#application extension

[comradekarin]

when you’re in a “shipping random white m|m/w|m ships to spite the bwwm ship” and your competition is every fandom ever like you guys fucking suck lmaoooo suddenly it’s no chemistry! heteronormativity! he’s gay and she’s a lesbian! platonic only! poor acting! she is an independent woman! even the elite ships aren’t safe for as soon as the girl looks physically different than their (usually book) canon counterpart, the people are up in arms. like suck my dick

[batsplat]

ok, in light of casey and vale’s reunion at the ranch. what are your top 5 or maybe 10 motogp feud developments of the year? could be something like casevale link up or someone saying something insane or it could be some insane fact that you’ve uncovered this year which changed/added to your perception of some rivalry?

excellent ask. obviously I got sent this around the time of the actual ranch visit and prevaricated on answering it, partly because one of my personal top three feud related revelations had not as yet been posted. now it HAS been posted - and while there's other as-yet-unposted material that would probably make this list, I'll have a crack at it with what we've got lol. also, this isn't a particularly balanced list... because obviously 'stuff I've found out this year' is a pretty big caveat. I haven't found out that much stuff this year! generally it's been to do with sete/valentino tbh, and most of it is stuff I've been sent by other people. I've been slacking on doing my own feud research. so as much as I'd like to sneak in a dovi/jorge cameo or whatever, unfortunately there's quite a few feuds where we are currently in a bit of a stagnation period... no real advances in the field I'm afraid. I've decided to go for the nice and round number of six items as nobody's attention will last that long anyway. no need to overdo things

6. casey mentioning valentino's qatar 2007 head rub three times in his autobiography: okay, look, there's a slightly irritating element to this discovery in that... y'know. I could've figured this one out YEARS ago because it literally just relies on reading casey's autobiography closely enough. which you'd think I would have done by now. the process by which I cobbled this one together has been documented here, and now we obviously also have a lovely gif of the moment itself at our disposal. just to refresh everyone's memory, even the bloody photo itself made it to the autobiography:

I love this! casey's so deeply weird about valentino and he's so repressed about it and he lets it slip in such funny ways. such a short moment for it to live so incredibly rent free in casey's mind. as always, it is important to note that casey is not giving an accurate recollection of events. I have little way of knowing whether valentino was still friendly to casey away from the track - but I can use casey's own metric of direct post-race interactions and tell you categorically that valentino continues to warmly congratulate casey after early 2007. there's this fun little technique I use to assess casey's claims called 'the power of my own eyes'

mugello 2009 first time vale lost his home race in a bajillion years and this is how he acts with casey on the podium... let's start a conversation

the underlying reasons for why casey takes such liberties in narrativising the rivalry have been previously discussed in much depth in this parish - and as ever it is fun and neat to note how casey's narrative has become accepted because he has taken advantage of a prevalent narrative about valentino and his affinity for feuding. old tricks used against the teacher!! mainly, though, this kind of thing is a fun little reminder of how rewarding it is to do a lot of reading between the lines where casey is concerned. he does let a lot slip, if you know where to look

5. jerez 2024, the weekend experience: I was thinking about putting something related to the pecco/marc set-up for next year in this post but quite honestly I am increasingly pessimistic about how that will unfold. like,, I do think there's plenty of stuff there and that in this kind of scenario any two of prime jorge, casey and valentino would start stabbing each other, any two of prime jorge and valentino could get something going with pecco, and marc would start a war with any of those three. but I'm just not convinced about this specific combination... and sometimes it's a good idea to set your expectations low. so unfortunately we continue to have to rely on old feuds to keep us fed, which means that valentino's link to pecco somehow remains the most surefire source of narrative tension. I don't particularly like this state of affairs and maybe somebody below the age of 35 should start pulling their weight, but it is what it is. sometimes you just have to contend yourself with archival research. anyway, I really enjoyed jerez!! it was fun having valentino there for all that stuff, the marc/pecco duel was only second to jorge/pecco sepang in terms of on-track thrills, plus repeatedly cutting back on marc does kinda feel like #heritage at this point. grateful that bez moved his ass once this season to get valentino to parc fermé

but above all I really enjoyed that valentino description of marc - how marc attempts to show his superiority over his opponent and that 'when he sees that you are less strong or are already bleeding, he bites harder'. that's lovely stuff. obviously valentino is correct in his assessment of marc... but what makes the whole thing more fun and dramatically juicy is that especially that second part is even more true of valentino himself. valentino sniffing out weakness is basically his entire MO as a rider, including in very practical terms how he likes to study and put pressure on his opponents during races. he's also someone who's always liked to attack from a position of strength - you see this most obviously in the 2008-09 period and it is something jorge himself acknowledges quite explicitly in his biography. idk, something about seeing a little bit of yourself in your enemy... and yeah, 'biting your rival harder when they are already bleeding' is just such a poetic little phrase that I've made heavy use of it since then. old man's still got it

4. what hrc was told at qatar 2004: this is another one of those slightly annoying ones where I suppose I theoretically could have found this out years before I did, but. having finally had the chance to watch the footage from that route 46 route 93 documentary and the bits about sete, twas very much worthwhile. I really enjoyed what valentino said, just a nicely rich text especially given the scarcity of comments he's made since 2004 - but I was particularly interested in the testimony from juan martinez, sete's crew chief. both of which are discussed in some depth here. as far as I can tell, martinez did quite literally say him and sete talked to hrc about the little grid rubber trick valentino's team pulled, which?? he claims it's for 'safety reasons' to try and convince them everybody needed the track cleaned - which is all well and good, but you don't need to be a witch to guess what hrc was going to do with that information

this testimony plus a few more details I've unearthed but haven't posted - primarily relating to the actions of fausto gresini and other honda bigwigs that day - make me increasingly convinced that valentino did have a legitimate grievance at qatar. including directed towards sete. obviously, the manner in which he responded to said grievance was still completely mental... but idk, I'd always had a sneaking suspicion that there had to be something to valentino's accusation. which makes sete's arc throughout that 2004 season and especially from qatar to sepang even more interesting!! I do think he wasn't being entirely honest in that sepang presser, but I also think he panicked a bit for fairly understandable reasons. idk obviously this is just such a fascinating few weeks for everyone involved, so I'm thrilled how I've found out so much more about that time period in such a short amount of time. again, mostly not off the back of my own research!! but I am grateful for what I have been allowed to Divine

3. valentino's podcast adventures: I still haven't talked properly about what valentino said about jorge but I will and I should, because those bits are all pretty enjoyable and fit into the rivalry write-up I did earlier this year. also, the casey stuff was excellent!! more of the valentino ambition vs casey talent theme, plus just some fun descriptions of laguna 2008 I will absolutely integrate into my long post about that race. nothing NEW exactly, but it's always nice having someone confirm your working. and the marc stuff was really fun!! obviously I was particularly keen on the alzamora stuff because I've always felt like there had to be more to his role. the argentina 2015 stuff is just really interesting in relation to what jorge has said (perhaps reflecting paddock gossip at the time question mark) that marc felt valentino deliberately made him crash, so you get into this excellent mutual j'accuse situation. and assen!! obviously valentino's description of marc's attitude isn't particularly novel since it does chime with what we have actual footage of in the presser, but the idea of a private lil confrontation is so much fun. especially paired with marc saying at sachsenring he felt assen was his best race of the season!! 2015 is one of the best puzzle box seasons to try and unravel what 'really happened' and why - and we really haven't gotten new details from one of the two blokes involved that often over the years. always appreciate some additional insight

and obviously the best bit - zero mention of sete. friendships, rivalries, even feuds can fade... curses last forever

2. the 'ciao sete' shirt valentino wore in 2004: which has now been posted here, god bless. this has been living rent free in my mind for weeks at this point, not a day has passed where I haven't thought about it. it has singlehandedly made motogp-blogging on this website worth it because I doubt I would have ever discovered it myself. I love this so so dearly. look at this absolute cunt

a third t-shirt has hit late 2004 feuding towers

first of all, that's a dyke aunt. that is a mother. some deep concentrated evil lesbian energy. I'm not straight but he can get it. second of all, what the FUCK is wrong with you. the best part is that this has been sent to me along with a steady diet of extra details confirming they were like. properly properly friends before all this shit went down, which makes every additional feud-related revelation particularly wild. they were close!! it's so brutal, it's so malicious, it is INCREDIBLY funny and I laugh every time I see those photos. I love the playful edge, the double meaning of 'bye thirst', that marriage of joy and cruelty that is so quintessential to the arc he goes on that year. just having a laff... one dead, dozens injured. I feel like I increasingly have a handle on why valentino went SO far with sete and what it was specifically about losing to sete that drove valentino nuts, which does also leave me with rather a lot of sympathy for poor sete in all this. endless ritual humiliation is one hell of a punishment for your former friend to inflict. that being said, unfortunately it is also hilarious. ah well

1. CASEY VISITED VALENTINO AT THE RANCH: casey!! visited!! valentino!! at!! the!! ranch!! CASEY VISITED VALENTINO AT THE RANCH. out of NOWHERE too, just suddenly opened tumblr to a bunch of asks and messages on a random sunday evening. I'd previously expressed myself sceptical on the vale/casey dinner front, feeling rather safe and secure in the knowledge they had not done so in the twelve years since casey's retirement. which, y'know. fantastic timing, lads. but I still think my reasoning mostly holds up - obviously, this was a more casual 'valentino harassing casey into sticking around' affair and not quite the soul-searching soul-baring exercise in exorcisms casey might be looking for. and idk, just vindicating of my general read of that relationship. casey's feelings towards valentino are extremely complicated - this weird cocktail of how he feels about valentino as a person and then valentino the character and also valentino the literal embodiment of the sport. valentino doesn't hate casey... and crucially, he also does not seem to particularly mind casey's bi-yearly habit of talking shit about valentino. I mean, come on, SOME of that stuff must get back to valentino. I'm consistent in my stance that - while casey obviously has plenty of legitimate grievances - I do also think valentino could reasonably take issue with some of the ways casey has characterised valentino and their rivalry. if valentino has his complaints, he's clearly not about to share with the class - and there's really not any bitterness whatsoever in how he's talked about casey these last few years. he's content to pass the reigns to casey in narrativising their rivalry to the public. pretty interesting, no?

idk, I like how true the entire ranch visit felt to their dynamic... valentino might have done what he needed to do to beat casey, but there was never any real personal animosity on his end - at most their intense bickering during 2010-12, but even there it was never that serious to valentino. and now, that's all done with as far as he's concerned... the door is open, if casey wants it to be. and casey, always just a bit more cautious and wary and far more conflicted, who clearly still has all these grievances relating to valentino he needs to share with the world... but when they're actually face-to-face, those have always had a habit of falling away. valentino in all his boundless enthusiasm and sincere belief that casey is as good a rider as they come, dragging around his erstwhile rival to proudly show him around his precious home. and casey, who once idolised valentino and perhaps even wished they could have been friends, allowing himself to be dragged along. it was sweet... it warmed my cold dead heart. I liked it. and I am going to laugh very hard indeed when casey gives his next interview discussing how valentino taught him about the horrors of the human condition

[starrypawz]

I think one aspect of being disabled that people don't think about

The Admin

[mearcatsreturns]

why is applying for jobs the worst thing on the planet

[teetle-time]

from a doylist/logistical standpoint, i get why a lot of the fiddling with dimensions we get tends to stay within the set boundaries of a given iteration. just look how they massacred the 87!gang, especially in the 2012 xovers. heck, they just slapped together some new lore for 87!krang all retcon style!

but the idea of having a big reveal where a character already baked into a modern iteration turns out to be not just a counterpart of a previous version of the character, but that actual character themself, having traveled through dimensions to end up in the new iteration…you gotta admit, if it got done properly, it'd be so cool.

ope! this villain swore vengeance as their fancy schmancy machinery malfunctioned and seemingly vaporized everything? huh. well they look to be gone but we'll keep our eyes peeled for their return…except they never come back. maybe they were planned to return, maybe not. maybe there was time in the show/comic's run to address it, maybe it got cancelled before they got a chance. it just seems like a plot thread that never got properly taken care of.

smash cut to another iteration. the local version of the villain in question has been fairly close to the source material thus far, but they've been working on something In Secret™, eh? whoopsie-daisies, it's straight-up just the dude from before, slowly building their power back up! their new and improved evil plan is revealed: they intend on taking out the local turtles before plunging into the multiverse to return home and eliminate their turtles! MWAHAHAHAHA!

yes, it would probably be a nightmare to coordinate any returning VAs or to figure out how to account for VAs who maybe can't reprise their roles. yes, it would probably suck balls to try and do multiple artstyles justice at the same time, be they animated, comic book, or being brought from one to the other. yes, trying to balance two different turtleverses' "vibes" by striking a happy medium between the two without completely wrecking anybody's characterization would be (and clearly has been) notoriously difficult.

but man, that would be such a fun watch. and potentially even a good way for canon catharsis for the older iteration, if the villain in question was one the fans already liked.

[jcmarchi]

Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstories

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/virtual-personas-for-language-models-via-an-anthology-of-backstories/

Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstories

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We introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by generating and utilizing naturalistic backstories with rich details of individual values and experience.

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We introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by generating and utilizing naturalistic backstories with rich details of individual values and experience.

What does it mean for large language models (LLMs) to be trained on massive text corpora, collectively produced by millions and billions of distinctive human authors?

In “Language Models as Agent Models”, compelling evidence suggests that recent language models could be considered models of agents: provided with a textual context, LLMs are capable of generating conditional text that represents the characteristics of an agent likely to have produced that context. This suggests that, with appropriate conditioning, LLMs could be guided to approximate the responses of a particular human voice, rather than the mixture of voices that otherwise emerges. If realized, this capability of LLMs would have significant implications for user research and social sciences—conditioned language models as virtual personas of human subjects could serve as cost-effective pilot studies and supporting best practices in human studies, e.g. the Belmont principles of justice and beneficence.

In this work, we introduce Anthology, an approach for steering LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by providing richly detailed life narratives of individuals as conditioning context to models. In doing so, we also present methods to generate backstories from LLMs themselves as a means to efficiently produce massive sets covering a wide range of human demographics. By grounding language models in naturalistic backstories, Anthology allows LLMs to simulate individual human samples with increased fidelity, measured in terms of matching the distributions and consistencies of human responses.

Our Approach: Anthology

Conditioning Language Model Generation with Individual Life Narratives

A significant limitation of earlier methods in steering LLMs to virtual personas has been the inability to reliably approximate individual human samples. Prior approaches prompt LLMs with broad demographic information, e.g., “I am a 25-year-old from California. My highest level of education is less than high school,” which are essentially bodies of text generated from a tuple of demographic variables. With these methods, we are only able to approximate human samples at a population level, not at the individual level, which results in:

Responses prone to LLMs defaulting to stereotypical and/or prototypical portrayals, as they are only conditioned on demographic variables (e.g., race and gender)

Inability to provide important metrics of interest such as covariance and statistical significance, as individual responses are required for such compuatations

Anthology enables the approximation of individual subjects by conditioning with richly detailed backstories. Through these backstories, the model captures implicit and explicit markers of personal identity, including demographic traits and spontaneous references to cultural, socioeconomic backgrounds, and life philosophies. Our approach involves generating a vast set of backstories representing a wide range of demographic attributes via language models queried with unrestricted, open-ended prompts such as, “Tell me about yourself.” We then match virtual personas conditioned by each backstory to real-world survey samples.

Results: Closer Approximation of Public Opinion Polls

For evaluation, we compare the effectiveness of different methods for conditioning virtual personas in the context of approximating three Pew Research Center ATP surveys: Waves 34, 92, and 99.

Results on approximating human responses for Pew Research Center ATP surveys. Boldface and underlined results indicate values closest and the second closest to those of humans, respectively.

As measures of success in approximating human samples with virtual personas, we consider the following metrics:

Average Wasserstein distance (WD) between response distributions as a measure of representativeness

Frobenius norm (Fro.) between correlation matrices as a measure of consistency

Cronbach’s alpha as an additional measure of internal consistency

Prior to analyzing virtual subjects, we estimate the lower bounds of each evaluation metric by repeatedly dividing the human population into two equal-sized groups at random and calculating these metrics between the subgroups. We take averaged values from 100 iterations to represent the lower-bound estimates.

We consistently observe that Anthology outperforms other conditioning methods with respect to all metrics, for both the Llama-3-70B and the Mixtral-8x22B. When comparing two matching methods, the greedy matching method tends to show better performance on the average Wasserstein distance across all Waves. We attribute differences in matching methods to the one-to-one correspondence condition of maximum weight matching and the limited number of virtual users available. Specifically, the weights assigned to matched virtual subjects in maximum weight matching are inevitably lower than those in greedy matching, as the latter relaxes the constraints on one-to-one correspondence. This discrepancy can result in a lower demographic similarity between matched human and virtual users compared to the counterpart from greedy matching. These results suggest that the richness of the generated backstories in our approach elicits more nuanced responses compared to baselines.

Final Thoughts

Anthology marks a promising new direction in conditioning virtual personas in LLMs that could potentially reshape how we conduct user research, public opinion surveys, and other social science applications by offering a scalable, and at times, ethical alternative to traditional human surveys. However, the use of Anthology, as in any other application of language models in the social sciences, also brings several considerations to the forefront: although the generated backstories help create more representative personas, there remains a risk of perpetuating biases or infringing on privacy, so results should be used and interpreted with caution.

In terms of future steps, we envision our approach benefiting from a more expansive and diverse set of backstories, each representing a consistent life narrative of individuals. Additionally, a valuable extension of the work would be to consider free-form response generation, enabling more natural and nuanced persona simulations beyond structured survey formats such as multiple-choice. Finally, an exciting next dimension in applying LLMs in behavioral studies would involve simulating longer-term effects, allowing virtual personas to model and retrospectively examine changes over time.

All of these directions present multitudes of technical challenges; please let us know if you are interested in collaborating or want to discuss our work further!

Learn more about our work: link to full paper

@articlemoon2024virtual, title=Virtual personas for language models via an anthology of backstories, author=Moon, Suhong and Abdulhai, Marwa and Kang, Minwoo and Suh, Joseph and Soedarmadji, Widyadewi and Behar, Eran Kohen and Chan, David M, journal=arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.06576, year=2024

[arodrwho]

uses of generative ai i think it makes sense to get mad about or be appalled by:

creating any kind of art, especially if then trying to build an audience using it and/or trying to make money off it

completing homework assignments

completing work tasks that significantly impact other people

completing work tasks that could significantly impact your professional reputation & career

any kind of research / treating it like a search engine

plugging unfinished fics into it to get an ending

editing writing of any kind

uses i think it doesnt make any sense to get all up in arms about:

writing emails

[pochapal]

part of me wonders if there was an intentional seeking out of beatrice (ie searching for The Witch and not The Person Behind The Witch) that she might actually let herself be found

[smartratework]

pvc electric red and blue wire #smartratework#tumblr

[kamil-a]

probably the first like, 2 or 3 aerolith ais were unfortunately bigoted in various ways by human standards because if youre a human being programming computers to Advance The Human Race your biases are gonna come thru loud and clear right. but by the time youre up to the like agent 8-10 series thats very like autonomous of personality. i think the current crop of computers is like im NOT SEXIST!!!!!!!!!! OKAY!!!!!! but i have compartmentalized humans in ways you didnt know existed. i can show you biases your feeble brain wouldnt be able to comprehend

[rainia]

HATE emailing people but even more hate emailing known unhelpful people like girllll this is such a lost cause frfr

[thelordofshrimp]

the weird noises means it's working

[softskiesahead]

this song and this song have the most intense angsty chiaya energy possible I think

[vulpinesaint]

what's the desktop site you use for sticky notes? i randomly stumbled across your post and now im curious

k so i used to use this one for chrome (it worked pretty separately from the browser though i hate sticky note extensions that are stuck to the page or only operational through your bookmarks. killing and biting i want to be able to have them open over other apps) and this morning i downloaded this one off the app store for my macbook (works the same except like. kind of better. tbh). so glad you could be with me on this journey hope this is applicable to your life at all <3

[seilon]

just wrote like three paragraphs ranting about my living situation and deleted it just know I am going insane and i hate it here and I need to live by my fucking self or I am going to absolutely fucking lose it

[benevolentbucky]

job 😎