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With a decent local GPU and some free open source software like ollama and open-webui you can try "open source" LLM models like Meta's llama, Mistral AI's mistral, or Alibaba's qwen entirely offline.
posted by Lenie Clarke to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 12:24 PM
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"When we initially reached out to scores of chefs, recipe writers, historians, and food luminaries for nominations for their most important American recipes of the past 100 years—Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformative for American home cooking between 1924 and 2024?—we expected strong opinions, but we didn’t anticipate the philosophical quandaries that adjudicating and assembling them would bring up."

The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years, from Dan Kois and J. Bryan Lowder at Slate.
posted by Frayed Knot to MetaFilter on Nov 20 at 4:57 PM
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As part of its open ethos, BlueSky provides access to "the Firehose" -- a real-time feed of all updates from across the entire network, an increasingly rare feature as more and more of the web gets walled off. The code for it looks pretty complicated, but it enables some really neat visualizations: there's the Firesky infinite scroll, with messages firing too fast to read -- Nightsky, a charming page that imagines the network as stars twinkling in the heavens -- and coolest of all, Firehose 3D, which converts the BlueSky feed into a three-dimensional dungeon crawl in the style of old Windows screensavers. Discover more projects built on the API via the Community Showcase, or check out the growing list of MeFites that are active on the platform, now that it no longer requires an invite.
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Nov 16 at 9:55 PM
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An enterprising MFA student at East Tennessee State University created a Baba Yaga "collectible figurine" as a thesis project. Ariel Adams' project involved designing the character, building it, and painting it, using a variety of analogue and digital tools. Her style and interpretation of the figure are interesting, not a 1:1 with the conventional depictions we most often see of Baba Yaga, and her thesis is absolutely worth a read, if you are interested in Baba Yaga, action figures, and/or character design.
posted by cupcakeninja to MetaFilter on Nov 16 at 6:03 AM
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The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity. from The Death of Search [The Atlantic: ungated]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 11:31 AM
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This belief that ideas literally originate in a single person’s mind, and that they should be paid by the rest of humanity for the rest of time is fucking ridiculous. Ideas do not reside inside self-contained people - they reside in a network of interdependent and interconnected people - but the fact that Bezos, or Musk, or whoever, was an early-mover in articulating a particular idea means they get locked in as somewhat arbitrary figureheads, and the fact that they’re billionaires simply reflects the legal reality of share ownership. They are products of our system, not creators of our system. from The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires by Brett Scott
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 1:08 AM
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Last week, bible scholar, author, vlogger (and owner of one of the finest t-shirt collections in town) Dan McClellan posted a video asking the question Did God choose an adulterous man to rule his nation? Apparently some viewers took issue with Dan’s message, so he immediately posted a followup video, On the intersection of some of my research & politics making abundantly clear what he meant.
posted by Thorzdad to MetaFilter on Nov 20 at 4:30 PM
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For those who suffer from recurrent UTIs, there's a vaccine. Urinary tract infections can be extremely painful and some women experience them frequently. Now there is a vaccine to help prevent UTIs.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 5:12 AM
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To my mind, this is the ultimate “realist utopian” image. If somebody says the word “Utopia” to you, you should think of an adult woman smuggling the severed head of her father away from an execution. from Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on Nov 21 at 12:27 AM
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One of the oldest, scarcest elements in the universe has given us treatments for mental illness, ovenproof casserole dishes and electric cars. But how much do we really know about lithium?
posted by ShooBoo to MetaFilter on Nov 16 at 10:08 PM
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The Colour Literacy Project "The Colour Literacy Project is a 21st century initiative that recognizes colour as a meta-discipline. Our mission is to provide state-of-the-art educational resources that strengthen the bridges between the sciences, arts, design and humanities in order to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. " [via: Is color even real?]
posted by dhruva to MetaFilter on Nov 19 at 2:35 PM
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R.U. Sirius interviews Jeremy Braddock about his new book Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as told in Nine Comedy Albums and the place of the seminal comedy group The Firesign Theatre in 20th century technoculture.
posted by Horace Rumpole to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 10:01 AM
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An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since.
posted by mittens to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 6:14 AM
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Most of Australia’s First Nations languages don’t have gendered pronouns. Here’s why. Australia’s 460 First Nations’ languages see the world in unexpected ways, revealing perspectives on the natural and spiritual worlds.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries to MetaFilter on Nov 21 at 4:35 PM
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The 100 Greatest Movie Musicals of All Time ...just what it says on the tin.
posted by fairmettle to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 7:23 AM
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Juan Romero, the busboy who cradled RFK’s head just after being shot, remembered those moments for StoryCorps. “I remember I had a rosary in my shirt pocket and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me. I wrapped it around his right hand and then they wheeled him away."
posted by zooropa to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 2:46 PM
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The haka is a Māori ceremonial dance best known internationally as the pre-game ritual of Aotearoa/New Zealand's All Blacks rugby team, but that association can sometimes obscure its true power as a symbol of formidable indigenous opposition, never better demonstrated than in Parliament yesterday when MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke led colleagues and members of the public gallery in one of the best examples in years.
posted by rory to MetaFilter on Nov 15 at 5:25 AM
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However, the calculator differs from the personal computer in one very significant way: calculators slid directly down the market from pricey machines owned by organizations to birthday gifts handed out by middle-class parents. At incredible speed (far faster than computers) calculators became as commonplace as wristwatches; indeed, it wasn’t long before manufacturers put calculators in wristwatches. Though the market leaders changed rapidly as the technology advanced, there was no disruption from below, no new path blazed by a doughty band of rugged entrepreneurs. We will have to consider later just why that was the case. from A Craving for Calculation
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on Nov 19 at 12:35 AM
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Chip Weinberger developed the Jamcorder, an always on device to record everything you play on your digital piano: "Truly set & forget, you never need to hit record. Instead, just open the app and all your music is already there. and we mean all of it. Jamcorder stores 25,000 hours of music — around 3 straight years — right out of the box. So you can focus on playing and just jam away." Video.
posted by ShooBoo to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 3:56 PM
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Dan Gardner on Henry Ford, his son Edsel, and unpasteurized milk. "Intellectual arrogance cripples the powerful but it is a danger to us all."
posted by russilwvong to MetaFilter on Nov 19 at 2:06 PM
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OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Effort! God knows we don't want to do anything... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 11:44 AM
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In a few years, we're going to have the first generation of adults who basically willfully didn't learn anything in school because they did all their work via cheat machine. When I think back to myself as a conscientious and nerdy kid, I still think that if all my peers had been using the cheat machine, I would have used it at least sometimes,... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 6:08 AM
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TBH, speaking as a librarian that works + researches heavily with old print, the current online-primarily search environment is already so attenuated and janky that it's likely just death through a few more of many, many cuts. There are a handful of big web pools that I now find indispensable (Hathi, Chronicling America, Internet Archive), but... [more]
posted by ryanshepard to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 11:48 AM
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Counterpoint: Can Someone Please Write Normally About This Fascinating Woman? [view]
posted by Ghidorah to MetaFilter on Nov 20 at 2:16 PM
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I would like to add that it is fully possible to save a sixteen year old from a bad situation without having sex with them. [view]
posted by robotmachine to MetaFilter on Nov 20 at 4:24 PM
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Don't be that person. Based. It just pukes up whatever people say to it. It's not an intelligence. If people send it trolling, it trolls. It doesn't know what it's saying, it doesn't know what saying is, it doesn't know what knowing is. Responses like this are always really challenging for me because I want to tailor my reply... [more]
posted by Ryvar to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 6:32 AM
55 users marked this as a favorite

I don't see any isssue with using AirBnBs for this, after all they want to be treated as hotels, and hotel rooms have long been a staple of many pornographic shoots. [view]
posted by zekesonxx to MetaFilter on Nov 19 at 10:05 AM
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I have implemented the advice from this article on all my devices, and am now unpleasantly surprised when I use some other device and am reminded that AI "overviews" in search results are a thing. Personally the AI overviews are of negative value to me. I want to understand the sources of the information I am finding, so that I can... [more]
posted by OnceUponATime to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 12:19 PM
48 users marked this as a favorite

It just pukes up whatever people say to it. It's not an intelligence. If people send it trolling, it trolls. It doesn't know what it's saying, it doesn't know what saying is, it doesn't know what knowing is. I despair for the modern human mind, so feeble and easily manipulated. [view]
posted by kittens for breakfast to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 5:26 AM
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Let's not act like both sides have "news that supports their beliefs." Climate Change is not a belief, it's a fact. Immigrants "invading" is an erroneous and toxic belief, not a fact. Choosing sides is not just choosing one flavor of alternative reality over another, it's living in the world vs living in a cult. [view]
posted by rikschell to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 1:22 PM
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I would love a little checkbox on the google search page that says "Include only human-generated results". [view]
posted by RonButNotStupid to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 12:12 PM
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It's not even about effort. It's that the signal-to-noise ratio has fallen so much--especially because of all the endless AI slop that's being generated--that we can no longer perform basic information retrieval tasks without being augmented by some AI assistant who will sort through the noise and distill information into something we can... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 12:18 PM
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more context, and more previously, which i wrote up elsewhere and am now reformatting/editing for here: one of the things that i really, really, really wish more people realized is that virtually everyone talking about the 4b movement in a positive light here in the west is not korean or korean diaspora. even most of the people... [more]
posted by i used to be someone else to MetaFilter on Nov 15 at 10:15 AM
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Inefficiency in search has long been the norm The wave of articles claiming that "something" is needed to fix search, less than a year after a wave of articles, largely in the same publications, making it clear that big tech execs ruined search on purpose to maximize profits is... really something. [view]
posted by DirtyOldTown to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 12:29 PM
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Any framing of LLM-related news that implies any sort of intentionality, positive or negative, on the LLM's part is just PR for the big LLM companies and their stockholders. Don't be that person. [view]
posted by signal to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 5:54 AM
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In recent years, more and more Google Search users have noted that the frustrations outweigh the delight—describing a growing number of paid advertisements, speciously relevant links engineered to top the search algorithm, and erroneous results. Generative AI promises to address those moments of frustration by providing a very different... [more]
posted by RonButNotStupid to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 11:38 AM
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let's be clear, He kept me safe, gave me protection. He was everything to me.... He was my world. is, uh, not inconsistent with a young person being groomed. like, at all [view]
posted by BungaDunga to MetaFilter on Nov 20 at 4:01 PM
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So everyone who needs a job is going to be a creative now? And this is why, as we move over to AI, creatives are being rewarded so incredibly well? Or is it that writing marketing material as a creativity influencer, which is what this looks like, is still the way to make money? Lo these many years ago, I was at a town hall meeting where... [more]
posted by Frowner to MetaFilter on Nov 18 at 12:10 PM
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If I had to do everyone’s homework in the universe for the rest of my life, I’d be pretty murderous too. [view]
posted by MirJoy to MetaFilter on Nov 17 at 5:19 AM
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Maybe some wider context - Te Tiriti was signed before NZ law existed, in fact it's essentially the act that caused NZ law to exist in NZ - it's a treaty (a contract) between the English Crown (King) and most (but not all) of the then Leaders of then Māori tribes, it happened at a time when there we very few white settlers. The Māori signed a... [more]
posted by mbo to MetaFilter on Nov 15 at 6:41 PM
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[more comments]