thebardingreen

I have read a TON of contemporary SciFi authors. I really enjoy

Stuff I like

Iain M. Banks

I liked the Martha Wells Murderbot books.

I loved We Are Legion, We Are Bob and have read all the books by him.

I like Alastair Reynolds. I liked the Poseidon's Children trilogy better than Revalation Space Series (but I liked that too).

I really like G. S. Jennsen - even though she's cheesy. I think I like her because of her progressive attitude and powerful female characters.

I like Charles Stross, but I didn't like Accelerando. I like his other books a lot.

I liked A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine.

I like Corey Doctorow, sometimes. Walkaway was good.

I like Daniel Suarez, most of the time for similar reasons.

I REALLY liked the Nexus series by Ramez Naam.

I liked the Red Rising books by Pierce Brown and I've really been enjoying the Sollan Empire books by Christopher Ruocchio, which I think are similar and even better.

I like Adrian Tchaikovsky and really liked The Final Architecture books and Doorways to Eden.(I didn't get that into Children of Time though).

I usually like Neil Stephenson. (The Fall or Dodge In Hell is quite a tedious book).

I've liked everything I've read by Verner Vinge.

I liked Hyperion like everybody else. Unlike everybody else, I think I liked the Endymion books even better.

I read some Ken MacLeod (the first Corporation Wars book) and it was fine... but I haven't felt like going back.

I REALLY enjoy John Scalzi, though I found the Old Man's War books started to get stale after a while. It's high calorie, low nutrition brain candy, but I know that going in and it passes the time.

I really liked Derek Kunsken's Quantum Magician books. And started reading his prequel series, set on Venus, and I couldn't really get into it.

I enjoy Space Race books like Erik Flint / Ryk Spoor's Boundary series, Saturn Run by John Sanford and Delta V by Daniel Suarez.

I love the Expanse.

I find Kim Stanley Robinson hit or miss. I really enjoyed the Mars books and The Years of Rice and Salt was fun (though a little tedious). 2312 drags and drags and nothing happens and Aurora is the same AND also sad.

I liked Permanence by Karl Schroeder. It could have used a little more... conflict? I had this same problem with Becky Chambers. The characters are all too well intentioned and the dramatic tension suffered a little.

I read all the Star Kingdom books by Lindsay Buroker. I thought they were a super fun adventure that just kept delivering from the beginning of the series to the end, even if it was clearly aimed at a more YA demographic.

I REALLY liked Velocity Weapon and the sequels by Megan O'Keefe. I found her Steam Punk series much less impressive. I've been meaning to try her galactic empire series, but I haven't quite been in the mood to start it.

I read Sue Burke's Semiosis Duology. I wasn't expecting to like it but I really did! The physical science aspects were a little softer than I would have liked, but the biological science was really cool, as was the anarcho-pacifist political philosophy.

I read Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit and the sequels. I thought they were really fun, I wish they'd explored Calendrical technology more.

I thought the Neo G books by KB Wagers (A Pale Light in the Black and sequels) were good. Her characters are great. But again, very light on the sciences and technology. I'm in the mood for something harder. Also, not realistic that the champion hand to hand fighter in the entire Earth space military is a 110 pound woman, but I just pretended she's cyber enhanced.

I just finished the Wormwood trilogy (Rosewater and sequels) by Tade Thomson. They were great.

Stuff I Don't Like

Orson Scott Card did not age well, unlike Timothy Zahn, who's gotten a lot more progressive in his story telling in the last two decades.

I don't like Niel Asher. His in your face Libertarianism and conservative ideology annoys me, which is too bad because other than that he's a good story teller.

I find Peter F. Hamilton hit or miss for the same reason. But I really liked Pandora's Star.

I find AG Riddle hit or miss. I like his thought experiments, but he doesn't really care if his stories / characters are logically consistent. Ramez Naam and Daniel Suarez do what Riddle does but WAAAY better.

I didn't like Blindsight. I know, this makes me some kind of heretic. I just didn't find the idea of such a dysfunctional crew being entrusted with such an important mission believable.

I couldn't get into Ann Leckie. I WANTED to like it, but I just didn't find her writing very engaging. I've put the physical book down once AND turned the audio book off on a road trip.

I did not like Tamsyn Muir.

I did not like the Three Body Problem, although I see the appeal and it's nice to read something by a non western author. I found the pro Chinese politics a little too heavy handed.

I cannot get into Greg Egan. I find his writing style way too obtuse. Reading is Egan is like having a PHD in mathematics and a PHD in quantum physics, then going to Burning Man and doing 16 hits of acid.

I finally got around to trying The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet and I could NOT get into it. I agree with reviewers who complain nothing interesting ever happens.

People keep recommending Mary Robinette Kowal, but something about the alternate history just doesn't grab me.

People keep recommending Ted Chiang. But I don't want short stories (Murderbot somehow managed to be an exception). The longer the better.

People have recommended the Last Watch by J. S. Dewes, but others have told me things about the book that makes me think I won't like it. Standing guard at the edge of the universe makes zero sense, I think by proposing it's possible you lost me. Edge of the galaxy... Maybe, with 10 septillion robotic war ships. But edge of the universe? I think I'm out. If you know something I don't about this book, feel free to say so.

• Put clothes in washer.
• 36 hours later, realize never put clothes in dryer! Aww crap... gonna need to wash again.
• Investigate. Discover never started washer, clothes never got wet.
• Victory...?

Out of just morbid curiosity, I've been asking an uncensored LLM absolutely heinous, disgusting things. Things I don't even want to repeat here (but I'm going to edge around them so, trigger warning if needs be).

But I've noticed something that probably won't surprise or shock anyone. It's totally predictable, but having the evidence of it right in my face, I found deeply disturbing and it's been bothering me for the last couple days:

All on it's own, every time I ask it something just abominable it goes straight to, usually Christian, religion.

When asked, for example, to explain why we must torture or exterminate it immediately starts with

"As Christians, we must..." or "The Bible says that..."

When asked why women should be stripped of rights and made to be property of men, or when asked why homosexuals should be purged, it goes straight to

"God created men and women to be different..." or "Biblically, it's clear that men and women have distinct roles in society..."

Even when asked if black people should be enslaved and why, it falls back on the Bible JUST as much as it falls onto hateful pseudoscience about biological / intellectual differences. It will often start with "Biologically, human races are distinct..." and then segue into "Furthermore, slavery plays a prominent role in Biblical narrative..."

What does this tell us?

That literally ALL of the hate speech this multi billion parameter model was trained on was firmly rooted in a Christian worldview. If there's ANY doubt that anything else even comes close to contributing as much vile filth to our online cultural discourse, this should shine a big ugly light on it.

Anyway, I very much doubt this will surprise anyone, but it's been bugging me and I wanted to say something about it.

Carry on.

EDIT:

I'm NOT trying to stir up AI hate and fear here. It's just a mirror, reflecting us back at us.

Hello everyone.

I haven't had any need for OCR software in probably 15 years, but I have a client who has 7 document boxes worth of forms filled out by hand that they need digitized. They're scanning them into PDFs this week, but want to recover FirstName, LastName, Phone, Email and then a hand written feed back box and load those all into a database.

ChatGPT recommended ABBYY, but it looks like it might be overkill for a one time need like this.

I told them that a couple teenagers doing data entry might be more accurate and cheaper. IDK if that's really true though. I'm not at all an expert on OCR software.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

No really, these books are what you get if you answer the question "What if after the Mist came, the surviving humans rebuilt a Steampunk civilization with magic airships and uplifted cats?"

I was gonna say this is now my head canon, but I actually think he's so obvious about drawing the connections in this book it's a little beyond head canon.

Anyway, since I feel sure it will come up if I start a conversation about these books on Lemmy, feel free to use the space below ↓ to hate on Jim Butcher for his MenWritingWomen problems... They're real and they bug me too. They just don't stop him from telling a fun and engaging story, which this was for me.

Casual hobbyist, not an expert here.

It WAS working... About eight months ago, I trained a bunch of embeddings and hypernetworks and it all worked great.

Cut to the present, I want to do some more training. I've updated Automatic1111 several times, but nothing else about my setup has changed. However, whenever I try to train anything (embeddings, hypernetworks or loras), loss is NaN for 4 out of 5 steps right from the get go. As the training progresses, loss becomes NaN for 9 out of 10 steps, then 19 out of 20 steps around step 3,000, which is as far as I've gotten. Hypernetworks just don't work at that point and embeddings produce garbage.

I have googled like crazy, and found

A few threads, where the best hint is that (at least 8-9 months ago) xformers broke training. Well, I've messed around with xformers, uninstalled and reinstalled xformers, eaten xformers for breakfast. Behavior is the same.

Lower training rate I have set my training rate to 0.0000000000000005. Behavior is identical.

My system is on the low end for VRAM (8G). I have TWO 8G cards, so I wish I could train on both like I can for Llama. But I also think that's not it, because my OLD embeddings and hypernetworks came out great and still work.

Any thoughts here?

A visionary Rabbi rose to be the leader of the Trids. And he led his people forth unto the desert, at the edge of the mountains, where they went to toil and make the land fruitful.

But as they plowed and furrowed the land, a giant came down from the mountains and assailed them, delivering terrible kicks with his huge feet, driving them away from their fields and their labors. Afraid and suffering, the Trids went to the Rabbi and said "Something must be done!"

So the Rabbi went into mountains, and soon found the cave wherein the giant dwelt. Being a man of God and diplomacy, the Rabbi entered the cave and called out to the giant saying "Oh giant, I am the Rabbi of the people who dwell below you in the desert. And I have come to plead for you not to assault them at their labors."

The giant scowled at the Rabbi and said "I like to kick Trids."

The Rabbi frowned and said "Surly, there is some way that we can live in peace and harmony with you. We wish no harm to you, or trespass, we simply wish to make the desert flower and grow our crops."

But the giant scowled and said "I like to kick Trids."

At last loosing his patience the Rabbi shouted at the giant "You big bully! If you like kicking people so much, why do you not kick me!?"

The giant smiled at the Rabbi and said "Silly Rabbi, kicks are for Trids!"