manicdave

For example, Britain's national mapping organisation's brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It's called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that's because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.

So I was just reading this thread about deepseek refusing to answer questions about Tianenmen square.

It seems obvious from screenshots of people trying to jailbreak the webapp that there's some middleware that just drops the connection when the incident is mentioned. However I've already asked the self hosted model multiple controversial China questions and it's answered them all.

The poster of the thread was also running the model locally, the 14b model to be specific, so what's happening? I decide to check for myself and lo and behold, I get the same "I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses."

Is it just that specific model being censored? Is it because it's the qwen model it's distilled from that's censored? But isn't the 7b model also distilled from qwen?

So I check the 7b model again, and this time round that's also censored. I panic for a few seconds. Have the Chinese somehow broken into my local model to cover it up after I downloaded it.

I check the screenshot I have of it answering the first time I asked and ask the exact same question again, and not only does it work, it acknowledges the previous question.

So wtf is going on? It seems that "Tianenmen square" will clumsily shut down any kind of response, but Tiananmen square is completely fine to discuss.

So the local model actually is censored, but the filter is so shit, you might not even notice it.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the next release. Will the censorship be less thorough, stay the same, or will china again piss away a massive amount of soft power and goodwill over something that everybody knows about anyway?

Just listened to him ramble on about AI for an eternity on the radio.

We're all going to die.

Are his advisors all so lacking in knowing anything as to have never spotted a mistake in Google's AI interventions.

We're just on the brink of bankruptcy and he's diving headfirst into what the rest of the world is beginning to realise is a boondoggle.

When people say there's been an "𝑥 fold increase in such and such." They mean such and such is 𝑥 times as big.

If you get something that actually folds like a sheet of paper, the amount of layers doubles each time. One fold = twice as many layers. Two folds = four times as many layers...

This warning is on the Indian release only

As far as I know this isn't a feature that exists, but I know the protocol should make it fairly easy.

What I'm thinking is for Lemmy to basically have the option to inherit the comment thread when posting a URL to another fediverse service.

E.g. If crossposting a Lemmy thread, you get a tickbox saying "inherit comment section" or something and it makes the new thread effectively a symlink to the original.

This could also be used to bootstrap other fediverse services like pixelfed and peertube by enabling people to comment directly from their Lemmy instance.

Aren't you all surprised by them blocking public rights of way and trying to intimidate anyone who says they should live by the same rules as the rest of us?

All profits from the digital sales will go to the Woodland Trust.

The countryside: a place of tranquillity, less compromised by modern life, harmonious communities, innocence and safety. This much is the rural idyll. Yet the rural is also the unknown rustling in the hedgerow as the country lane is travelled at night. It can be the half-seen shapes and shadows in the woodland and copse; the desolate hillside, the treacherous rocky crag; the lone leafless tree atop the knoll. The countryside is the space where supposed closely-knit social ties become like suffocating and impenetrable knotweed to the outsider, the incomer, the blow-in. It is the place of curious rituals, wyrd practices and often unfamiliar and still-surviving lore: a space haunted by the ghosts of occluded pasts. Beyond the supposed rural idyll malevolent forces often work, uncanny sensations prowl and the eerie is always lurking and ready to be encountered.

Rural Eerie seeks to explore this countryside through music, sound, spoken word, poetry and visuals. It hopes to bring to the surface different ruralities – real, half-remembered, imagined, absent and present – and make us think differently about the countryside.

A number of poets and writers were commissioned to speak to this idea. Each poet and writer gave Flange Circus a number of keywords from their writing and the band then crafted individualised soundscapes befitting their work.

Presented by Flange Circus, Emily Oldfield (Haunt Manchester) and MASSmcr, Rural Eerie was debuted and performed in its entirety on the 19th October 2019 at The Peer Hat in Manchester, as part of the Gothic Manchester Festival 2019 (bit.ly/2XF8kKB). An abridged version was performed at the Manchester Folk Horror Festival III 1st Feb 2020, also at The Peer Hat in Manchester (youtu.be/egd7JTdDyxY).

Flange Circus are:

Pete Collins: Keyboards, Programming, Noises, Visuals.

Bon Holloway: Keyboards, Programming, Field Recordings, Noises.

John Taylor: Keyboards, Accordion, Noises.

The poets and writers appearing on Rural Eerie are:

Emily Oldfield:

Emily is a writer originally from Rossendale, currently based in Manchester. She is interested in the intersections between writing, place, community and under-covered histories. Her first poetry pamphlet ‘Grit’ was published with Poetry Salzburg in March 2020. During 2020 she has been working on a project about Winter Hill as part of Penned In The Margins’ Edgelandia series and is the Editor of Haunt Manchester (Manchester Metropolitan University). She has also written for a number of music websites including Louder Than War and At The Barrier.

Mark Pajak:

Mark has written for The BBC, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others. His first pamphlet, ‘Spitting Distance’, was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as a Laureate’s Choice and is published with smith|doorstop (poetrybusiness.co.uk/bookshop/). You can find him at: markpajakpoet.com

Helen Darby:

Helen is a poet and performer who has lived in the North West of England for nearly 50 years. Her piece for Rural Eerie is inspired by harvest rituals, folk music and the rise of populism in contemporary times. You can find her at: Helendarbypoetry.com

Sarah Hymas:

Sarah lives by Morecambe Bay, England. Her writing appears in print, multimedia exhibits, as lyrics, installations and on stage. She also makes artist books and immersive walks. You can find her at: www.sarahhymas.net

Andrew Michael Hurley:

Andrew Michael Hurley is a short story writer and the author of three novels, The Loney (Winner of the 2015 Costa Book Awards First Novel Award), Devil's Day and Starve Acre. He teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School.

Track 12, ‘The Desolation’, is read and performed by Louise Holloway. This comprises a number of stanzas of the epic poem ‘The Desolation of Eyam’ by Mary Howitt (1827). The last stanza is from Canto II of ‘Medicus-Magus’ by Richard Furness (1836).

All music written by Flange Circus.

Field recordings from various rural locations in: Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and North Yorkshire.

Produced, Mixed and Mastered by Bon Holloway at High Peak Recordings, New Mills, Derbyshire. www.highpeakrecordings.com

Mark Pajak, Sarah Hymas and Andrew Michael Hurley were recorded at Manchester Metropolitan University with the assistance of Lucy Simpson.

Flange Circus would like to extend special thanks to Lucy Simpson and Emily Oldfield. Without their dedication and enthusiasm, Rural Eerie would never have happened.

We would also like to thank: all the poets and writers, MASSmcr, Haunt Manchester, RAH! Manchester Met (@mmu_RAH), The Three B's, Mrs. H., KMH & DCH & MNH, Nick Kenyon at The Peer Hat, Ian Rothwell and Salford City Radio, Richard Skelton, Kevin Fisher, Matt Gannicliffe and you. Especially you.