I've been on Mastodon for a few years, and though it has less drama than Twitter/X, it does seem to have reached critical mass of users and does cover most of my needs for random gossip. I am surprised that that nobody has mentioned it here.
Threatening assault on a paying customer for not knowing tipping norms is just one of the many reasons why American society is in the state it is. I've seen similar things like 'be glad I didn't spit in your food', 'next time they are getting trouser food'. This is despicable.
You can always hide in your own country, as long as you or the people who protect you are able to stay in power, but at least you cannot use the rest of the world as playground or shopping center. Sucks to be a rich kleptocrat and not be able to have a yacht in Nice or be able to take your wife shopping in London.
Hi Jacob, thanks for sharing! Witchcraft looks super interesting—starring the repo now.
The late interaction (ColBERT / MaxSim token-level) approach is fascinating for local search. Retaining per-token interaction matrices gives incredible semantic retrieval precision without losing fine-grained token context.
From an architectural standpoint, the main trade-off I explored with Hillock was moving away from dense token-embedding matrices entirely toward an explicit neuro-symbolic split:
1. Symbolic Grounding: Hard Subject-Predicate-Object (SPO) triples in relational SQLite tables to eliminate vector drift for exact factual memory.
2. Subsymbolic VSA Gating: A 10,000-dimensional Vector Symbolic Architecture (HDC) hypervector space on CPU using subword n-grams and GloVe SimHash projections for <1ms gating and pronoun resolution.
3. Edge VRAM Footprint: Keeping the whole engine under 1.2 GB VRAM on a GTX 1070 by using a CUDA bi-encoder pipeline (Fastcoref + MiniLM + GLiREL) for non-generative document parsing.
I'm curious—how do you manage the index footprint and per-token memory overhead in Witchcraft when scaling to larger local document collections?
There is no memory overhead, in that everything resides on disk/in the sqlite database, and is read from there on demand. That said, sqlite for blob storage is a bit inefficient, so the next version will use tightly packed structs on disk. I also managed to finetune an embedding down to 96d, so in the coming version the storage for the index is getting close to parity with the size of the text being indexed.
Make sure you watch the Big Blue, in the original French (not US, has the wrong soundtrack) version, but with the original(!) English speech, not the dubbed-to-French version.
Smoke free perhaps but not nicotine free by far. I live in Denmark and have a teenage son, he tells me that 90% of girls at his year are hooked on illegally imported and unregulated vapes, much stronger in nicotine than cigarettes, and in some cases loaded with fentanyl and other drugs. We have had the first couple of deaths of 15-year olds already.
Meanwhile, the parents' generation and politicians are looking at the declining cigarette sales (and declining tax revenues) and are busy declaring victory and self-congratulating, with no idea what is coming.
It is not that long ago that smartphones would die from moisture exposure if you left them in the bathroom while taking a shower. I had a girlfriend around 2001 who spent all her savings on a shiny new Nokia 8250, got drunk and barfed on her jacket. The phone was in the pocket, and the moisture from the wet jacket completely killed it, she cried about it for weeks. I also remember my mother dropping her iPhone 6 in the harbor while getting off a boat, it got picked up but was dead. Last year I was out hiking in the rain, and my aging (5+ years old) iPhone 11 got water inside it and started dying soon after (I'd been sailing/swimming with the phone and had exposed it to salt water, apparently that will wear down the seals if you do it enough.)
In other words, I absolutely see the need for waterproof phones, even for ordinary people doing ordinary things, and am never going to buy one that isn't.
In Denmark, wind mills were initially quite popular, because locals owned them and benefited. The iconic wind farm Middelgrunden on the waters outside of Copenhagen is 50% owned by a co-op.
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