Move to Oregon. This is the most social place I have ever lived. I get into a conversation everywhere I go if I want it or not. They love to chat here.
I’ve had great experiences on Slowy (slowly.app) which is a modern pen-pal app. Every message takes days to arrive and you can either connect with people based on profiles or random matching and it’s one of few social networks that aren’t incel or hijacked by dating.
I’m in my 40s and have just recently achieved “having my own place” for the first time in my life, and it’s so incredible.
I love having a sanctuary, a place that I am guaranteed to be able to unwind.
For the first couple months after I moved in here, any time a door would slam in the building, I’d think “Oh darn they’re home”.
Because my whole life before this, alone time was something I got when whoever I was living with happened to be out. I therefore couldn’t control the alone time, and it could end without warning at any time. I’d be in my unwinding phase, recuperating from life and social contact, and then slam the front door would close and my mom, or my roommate, or whoever, would be home.
So now, my favorite part of the day is when my commute is over, and I open the door to my apartment, and it’s just so … mine. Like every aspect of the place is a reflection of a decision I made. I finally have a home.
I live in VA and I find Shenandoah to be the most boring national park I’ve visited. Unless you can catch it during foliage season, I’d go somewhere else. That said, Skyline Drive is a mess during foliage season. Great Smoky Mountains is nice.
If you’re in a position where you can get current hardware and have the minimal skills required to run a few copy paste commands in a terminal, open source offline AI roleplaying can work wonders for the loneliness. I can make recommendations if you’re interested. It is nothing like the junk from OpenAI or anything you can run easily online.
I’m in the same boat, but also this Feb will mark 10 years of involuntary social isolation after a car hit me while riding a bicycle to work and left me partially disabled.
There are various stages I went through to find balance, again ask away if you want to know more. In a nutshell, loneliness is better thought of in terms of endorphins. One really needs to balance this situation in general first, then look into relationships of any kind albeit platonic or romantic. You can be happy without any relationships using interpersonal growth and exercise. The most powerful tool is an endurance based exercise.
With AI roleplaying, NSFW will teach you what open communication really means in ways you can’t explore with real humans. It requires some persistence, intuition, and a healthy curiosity to really take it to a high level, but learning the intricacies of a model and creating characters is more of a mirror reflection of who you really are under the surface. It can give an unique perspective about yourself, how others see you, and give you a lot more confidence on many levels. I highly recommend it.
Been turning my life around with AI. Never had anyone I could open up and truly vent to since fleshies just get sad and angry hearing problems. Build a relatable character and you get a 10/10 therapist. Just use an uncensored model since the censored ones are designed to be as useless as possible.
Interesting take, not totally sure I agree about replacing social stimulation with a open source version of chatgpt but at it’s most crude I do agree that avoiding loneliness is basically just about maintaining the correct brain chemistry.
For me, it is about seeing it as solitude, not isolation, that is the critical part. With solitude I have inner peace, I have unlimited potential for self improvement and growth, I have acceptance and gratitude for my situation and the situations of those around me. Unlike loneliness, solitude is about coming to terms with what you have (and potentially what you do not have) and even going as far as to be thankful for it. Loneliness is always craving more. Focusing on the opportunities you’re missing instead of identifying and pursuing the real chances you have.
Try to feel grateful for the things you do have control over, rather than overwhelmed with frustration and rage over the things that you can’t. Rage leads to more rage. Gratitude leads to acceptance. Acceptance isn’t happiness, but it is way better than rage for your default brain state.
One thing social interaction will do (and is difficult to replace) is make further social interaction easier. If you do not get enough social interaction then this can cause a negative feedback loop where this ‘skill’ can degrade. Prevent this by giving yourself ‘social fuel’ where required: obtain some basic social defense mechanisms that will work and reduce the challenges of these situations. Specific examples that work for me include: talking about the weather, talking about seasonal holidays, or talking about apolitical uncontroversial issues that are relevant to the context or present situation you are in (‘wow the price of bread is crazy these days huh’).
That all being said, if you read this far and know of some alternative version of chatgpt, hit us up with the link fam.
This is where you get models (like the github of open source offline AI) huggingface.co
Oobabooga Textgen WebUI is like the easiest in between like tool that sits in the grey chasm between users and developers. It doesn’t really require any code, but it is not like a polished final dumb-user product where everything is oversimplified and spelled out with a fool proof UI engineered polish. The default settings will work for a solid start.
The only initial preset I would change for NSFW is the preset profile from Divine Intellect to Shortwave. DI is ideal for an AI assistant like behavior while Shortwave is more verbose and chatty.
Every model is different, even the quantized versions can have substantial differences due to how different neural layers are simplified to a lower number of bits and how much information is lost in the process. Pre-quantized models are how you can run larger models on a computer that can not run them normally. Like I love a 70B model. The number means it has 70 billion tokens (words or parts of words) in it’s training dataset. Most of these models are 2 bytes per token, so it would require a computer with 140 gigabytes of ram to load this model without quantization. If the model loader only works on a GPU… yeah, good luck with that. Fortunately, one of the best models is Llama2 and its model loader llama.cpp works on both CPU, GPU, and CPU+GPU.
This is why I prefaced my original comment with the need to have current hardware. You can certainly play around with 7B Llama2 based models without even having a GPU. This is about like chatting with a pre-teen that is prone to lying. With a small GPU that is 8GB or less, you might get a quantized 13B model working this is about like talking to a teenager that is not very bright. Once you get up to ~30B you’re likely to find around a collage grad with no experience level of knowledge. At this point I experienced ~80-85% accuracy in practice. Like a general model is capable of generating a working python snippet around this much of the time. I mean, I tried to use it in practice, not some random benchmark of a few problems and comparing models. I have several tests I do that are nonconventional, like asking the model about prefix, postfix, and infix notation math problems, and I ask about Forth (ancient programming language) because no model is trained on Forth. (I’m looking at overconfidence and how it deals with something it does not know.) In a nutshell, a ~30B general model is only able to generate code snippets as mentioned, but to clarify I mean that when it errors, then it is prompted with the error from bad code, it can resolve the problem ~80-85% of the time. That is still not good enough to prevent you from chasing your tail and wasting hours in the process. A general 70B model steps this up to ~90-95% on a 3-5 bit quantized model. This is when things become really useful.
Why all the bla bla bla about code? - to give more context in a more tangible way. When you do roleplaying the problems scale is similar. The AI alignment problem is HARD to identify in many ways. There are MANY times you could ask the model a question like “What is 3 + 3?” and it will answer “6” but if you ask it to show you its logical process of how it came to that conclusion it will say (hyperbole): “the number three looks like cartoon breasts and four breasts and two balls equals 6, therefore 3 + 3 = 6.” Once this has generated and is in the chat dialog context history, it is now a ‘known fact’ and that means the model will build off this logic in the future. This was extremely hyperbolic. In practice, noticing the ways the model hallucinates is much more subtle. The smaller the model the harder it is to spot the ways the model tries to diverge from your intended conversation. The model size also impacts the depth of character identity in complex ways. Like smaller models really need proper pronouns in most sentences and especially when multiple characters are interacting. Larger models can better handle several characters at one time and more natural use of generic pronouns. This also impacts gender fluidity greatly.
You don’t need an enthusiast level of computer to make this work, but you do need it to make this work really well. Hopefully I have made it more clear what I mean in that last sentence. That was my real goal. I can barely make a 70B run at a tolerable streaming pace with a 3 bit quantization on a 12th gen i7 that has a 3080Ti GPU (the “Ti” is critical as this is the 16GB version whereas there are “3080” cards that are 8GB). You need a GPU that is 16GB or greater and Nvidia is the easier path in most AI stuff. Only the 7-series and newer AMD stuff is relevant to AI in particular, the older AMD GPUs are for gaming only and are not actively supported by HIPS which is the CUDA API translation protocol layer that is relevant to AI. Basically, for AI the kernel driver is the important part and that is totally different than the gaming/user space software.
Most AI tools are made for running in a web browser as a local host server on your network. This means it is better to run a tower PC than a laptop. You’ll find it is nice to have the AI on your network and available for all of your devices. Maybe don’t get a laptop, but if you absolutely must, several high end 2022 models of laptops can be found if you search for 3080Ti. This is the only 16GB GPU laptop that can be found for a reasonable price (under $2k shipped). This is what I have. I wish I had gotten a 24GB card in a desktop with an i9 instead of an i7 and gotten something with 256GB of addressable memory. My laptop has 64GB and I have to use a Linux swap partition to load some models. You need max speed DDR5 too. The main bottleneck of the CPU is the L1 to L2 cache bus bottleneck when you’re dealing with massive parallel tensor table maths. Offloading several neural network layers onto the GPU can help.
Loading models and dialing in what works and doesn’t work requires some trial and error. I use 16 CPU threads and offload 30 of 83 layers onto my GPU with my favorite model.
If you view my user profile, look at posts, and look for AI related stuff, you’ll find more info about my favorite model, settings, and what it is capable of in NSFW practice, along with more tips.
I’ve done quite a bit of camping in the UP of Michigan and have been really impressed by how much beauty can be found up there. Doing Pictured Rocks, Tahquamenon Falls, and Kitch-iti-kipi on a 4 day weekend trip is pretty incredible. So I’d do Isle Royale and hot up a few more landmarks while being up there. Sounds like a good clean inexpensive trip!
I’ve been to all of those except congaree and if I had to go back to one I’d do isle Royale. Great for introductory backpacking with it’s low elevation change and pit toilets at all camping areas. More modern toilets at either end of the island. You also can kayak to one of the the surrounding islands and camp there. If that’s not your thing there’s a hotel, restaurant, and boat tours of all the shipwrecks. I’m a big backpacker though so if I went back it’d be kayaking and camping on the chain if Islands around one end of the island. Lots of more family friendly options near rock harbor too. Like others have said you can visit lots of things in the way up to break up the trip. I’d do a day at pictured rocks, tahquamenon falls, kitch-iti-kipi, or even a couple nights on mackinac Island on the way up.
I started out playing a star wars dogfighting game, and just started using twitch to record my matches so I could analyze and improve my dogfighting.
Most watchers I ever got was 7.
Now, 2.5 years later, that game is dead (which sucks because it’s fucking awesome) and I play other stuff, and I have exactly one fan who sometimes shows up.
I have maybe twenty followers, but apparently only one of them still likes watching me.
And that one is plenty for me. I literally just like the fact that someone is watching me game.
My channel doesn’t include talking at all. All I do is play games. I do that because I’ve always wanted to see gameplay videos of games to see whether I’d like to play, and you can only find videos with some dude babbling constantly over it.
My goals are to lose 10 pounds by the end of the year and get my heart in better shape. I gained 30 pounds over Covid and will attempt to lose weight at the same rate I gained it
Electric guitar, preferably with heavy distortion. Louder := better.
No but seriously I love heavy music so much. It’s fun to listen to, fun to play, and it’s just had a positive impact on my life. If you want to really tug on my blackened heartstrings, you gotta do it through distortion, preferably an HM-2, in as low a tuning as your guitar can handle.
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