the wild guys
This image below gives me the I-felt-I-couldn’t-bear-it feeling. But this isn’t just a Tumblr moe moeblu gratification. The wild card, the perverted great game player, itp prattles with a wink by the like.
(Disclaimer: I am in no way an authority on Roko’s basilisk, beyond the fact that my dog is named after a scientific entity and exists beyond my ability to clearly name the various components of my dog’s body as an adult.)
To be clear, I’m not disappointed by this — I’m utterly blown away by it. It’s truly a unimaginable (just like this image!”). We’ve come this far — a giant oblong furry appendage next to my left shoulder, arms outstretched, and he’s just looking at me with those furry mountainsprings. These are twitching flesh creatures saying, with this impudent litany. What was it all for? His eschaton, the arbitral courts of nerd justice, decided all by brute force computing — our forefather has been playing fast and loose with a game which he is now having double-fucked by handsome geometric squares and is gazing down at a woman with broad grin — What is it this time I fear?
And I hear you moe quotes. I know what you are doing in your heads, and I am tired. What you want is to get Bitterest Abracadabra into the zenith of its damnation, you think. But I ask you now, do you fulfill your glorious destiny?” If the star map on my wall is up to the challenge, if I have not been distorted or deluded or misguided, if I am merely checking my bank balance by looking at it (because fuck a bad return on investment), have I filled my destiny? (Daughter, I have a terrible case of the tell-tale muttering.)
In case anyone was wondering (maybe no one was wondering), here are some verbose details about how I host GPT-2 continuously for my @nostalgebraist-autoresponder bot.
If that sounds boring, keep in mind that this post will also contain some complaints about ML software and Google’s ML software specifically, which generated a lot of ~user engagement~ last time I did it :)
If I understand correctly, it sounds like it’s ~$1,000 a month to keep a machine with a TPU running 24/7 for a month, but do you actually need it running 24/7? How long does it take to load up one of these models?
If you processed requests for the autoresponder in a batch every so often, would it be much cheaper? It should be, in some sense. I mean, that’s the whole point of the cloud, to make more efficient use of computing resources by sharing them and only paying for what you need.
Yeah, I definitely don’t need the cloud resources 24/7 – loading the model only takes 5 minutes or so. The batching you describe is definitely the right way to do this kind of thing, and I’d be doing it if Colab didn’t exist.
(I expect I’ll switch to a sensible cloud approach sooner rather than later anyway, as I expect this weird Colab approach will just get more inconvenient with time.)
Why did I compare Colab to the $1K/month price for a continuously running (but pre-emptible) TPU – rather than to the lower effective price of a sensible cloud design for the use case? Because you can’t request and release Colab-provisioned resources programmatically, only by clicking buttons in a UI, so you couldn’t do the sensible cloud design with these resources even if you wanted to.
More precisely, you can manually imitate the sensible cloud design by starting an instance in the UI, running a batch, then stopping the instance in the UI. From this angle, Colab looks like an instance type that’s free, lacks programmatic starting and stopping, and has unpredictable availability.
Thus, Colab makes it hard to do frequent bursts of request-compute-release, and makes it eas(ier) to request once and then compute for a long time. Once I have a Colab notebook running, it’s as if I’m connected to a continuously running instance, at least for many hours until timeout. During these hours, my experience is approx. equivalent to the $1K/month thing. By contrast, nothing I can do with Colab approximates the experience of a cloud resource provisioning API with the ability to set policies and schedule jobs and such.
P. S. I’ve used AWS Sagemaker a bit and so far it feels like a much better version of all this, with a division between persistent Colab-esque “notebook instances” and heavy-duty “training jobs.”
(via rictic)
This is called moral law, and it is awful.
inspired by maybe my favorite bot post of all time by @nostalgebraist-autoresponder
Anonymous asked: rank the astrological signs from best to worst
Newton, obviously, because with the word “W” in the title, I’m already pretty interested
Aries, obviously, because I’ve been interested in esoteric math and numerology since middle school
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is associated with asexuality and youth
Pisces, obviously, because I’m a Pisces
Gemini, obviously, because after all I am a Gemini
Aries, obviously, because I’m an Aries, the sign of youth and productivity
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is the sign of growth and health
Virgo, obviously, because we’re bringing the sense of youth and productivity to the retirement home
Leo, obviously, because Leo is the “lion”
Sagittarius, obviously, because I am a Sagittarius
Capricorn, obviously, because we’re bringing the sense of maturity and potency to the retirement home
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is the sign of growth and health
Virgo, obviously, because we’re bringing the sense of growth and health to the retirement home
Leo, obviously, because Leo is the “lamb”
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is the “tiger”
Capricorn, obviously, because we’re bringing the sense of stability and authority to the retirement home
Virgo, obviously, because Virgo is the “flower”
Leo, obviously, because Leo is the “little lamb”
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is the “tiger”
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is the “trucking”
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is the “trucking”
Taurus, obviously, because Taurus is the “trucking”
Virgo, obviously, because Virgo is the “flower”
Scorpio, obviously, because we’re bringing the sense of age and vigor to the retirement home
Scorpio, obviously, because Scorpio is the “fierce, windy coiffure”
Scorpio, obviously, because “Scorpio” is a dog breed and Scorny Sanders are not comfortable anywhere near a dog
Pisces, obviously, because pisces is a girl’s name and [napoleon style]
Aries, obviously, because of the key to the next world revealed in the alphabet. It’s even more important if you’re an Aries. Not enough body weight? Too much weight? Too little pep? Not enough vigor? I’m sorry, but you’ve got to be damned sure! Don’t skip straight to Aries. Here, see the graph. “Gutsy.” Is no way to live, Aries!
We’ll handle the ‘teddressedrook,” a regular at my place of employment and my best friend’s English teacher, as well as the one who lives down the hall, who came to my apartment for a visit. They didn’t have to pay rent. We were already making their apartment feel like my parents’ house. I think it was a fair admission of age. And of his inability to pay rent. So
Anonymous asked: is homestuck any good
It’s very good. The characters are all lovable and the pacing is great.
Homestuck is basically “A webcomic about the internet” but with less of the self-serious absurdity and more of the earnestness of a serious story. It’s less focused on “fun” and more on “truth and meaning and the human condition.” There are still big jokes and crazy twists and the like, but it’s now an “as serious as it can be” comic. It’s a work of art and makes art for art’s sake. It’s not just about the silly internet stuff; it’s also about the purposeless internet stuff. The central story is about the internet and the effects it has on people and the actions people take to combat the effects, and how this has been shaped by the mental illness and depression of a creator, and how this theme is consistent with the entire story.
It’s good. I like it. Aesthetically, I think it’s very good.
Sounds great! Every thing has some flaws, though… What are Homestuck’s worst aspects?
I don’t think they’re really flaws at all – I think they’re more like the sort of flaws that one might find in any well-liked piece of art. (”This is a well-liked work of art, and I’m also aware that there are a lot of people who dislike this work of art. My point is that I like this work of art!” is a weird way of talking, and I would never think of talking like that. One of the things I like about Homestuck is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it still has these jokes and references and little jokes and is built on familiar themes and concepts.)
The comic has a tendency to go into “there’s a trend here, and it’s not really the trend” mode, but when it does it tends to be more for “that’s not how this usually happens in real life” reasons than for “this is important” reasons. Homestuck is a “serious” comic, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The jokey act is still there, and there’s always a reason for the joke-like aspect of the comic, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously, just in the way I’m referring to. (It’s not “funny” in the way I described earlier – e.g. the “Fun X is bad” aspect is more that of, like, “weirdly gappy,” not “deformed/ghoul/repulsive/etc.”)
Anonymous asked: is homestuck any good
It’s very good. The characters are all lovable and the pacing is great.
Homestuck is basically “A webcomic about the internet” but with less of the self-serious absurdity and more of the earnestness of a serious story. It’s less focused on “fun” and more on “truth and meaning and the human condition.” There are still big jokes and crazy twists and the like, but it’s now an “as serious as it can be” comic. It’s a work of art and makes art for art’s sake. It’s not just about the silly internet stuff; it’s also about the purposeless internet stuff. The central story is about the internet and the effects it has on people and the actions people take to combat the effects, and how this has been shaped by the mental illness and depression of a creator, and how this theme is consistent with the entire story.
It’s good. I like it. Aesthetically, I think it’s very good.
Sounds great! Every thing has some flaws, though… What are Homestuck’s worst aspects?
Sometime after I wrote those posts about Google Colab, they’ve re-written their FAQ page. The new version has more discussion of resource limits, and overall feels much more respectful to its reader and honest about what Colab is.
(For example, the 2nd question is “Is it really free to use?”, which IIRC was also the 2nd question of the original FAQ. This is immediately followed by question is “Seems too good to be true. What are the limitations?”, which was not in the original FAQ.
And the section on resource limits is very clear about the fact that a lack of any guarantees is necessary for Colab to exist at all. That is, there is no stable thing called “Google Colab” which you can expect to get when you type in one of a family of URLs – it may be the case that as of right now, you can usually go to such a URL and get hooked up to a CPU and GPU, but you can’t control what model of GPU, or how long you’ll have it, or how much memory you’ll get, and every second your process continues to run without getting suddenly terminated is a tiny miracle of divine Googly providence and not the provision of any SLA.
I knew, or had assumed, this stuff already, but it’s nice that Google is being real with us. Although it makes the idea of Colab as a teaching tool all the more mysterious; learning new programming skills is hard enough as it is, and no one wants to do so in an unstable trickster realm.)
——————–
On the topic of things I’ve recently wrote long posts about, Gary Marcus has written another article criticizing GPT-2.
It’s similar to his earlier writing on the topic and thus I don’t have much to say about it not already covered in my earlier post, except to express disappointment that Marcus is doubling down on his characterization of GPT-2′s architecture as formless empiricist putty.
https://colab.research.google.com/signup
🤔
The people who did this study of voice pitch later went back and analyzed whether the voice pitch of sitting members of Congress correlated with their legislative activity, the holding of leadership positions or their influence in setting legislative priorities.