Sorry, didn't check back here for a few days. There absolutely can be German Shepherds!
These are the initial generations before upscaling/processing. Generated with Bifrost Project (SDXL model).
Here are a few more I made with Bifröst Project. It can handle generating in 1280x1024 which is pretty nice. I don't really like the square format that much.
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Glad you liked it. Here's one more for the road!
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Maybe he's not in perfect shape but that's not going to stop him from enjoying li— I mean being activated.
No one expects the laser from the back.
They say war changes a man. I guess that goes for poodobots as well.
The messed up powerlines were annoying me, so here's one more attempt.
Sure... It's a bit hard to get pitbull, lab and robot to all come through clearly but I tried! (I also took it easy on you and didn't make him too pitiful looking.) First image is the completed version, second one is the initial 1024x1024 generation.
Not bad, but he looks a bit too upbeat for this thread. Let me fix that for you.
edit: I did the other one for fun also.
He seems very helpful and willing to give you a hand.
Any requests? I can make various dog breeds, wolves, foxes, whatever it takes to completely extinguish the joy in your heart.
Bonus white Dobermann and Siberian Husky pup.
- At home
- As above. Happy days!
- On the streets for one day.
- On the streets for two weeks.
- On the streets... well, who can guess how long he's been standing there? It's not like they fall down once the batteries run out.
Model: FenrisXL, made in ComfyUI.
That is the worst site I've seen in a long time. Do yourself a favor and add
www.verticalfarmdaily.com###zijkant
www.verticalfarmdaily.com###banners_zijkant
to your uBlock rules before following the link. If you don't have a way to block elements, may $diety have mercy on your soul.
Then it’s a cat-and-mouse game between the anti-adblock tech and the anti-anti-adblock tech.
My money (not literally though :) is on the anti-anti-adblock tech. That can be crowdsourced and generally adapts much faster than big companies.
You can read as much Ayn Rand as you want with perfect understanding and you're not really going to learn anything.
Fans? Customers yeah, but fans?
They actually did at one point, but they threw it all away.
Smaller models (7B down to 350M) can handle long conversations better
What are you basing that on? I mean, it is true there are more small models that support very long context lengths than big ones, but it's not really because smaller models can handle them better, but because training big models takes a lot more resources. So people usually do that kind of fine-tuning on small models since training a 70B to 32K would take a crazy amount of compute and hardware.
If you could afford fine tuning it though, I'm pretty sure the big model has at least the same inherent capabilities. Usually larger models deal with ambiguity and stuff better, so there's a pretty good chance it would actually do better than the small model assuming everything else was equal.
The article seems to repeat the same stuff over and over again.
On Lemmy, a popular social networking site, user KerfuffleV2 astutely noted that the article repeated points that had already been stated in the article.
"It seems like the article repeated the same content multiple times" said KerfuffleV2, a user on the social networking site Lemmy. "Perhaps they get paid by the word." the user added.
A rather uncreative article on thestreet.com triggered some snarky online comments including one from a user named KerfuffleV2. This user noted that the article repeated the same content multiple times.
Can you provide an example where science cannot explain a situation, because I can’t honestly think of any.
Not OP, but there is some stuff. One big example is qualia. How does matter give rise to actual feelings, experiences of things? This isn't something we can measure directly and it actually seems like it won't be something we ever can measure. Might also be able to use something like "what was there before the big bang?" and that kind of thing.
Of course, the fact that science can't explain something doesn't really justify falling back on magic as an explanation though. Some stuff just may not have an answer.
Pretty sure it's mainly non-furry non-gay hackers that take down the majority of websites.
From dealing with their support in the past and stuff they've accommodated, I wouldn't be surprised if you could just ask them to do it for a small amount like that. If you do a web search, you can also find a lot of information and people claiming it's possible to do stuff like transfer it to a Paypal account, etc.
I haven't tried to do that personally, so maybe it really just isn't possible. It's still only something that will affect someone that's never going to spend money at Amazon again, right? If I'm going to spend $5.99 at some point, it's effectively the same as a cash refund for me. If I'm going to spend $10.99 at some point it's almost the same as getting double the refund, since I would have spent cash instead in those cases.
Do we need to be more efficient?
I mean, it's usually a beneficial thing. Using less resources (including land) to produce the same amount of food is probably going to mean less environmental damage. In the case of switching to vat grown meat it also means not torturing billions of animals every year.
We have the resources to feed everyone on Earth and have leftovers
Sure. No one starves because the food just isn't on this planet, they starve because the people who have it won't give it to them. That said, we're also not using resources very sustainably so saying we produce enough food currently isn't the same as saying we can continue this way.
We could also increase efficiency even further by reducing meat/dairy consumption.
I don't eat any animal products so you can probably guess this is something I'm strongly in favor of as well!
Anyway, I was just responding to what I quoted not specifically arguing for 3d-printed foods. Depending on how it's implemented, it may or may not be better environmentally than the status quo
I agree it’s still better than walking away empty handed, but let’s not pretend that got their money back.
In the rare case the person has just stopped spending money at Amazon, I guess. For anyone that's spending $10/month, it's effectively the same as cash. (Also, you probably can transfer the credit to a bank account if you really want to.)
I recently ran into an issue where I wanted to use Any for slices. However, it only allows 'static types (based on what I read, this is because you get the same TypeId regardless of lifetimes).
I came up with this workaround which I think is safe:
```rust use std::{ any::{Any, TypeId}, marker::PhantomData, };
#[derive(Clone, Debug)] pub struct AnySlice<'a> { tid: TypeId, len: usize, ptr: *const (), marker: PhantomData<&'a ()>, }
impl<'a> AnySlice<'a> { pub fn from_slice(s: &'a [T]) -> Self { Self { len: s.len(), ptr: s.as_ptr() as *const (), tid: TypeId::of::(), marker: PhantomData, } }
pub fn as_slice(&self) -> Option<&'a [T]> { if TypeId::of::() != self.tid { return None; } Some(unsafe { std::slice::from_raw_parts(self.ptr as *const T, self.len) }) }
pub fn is(&self) -> bool { TypeId::of::() == self.tid } } ```
edit: Unfortunately it seems like Lemmy insists on mangling the code block. See the playground link below.
T: Any ensures T is also 'static. The lifetime is preserved with PhantomData. Here's a playground link with some simple tests and a mut version: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=3116a404c28317c46dbba6ed6824c8a9
It seems to pass Miri, including the mut version (which requires a bit more care to ensure there can only be one mutable reference). Any problems with doing this?
Why?
Even though green coffee beans tend to be heavier due to the higher water content, generally it's cheaper to roast your own compared to buying them pre-roasted.
You can roast the same beans at different levels to get some variety without having to go out and buy a new batch.
It's kind of fun and a decent conversation topic.
Notes
Don't be scared by how long this post is. It basically just comes down to spread beans on a cookie sheet, put in preheated oven, wait around 12-15 minutes and then take them out and cool them.
Since we're talking about roasting beans, naturally you're going to need a grinder to actually use them.
The process will create some smoke, even with a light roast. Basically, darker roast, more smoke. So far I've mainly done pretty light roasts and even though my kitchen doesn't have much ventilation (and my oven doesn't have fancy modern contraptions like, you know, a light or a fan) it hasn't been an issue.
Your oven should be reasonably clean if you don't want the roasted coffee to taste like random stuff.
If you're a super coffee snob and it has to be perfect, this may not be for you. It's pretty easy, but odds are the first few tries aren't going to be perfect especially if you like darker roasts.
You're going to want something like a large metal mixing bowl and colander for the cooling process. My colander is plastic, so you can probably get away with that if you don't put the red hot beans in it directly out of the oven.
You'll also probably need access to an outside area where bits of coffee chaff blowing around aren't going to bother people. I don't think there's really an easy way to deal with coffee chaff indoors.
By the way, don't try to grind green coffee beans in a normal grinder. They are insanely, and I mean insanely hard and tough. You'll destroy your grinder unless it is an absolute tank. (I'd say it's also not really worth trying, green coffee didn't taste very good to me.)
How
Here's the process:
- Start preheating your oven to 500f/260c. (Some people say as hot as possible, some people use a slightly lower temperature like 460-475f.)
- Get a cookie sheet ready. Just a standard cookie sheet. Mine aren't super clean so I put a layer of silver foil on it. Don't preheat the cookie sheet itself.
- Measure out about 1 cup of green coffee beans. (I've found you can fit about 2 cups on a single sheet but it's probably better to start small.) You want to make sure the beans are spread out evenly in a single layer.
- Look for beans that are discolored/damaged and toss them away. Don't be a perfectionist though, just get rid of 10-15 of the worst looking beans. Something like that.
- Place the cookie sheet in the oven once it's reached the correct temperature. I put mine on the bottom rack near the (electric) heating element. If you're going for a darker roast, I guess this might make burning them more likely.
- Set a timer for ~12 minutes. I wouldn't recommend roasting longer than 14 minutes your first time.
- Now you wait a bit. Probably around the 8 minute mark, you're going to start hearing sharp cracking/popping sounds. Don't worry, the beans won't jump around like popcorn and the sound is fairly loud so you're not likely to miss it. At this point (or in 1-2 minutes) you can remove the beans and have a light roast. This point is known as the "first crack".
- After a couple of minutes, the sounds will die off and you won't hear anything for a little bit. If you keep roasting, you'll start to hear a softer, more muted crackling sound start. This is the "second crack". I would not recommend roasting past this point until you're comfortable with the process and have an idea of how roasted the beans are at this point. If you roast much longer, it's very easy to burn them and there's also going to be a lot more smoke.
- Remove the beans from the oven. You can let them rest for 1-2 minutes on the cookie sheet if you want, then transfer to something like a metal mixing bowl. It has to be something that can deal with 500f stuff touching its surface.
- Ideally get another mixing bowl/colander/whatever as well. Pouring the beans back and forth through the air is a good way to cool them off and remove chaff. What's chaff you ask? The beans are coated with a papery layer of chaff. Don't worry though, once they're roasted it's really easy to remove. You want to try to cool off the beans pretty quickly at this point.
- Go outside and blow gently on the roasted beans in your bowl. You should see a bunch of super light, papery chaff fly out. You can pour the hot beans from one bowl to another, and if there's a bit of a breeze that'll help a lot. Otherwise, you can just blow on them. You could also stir them around with a wooden spoon or something to encourage the chaff to separate.
- Once the chaff is mostly gone (it's fine if there's a little left, or little pieces stuck to some beans) and the beans are fairly cool you can just leave them in a safe place for around 12 hours to fully cool and vent CO2. Don't put them in a sealed container for the first 12-ish hours.
Conclusion
One thing to note is you don't want to actually grind/use the beans for at least 12 hours. It might seem unintuitive, but from what I've read as freshly roasted as possible isn't necessarily best. Depending on the beans/roast level, the coffee might reach its optimal tastiness even a couple weeks after roasting.
I'm far from an expert, but feel free to ask questions in the comments if you want. I can recommend a grinder/beans to get started with if anyone needs information like that.
This subject is kind of niche, but hey... It's new content of some kind at least! Also just want to be up front: These projects may have reached the point of usefulness (in some cases) but they're also definitely not production ready.
***
ggml-sys-bleedingedge
GGML is the machine learning library that makes llama.cpp work. If you're interested in LLMs, you've probably already heard of llama.cpp by now. If not, this one is probably irrelevant to you!
ggml-sys-bleedingedge is a set of low level bindings to GGML which are automatically generated periodically. Theoretically it also supports stuff like CUDA, OpenCL, Metal via feature flags but this is not really tested.
Repo: https://github.com/KerfuffleV2/ggml-sys-bleedingedge
Crate: https://crates.io/crates/ggml-sys-bleedingedge
***
llm-samplers
You may or may not already know this: When you evaluate an LLM, you don't get any specific answer back. LLMs have a list of tokens they understand which is referred to as their "vocabulary". For LLaMA models, this is about 32,000 tokens. So once you're done evaluating the LLM, you get a list of ~32,000 f32s out of it representing the probability for each token.
The naive approach of just picking the most probable token actually doesn't work that well ("greedy sampling") so there are various approaches to filtering, sorting and selecting tokens to produce better results.
Repo: https://github.com/KerfuffleV2/llm-samplers
Crate: https://crates.io/crates/llm-samplers
***
rusty-ggml
Higher level bindings built on the ggml-sys-bleedingedge crate. Not too much to say about this one: if you want to use GGML in Rust, there aren't that many options and using low level bindings directly isn't all that pleasant.
I'm actually using this one in the next project, but it's very, very alpha.
Repo: https://github.com/KerfuffleV2/rusty-ggml
Crate: https://crates.io/crates/rusty-ggml
***
smolrsrwkv
If you're interested in LLMs, most (maybe all) of the models you know about like LLaMA, ChatGPT, etc are based on the Transformer paradigm. RWKV is a different approach to building large language models: https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM
This project started out "smol" as an attempt to teach myself about LLMs but I've gradually added features and backends. It's mostly useful as a learning aid/example of some of the other projects I made. In addition to being able to run inference using ndarray (pretty slow) it now supports GGML as a backend and I'm in the process of adding llm-samplers support.
Repo: https://github.com/KerfuffleV2/smolrsrwkv
repugnant-pickle
Last (and possibly least) is repugnant-pickle. As far as I know, it is the only Rust crate available that will let you deal with PyTorch files (which are basically zipped up Python pickles). smolrsrwkv also uses this one to allow loading PyTorch RWKV models directly without having to convert them first.
If that's not enough of a description: Pickle is the default Python data serialization format. It was designed by crazy people, though: it is extremely difficult to interoperate with unless you're Python because it's basically a little stack based virtual machine and can call into Python classes. Existing Rust crates don't fully support it.
repugnant-pickle takes the approach of best-effort scraping pickled data rather than trying to be 100% correct and can deal with weird pickle stuff that other crates throw their hands up at.
Repo: https://github.com/KerfuffleV2/repugnant-pickle
Crate: TBD
Copied across from that site which will will not name. (There may be a bit of duplication)
***
Collected audio resources
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/z21v3f/imagin8_press_has_a_lot_of_free_audio_book/ — I posted this one a long time ago but I'm putting it at the top since it's generally the least advanced (HSK 2-4ish). The main content is a beginner's version of 西游记 (Journey to the West). Imagin8 Press publishes graded readers which you can buy, but they also make the audiobook version of all their books available completely for free which is really generous.
my-hsk.com has a whole bunch of audio books and stories available:
- https://my-hsk.com/category/audiobooks-for-kids-in-chinese/ — This is a collection of fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood.
- https://my-hsk.com/category/audiobooks-in-chinese/ — Full books (some of these are probably pretty advanced).
I really, really love the version of 小王子 (The Little Prince) there. The woman reading it does a tremendous job with the voices for different characters and setting the mood.
https://www.youtube.com/@zhongwenyousheng/playlists — This YouTube channel also has a number of books including another version of 小王子 — I don't like it as much as the other one (and it seems to be a different version of the book as well) but it's still quite high quality and actually has Mandarin subtitles. With the my-hsk material you're just on your own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0gCop58Lec — 小狗钱钱 is a (children's) story about a white Labrador named 钱钱. He has a very special ability. The story is also probably not what you're expecting, but the dog's name is a pretty good hint. The man who read it is also very good, although he gets a little 夸张 sometimes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5xt0-4uu_I — 动物农场 (Animal Farm). This is a pretty advanced one, also another very high quality performance with the reading.
https://www.ximalaya.com/sound/605795718 — A nice reading of 兔子共和国 (Watership Down). Ximalaya stuff doesn't seem to play in the browser for me but I was able to download it with yt-dlp: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
https://www.ximalaya.com/album/59386928 — A performance of the Mandarin version of Blindsight (very dark sci-fi from the author Peter Watts). Unfortunately, a lot of it is only accessible to Ximalaya VIP members. By the way, Peter Watts very generously makes all his books available online for free: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm - those are the original English versions. Definitely my favorite author and if you like sci-fi and it can be English I'd highly recommend his work, especially Blindsight.
There you go. That should be 20-30 hours of listening material.
***
Imagin8 Press has a lot of free audio book content around the HSK2-4 level, most notably 西游记 (Journey to the West)
They created a version of 西游记 (Journey to the West) with simplified vocabulary. To read the actual books, you'd need to buy them. However they allow anyone to access the audio book version on their YouTube channel or even just download the MP3s.
Imagin8 Press main site
YouTube channel
Journey to the West seems like their main project but they also have a bunch of other stories/folktales available (to buy and in audio book form). The price for the paperback books is pretty reasonable (about $10 per volume, or $20 for a set of 3 books together).
I just received the volumes 1-3 西游记 paperback and I'm really enjoying it so far. It has Chinese characters on one page and the pinyin on the other so it's possible to read the characters without the pinyin interfering. There's a traditional version also (you choose the version when you buy, to be clear). New words are marked with a footnote and the book also includes an index with the definition of every word as well as a section with the English translation.
There's definitely a lot of convenience that comes with reading books in electronic format (and these are available as e-books too) but there's just something about having the physical book. The text is pretty large and clear. They do use a serif-based font which I'm not really used to, but it's not too much of a challenge to read.
Anyway, I have no affiliation with them but I was impressed with how generous they are with the free content and wanted to help people out with another good resource and give them some exposure at the same time. As far as I can see, it hasn't been mentioned here before.
***
TEDxTaipei has many speeches on a wide variety of topics
Some examples I thought were interesting:
- 保護動物就必然犧牲掉保護人的權益嗎？| Deconstructing the animal-human binary
- 死刑辯護教我的事情 | Confessions of a death row lawyer
There are hundreds, so it's very likely you'll find a topic that's relevant or interesting to you personally!
Example search query: https://www.youtube.com/user/TEDxTalks/search?query=tedxtaipei
One nice thing is it seems like most (or all of them) have subtitles which aren't embedded in the video. Some may use traditional characters but it's possible to automatically convert those using a browser addon if necessary.
Right now it's pretty far above my level but I definitely plan to come back soon!
***
If you have Amazon Prime, there are some good alternatives to Peppa the Pig
These are all children's shows. I'm going to try to order them roughly in order of how advanced the vocabulary/grammar seems. Since they're shows for young children, you can expect them to all be very positive and charming/cute. Naturally all these options have a Mandarin language option and subtitles (I think they all have both simplified and traditional character versions for the subs).
If anyone else finds some other good options on Prime I can edit in more sections. There probably are a few. It's fairly difficult to search for shows based on language, at least with Mandarin.
If you're slightly technical, there's a userscript that can be used to download subtitles from Prime: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/34885-amazon-video-subtitle-downloader It will add a link to the main episode list that lets you ZIP up the entire season's subs and download them. This will require a userscript browser addon and probably can't easily be done from a mobile device.
Creative Galaxy
The show is about a green alien and his pal. They fly around in a spaceship doing arts and crafts and solving problems. About half of the show is cartoon, the other half is actual kids doing stuff. I skip the latter part, and the fact that it's dubbed is a lot more obvious in those parts because the children don't actually speak Mandarin.
Tumble Leaf
The show is about anthropomorphic animals. The main character is a blue fox and he has a caterpillar friend. It's not a cartoon, it's some kind of claymation type of thing. The theme is at the beginning of every part (each episode consists of two parts) a crab tosses some random item into a treasure chest and then Fig the fox goes and checks it out. It's a good way to learn vocabulary for all sorts of random items from hoses to magnets to balls of twine.
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
A cartoon show about a bunch of animals and children. The main character is a cookie loving mouse. There are some singing sections, but not a whole lot. The theme song is pretty catchy though. I'd say this one has a higher difficulty level than the other two in terms of vocabulary/grammar but they also speak pretty clearly.
Pete the Cat
The main character is a blue cat, he lives in a town with a bunch of other animals. There are no humans. The grammar/vocabulary seems the most complicated of all of them. The show is very heavily oriented to music/singing and Pete the Cat will break out his guitar and start wailing at the slightest encouragement... Or discouragement. Personally, I don't really love singing that much in general but some of the songs are actually quite good. They did a really good job of adapting the songs to Mandarin.
It seems like there are some nods to an older audience. It's a little like Bluey.
Apparently Lemmy copied the new reddit layout which shoves everything into the middle of the screen and wastes a massive amount of space. Even on the monitor I oriented vertically this is the case: the post I'm typing right now is using like 30% of the available screen real-estate and wasting the other 2/3rds.
My philosophy has always been that if reddit removed support for the old style, that's when I'd stop using reddit. Switching to Lemmy is like switching to new reddit though.
I made an account, but I can't really see using this as a replacement. I'd guess (but I might be wrong) that the type of people clinging to the old reddit style are also the most likely to do something like switch to Lemmy out of principle.
(I looked around and it doesn't seem like there are any browser addons or userscripts to restyle it either.)