking loved to whip out as a rebuke to the chuds of the day directly asked the reader, “So, what have you done to be worthy of a woman with an eating disorder?”
TVTropes is such a weird website because the language (and I guess the ‘culture’) of the site was codified in an extremely specific era of internet use (mid to late aughties), and by members of an extremely specific and insular subgroup (nerds) that it codified all the tropes in what is effectively a dead language. No one talks like that anymore and yet because there’s no renaming or updating, and in the 2000s we thought the future was forever babyyyy etc, it all continues to chug along as part of a world where self-respecting adults use words like “woobie”. It’s remarkable to me because its not a relic or preserved in amber (an online Pompeii like an abandoned geocities page), people are actively using it! Like finding an island where everyone speaks English in the style of Chaucer. I would be just as surprised if a man on the street greeted me “Hail and well met” as if someone in casual conversation deployed the phrase “crowning moment of awesome”.
its just so weird how this post diagnoses the problem without mentioning the actual cause: it wasn’t just nerds it was specifically joss whedon fan nerds particularly centered around Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
the tvtropes people talked/wrote weird compared to general internet users, or even fandom types specifically in 2005 as it started, let alone as it continued to accrete users. expansion brought in wider use of general internet/fandom writing but the core of people really really into buffy in particular and joss whedon in general kept it somewhat discordant against popular usage.
oh man! that explains so much! it sorta follows his lead in many ways; the ideal TVT writer is a fan of the tropes despite believing (sometimes correctly, sometimes Very Not) that they see through them and can identify all the strings being pulled; chauvinistic about Nerd Dialect that was off-putting in its vintage year and anachronistic now; bought-in on the whole “nerd culture” phenom lock stock and barrel, with all the weird reading and writing priorities that come with that; and way, way less progressive than they seem to believe they are. in other words: Joss Whedon.
TVTropes is a monumental temple built to a god that failed, which is beautiful in the abstract and repugnant in the particular. I think that’s where I’ve landed
Appreciating in retrospect that my online Buffy fan community was the Hanniganites on AOL, who thought Alyson Hannigan was neat
“neat”
As someone who was a tvtropes editor circa 2008-2012, there were actually two rival factions: whedon fans and anime weebs. The weebs were purged around 2012 (leading to me pivoting the main nexus of my online existence to a certain blue hellsite), but prior to that mid-late 200s anime fandom was at least as big a part of the site’s culture as Whedon.
In the build up to the aforementioned purge, there was a campaign to have “anime” renamed to “Japanese animation” so that it wouldn’t be the alphabetically first section of each page. This ultimately proved to patently rediculous to get much traction, but they were eventually successful at getting almost all of the tropes named after anime terms renamed.
the degree to which tvtropes has influenced the way people think about media is astonishing, for better or worse, there’s a risk to reducing everything to a set of standard tropes, but having a shared vocabulary that is accessible is very valuable
I mean, I wouldn’t have spent five years of my life on that site if I didn’t believe that. It’s just kind of hard not to feel just a bit jaded about the sites ability to fulfill that mission when you’ve been privy to the behind the scenes bullshit that went on.
OP’s point has come up before but its worth mentioning again - this isn’t true. TVTropes has over the years renamed virtually all of the entries with the names you are referring to, its not only capable of doing so but does so regularly. The number of renamed tropes is so large it need a folder structure and four different pages:
Almost all of the specific Whedon-type stuff someone mentioned, just to name an example, has been purged:
Badass Decay used to be “Spikeification”, after Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not only did this require familiarity with the work, there were debates as to whether the trope namer was even an example. Others didn’t realise that the trope was named for a character and thought it had to do with adding Spikes of Doom to things.
Trope names based on a character (or other references to a specific work) have fallen out of fashion, because not everyone watches the same shows.
You are mentioning “Woobie” because its one of an exceedingly tiny number of those kind of trope names left from the old days, which I mean you can hate, that is fine, but it was kept because it just got so successful as a general term of its day. Its faded from use now, so honestly they probably could change it, but really my impression is TVTropes is a decently-dead website so likely they aren’t bothering. Otherwise tropes are now things like “Annoying Younger Sibling” or “Ambition is Evil” which is just bog-standard nomenclature.
I always find this myth to be very funny when people mention it because it really is good evidence for how faded TVTropes is nowadays - the people making this complaint haven’t been on the website for likely a decade (these changes were made in the *early 2010’s*), which is why they don’t know. Certainly the occasional TVTrope dive still happens, but the meme of “don’t log on you will spend hours there and never escape” is too alien to even parse these days.
Every kid knows Baphomet. Every child knows about the history of the knights templar, and how they were persecuted by the church, and how several centuries later a French occultist built a syncretic religion around the invented demon at the center of the anti-templar polemics.
isn’t Baphomet, like, the crusader’s mishearing the name Mohamed? or something?
This is an extraordinarily difficult topic to study, so it’s hard to say anything for sure, but I’m almost positive that’s not true.
Like, there’s no actual evidence that the templars ever worshipped anything unorthodox, much less a demon. Some of earliest concrete evidence we have of Baphomet comes from agents of the church accusing templars of demonolatry, which is likely entirely fabricated for political reasons.
no, no, I know the Templars didn’t worship anything weird, like the name itself. I had heard it was a corruption of Mohamed after being translated through like five languages because they thought that the Muslims worshipped him as a god and so assumed they were a demon, or something.
There are crusade troubadours that transliterate the name of Mohamed into “bafomez” or “bafomhet” but it’s unclear whether or not they thought that Mohamed was a demon. I would say it’s unlikely.
When charges were leveled against the templars, they were clearly cranked up to 11. So even if “Baphomez” was just the transliteration of “Mohamed” the charge was likely exaggerated from “you’re following some weird foreign preacher calling himself a prophet” to “You’re Worshiping a LITERAL DEMON”
No! The image we are all familiar with, the “Sabbatic Goat” with the tits and the huge hog and the SOLVE ET COAGULA, comes almost 600 years later, from french Occultist and noted Hebrewaboo Elphias Levi. He just made a cool ass demon drawing and said it was the Templar Baphomet because it sounded cooler and more badass if you claimed your thing was old.
I appreciate that it’s the opposite of the rigorous scholarship everyone’s trying to do in this thread but I haven’t mentioned the Twyman book on this platform at all yet and if anyone wants to go down some really wild rabbit holes
but to address the anon’s original question, it’s a Templar/occult thing that’s all over all sorts of normie pop culture at this point (and he’s recognizing the most bastardized telephone game version of it as “vaguely spooky goat”) so nah not that unusual. like he probably recognizes it from Shin Megami Tensei or something
VOTE BARU! THE TRAITOR! THE MONSTER! THE TYRANT! THE PROBLEMATIC LESBIAN HERSELF! testimonials included
COME ON GUYS THIS LEVEL OF WINNING IS POSSIBLE FOR FURUDO ERIKA but also read Mercenary Planet bc Leona is gonna sweep this tournament in a couple of years
>lesbian space atrocities >gun butch trans protagonist >body sharing >hard (gay and communist) military sf >rationalfic-adjacent >hope-against-hopepunk >gambit pileup to unprecedented levels >internet fuckups with way too much power >biocosmist alien religion >Blood Meridian in space >make aliens weird again
for fans of: Wildbow, Warhammer 40K, Animorphs, Code Geass, Hunter X Hunter once it gets really dense, Coquette Dragoon, Barlowe’s Guide To Extra-terrestrials, Remembrance of Earth’s Past if it wasn’t fascist, The Forever War
The visual novel scene is as small and new as the medium is. It’s also pretty tight. Everyone knows everyone, and as a result I regularly meet various scene luminaries and other creatives. Recently I had the chance to hang out with the great Kinoko Nasu at a inflation/vore fetish erogame release party we both were at. I didn’t care about the game much and the booze was shit, but Nasu turned out to be a super good guy. He’s pretty charming and as witty as his prose would suggest. By coincidence I found out that, like myself, he enjoys high level cooking. I expressed interest in his cooking and on the spot Nasu suggested we’d have a boys’ night at his place, dedicated to cookery and getting drunk.
————- —– ——– —-
“So it’s like something you do to unwind yourself?” I ask him, as I watch him score eggplants with a ritual dagger of some sort. He nods, shrugs bashfully and tries to elaborate with his halting English. “It is like… I worry much less. It’s not stressful. Just doing with my hands and see what comes out. I get outside of my head.”
“I feel the same I suppose, at least on some level. On the other hand, it’s still an aspiration for me. I’m not a casual.”
Nasu nods his approval. I was unexpectedly quite nervous about this evening, but as soon as I got a glass of wine in me I settled down a bit. Nasu is a great host, and I like looking him cook. I can’t help noticing his delicate hands and enchanting, graceful moves. He had chosen a three-course menu of his signature dishes for us tonight. In theory I’m supposed to help him but he’s handling most of the work by himself, very effortlessly. I’m getting a little bit excited.
We sit to eat at the intimately small dinner table of Nasu’s apartment. His forehead is glistening with sweat and his cheeks are flushed. Cooking is a physical activity in a hot kitchen, after all. As we dig in, I see Nasu steal glances at my direction, trying to see a reaction on my face. Naturally, the food is excellent. There’s a wonderful harmony in the elements of each exquisite dish. I compliment Nasu profusely, causing him to blush deep red. He doesn’t really seem to know how to respond. Could it be that he doesn’t cook to other people often?
“Thank you again, the food was incredible.” I sigh as I sit down on the comfy looking sofa. The living room’s walls are full of posters of all the different versions of Saber from Fate/Stay Night. They continue all the way to the ceiling as well. There’s a life sized Saber statue in the corner and a replica Excalibur on the fireplace mantel. A toasty fire is burning, warming us up. “You’re welcome. Maybe next time, I come to your place and you cook?” “Sure, that’s a deal.” “Looking forward to it. But tell me Aura, what are you guys working on now?” “Well… we have this great concept of…”
—-
“Would you like to stay the night?” he asks casually after it’s already well past midnight. I had been sitting on his comfy sofa, lost in thought and cradling a sniffer of Chateau du Breuil VSOP calvados. The fire is already out. I feel pretty drunk. Suddenly I find Nasu sitting on the couch right next to me, reaching with his hand at my…
“Kinoko-san, I…”
Poached Egg “Kinoko Nasu”
Instructions:
Pickled mushrooms
3dl aromatic mushrooms, like shitake, chanterelle, or other
0,75dl champagne vinegar
1,5dl water
2tbsp sugar
5cm piece of lemon peel
1 bay leaf
whole black pepper and allspice
a couple thyme twigs
1. Concoct a solution by boiling all the reagents in a small pan. Add the mushrooms, boil for a minute and let cool. Drink a cup of tea with your sister while avoiding thinking of the insides of her thighs. Endure a sleepless night as the full moon haunts you.
Eggplant caviar
1-2 Eggplants
1 garlic clove per eggplant
olive oil
thyme twigs
2 tbsp sour cream
1. ——–When the dawn cuts in your eyes, command the blonde foreigner lying beside you to leave the house. She will comply without a word. Return to your laboratory. The blood on your hands is not your own. 2. Cut the garlic into very thin slices cut it cut it CUT IT CUT IT CUT IT CUT IT. Split the eggplants lengthwise and score the cut surface, carefully like a surgeon. Jam the garlic slices in the cuts. Rub with some olive oil and lay a quartet of thyme twigs on top, then return the eggplant halves back together as they were, as if undoing your own work. Enbalm with aluminium foil. Roast in your furnace for about 45minutes to an hour (longer if needed), until the eggplant is soft to touch and you can almost penetrate the wet, hot flesh with your finger. 3. Discard the thyme and scoop the eggplant flesh off the skins, a gruesome task but it must be done. Put in a food processor, add sour cream, salt and pepper and blend. 4. Heat a wok or frying pan and toast the caviar until it gets a bit thicker.
Rucola pure
5dl rucola leaves
1tbsp sour cream
1. Violently rip the rucola leaves apart from the stems. Like an animal. Like a beast. Parboil the leaves in boiling water for 30 seconds. Blend them with the sour cream, salt, white pepper and a dash of sugar.
Parmesan tuile
1. Grate a small pile of parmesan on a baking sheet and bake in oven for a couple of minutes, until the cheese has melted, bubbling and taken colour.
Construct the dish from the pure, the caviar, the mushrooms, a poached egg and the tuile. Garnish with thyme and rucola leaves and dried mushroom powder. ~ BAD END ~
