simplyzalp

[simplyzalp]

Listen I am not going to name anyone specifically, but pattern makers need to talk to one (1) fat person before they can post their patterns online.

I am so sick of finding a cute pattern, getting all the supplies, checking my gage, and starting to knit, only to find that my sleeves are a foot longer than a normal human because the pattern maker just multiplied all their numbers by 10 when they sized it up. I can't believe I have to say this but, just because my ass is fat does not mean my arms go down to my knees???

[simplyzalp]

after 1 million years i finished my statue sprites

[simplyzalp]

They’re t4t 😌🏳️‍⚧️💙

[simplyzalp]

told my manager today that i wish i had a shirt that said “i love vaccines, autism, and abortions” to wear to work (we have a big conservative clientele) and immediately she said “i can make one for you. does your partner want one? i want one too. we can get staff shirts.”

i’ve never felt happier in a workplace

[simplyzalp]

If you're new to tumblr from reddit, we don't do down vote here.

We have a much more …elegant system in place, which I’m sure one of my mutuals would be willing to demonstrate here.

[simplyzalp]

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[simplyzalp]

[simplyzalp]

Japanese VK Singer on the Street in Harajuku

Japanese visual kei singer Eru-Nyan of Awake wearing pink kawaii decora-inspired fashion on the street in Harajuku. His jacket and shoes are by Japanese outsider artist Shuhei Tsuji of Asakura Garo, with accessories from Ai to Kyouki no Market Harajuku, Kirby & Opanchu Usagi, and more. Full Look

[simplyzalp]

I am not joking I am not exaggerating the thirst on this fucking website for cis dudes w a lil extra fat on their chests... And the insistence on referring to those as titties and boobs and big naturals. Has made me (trans man) feel significantly better about my boobs! Everyone here sees a dude with big ol bazoonkas and goes fucking apeshit. Hell yeah. Men's tits. I got those too! Maybe they're also hot on me! Holy shit! Men's tits!

[simplyzalp]

CorelDRAW! 3.0 - CorelCHART!

[simplyzalp]

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.

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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.

[simplyzalp]

Throwback to when I took painkillers and woke up with Photoshop open on my computer to this image I had made

[simplyzalp]

Impossible Creatures (2003)

[simplyzalp]

[simplyzalp]

Put Abortion on the Florida Ballot

Floridians Protecting Freedom, consisting of the ACLU, Florida Rising, Women's Voices of Southwest Florida, and Planned Parenthood are working together to put a constitutional amendment that protects abortion on the ballot so that voters have a direct say. You can read the full text of the amendment on the site. (I am not associated with this organization).

If you are a registered Florida voter, you can print this out and mail it to the address listed on the below page. Alternatively, you can drop it off at one of the drop-off locations shown on the map. Unfortunately, it can't be done virtually.

They also have online volunteer petition trainings so you can learn how to collect signatures in your community. If you aren't registered to vote in Florida, you can spread the word to anyone you know who is. If you live in the state, you can print out a bunch of these, get envelopes and stamps, and help other people around you send them in.

Please spread this so Florida residents will have the chance to say yes to protecting abortion!