will

Believe it or not that initial wave of consolidation brought prices down. A license of SGI Power Animator cost over $30k in the 90s. softImage was not far behind. 3ds Max basically took the fight out of them, at which point Autodesk started going on a buying spree.

Trolling.

The two things I always tell my type-A kids:

1. There is no “on time” or “on schedule”, and
2. You can’t min/max your way through life

Both are great ways to stress/burn yourself out.

It doesn’t come up much except to underscore that in The Culture there is no “normal” with regard to sex or gender because people can be whatever they want and can change on a whim. so without a base gender/sex you can’t have a queer gender/sex.

I believe in the Quantum Claus^TM theory - there’s just one guy, and he just makes one present for just one kid (on the nice list, which has at most just one name). But on Christmas Eve he exists in a superposition of states at every child’s house with every possible gift.

Making your own embeddings is for RAG. Most base model providers have standardized on OpenAIs embeddings scheme, but there are many ways. Typically you embed a few tokens worth of data at a time and store that in your vector database. This lets your AI later do some vector math (usually cosine similarity search) to see how similar (related) the embeddings are to each other and to what you asked about. There are fine tuning schemes where you make embeddings before the tuning as well but most people today use whatever fine tuning services their base model provider offers, which usually has some layers of abstraction.

The easiest option for a layperson is retrieval augmented generation, or RAG. Basically you encode your books and upload them into a special kind of database and then tell a regular base model LLM to check the data when making an answer. I know ChatGPT has a built in UI for this (and maybe anthropic too) but you can also build something out using Langchain or OpenWebUi and the model of your choice.

The next step up from there is fine tuning, where you kinda retrain a base model on your books. This is more complex and time consuming but can give more nuanced answers. It’s often done in combination with RAG for particularly large bodies of information.

Thanks for the reminder!

@pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org posts fantastic, fediverse-only comics to !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org. They can be super weird and will admittedly not be for everyone, but hey isn’t that why we’re all here in the first place?

So. Much. Fucking. Litter.

Seriously. Fully-automated luxury gay space communism. I could do without most of those adjectives and still be living it large.

Down with MATA!