GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.

Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

Liberal three-percenter lore?

I mean, I do think non-violent disobedience can be effective, but the state usually makes it violent. State sanctioned protests where most obey most of the rules isn’t disobedience. Is a good start though, and I hope things progress (in a good way).

So much more than an init system though, which I think is why people don’t like it. Personally, the only annoyance I have is I preferred log files over journald.

Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.

I think there’s a massive oversupply of software engineers world-wide, and investors and executives are heavily pushing offshoring to countries where there are even more engineers that are even more desperate to find work. The ideology or focus of the entire US investor/executive class seems to have shifted as soon as Musk gutted Twitter. I fear this may be another, “these jobs aren’t coming back,” kind of thing the manufacturing industry went through. Perhaps we’ll see a boom of bootstrapped start-ups ran by engineers (or preferably worker-cooperatives), but that’s extremely hard to do.

I think tool calling is just a form of structured output, where the LLM outputs something like json that describes the function to call and the arguments, then you parse that and run the function with the arguments, then feed the output back to the LLM in a new message, if you want. IDK the specific details, I’m guessing there are some special tokens some LLMs produce for tool calling, and I’m also guessing there is “controlled generation” (masking the logits/tokens, and only choosing to generate the tokens that would be valid). Ollama apparently doesn’t support the special tool-calling tokens or output structure that some models use.

This is how it looks when using OpenAI compatible APIs: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling?api-mode=responses.

I’ve never heard of TabbyAPI (I’m new to using local models, in general). I’m also not sure what TabbyAPI brings over Ollama, llama.cpp, or vLLM. So would be curious as well.

Edit: For my little toy project I’m working on, I’m switching to not using tool-calling at all, and building a LangGraph and using structured output, which should be more reliable with my use-case. I.e. just always call the tool manually, feed the output back to the LLM to have the LLM evaluate if the output was correct, retry calling the tool with different arguments if not, and just fail after 5 calls.

I like watching Yannic Kilcher, to keep up with some of the newer developments, and read various papers. I do have a background in ML (mostly the more traditional, non-generative, supervised learning and reinforcement learning) though.

Hmm, Devstral doesn’t call any tools for me in the current stable Ollama version or the current release candidate. Wonder if it’s a bug in ollama or langchain. I’ve since tried “QwQ-32B-GGUF:Q3_K_XL”, and it’s a little better than Qwen3-14B:Q6, but still not quite satisfactory, and is much slower and “thinks” too much.

Kinda weird GPT4-Chan wasn’t referenced. A guy fine-tuned GPT-J on 4chan, then deployed bots to write posts. I guess it was more of a stunt than academic or scientific, but training on 4chan improved the model’s performance on a truthfulness benchmark.

Yeah, that’s how they sell it. Problem is, studies have shown the fraud in these programs isn’t much of an expense, in the broader context. And, Trump has granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, who stole $205M from Medicare, which tells you they don’t really care about that. These programs are actually pretty efficient, and spending funds to investigate small-time fraud would often cost more than just letting it happen. It’s not like tons of people wish to be on our shitty social programs that don’t even supply enough help for the people that absolutely need it.

Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up “innovating” (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.

From the people I know, who do depend on these programs and like Trump, they don’t believe they will have their benefits reduced. The think the other people, “taking advantage” of the system will be kicked off. It’s being sold as reducing fraud and abuse. The right-wing has been pushing this framing for decades, and many people have bought into it.

but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.

I doubt much of that cash was going to their workforce. Should have though.

I know a couple life-long Republicans I sometimes briefly talk about politics with (one family, one acquaintance). Neither of them like Trump, but like the idea around Project 2025. One is an evangelical Christian, the other is a Catholic.

The Catholic strongly believes government should be run like a business, and the president should be like a CEO, so he should be able to fire everyone and replace them, if needed, with workers that will execute his plans. He’s also an anti-abortion, and tough-on-crime/immigration type. However, he strongly disapproves of Trump seemingly being pro-Russian now, Trump and his cabinet’s personal lives (he’s always strangely fixated on people’s personal lives, in a moral sense, for some reason), the take-over of the FBI and CIA, and the tariffs hurting his stock portfolio.

The evangelical Christian just doesn’t like Trump as a person, and doesn’t like Russia. He’s a just-world-hypothesis, small government, women are subservient, pro-business type; but also low/lower-middle-class, and has needed, and will need the social services he opposes. I guess his opinions are pretty similar to the Catholic’s, just a little more extreme on the social side, and supports policies that have always hurt him. I mean, Republican policies hurt the (fairly wealthy) Catholic too, but at least they get to say their taxes are lower and there’s less red-tape.