#primitive tech

[grrl-beetle]

Omar Afridi

[ganondoodle]

did not anticipate that addtionally to the problem of 'im posting to quickly and too much about whatever floated through my head in that moment that i maybe shouldnt' i would also grow to have the problem of 'deleting posts i probably shouldnt just bc of a sudden feeling of being wrong or unclear'

[kineticpenguin]

did you miss the part where the chapter of the BOS in the show recruits exclusively from the wasteland and forbids all sexual relationships between members, so another chapter being the opposite way and being homophobic as a result has no bearing?

Pointing out another way the show's BoS are out of character doesn't really have much bearing on my point that the show's BoS are out of character, now, does it?

[oopey-doopey]

All it takes is one of the Spiderteens realizing Miguel is technically from the future and the implications of that cause like...That means they are technically older than him.

By a technicality almost every Spider-person is older than Miguel and I know he’d hate some teenagers who can’t drive, vote and still have to ask permission to go to the bathroom in school to start calling him kid or saying shit “Back in my day-” like he isn’t in his mid 30s.

[othercat2]

I like this fan fic, but one of the plot points is "causing an eco-disaster on one planet to fix the eco-disaster on another." That is, this is a fan fic where the clones were able to over-ride order 66 and took back mandalore, which they are trying to terraform...by dumping water on it, which in turn is being taken from Kamino, which they've conquered. No word on if they xenocided the Kaminoans. This is the SECOND Star Wars fic where they did "take water from different planet and put it on a different planet!" (I am told they might have lifted the idea from Captain Marvel.)

[mxtxfanatic]

Transport him to a mecha world, he immediately steals a mecha. Imprison him on a human trafficking ship, he immediately tries to hijack a ship. Maybe the scientists should stop putting Ge Xiu on worlds with advanced technology 🤧

[teamfortresstwo]

Guys,,, whabd if,,, Vox had limb enhancers like Peridot,,,, and he was secretly short when he first fell,,,,,,

[box-o]

I'd like to think that towards the end of the classic era Sonic got his hands on a Sound Board of some kind and would have recordings of some basic sentences to say obviously but then some insults and some conjunctions to string together little quips without having to be able to talk to be a little shit

[youareanidiot-org]

what are u leaving him for?

Nothing? I'm just exploring the planet I'm gonna be stuck on for eternity.

[nexus-nebulae]

cruel prince really has me thinking a ton now abt which fantasy/scifi species has the ability to birth twins (especially identical ones). like apparently the Fae in that realm just do not have a concept of bearing twins (let alone triplets or more) so when they meet a pair of identical twin humans in the book they have no idea what to do abt it

[frankenstheythem]

barbie thumbelina was actually so right in displaying bigass industrial machines as those giant creatures with near-facial features such as teeth, capable of destruction but also mortal and vulnerable to external forces, both equal in extent, and my child brain was not fuckign ready for it

[lonelyrollingstar]

Oh hey I have this beautiful boy sitting right next to me!

NEC (1982)

[nostalgebraist]

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.

[EDIT: I've seen several people misread the previous line and infer that nostalgebraist-autoresponder is still using GPT-2. She isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Her latest model is a finetuned LLaMA-13B.]

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.

[letters-to-rosie]

I think though it's also that Piltover maintains that hierarchy not just by being better at tech but actively preventing people from Zaun from accessing it. I feel like there's kinda a false dichotomy here, since in the show, Vi and Jinx and Viktor etc ARE Piltovan kids in that Piltover is their government actively denying them a good education, failing to set up schools or give a shit (as Cait puts it) about what goes on down there. it's not like Piltover maintains hierarchy by being better at tech in a vacuum. they get to be good at tech because in Zaun kids have to work instead of go to school and that gives them access to cheap materials so they can have science fun instead of work in the mining colonies

There is a theory that the way children play serves as a means to simulate and prepare them for the tasks they'll take on as adults. So for all the narrative weight both Jinx and the story give the boxing machine at the arcade it would never have prepared her or the kids to take on Piltover.

What are the two things that Piltovans excel at over their Zaunite counterparts to keep the hierarchy? Weapons and technological development.

When you look at the way Piltovans invest in their children, they don't prioritize hand to hand/melee combat training. Piltovans focus on giving their children experiences in handling firearms, a pursuit that is both leisure sport for the wealthy and a key offense against dissenting Zaunites.

And from the show notes even Jayce, whose family occupies the upper middle class, was sent on educational excursions across Runeterra to explore the world and learn what it had to offer. Without Jayce's education abroad he would never have been inspired to pursue the concept hextech.

It's no wonder that the two figures that are set to be Piltover's biggest threats from Zaun are Jinx and Viktor, becasue they engaged in the same kinds of games and activities as their Piltovan counterparts.

Jinx didn't have an entire forest to preserved to help her practice her sharpshooting like the high houses of Piltover, but she did excel in the few games at The Rift (the arcade) that built on her talents. She's the only Zaunite thus far who's long distance offensive is a strong counter to Piltover's forces.

Viktor couldn't travel the world like Jayce did, but for better or worse he managed to stumble into an opportunity to get real opportunity in research not offered to his peers through Singed. It was through that experience that Viktor knew to turn to Singed when he was at the end of his rope, and the consequences of that will be fully realized in season 2.

Ironically, the kind of skill the boxing game champions is only good for keeping other Zaunites in line. Vander's days of fighting Piltover were way behind him when we first met him, and Vi spends season 1 primarily fighting other Zaunites. It's no surprise the Zaunites who embody the old ideal of strength in Zaun that the game portrays, Vi and Vander, are largely at the mercy of Piltover and end up collaborating with them to avoid further harm.

Zaun's future as an independent city-state couldn't happen if they stuck to their old ideals. The people who stand a chance against Piltover are the ones that not only succeed but excel at playing Piltover's games against them.

[peace-hunter]

so what would the primes think of humans?

it kinda depends on who you ask but in general they find them just. very tiny. and squishy looking.

some like onyx and quintus find them kinda cute. others like prima and amalgamous think they're kinda ugly but in a cute way. liege just thinks they're plain ugly. he learns to appreciate them in his own way but he never stops finding them a little weird.

solus is impressed by how much things they can do and how much destruction they can create when they're so tiny and their technology so lacking. their tech is soooo primitive but she's making grabby hands at some of those explosives to see what they can do.

zeta is grateful solus cannot in fact get her hands on any of those explosives.

and megatronus is for once glad he's incorporeal. just the thought of how careful he would have to be to not step on them at all times stresses him out.