and the vibes around Trump were good? the dude is a shitstain on the very fabric of existence

The Man in the High Castle comes close… or at least, makes it clear that it’s not as though the Nazis and Japanese occupying America would actually live by the code they dictate for others.

Yes, actually it’s beyond that; the landlord has to put the security deposit in an interest-bearing account so that it makes money while they hold it for you!

OMG a conspiracy by the DNC to elect an actual registered Democrat instead of an independent, how shocking /s

seriously, what did you expect?

the bernie bros have been out in force since the election shouting down anyone who disagrees with their vision of a populist party run by an old, out of touch white man. why does that sound familiar /s

I hate to say this, but it’s too fucking late for any sort of electoral solution, at least on a national level. At this point we need to develop local capacity to secure our progressive enclaves in liberal states and big metropolitan areas. This means rooting out the conservative factions within our police and firing bad actors, as well as training community-based self-defense forces. We also need to build more effective local resilience and mutual aid networks so that the Federal government can’t dangle emergency aid over us when pandemics and climate-related disasters recur, as they frequently will. We need politicians who will defend our territory, boundaries and values, and fight to discontinue the tremendous subsidy we pay to MAGA territories. We need more self-sufficient economies that trade primarily with healthy, rights-respecting economies in Canada and Europe. It’s a heavy lift and unfortunately I don’t see anyone up to the task right now, as even Bernie, Warren, and AOC are stubborn institutionalists who will continue trying to work within the system even as it works against them and their constituents.

this is learning completely the wrong lesson. it has been well-known for a long time and very well demonstrated that smaller models trained on better-curated data can outperform larger ones trained using brute force “scaling”. this idea that “bigger is better” needs to die, quickly, or else we’re headed towards not only an AI winter but an even worse climate catastrophe as the energy requirements of AI inference on huge models obliterate progress on decarbonization overall.

those are all classification problems, which is a fundamentally different kind of problem with less open-ended solutions, so it’s not surprising that they are easier to train and deploy.

In every list I find online, it’s Massachusetts

I live in a rural part of a deep blue Northeast state and have been thinking about this a lot. Most of my surrounding area is predictably liberal college towns but the town next door to me is very MAGA and I have to drive through it to get to the highway. Honestly, I want to know what it takes to get those people to leave so that we can secure and expand a safe haven here…

I really wish it were easier to fine-tune and run inference on GPT-J-6B as well… that was a gem of a base model for research purposes, and for a hot minute circa Dolly there were finally some signs it would become more feasible to run locally. But all the effort going into llama.cpp and GGUF kinda left GPT-J behind. GPT4All used to support it, I think, but last I checked the documentation had huge holes as to how exactly that’s done.

ok but… the Democrats in swing states (hell, any state) who said “I’m staying home because Kamala courts Republicans, even though I know Trump is Hitler” are absolutely as shitty as the people who voted for Trump

there’s a lot of racist and misogynistic democrats

One of the reasons I love StarCoder, even for non-coding tasks. Trained only on Github means no “instruction finetuning” bullshit ChatGPT-speak.

You want an e-Golf, which was a beautifully stupid, half-hearted implementation of an EV by Volkswagen, who because they really didn’t want to do it, spent almost nothing on redesign, and in the process creating a ridiculously fun vehicle to drive with sporty handling and high torque at low speed, but nothing else changed from the classic Golf design. Door handles, freaking dials on the dashboard, manual climate and audio controls. Sadly, it isn’t being made anymore. We’ve outgrown ours and it’s time for me to let someone else enjoy the experience (especially with the Biden used EV sales incentives going away soon) but my daughter loves it so much that I’m dreading the tantrum that I know will come when I sell it.

oh great, so we can look forward to another horrifyingly mismanaged pandemic!

absolutely batshit crazy how nobody at all mentioned that not laid it at Trump’s doorstep during the campaign

The Internet in general, but especially social media, is a cesspool of AI slop, bots, algorithm manipulation, and less exotic/high-tech forms of disinformation. How about instead of telling our politicians to meet us there we get the fuck off of it and meet each other in the streets. They can join our party if they want but we’re starting it.

Walz losing the VP debate to Vance was the start of the Trump ticket comeback.

If you look at the election prediction history graph on Nate Silver’s substack, you see an upwards trajectory for Trump/Vance ever since the vice-presidential debate. That was also when the “Republicans are weird” narrative that was working so well for Harris/Walz abruptly left the discourse. And I believe that what happened was that Republicans who were embarrassed by Vance as well as Trump had a moment like you describe where he suddenly didn’t seem so unrelatable and that right there sunk the Dems… as much as it pains me to admit it, because I’d much rather have a party that wins on the issues and communicates clearly how insane and risky it was to vote for literal autocracy, the Harris campaign probably made the wrong choice with Walz and never should have stopped mocking Republicans for being “weird.”

The problem, I believe, is that most Democrats are institutionalists who will defend the rule of law even when it means handing the reigns over to a group who have openly declared hostility towards it. They are also afraid that using any kind of force to stop Trump and his cronies will trigger violent rebellion and they know who owns most of the guns in this country. They’re playing a trolley problem game but because they don’t really have progressive values they aren’t putting, say, Ukraine, Palestine and the entire fucking climate on the “peaceful transfer of power” track.

We need a party with higher values than just “defending institutions.”