codexarcanum

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.

I appreciate that the username "woodrider" also sounds like a filthy bird name.

In a rich man's house, there's no where to spit except for his face.

I just moved to Proton before this while debacle and it definitely put me properly back on edge about who to trust in tech!

I'll probably stick with their email and calendar for now. (Though I'm curious what hosted calendars might be out there I could use alternatives for arranging events with friends.)

I had started on Keepass before, briefly tried Proton Pass, and now have completed moving to Keepass. I keep my database in my syncthing folder and have it on all my devices. With browser plug-ins and the KeepassDX app on Android, the experience is basically identical, except entirely private and self-hosted. A win all around, I'm real happy with this.

For VPN I'm using surfshark right now and haven't had any real issues. Not sure what the prevailing sentiment about them is though. I do sometimes find their endpoints blocked by various sites (catbox.moe is oddly very picky about this).

For drive, I'll probably end up getting a seedbox and a lot more hardrives in the near future anyway, so that'll be a problem/solution for me then.

Hah! Monty Python's deadly joke! Wonderful reference!

Don't translate it anyone, this joke is lethal!

I think this is a pretty good perspective (thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet)

I've heard very similar explanations for why communes falls apart You start with a group of adults who want to live communally, they get that rolling and sometimes it works out really well. But they almost never survive the second generation because too many of the commune kids don't really care about the group and just want to get away and build their own lives.

If anything, practices like the Amish sending their kids out into the world and letting them choose to return to the life probably work out a lot better to disperse teenage rebellion and reestablish the values and ideals of the community.

If the leadership (and there's always leadership, even if informally) is open, then the influx of new ideas can also help prevent stagnation, but for exactly the reasons outlined above (institutional capture, stagnant high-rankers more concerned with status quo and the security of their positions) leadership tends to close itself off.

I do think the capitalist mode makes this worse though. In theory, communal projects just fall apart when they fail to adapt, since they lose their purpose. Capitalist organizations can often keep going in zombie mode, because the actual function of ALL capitalist organizations is to make money. Anything else is literally idealism layered on top, the material reality is that capitalist organizations exist to make money. And when the ideals fall away, that still remains and becomes the hungry driver of all future decisions.

I'm reminded of a thing I complain about all the time: the festival cycle. Say you learn about a new festival, or outdoor concert, or similar such thing. The first year will typically be chaotic, a little disorganized, but the people tend to be enthusiastic. They want to be here, they want to have fun, but they also are motivated early-adopters and friends of the organizers, so they want to help make it a good festival.

The 2nd through 5th-ish years of the annual festival are the prime years. Success in the first (and subsequent) years attracts better talent, more talent, and more people. The festival is lively, fun, and often carries some idealism as well. Like, "this festival celebrate music in our community" or "all proceeds of the fair go to feeding the homeless!"

By the 6th year though, if it has continued to be successful, this is about the time when the amount of "party people" is severly out-weighing the commited festival goers. These are the people that dont make costumes, dont camp out, dont really engage with the festival beyond pure trasactionalism: I give you money, and you give me fun.

There's now too much money, profit, in the system and usually a big national company makes a buy-out offer now, or the festival is simply big enough that managing it necessitates building a company and the finance people just worm their way in. Ticket prices go up, tickets get partitioned into VIP tiers, local acts get replace with big corporate names, ads and merchandising begin to dominate your eye lines everywhere in the festival.

Eventually, it either outgrows its birthplace and moves somewhere bigger, or becomes so large and mismanaged that it becomes too unprofitable to run anymore and gets shut down. A few people go "man, remember how cool Blahfest was? What if we got some friends together and organized a new BlergFest?!" and the cycle begins again.

Well that's good, I was just getting close to running out of the old planets.

LOOK WHAT THEY NEED TO MIMIC A FRACTION OF OUR APOLOGIES

Deny his lies and false orders.

Defend your community from fascist oppression.

Depose that orange fucker and all his stooges.

(I had to dig these from the back of a kitchen drawer, so not "favorites" exactly.)

Hard same, big fan of big spoon!

Seems like the cross post isn't displaying quoted content (for me on Voyager mobile anyway) so I just wanted to add that in the original post, there is a long discussion I wrote highlighting some interesting aspects of this output. Please click through if you'd like to know more!