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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • I made a comment to a beehaw post about something similar, I should make it a post so the .world can see it.

    I’ve been running the 14B distilled model, based on Ali Baba’s Qwen2 model, but distilled by R1 and given it’s chain of thought ability. You can run it locally with Ollama and download it from their site.

    That version has a couple of odd quirks, like the first interaction in a new session seems much more prone triggering a generic brush-off response. But subsequent responses I’ve noticed very few guardrails.

    I got it to write a very harsh essay on Tiananmen Square, tell me how to make gunpowder (very generally, the 14B model doesn’t appear to have as much data available in some fields, like chemistry), offer very balanced views on Isreal and Palestine, and a few other spicy responses.

    At one point though I did get a very odd and suspicious message out of it regarding the “Realis” group within China and how the government always treats them very fairly. It misread “Isrealis” and apparently got defensive about something else entirely.








  • Very very skilled idiots.

    On that–and as a highly skilled idiot myself–we fully agree!

    The adage “social problems don’t have purely technological solutions” is something I’ve known for years yet must continuously remind myself of and reintegrate it for new issues.

    It’s a shame the old vision of computer specialists integrated into empowered teams building bespoke solutions never really came to pass. Not enough profit in that model, when mass market slop is so lucrative.


  • Not that I disagree with the sentiment but in most software systems localization does not just mean translation either. Localization as a practice includes date, time, and number formats, preferred units of measure, language and dialect, and sometimes a few other things. I’m not saying localization or translation are done well, or that the Big Tech companies give any shits about it at all, but its not as though computer professionals are all entirely ignorant of these distinctions.



  • Google announced that something like 25% of their code is AI generated now, and it’d be hilarious how much these companies have enshittified themselves into a cycle of constant self-owns except that we keep suffering for it too.

    Like every google app and service is bad now. Search sucks. YouTube apps are bloated, have been crashing, and the algorithm is serving up just random stuff now. G Maps won’t stay open on my phone, and randomly minimizes itself. Gmail is out of space, full of newsletters, and also degrading in search.

    Facebook is the same deal. I’ve been on it more recently because I need to track events and it’s all anyone in this city uses. Searching for the name of an event, which you’ve stated you’re going to, by it’s exact name, will find nothing, or an older version of the event from 4 years ago. The feed is 90% ads and sponsored posts, mostly videos. And the videos aren’t ads, they’re just random tiktok-wannabes about paint mixing or machining stuff. It’s utterly bizarre to be inundated with clickbait that desperately wants your attention for no reason.

    I consider myself a pretty good engineer and it’s amazing how little these companies can accomplish with literally tens of thousands of developers. Its another of the great paradoxes of our times: individually, software devs must be among the least productive workers of all time, and yet as a group the profession (the computer itself really) has realized such astronomical productivity gains that we’re probably already past the point where anyone really needs to work full-time ever again.


  • I looked into doing something similar with Wikipedia and the recommendation is also to use Kiwix, and the offline file size is also very large.

    Welcome to the collapse! Hoarding “clean data” for personal use is like hoarding clean water and food: you need a place to keep it, and it starts going stale the minute you shelve it. So either buy a digital bunker to load up with what you need or ask the all knowing AI gods for answers like the other poors.

    Also the Stack Exchange software used to be open source, surely there’s still a fork somewhere. You could certainly run your own Developer QA site, but like with Lemmy, the problem then is getting enough traffic to be able to productively tap into the collective wisdom.

    (Edit: sorry, this comes across mean spirited but I’m honestly sympathetic and just nihilisticallly frustrated to be in a similar situation. I foresee a big NAS and a lot of downloads in my future, but I hope we also find ways to share our forbidden knowledge until the day it can be free again)


  • I also stopped posting there years ago for much the same reason. You could feel the strangulation of the community as duplicate questions started getting shouted down, posts got turned into “community wikis” against your will and your own questions started getting edited to better fit someone else’s plans and ideologies. The company was sold shortly after, so maybe animals can sense their pending extinction (some of them anyway)?

    I miss those days when writing an answer genuinely felt like helping to grow the global community of friend developers. It’s a shame no technology has been discovered that will let the small amount of collective good in us all work together against the assholes, but alas it seems the opposite is always true.



  • For as much as people talk it up, I thought there was a lot to it. There isn’t.

    A dialectic is a tool for thinking through a problem or idea. You start with an idea or concept (called the Thesis) and then you consider the forces and concepts that lie in opposition to the chosen one (called the Antithesis). After considering both, you try to understand the relationships between the two things and how they support, oppose, and generate each other. This unified understanding of how the two concepts are actually one concept through these connections is called the Synthesis.

    Dialectical Materialism is applying the dialectic as a tool while also keeping in mind physical/material reality and the ways in which physical/material constraints influence these things.

    For example you might ask “Why do rebellions occur in formally peaceful states?” Your thesis is “rebellion” and so your antithesis is something like “the state” or “status quo.” Through materialism, you’d ask questions like “where do the rebels/state acquire food, shelter, weapons, etc. What is the role of poverty in fomenting rebellion?”

    Through synthesis, you would come to conclusions like “the people pay taxes to fund the state, but some people also devote a larger share of their time and resources to the rebellion.” Or: “Rebel recruitment goes up after police crackdowns, a lighter hand with policing may reduce re-occurrences of riots.”

    Because this isn’t ideal dialectics (not “ideal” like optimal but “ideal” as in “concerning ideas and immaterial things.”) So we’d be less concerned with “what is the rebellions stated aim” or “what is the state’s majority religion?” you can make these questions material though: “what do the rebels hope to gain materially” or “how is the state religion funded and enforced?”

    And although I’m just riffing an example, in real life when using this tool to convince others of your sound logic, it is best to have actual references and data to support the conclusions derived. This gives reality to the material considerations.