I gave a workshop yesterday on the effective use of large language models. We had participants from numerous Dutch corporations.
There is a lot of unmet demand for a non-American LLM. I suggested DeepSeek, but that's Chinese. I suggested Mistral, but that's French (joke!). I found OpenGPT-X from a European consortium, but it seems quite immature as yet. https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X
Perhaps there will be a European DeepSeek replica soon -- it should be quite affordable to build. But that's just one piece of the ecosystem -- there is a need for a lot of digital infrastructure.
You joke but there is a lot of truth behind this. Europe is a very divided place and often prefers to do business with a foreign company than help their literal neighbour due to historical baggage.
“We should regard the Internet Archive as one of the most valuable pieces of modern history; instead, many companies and entities make the chances of the Archive to survive, and accumulate what otherwise will be lost, harder and harder. I understand that the Archive headquarters are located in what used to be a church: well, there is no better way to think of it than as a sacred place.”
Amen. There is an active effort to create an Internet Archive based in Europe, just… in case.
Yup! We're here and looking to do good work with Cultural Heritage and Research Organizations in Europe. I'm very happy to be working with the Internet Archive once again after a 20 year long break.
Great question and thank you for asking it. I don't know at this point as we're still ramping up. At this point, it would be helpful to follow us on bluesky and mastodon and help spread the word about our efforts.
Brewster is giving a speech on Tuesday March 18 at the University of Leiden. Not sure if you're in Europe, or in the Netherlands, but we're here.
I was looking to a book a wedding in this venue (The Permanent) and the Internet Archive server is prominently visible on the 2nd floor. The server is pretty cool and adds to the aesthetics of the space.
With this belligerent maniac in the White House who recently doubled-down on his wish to annex Canada [1], I wouldn't feel safe relocating there if the goal is to flee the US.
Anyone who takes even an hour to audit anything about the Internet Archive will soon come to a very sad conclusion.
The physical assets are stored in the blast radius of an oil refinery. They don't have air conditioning. Take the tour and they tell you the site runs slower on hot days. Great mission, but atrociously managed.
Under attack for a number of reasons, mostly absurd. But a few are painfully valid.
In 2020 at least one public filing shows expenses of $19.9MM with $9.2MM classified as wages. So no more than $900k/month in 2020 and maybe double that now. Recent data is messy due to Covid donations and lawsuits.
How significant is "in the blast radius of an oil refinery"? Once every how many years should I expect a typical oil refinery to explode? This really doesn't seem like it should be their first, second, fifth, or twelfth priority to"solve".
EDIT: asking Claude:
Based on historical data, major refinery explosions in developed countries might occur at a rate of approximately 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 2,000 refinery-years of operation. Using this very rough estimate, a single refinery might have approximately a 50% chance of experiencing a significant explosion somewhere between 700-1,400 years of continuous operation.
Keep in mind that Brewster bought the building because it looked like the icon, not vice versa. Not exactly the amount of thought that might be expected of an archival institution.
I understand what you describe is prohibited in many jurisdictions, however I’m curious about the technical aspect : in my experience they host the html but often not the assets, especially big pictures and I guess most movies files are bigger that pictures. Do you use a special trick to host/find them?
No. And every video game every made is available for download as well. If you even have to download it: they pride in making many of them playable in browser with just a click.
Copyright issues aside (let's avoid that mess) I was referring to basic technical issues with the site. Design is atrocious, search doesn't work, you can click 50 captures of a site before you find one that actually loads, obvious data corruption, invented their own schema instead of using a standard one and don't enforce it, API is insane and usually broken, uploader doesn't work reliably, don't honor DMCA requests, ask for photo id and passports then leak them ...
It's the worst possible implementation of the best possible idea.
And yet, it's the best we currently have. I donate to them. We can come with demands of how it should be managed, but it should not prevent us from helping them.
If you poke around at what US government agencies are doing, and what European countries and non-profits are doing, or even do a deep dive into what your local library offers, you may find they no longer lead the pack.
They didn't even ask for donations until they accidentally set fire to their building annex. People offered to help (SF was apparently booming that year) and of course they promptly cranked out the necessary PHP to accept donations.
Now it's become part of the mythology. But throwing petty cash at a plane in a death spiral doesn't change gravity. They need to rehabilitate their reputation and partner with organizations who can help them achieve their mission over the long term. I personally think they need to focus on archival, legal long-term preservation and archival, before sticking their neck out any further. If this means no more Frogger in the browser, so be it.
I certainly don't begrudge anyone who donates, but asking for $17 on the same page as copyrighted game ROMs and glitchy scans of comic books isn't a long-term strategy.
They've tried for years and nobody steps up. And as it turns out they couldn't even maintain torrent files at scale. Broken for years, and still no strategy for versioning them when metadata or files change.
Also until recently their whole model was storing physical material (on an active fault line next to an oil refinery) then allowing digital access to it. Courts ruled that illegal for modern works.
It's in ren'py, so the states are all hard-coded, LLM powers interactions with NPCs --including branching based on being able to convince them. So rather complementary to this project.
The dynamic features presented are interesting; at the same time, the lack of great consistency with LLMs makes me prefer their use for local tasks, and have a human make the global decisions.
Other interesting games (that are readily playable):
The group behind AI Dungeon released the Wayfarer model in 12B and 70B variants. The former is small enough to run on local hardware. 10/10 would get eaten by a giant sloth again.
People stress about good system design because of maintainability. No one cares about binary code because that's just the end result. What matters is the code that generates it, as that’s what needs to be maintained.
We have not yet reached a point where LLM generated code can also be maintained by LLMs and the tooling is not there. Once that happens, your argument will hold more weight. But for now, it doesn’t. Injecting unreadable, likely bug-ridden code into your application increases technical debt tenfold.
Magnesium — cheap & plain-as-possible magnesium pills — are a great laxative. I suspect that this has follow-on psychological effects. All the expensive pills are just to avoid the laxative effect. No further benefit. So if you think a good dump contributes to your wellbeing, consider the plain stuff.
There is no such thing as “plain”. You can’t eat pure magnesium. mg oxide is cheap, but apparently mostly laxative. Mg citrate is part laxative but also absorbed. Mg glycinate is more expensive but avoids the laxative effect.
For the muscle relaxant effect (other than perhaps bowel muscles), mg oxide is hardly useful.
> For the muscle relaxant effect (other than perhaps bowel muscles), mg oxide is hardly useful.
This is what I’m questioning. Most of these variants are claiming subtler psychological effects — when the basic stuff has a very direct effect that I think is positive.
I always just buy the magnesium pills that just say “magnesium.”
Well please read things more carefully in the future.
No one sells pills of pure magnesium - that would be eating metal shavings or metal beads.
It is ALWAYS a magnesium ion paired with an anion of some sort. Is that what you mean? Ones with only magnesium salt or oxide - I.e citrate, carbonate etc
As others have illustrated no one sells "magnesium" pills. It is a pill of magnesium reacted with something else. The source of this varies as to whether or not the product wants to be considered as vegetarian, kosher, or otherwise.
> All the expensive pills are just to avoid the laxative effect. No further benefit.
Different substances may have seriously different subjective (e.g. on mood, sleep) effect in at least some people (e.g. me). I may be a good idea to try bisglycinate, orotate, threanate to check whether some of them act the way you like.
Theonate gives scary NDE style dreams/out of body experiences. It is supposedly a nanoparticle formulation that crosses the blood brain barrier. Makes me wonder about safety.
Not to me, gives me a full night of deep uninterrupted sleep instead.
> out of body experiences
I would pay thousands of dollars for a pill which would give me an out of body experience. To me it seems among the most important things to have experienced before you die.
Have you taken any malaria prophylaxis pills? I had the weirdest dreams on those (maybe not an oit of body experience though), and so did most of the people on the work trip I needed them for. Malarone seemed most likely to trigger vivid dreams, some people had received a newer? medicine which seemed less impactful.
Some malaria drugs have pretty serious warnings aboit psychiatric effects that may continue even after stopping use, so be careful.
There are many substances (including legal and easily available) which can cause vivid and weird dreams. For example you can try apple juice and St. John's wort.
“Let us not forget, however, that for the Roman religion, conceived as a rigid state religion, the unbridled nature of a cult like that of Dionysus was considered dangerous. Arriving from Campania, the Dionysian cult spread rapidly to Rome, where the famous scandal of the Bacchanalia broke out and the devotees were deemed dangerous for the stability of the res publica itself.
In 186 BC a famous senatus consultum prohibited the cult of the god and prosecuted transgressors. Numerous places of worship were destroyed and even death sentences followed. In Pompeii, a sanctuary dedicated to the god and dating back to the middle of the third century BC remained in operation until the end of the city, in 79 AD and Pompeii always showed a fervent and growing devotion to the mysterious manifestations of the god.”
Blavatsky? Incarnate God? this might be an attempt to smear masonry.. what giant quasi-government institution in Brazil might have interest in doing that?
There is a lot of unmet demand for a non-American LLM. I suggested DeepSeek, but that's Chinese. I suggested Mistral, but that's French (joke!). I found OpenGPT-X from a European consortium, but it seems quite immature as yet. https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X
Perhaps there will be a European DeepSeek replica soon -- it should be quite affordable to build. But that's just one piece of the ecosystem -- there is a need for a lot of digital infrastructure.
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