I had never heard of it before now–thanks!

I’m honestly surprised that nobody has said anything about MS Office, but it’s not like I expect anyone to miss the application itself, it’s just that if your work requires you to interface with it, there really is no alternative to running Windows or MacOS. Microsoft’s own Office Online versions of the apps do a worse job of maintaining DOC/PPT formatting consistency than the possible Russian spyware that is OnlyOffice, which also screws things up too often to be relied upon. LibreOffice is, let’s be honest, a total mess (with the exception of Calc, which also isn’t consistent with the current version of Excel, but can do some things that Excel no longer can do, so I appreciate it more as a complementary tool than as a replacement).

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.

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.

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

Tangential, but I absolutely loved working in technical support. The satisfaction of actually helping someone with a problem affecting their real life totally outweighed the abuse from individuals who were letting the work part of their life drag the whole rest of it down (which was just kind of sad to watch). I’ve gotten paid much more for other roles since then, but it’s one of the few roles in which I was thanked for what I did by the person I was working for, and that makes a huge difference.

The problem is, that would limit my own option to make a version of the software and sell it under a more limited license in the future. Whomever I sell it to then has the right to go ahead and redistribute it, competing with me. Sure, my current, highly niche code already carries that risk, but the MIT license doesn’t stop me from releasing a modified version I may write that is more valuable as software, and then protecting that release with other licensing terms.

I am a consultant who sometimes writes code to do certain useful things as part of larger systems (parts of which may be commercial or GPL) but my clients always try to impose terms in their contracts with me which say that anything I develop immediately becomes theirs, which limits my ability to use it in my next project. I can to some extent circumvent this if I find a way to publish the work, or some essential part of it, under an MIT license. I’m never going to make money off of my code directly; at best it’s middleware, and my competitors don’t use the same stack, so I’m not giving them any real advantage… I don’t see how I’m sabotaging myself in this situation; if anything the MIT license is a way of securing my freedom and it benefits my future customers as well since I don’t have to rebuild from scratch every time.

Running such a bot with an intentionally underpowered language model that has been trained to mimic a specific Reddit subculture is good clean absurdist parody comedy fun if done up-front and in the open on a sub that allows it, such as r/subsimgpt2interactive, the version of r/subsimulatorgpt2 that is open to user participation.

But yeah, fuck those ChatGPT bots. I recently posted on r/AITAH and the only response I got was obviously from a large language model… it was infuriating.