that seems about right, and “this anti-cult information source isn’t actually anti-cult, it’s a competing cult you should avoid” is a pretty common form it can take. it’s very convenient for the cultists, because it defuses criticism without engaging with it, by keeping all thought within the framework of the cult. the idea that we all organically stumbled upon Rationalist ideas (or were exposed to them through our friends or industry) and wholesale rejected them, must be eliminated as a possibility. we must have an ulterior motive that can’t be summed up as “hahaha holy shit look at these assholes” — or else the cult has to accept that a lot of people legitimately hold the idea that Rationalists and Zizians and all of Yud’s other ideological children are in fact fucking assholes.
“the companies declared that they do not operate in Italy and that European legislation does not apply to them.”
ah, the “you can’t prove I touched you with the shit-covered stick” defense that all the AI and social media companies pivoted to when they decided it was easier to break European law than comply with any amount of consumer protection legislation
I might pick this one up — almost every algebra text I’ve ever read has been an utterly miserable experience, so it’d be interesting to read a math textbook I don’t hate
I’ll never forget the Commodore 64 user manual. Don’t know if that counts as a book, but at least it was bound like one. It’s unimaginable for a computer manual today, but it contained a whole BASIC programming course, which was my first encounter with the whole topic of programming.
fuck yes, this is where it started for me too. I don’t have any love for BASIC as a language, but the idea that programming was central to being able to use the machine was incredible, because it normalized the ability to program. all of the documentation and most of the UX around the Commodore 64 and similar 80s micros was oriented around that idea: that programming isn’t scary or complicated, it’s a normal thing you should be familiar with in order to get the most out of your machine.
you came into TechTakes wanting less snark? holy fuck you’re lost
if I wanted to cheat the downvote count I’d just modify our instance’s database. our view of votes is different and neither our posters nor our instance really give a fuck which posts random federated weirdos like or don’t like
feel free to report me to me though
no, the downvotes are me because a lot of these takes are shitty
my least favorite thing about old forums, which carried over to a lot of open source spaces, is how little moderation there is. coming into the help forum with a “no fuck you help me the way I want” attitude should probably be an instant ban and “what the fuck is wrong with you” mod note, cause that’s the exact type of shit that causes the community to burn out quick, and it decreases the usefulness of the space by a lot. but somehow almost every old forum was moderated by the type of cyberlibertarian who treated every ban like an attack on free speech? so you’d constantly see shit like the mod popping in to weakly waggle their finger at the crackpot who’s posting weird conspiracy shit to every thread (which generally caused the crackpot to play the victim and/or tell the mod to go fuck themselves) instead of taking a stand and banning the fucker
and now those crackpots have metamorphosed into full fascists and act like banning them from your GitHub is an international incident, cause they almost never receive any pushback at all
So I check the 7b model again, and this time round that’s also censored. I panic for a few seconds. Have the Chinese somehow broken into my local model to cover it up after I downloaded it.
what
oh this is brilliant, I’ve been looking for something like this
ah, I stand corrected! the figures I was looking at previously were for doing it at acceptable speeds in a data center.
can you imagine the intensity of the RGB in the boy genius Prompt Engineer’s new $6000 custom top end gaming PC with server components? maybe they’ll have the LLM slowly plagiarize them a Python script that turns on more RGB when the GPU’s under load.
cw: body horror
e: and now my brain is writing the matrix horror fan fiction where Jk Rowling gets Agent Smithed into someone’s brain and overwrites everything