One of anthracite's members (Delta-Vector) has been on a roll lately, below their introduction of a new model: Hamanasu a continued pretrain with books and more!
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After spending hours writing Python scripts and creating two massive datasets, Orion-Asstr & Orion-LIT, I finally got around to fine-tuning with them.
How did this start? Pretty much:
>Man, so many NeMo tunes. Kinda overdone.
>Man, I don't like Qwen at smaller sizes for RP.
>I know! What if I try to de-coal Phi-4?
I started things off with a continued pretrain run using Orion-Asstr & Erebus-87K, totaling about half a billion tokens. First attempt? LR was way too high, grad norm shot straight into the stratosphere. Second attempt? Lowered LR, and the grad norm stayed sane. Shocker!
Then I stumbled upon 100K rows of books on Hugging Face. Converted them into a usable format and trained on them, another half a billion tokens. The final pretrain was done.
Next up, some instruct tuning with something Phi-4 is very familiar with (assistant-style data). And with that, Hamanasu-15B was born.
Tried it out, and christ, it’s amazing at RP. Sticks to character definitions, handles story-writing beautifully, and doesn’t inject positivity or refusals into RP at all. Phi-4 used to skim over certain NSFW parts, but not this. Best of all? It doesn’t even feel that dumb! No, it’s not going to single-handedly build you a GPT wrapper to pitch to a VC, but it will stay focused and coherent in RP without spiraling into nonsense.
And this Instruct model isn't even the end, I plan on 3 more runs, one involving Magnum, another involving my very own chat-style Control-Mix and finally KTO to end it off.
I've been using Duolingo to try to divert some of the time I waste on Reddit to something that feels more satisfying and mentally healthy. Can you help me think of other apps/tools I can use along these lines?
I like that with Duolingo, I feel like I'm learning something at a slow/non-demanding pace. It's certainly more challenging than mindlessly scrolling Reddit, but it progresses slowly enough that it's not that much more of a lift for my brain than scrolling.
Are there other apps that may do a similar thing? Something else that slowly helps you learn a topic or skill? I want it to be all on the phone, so no needing to get out a notebook to figure out math problems or something. Maybe something that like, teaches you about identifying plants and then quizzes you on it? Just as a thought of something along the lines of what I'm looking for.
I already use my phone for reading library books from Libby, so I have that covered.
I'm not really interested in straight up games. I go through periods where I do crosswords or Wordle or what have you, but they don't hold my interest that long, and that's not what I'm looking for here.
The Lost Book Exhibition. "Livres Imaginaires, Reid Byers' exhibition of Imaginary Books, is a collection of volumes that live only in other books: lost, unwritten, or fictitious books that have no physical existence. [Items include The Giant Rat of Sumatra, The Murder of Gonzago, and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as Marlowe's Maiden Holiday whose pages were used by a cook to line pie tins and start fires] Its exhibition at the Fortsas Club has been extended until the end of 2024, when it will move to the Grolier Club in New York....After the exhibition, the books will return to a famed museum in Paris at 145 La Fayette St.
This piece has been lightly edited from its original version, which originally Valerie Stunning originally published on her site in twoparts.
Countless first responders, firefighters, search and rescue workers, EMT’s, law enforcement officers, ER nurses and doctors, military members, and even a Homeland Security guy or two have paid to see me naked. Accordingly, I often joke that I, too, was a public servant — especially because my experience working as a stripper for 13 years was that nudity is the amuse-bouche, but rarely the meat and potatoes of what these folks seek at the club.
First responders, like 98% of people I’ve entertained, often come for the titties and stay for the connection. It’s a group of people I was regularly happy to engage with, as no one appreciates a smiling professional party girl more than a person who regularly bears witness to the worst day of peoples’ lives. Actually, I was regularly happy to engage most of my customers. Ok, all of them except cops.
I have a long history of not trusting cops. I had the seed of distrust planted in me as a kid witnessing domestic violence, then nourished as a troubled teen, and grown and grown throughout my adult life — particularly during my tenure as a sex worker and community organizer. In fact, “not trusting” cops is putting it mildly, vehemently disdaining is probably more apt, to the point that if I met someone at work who admitted to being a cop (typically from another city or state) I would get up and walk away.
Heralding an ACAB ethos (all cops are bastards) has been a fixture in both my personal and professional belief systems. If I tally the combination of my own experiences plus years of organizing with fellow sex workers who’ve shared stories of being violated by police when they needed protection (or were just going about their business), and add in the endless historical and modern day examples of police racism and brutality, it’s really a no brainer. I like piña coladas, getting caught in the rain, long walks on the beach, and, I hate cops. That is, until a series of encounters at a ramshackle nudie bar in Colorado Springs.
The second-to-last club I worked at before retiring was a proper relic, the kind of place with un-ironic wood paneling and its original carpet and staff. The drinks were stiff, the sound system was weak, and the pool table was lopsided and spotted with unidentifiable gunk. As emphasized in this love letter I wrote to a jiggle joint in Vegas when it closed, I have a soft spot for strip clubs like this, and had a blast working there.
One night, as we were getting dangerously close to power hour (the hour before last call when all strippers go into overdrive pushing sales), I sauntered over to a big square man at the bar. He was clean cut, sported a bushy mustache, and wore a bright colored Hawaiian shirt. He appeared uncomfortable in that way highly anxious people do when they’re attempting to assert confidence. I appreciated his effort; it signaled he was dealing with some shit (who isn’t) but was making the effort to have fun. The first rule of strip clubs is you have to want to participate.
He bought me a drink and we took a seat behind the stage. Then I did what I always do when getting to know a prospective client: I sat in a way that flaunted my assets and asked innocuous questions. As a rule of thumb I never asked what people did for work. One, I really didn’t care (unless they were cops). Two, strip clubs should provide respite from work and real life problems (unless you’re a cop). Three, 90% of people ended up volunteering that information anyway, which always reinforced to me that work is where a lot of us source our identity and sense of value.
As we talked I noticed this guy was prickly. His mouth was saying all the right things, but the way he said them and his physical rigidity told me he was hiding. It made me not trust him. Unfortunately, my purse was a lot lighter than I had wanted it to be for the time of night it was, so I decided to sit a few minutes longer and continue to feel him out. I needed to know, was he a bad person? Someone capable of violence or at the very least being a disrespectful customer and more hassle than he was worth? If so, I’d cut my losses. Or was he, as I'd initially picked up on, fronting as a way to not think about or expose whatever he was dealing with outside the club?
I flirted a little more and as he talked, I realized his Hawaiian shirt had grenades on it. Then it dawned on me — the mustache, the prickliness, the douchie shirt… this guy was a cop. As if he had heard me think it, he suddenly stated that he was on leave from his job as a police officer.
He kept talking, but whatever he said after his reveal faded away. I was too busy slowly reapplying my lipgloss and taking note of the number of songs that had played since we sat down. Then I looked at the waning crowd in the room, mentally recounted my night's earnings, and made the calculated decision to try to close the sale. I lowered my voice, touched his arm, and went in for the kill. With a hefty dose of fuck it, he slammed his drink and stood up. We were off to the VIP room.
Of the 37 strip clubs I worked throughout my career, all of them employed at least one somewhat capable guy as security. At the same time, I have never trusted leaving 100% of my safety solely in the hands of a person who was almost always overworked, under-slept, and underpaid. Because of this distrust, my standard operating procedure before performing any kind of table dance, lap dance, private dance, VIP room, Champagne Room, or Fantasy Room was to conduct a TSA style search — a fun silly one that didn’t read as a search, but a search nonetheless. I’d tell customers a partial truth, that my bare ass was sensitive and if they wanted me to get close they’d have to empty their pockets because rubbing up on hard lumpy things while dancing did not feel good. Wink. It worked every time.
If eyes are the window to the soul, then seeing what’s in their pockets is the basement door. A few things I’ve witnessed customers toss on to the cocktail table or floor:vibrators, butt plugs, vials of coke, vials of poppers, pipes (for drugs other than weed), a sandwich baggie full of meth, knives of all sizes, patient ID wristbands, and wedding rings.
The only two things the cop had in his pocket were car keys and a crisp white envelope full of cash. On the front of the envelope read the words “college fund” with college crossed out and the word “stripper” written above it. That was a first, and it made me chuckle.
By the time our fifteen minutes had come to an end, I was struck by how withdrawn the cop had been throughout the dance. He couldn’t have cared less about being teased, aroused, or engaged in any way. Hell, he hardly even marveled at my award-winning ass. It wasn't that he was rude or indifferent he just wasn’t present. Truth be told, he seemed to only show signs of life when I gave him a final hug before we exited the VIP room.
I ended up seeing the cop two more times before I stopped working at that particular club, though it wasn’t until his last visit where I learned more. Once again, he showed up sporting a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, this one with rifles patterned across it; like the first time, he paid me cash from the “stripper fund” envelope, which by that point had seen better days.
Despite the fact we had established a bit of a report, he was still cagey. And I was still on guard about what his deal was. But a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
About a third of the way through the dance, he told me it was the last time I’d see him. I hesitated and tried to decipher if his admission was intended to provoke a specific reaction. Was he fishing for attention? Did he want me to ask him why, to gush and tell him he was going to be missed? Or was I reading too much into it, and he was just being polite?
It's not abnormal for a repeat client to tell me when they won’t be returning; after all, the connections I’ve formed with many of my customers have walked a line of intimacy, so I always considered them saying goodbye as a small gesture of respect. I suppose because I believed all cops were dismissive of sex workers’ humanity, it hadn’t occurred to me that this cop — now a repeat client — had humanized me enough to let me know it was his final visit.
While this consideration rattled around in the back of mind, I decided it was time to dig a little deeper. If it truly was to be the last time we saw each other, I had to know why the big Eeyore vibes? So I flipped my hair and casually responded, “are you not coming back to the club because you’re going back to work?” He replied with an abrupt, “No.” Then mumbled something about the reason he’d been on leave being more complicated, and fell silent.
I held his silence and waited. When confronted face to face with a naked stranger wafting knock-off Gucci perfume, who has suddenly gone from shaking her glittery ass to 2 Chainz to sitting perfectly still, it is proven that 99.9% of people will talk first. After two more verses, the cop continued, stating in a hushed voice the reason he was forced to take a leave of absence because he was struggling with PTSD. Ahhhhhh.
Now, you might be thinking this is the part of the story that leads me to some kind of come-to-Jesus moment. That after catching a glimpse of one cop’s vulnerability, I was suddenly inspired to change my cop-hating ways.Maybe I put a Blue Lives Matter sticker on my water bottle, or hung one of those Thin Blue Line flags in front of my house. I’d caution you not to get ahead of yourself.
While I did do my best to show outward sensitivity for this man’s obvious hurt, I also caught myself wondering: What awful thing did he do to get PTSD?
If this had been an ER Nurse, firefighter, or search-and-rescue worker expressing the same vulnerability, chances are I would have immediately empathized. After all, I know PTSD. When left unaddressed, I know how isolating and terrifying and unpredictable PTSD symptoms can be. How much it sucks to go from running errands on a regular Tuesday afternoon to having a full-blown flashback of a traumatic incident seemingly out of nowhere that proceeds to hijack your mental stability for the next week.
In that moment, the fact that I could relate to the terror of experiencing PTSD did not matter. Instead, my initial reaction was to dismiss the hauntedness in the cop’s eyes and how dissociated he was from his body in favor of abiding by a familiar narrative — one that had become somewhat of a commandment for me. In that moment, what mattered was that I had already judged this man based on his vocation, one whose representatives regularly degrade the very citizens it vows to protect and serve. And this rendered him undeserving of my empathy.
I keep revisiting my exchange with this not to decipher whether or not I was right or wrong in feeling justified, but because my feelings made me do to him the very thing so many people have done to me: I victim-blamed him.
Of course at the time I didn’t see it as victim blaming. And again, for the record, I didn’t say it aloud. I am a god damn professional. But just because I kept it to myself, unlike the people who have flat-out told me that because I chose sex work I get whatever I sign up for, it still felt gross.
What I felt gross about was that by victim-blaming the cop instead of empathizing with him I dismissed his humanity. And one of the biggest things I’ve advocated for as a community organizer is the humanization of sex workers, regardless of one’s moral stance about the work.
It’s a gale of hypocrisy that has knocked me off my crusading horse and forced me to examine: What does being right or wrong in feeling justified have to do with anything?
Do my thoughts and actions reinforce a belief that some humans matter more than others? Where do I draw the line in weighing the actions of the collective versus the individual? How does feeling justified in victim-blaming the cop contribute to the actual change I wish to see in policing? Furthermore, has there ever been a time in history when the way forward for a person or group of people who have been dehumanized was forged by them in turn dehumanizing others?
Since 2016, Valerie Stunning's blog has explored human issues through her lens as a small business owner, community organizer, and (now retired) sex worker. Her insights, advocacy work, and business ventures have been featured in HUSTLER MAGAZINE, Las Vegas Weekly, Las Vegas Review-Journal, and more. When she isn't writing, Valerie takes pleasure in being an amateur gourmand, expert gesticulator, and a glittering example of the American dream.
So, ironically, I already can't see any comments on Inoreader.
With the rollout of Inoreader’s new design in October 2024, we introduced a streamlined approach focused on discovering, consuming, and organizing content. As part of this update, we made the decision to sunset several social features due to low usage and limitations in their user experience. These features are no longer available in the new version.
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