There was never any point in history (before now) where quickly rising measles, polio, and nazism were seen as, err, fine because that’s a personal choice or viewed as hysteria.
Ignorance is nothing new, but people are so freaking entitled now.
To me, the original trilogy is… ok.
That’s probably why I’m not in the Star Wars fandom, heh.
Still, Andor felt so fundamental, quintessential Star Wars.
I poked my fan into the Star Wars Reddit fandom once, and it seemed like they hate Andor?
I was honestly baffled at the time. I’m not a huge fan, but it’s like the best Star Wars thing I’ve ever seen (with the runner up being kotor II)
Yeah, and the engagement metrics are massive. This reaching people. Heck, I wonder if more eyeballs see this than the actual NYT article.
God, anyone, please send some meteors to Twitter data centers. And Facebook while you’re at it…
onlyfans is successful because you can pay for personalized actions and one can build something appearing like a relationship with the porn star. Before one would just passively watch them.
It’s still so one-way though.
I guess what’s remarkable is the collective unawareness of how artificial those relationships are. I get it, I know IRL loneliness and went down the engagement rabbit hole too.
But still, it’s remarkable. I still see articles from professional journalists, all the time, wondering what’s happening to relationships or democracy or whatever then end their post with something akin to a “like and subscribe!” and a busy Twitter profile.
Posts/comments aren’t sorted and hidden by a ML model optimizing for engagement though.
That’s the key. That’s what makes the environments so toxic and addictive.
Maybe sorting by upvotes isn’t perfect, but it’s still leagues away.
And people criticized this as paranoid and wrong when Biden did it…
Trump just blurts it out. No eyebrows even raised. Again, just imagine the outrage of Biden sat in that chair and said the same things.
TBH that would sell well.
It’s great for pushing enraging content though. I feel like the content itself has gravely affected the collective psyche, and so have influencer endorsements (which companies pay big bucks for), even if the explicit ads have not.
It’s already hit oil companies hard, again massively ironic, heh. Especially if other countries tariff US oil… which I haven’t heard, but strategically is not a bad idea.
Look at her social media posting history. Look at her published book:
BRAVE Books and Ashley St. Clair partnered to write "Elephants Are Not Birds," a Christian, Conservative children's book that tackles the topic of gender identity. In the book, children will learn that boys are not girls, and Elephants Are Not Birds.
I retract/regret what I said… I didn’t mean to victim blame. This sucks for her and she doesn’t deserve one bit of it, nor does her abuser deserve any sympathy. She deserves empathy.
But she also appears to have made a living peddling (IMO) hate far and wide. I am struggling to express/process how I feel about that… it’s a tragic irony, I guess? And frustration at that whole ecosystem she was in (which Musk is at the very tippy top of).
Watch this video, ignore the clickbait sounding title:
It completely changed my view on that.
Basically, without high birth rates, countries are totally screwed. Immigration (which skews young, from high birth rate countries), has softened that issue for the US, hence you don’t hear about it as much here. One can wave their hands and say "elder care and the economy will be automated in the future," but that’s wishful thinking if you ask me.
Figuring out how to more efficiently house/care for a glut of humans farther in the future is way more practical. Honestly we’re ridiculously inefficient now; there’s a lot of low hanging fruit to pick. And we can use much higher technology to address that.
Yeah, at the very least she needs security and lawyers. 20K is little enough to endanger her life.
…On the other hand, she's an influencer farming attention. And not in a good way. That cuts a lot of my empathy short.
It’s really not funny TBH, it’s all tied to his views on eugenics (or whatever euphemism is used) and frankly horrific visions of the future he shares with a few lower profile billionaires.
TF, this guy is still getting millions of views on TikTok and Twitter.
Can we just burn engagement-driven social media? Please?
+1, but with the addendum that the next few years might not look good for the US.
I mean, if I were her I’d feel drained and devastated. Everything that happened during the election and people still picked Trump over her…
Way in not the onion territory, heh.
Social media isn’t a network, it’s a set of siloed attention farms.
That’s a very important distinction to make IMO. We’ve treated Big Tech like they’re the stewards of the internet for way too long. Facebook, Twitter, Discord, TikTok… those are the villains eating everyone’s attention.
Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely more in the bucket of the “old internet” and more network like. I love it! And I love were chatting. But a tiny fraction of the population is engaging like that these days.
How do y'all post clips/animations on Lemmy? Only GIF seems to work.
So I had a clip I wanted to upload to a lemmy comment:
- Tried it as an (avc) mp4... Failed.
- OK, too big? I shrink it to 2MB, then 1MB. Failed.
- VP9 Webm maybe? 2MB, 1MB, failed. AV1? Failed.
- OK, fine, no video. Lets try an animated AVIF. Failed. It seems lemmy doesn't even take static AVIF images
- WebP animation then... Failed. Animated PNG, failed.
End result, I have to burden the server with a massive, crappy looking GIF after trying a dozen formats. With all due respect, this is worse than some aging service like Reddit that doesn't support new media formats.
For reference, I'm using the web interface. Is this just a format restriction of lemmy.world, or an underlying software support issue?
Trump 2.0 initial approval ratings higher than in first term
53% of Americans approve of Trump so far, according to a newly released CBS News/YouGov poll conducted Feb. 5 to 7, while 47% disapproved.
A large majority, 70%, said he was doing what he promised in the campaign, per the poll that was released on Sunday.
Yes, but: 66% said he was not focusing enough on lowering prices, a key campaign trail promise that propelled Trump to the White House.
44% of Republicans said Musk and DOGE should have "some" influence, while just 13% of Democrats agreed.
Behind the Curtain: Meta's make-up-with-MAGA map
Here's the Meta formula:
- Put a Trump friend on your board (Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White).
- Promote a prominent Republican as your chief global affairs officer (Joel Kaplan, succeeding liberal-friendly Nick Clegg, president of global affairs).
- Align your philosophy with Trump's on a big-ticket public issue (free speech over fact-checking).
- Announce your philosophical change on Fox News, hoping Trump is watching. In this case, he was. "Meta, Facebook, I think they've come a long way," Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, adding of Kaplan's appearance on the "Fox and Friends" curvy couch: "The man was very impressive."
- Take a big public stand on a favorite issue for Trump and MAGA (rolling back DEI programs).
- Amplify that stand in an interview with Fox News Digital. (Kaplan again!)
- Go on Joe Rogan's podcast and blast President Biden for censorship.
Trump sides with Musk in H-1B fight
Reality check: Trump pledged to end the program in 2016.
Called it. When push comes to shove, Trump is always going to side with the ultra-rich.
Elon Musk pledges "war" over H-1B visa program, calls opponents racists
Trump, who has remained silent thus far on the schism, faces a quickly deepening conflict between his richest and most powerful advisors on one hand, and the people who swept him to office on the other.
All this is stupid. But I know one thing:
Trump is a billionaire.
And I predict his followers are going to learn who he’ll side with when push comes to shove.
Also, Bannon’s take is interesting:
Bannon tells Axios he helped kick off the debate with a now-viral Gettr post earlier this month calling out a lack of support for the Black and Hispanic communities in Big Tech.
Musk calls MAGA element "contemptible fools" as virtual civil war brews
MAGA vs. Musk: Right-wing critics allege censorship, loss of X badges
I think the title explains it all… Even right wing influencers can have their faces eaten. And Twitter views are literally their livelihood.
Trump's conspiracy-minded ally Laura Loomer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax and InfoWars host Owen Shroyer all said their verification badges disappeared after they criticized Musk's support for H1B visas, railed against Indian culture and attacked Ramaswamy, Musk's DOGE co-chair.
Brainstorming Post LoK/Avatar Seven Havens Story Ideas
I have no idea if anyone on Lemmy is into Avatar lore/fanfiction, but in the spirit of posting content here instead of Reddit... here goes.
A new Avatar series featuring 'twin' Avatars has been leaked, in case you missed it:
https://lemmy.world/post/23427458
In a nutshell, its allegedly set in a cataclysmic world overrun by spirit vines, and two twins are the 'Avatars' with diametric personalities. Not much is known beyond that, but I've been brainstorming some post-LoK ideas forever.
And now I kinda feel like writing them out. Here's my thought dump for a story:
In the (largely undepicted) three years of canon Korra Alone, Korra (traveling anonymously) makes a stop on Kyoshi Island hoping to reconnect with her spirit. Instead, she meets a humble blacksmith with a bird spirit on his shoulder, and connects with him. They both wrestle with the demons
'Avatar: Seven Havens' Rumors Emerge
Avatar Studios upcoming Earth Avatar TV Series will initially run for 26 episodes.
Most details are in the article ^
Reddit source of images: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/1hi2tte/more_confirmation_on_the_leaks_this_was_using_the/
I find this interesting! Post apocalyptic is a good way to "reset" the world, and the idea of twin Avatars has been batted around the fandom for some time.
Shipping Listing Suggests 24GB+ Intel Arc B580
Maybe even 32GB if they use newer ICs.
More explanation (and my source of the tip): https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/shipping-document-suggests-that-a-24-gb-version-of-intels-arc-b580-graphics-card-could-be-heading-to-market-though-not-for-gaming/
Would be awesome if true, and if it's affordable. Screw Nvidia (and, inexplicably, AMD) for their VRAM gouging.
Guide to Self Hosting LLMs Faster/Better than Ollama
I see a lot of talk of Ollama here, which I personally don't like because:
- The quantizations they use tend to be suboptimal
- It abstracts away llama.cpp in a way that, frankly, leaves a lot of performance and quality on the table.
- It abstracts away things that you should really know for hosting LLMs.
- I don't like some things about the devs. I won't rant, but I especially don't like the hint they're cooking up something commercial.
So, here's a quick guide to get away from Ollama.
- First step is to pick your OS. Windows is fine, but if setting up something new, linux is best. I favor CachyOS in particular, for its great python performance. If you use Windows, be sure to enable hardware accelerated scheduling and disable shared memory.
- Ensure the latest v
GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DEMO DISCORD Introduction In the past three months since Qwen2’s release, numerous developers have built new models on the Qwen2 language models, providing us with valuable feedback. During this period, we have focused on creating smarter and more knowledgeable languag...
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19925986
https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen25-66e81a666513e518adb90d9e
Qwen 2.5 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B, 14B, 32B, and 72B just came out, with some variants in some sizes just for math or coding, and base models too.
All Apache licensed, all 128K context, and the 128K seems legit (unlike Mistral).
And it's pretty sick, with a tokenizer that's more efficient than Mistral's or Cohere's and benchmark scores even better than llama 3.1 or mistral in similar sizes, especially with newer metrics like MMLU-Pro and GPQA.
I am running 34B locally, and it seems super smart!
As long as the benchmarks aren't straight up lies/trained, this is massive, and just made a whole bunch of models obsolete.
Get usable quants here:
GGUF: https://huggingface.co/bartowski?search_models=qwen2.5
EXL2: https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=exl2+qwen2.5
GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DEMO DISCORD Introduction In the past three months since Qwen2’s release, numerous developers have built new models on the Qwen2 language models, providing us with valuable feedback. During this period, we have focused on creating smarter and more knowledgeable languag...
https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen25-66e81a666513e518adb90d9e
Qwen 2.5 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B, 14B, 32B, and 72B just came out, with some variants in some sizes just for math or coding, and base models too.
All Apache licensed, all 128K context, and the 128K seems legit (unlike Mistral).
And it's pretty sick, with a tokenizer that's more efficient than Mistral's or Cohere's and benchmark scores even better than llama 3.1 or mistral in similar sizes, especially with newer metrics like MMLU-Pro and GPQA.
I am running 34B locally, and it seems super smart!
As long as the benchmarks aren't straight up lies/trained, this is massive, and just made a whole bunch of models obsolete.
Get usable quants here:
GGUF: https://huggingface.co/bartowski?search_models=qwen2.5
EXL2: https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=exl2+qwen2.5
How does Lemmy feel about "open source" machine learning, akin to the Fediverse vs Social Media?
Obviously there's not a lot of love for OpenAI and other corporate API generative AI here, but how does the community feel about self hosted models? Especially stuff like the Linux Foundation's Open Model Initiative?
I feel like a lot of people just don't know there are Apache/CC-BY-NC licensed "AI" they can run on sane desktops, right now, that are incredible. I'm thinking of the most recent Command-R, specifically. I can run it on one GPU, and it blows expensive API models away, and it's mine to use.
And there are efforts to kill the power cost of inference and training with stuff like matrix-multiplication free models, open source and legally licensed datasets, cheap training... and OpenAI and such want to shut down all of this because it breaks their monopoly, where they can just outspend everyone scaling , stealiing data and destroying the planet. And it's actually a threat to them.
Again, I feel like corporate social media vs fediverse is a good anology, where one is ki
Cohere Drops Command-R 35B 08-2024 Update, Just About a Perfect Local LLM for 24GB GPUs.
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19242887
I can run the full 131K context with a 3.75bpw quantization, and still a very long one at 4bpw. And it should barely be fine-tunable in unsloth as well.
It's pretty much perfect! Unlike the last iteration, they're using very aggressive GQA, which makes the context small, and it feels really smart at long context stuff like storytelling, RAG, document analysis and things like that (whereas Gemma 27B and Mistral Code 22B are probably better suited to short chats/code).
Cohere Drops Command-R 35B 08-2024 Update, Just About a Perfect Local LLM for 24GB GPUs.
I can run full 131K context with a 3.75bpw quantization, and still a very long one at 4bpw. And it should barely be fine-tunable in unsloth as well.
It's pretty much perfect! Unlike the last iteration, they're using very aggressive GQA, which makes the context small, and it feels really smart at long context stuff like storytelling, RAG, document analysis and things like that (whereas Gemma 27B and Mistral Code 22B are probably better suited to short chats/code).
Pressure grows as "last chance" negotiations for Gaza deal resume
Senior U.S., Qatari, Egyptian and Israeli officials will meet on Thursday under intense pressure to reach a breakthrough on the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.
he heads of the Israeli security and intelligence services told Netanyahu at the meeting on Wednesday that time is running out to reach a deal and emphasized that delay and insistence on certain positions in the negotiations could cost the lives of hostages, a senior Israeli official said.
Hostage-ceasefire deal talks stall over new Netanyahu demands, Israeli officials say
Alleged AMD Strix Halo APU Appears in Benchmark
HP is apparently testing these upcoming APUs in a single, 8-core configuration.
The Geekbench 5 ST score is around 2100, which is crazy... but not what I really care about. Strix Halo will have a 256 -bit memory bus and 40 CUs, which will make it a monster for local LLM inference.
I am praying AMD sells these things in embedded motherboards with a 128GB+ memory config. Especially in an 8-core config, as I'd rather not burn money and TDP on a 16 core version.
Paramount Acquisition Deal Falls Through
Supposedly for petty personal reasons:
The woman who controls the company, Shari Redstone, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last week as she scuttled a planned merger with David Ellison's Skydance Media.
Redstone had spent six months negotiating a complicated deal that would have given control of Paramount to Ellison and RedBird Capital, only to call it off as it neared the finish line.
The chief reason for her decision: Her reluctance to let go of a family heirloom she fought very hard to get.
The fandom doesn't want to talk about it, but the Avatar franchise is in trouble.