amiantos.net

The hysteria over Discord implementing age verification inspired me to set up my own forum/chat system, so after a little research, I set up Discourse. This makes a lot of sense, I think, because it lets me consolidate all of my project update stuff into one place where it makes the most sense, and also works as a support forum for my apps outside of GitHub, if such a thing is needed.

I’ve been using my personal discord server as a place to dump all sorts of stuff, which has ended up feeling like I am just chucking all of my thoughts into a blackhole, where they will never be seen or recovered by anyone. With Discourse, at least there’s a permanent archive that is within my control and people can find it by googling around, unlike Discord, which is an infinite void.

If you’re interested in all things tech & AI, and all things Brad, well, it’s the place for you to check out.

There’s not much else to say about it. Discourse seems like a really cool forum system and every time I’ve used it across the internet, I’ve liked it.

Without further ado…

https://discuss.bradroot.me

Last year, after taking a trip to Europe and having a bit of a Midnight in Paris experience that left me wanting to meet more strangers from all walks of life, it felt like the right time to finally satisfy a nearly lifelong curiosity about Freemasonry. It seemed like a no-brainer: I’d get to spend time with worldly and cultured men once a week, hopefully nourishing my intellect and fulfilling my human need for camaraderie.

Unfortunately, after spending more than a year visiting the lodge every week, that didn’t seem to be the case. I don’t want to harp too much on Freemasonry in general, but it’s remarkable how what is essentially a theater troupe full of lonely dweebs has used the illusion of secrecy to make itself appear to outsiders like an exclusive society full of powerful people.

Freemasonry is more like a support group for bored, lonely men in their late thirties — perhaps a healthier alternative to a full-blown midlife crisis. That wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t take themselves so seriously while behaving as hypocrites who only seem to care when recruiting others.

I knew going in that, for the most part, Freemasonry appears externally to be the dwelling place of right-wingers. When I mentioned an interest in it online, I heard from multiple people who said they’d visited lodges in the southern United States and were aghast that the members seemed to be “literal Nazis.” I assume they really meant “very right-wing.” I didn’t end up at a very right-wing lodge, but it was still a clear majority — and ultimately, this aspect of Freemasonry disillusioned me the most.

Before I began going to the lodge, I was intrigued by an alleged rule about “not discussing religion or politics.” I thought this meant there would be some insulation between me and finding out that some of the Brothers held reprehensible political views. Unfortunately, that rule apparently only applies to inside the lodge room itself — not the dining area. Very quickly it became clear that right-wing Brothers couldn’t help themselves and would bring up politics at every opportunity.

• On my first visit or close to it, a Brother told me that he was right-wing and his wife was left-wing, and that “I just have to cover my ears when she starts talking about politics.” Okay — you hate your wife, got it.
• A Brother told me he was a Libertarian, that he thinks the government should not provide any public services, and that the Christian Church should provide them instead. I did not point out that religious institutions regularly decide not to treat members of the public who don’t adhere to their moral guidelines, for fear I’d find out he thinks it’s perfectly fine for hospitals to reject patients on religious grounds.
• A Brother spoke positively of segregation, saying that Israel is really nice because all the religious groups live separately from each other and that there’s “nothing wrong with wanting to be around your own kind.”
• One Brother was well known for saying he wanted to be a Mason because George Washington was a Mason and that it inspired him to be walking in the same footsteps of “such a great man.” (P.S. George Washington was a slave owner.)
• During the infamous “THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS” debate between Trump and Harris, a Brother loaded up the debate in the meal area and began shouting, “Trump, stop getting distracted! You have her beat on policies — just stick to policies!”
• A Brother showed me an AI-generated video of Ronald Reagan telling a joke about how liberals are stupid because we want to give aid to the homeless. He prefaced it by saying, “This is what’s making me happy this week!” And here I thought Freemasonry was supposed to be a charitable organization, but the only thing making this Brother happy that week was a joke about how charity is foolish.
• When I became Facebook friends with some Brothers — a huge mistake — FB surfaced a post from the pandemic era where a Brother visited Arizona and praised how no one was masking, saying Arizona was “more free” than our home state. Keep in mind that the only reason masking was ever required was to protect vulnerable people in our community. And here I thought Freemasons were supposed to care about their community.
• That same Brother also commented on a post about Dave Grohl apologizing to Europeans for our terrible president: “You’re a musician, stick to making music.” I had to resist replying, “You’re a realtor, stick to selling homes,” and I now wish I hadn’t.

At one of the last meetings I attended, the lodge voted on accepting applications for several prospective Brothers. The process is an anonymous vote: Master Masons stick their hand into a box and drop either a white marble or a black marble into another chamber. If, after everyone has voted, there’s a black marble, that prospect is “black-balled” and not allowed to join. I suppose it’s meant to give every Mason an equal voice in the process, but I hadn’t thought much about it until that night.

During this vote, a black marble ended up in the box. Because the vote covered more than one applicant, they decided to do a second, “clarifying” vote — this time for each candidate individually — so they could identify which one had been black-balled. After the first candidate’s vote, a black marble appeared again. I thought, “Well, I guess that guy isn’t going to be a Mason,” which was a bit of a shock, since everyone seemed to like him (though I’d had my suspicions about him, which I’ll keep to myself).

But no. Instead of accepting the vote and moving on, everyone acted confused, and one Brother became visibly angry, ranting that this had never happened before — that no one had ever been black-balled at this lodge. He said that if a Brother felt that way, they should have addressed their concerns privately with the Master of the lodge, not used the vote to express them. It was explicitly stated that Masonic law dictates the applicant must be rejected at this point, yet the Brothers began scheming ways to get around the vote anyway.

When a vote is happening, no one is allowed to leave the lodge room. But they wanted to call the Grand Master of California to find a way to redo the vote — privately. So they decided it would still count as “not leaving the lodge room” to go into the storage closet behind the wall to make the phone call in secret.

During the call, the Worshipful Master walked around encouraging Brothers to whisper to him why they’d voted with the black marble, so the lodge could “handle it properly.” Of course, no one whispered a thing.

After the call, the Brothers returned and announced that there was a “special circumstance” where they could declare the vote invalid. Everyone was allowed to leave the room, with instructions that a new vote would be held in ten minutes: anyone who wanted to participate should return promptly. It was heavily implied that if you were the one who’d cast the black marble, you should leave — and not come back. Almost no one returned, and the second vote passed.

At this point, you might be asking yourself: what’s the point of a vote if no one is ever expected to be rejected by one? I certainly was. Brothers are told to “subdue their passions,” but all I saw that night was unsubdued anger and confusion. In an ideal world, the anonymous ballot would stand, and the others would trust that their fellow Brother had a good reason for his choice.

But apparently not. It’s hard to imagine a more disillusioning moment for anyone who still believes the rules of Freemasonry mean anything at all. As always, rules are applied selectively by those in power — never to the in-group. This particular prospect had a bit of local celebrity, so there was no chance they weren’t going to admit him.

I lost my nerve after the killing of Charlie Kirk. A Brother posted this, and another commented on it.

Keep in mind, Charlie Kirk said things like, “The Democrat Party loves everything that God hates,” that he “can’t stand the word empathy,” that “black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously — you have to go steal a white person’s slot,” and that his ten-year-old daughter would have to carry the baby if she were raped. Along with plenty of other statements revealing a deep hatred of his fellow man — many of whom would be the Brothers of these Brothers. And yet, somehow, “he would’ve made a great Mason.”

That was the final straw for me. If Charlie Kirk would have been a great Mason, then there’s no chance I would be one, because I don’t share his deep-seated hatred of women and minorities.

I also want to specifically note the phrasing of that FB post: “I remember a few shootings, but this is […] the most horrible for our time or anytime.”

Need I remind this Brother, back in 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, twenty children below the age of eight were murdered in a mass shooting. Does this Brother really believe that the murder of a single man, of Charlie Kirk, is more horrible than that?

Ultimately, my experience visiting a lodge and becoming a Freemason was deeply disappointing. I didn’t encounter anyone who struck me as worldly or cultured. One Brother spent months in Paris and even spoke of moving there — yet had no interest in learning French — which struck me as the perfect summary of the gap between appearance and substance.

I didn’t have one memorable conversation in over a year of attending weekly meetings, aside from a Brother who told me he’d visited a town in the South where there was still a sign on the way in that said, “Don’t let the sun set on your black ass.” Unfortunately, that’s a perfect metaphor for what the lodge became for me: a stark reminder that those who are most outspoken about religion-based morality often end up being the most bigoted and undisciplined in their behavior.

I noticed a lot of people ask in the AI Horde Discord how to run a worker. I thought it would be useful if the community had a blog post to point people to, and maybe that can be this post. Let’s go!

How to get an AI Horde API key

Be sure to get an AI Horde API key if you don’t have one. You can register here: https://aihorde.net/register. Be sure to protect this API key, put it in your password manager or somewhere else for safe keeping. This API key will be your ticket to all the kudos you can earn.

How to Run a Text Worker (“Scribe”) on Windows

If you’re using Windows, you’re in luck, because running a Horde worker is easier than ever thanks to Koboldcpp, which compiles all the bits and bobs into one executable file for you.

Step 1: Download Koboldcpp

Go to the Koboldcpp Releases page, and grab the executable most relevant to you. This is probably koboldcpp.exe. If you have a newer Nvidia GPU, grab koboldcpp_cu12.exe. Stick this file in a folder somewhere, like D:\koboldcpp\koboldcpp.exe

I like to make a presets and models folder in here, so your folder might end up looking something like this depending on which version of koboldcpp you downloaded.

Step 2: Download a Model

Koboldcpp can run models quantized in the GGUF format. What does that mean in the most basic sense? Koboldcpp can run models that are compressed in a way that allows them to run on lower-end hardware, with some trade-offs (like decreased quality of generations). For example, CohereForAI/c4ai-command-r-v01 requires ~70gb of VRAM in its original form, but a 4-bit quantization (available here) of it only requires ~23gb of VRAM.

We’re going to focus on a model that everyone should be able to run locally, Sao10K/Fimbulvetr-11B-v2, which is a smaller model that really excels at roleplay chat, and there is plenty of demand for it on the horde. It’s a personal favorite of mine as well.

Step 2.a: Find a GGUF version of the model

Google (or use your search engine of choice) “<model name> gguf”, in this case we’ll look for “fimbulvetr-11b-v2 gguf“. Usually the first result going to huggingface.com is what you want. In this case, we’re going to end up on the second result, at mradermacher/Fimbulvetr-11B-v2-GGUF, because it gives us more options in regard to quantization sizes.

Step 2.b: Download a GGUF version of the model

You can see on the model page for that GGUF version, that there is a chart that tells you how “good” the various quants are, but here are some general tips:

• Models hosted on the horde should be Q4 or greater, to ensure best generation quality.
• You should pick the largest quant that looks like it can fit in your GPU’s VRAM.
  • If you have a 8gb GPU, get a model under 8gb, etc.
• If you aren’t sure what to try, try Q4_K_S first. You can always download a bigger quant and try it later.

Download the .gguf file into your koboldcpp/models folder. My models folder looks like this:

Step 3: Configure Koboldcpp

Now we’re ready to launch Koboldcpp and start configuring it. The initial Quick Launch screen has all the main information we need to worry about.

1. Hit browse and pick the .gguf file you downloaded into your models folder.
2. Set the context size you want. I like to have plenty of room for context, so I pick 8192 by default, but if you have less system power you should try 4096 to speed up generation times.
3. If you’re certain the model will fit entirely into your VRAM (because you downloaded a model smaller than your available VRAM), set a large number here. If you don’t know if the model will fit into your VRAM, there will be a section below about figuring out layer quantity.

1. The model name is very important to get right, as it determines how much kudos you will get for your submitted generations. If you put an incorrect name here, you will get very few kudos. To makes sure you put the right name, check the model whitelist for the name of your model, without any quantization naming attached. In this case, we see that the base model of Sao10K/Fimbulvetr-11B-v2 is in the list. But that isn’t the name we want to put into the “Horde Model Name” slot, we want to identify that the model is being run with koboldcpp, so we put in the model name as “koboldcpp/Fimbulvetr-11B-v2”. Nothing else matters, you do not need to include the quantization level in the name.
2. This is where you put your API key so you can receive kudos properly!
3. Your worker name should be the same every time you run your worker, regardless of the model being used.
4. Save your configuration to a .kcpps file so it is easy to reload it later. This is what the presets folder is for, save your configurations in there so you can easily use them later on. ⚠️ Koboldcpp doesn’t save your settings automatically!

Once your configuration is saved, hit Launch!

Step 4: Is it Working?

Once your worker is running, you should end up with a terminal display that shows you what your worker is up to. It looks like this.

1. This is how many kudos you are earning for this specific job. If this number is very low, like 1 or 2 kudos, you likely have your model name configured incorrectly or the model is not whitelisted for the horde. Double check that your model name is correctly entered and that the model is whitelisted.
2. This read out shows how many jobs your worker has completed and how many kudos per hour you are making. If you’re not earning several thousand kudos per hour, your worker is likely configured incorrectly or you’ve picked a model you are not able to run at a decent speed.

You can test your worker through the horde by using Kobold Lite. Load up the website and then click on the “AI” button in the top left corner.

1. Put in your AI Horde API key if you haven’t before.
2. Check the box “Select By Worker”
3. Look for your worker in the model list. If you don’t have a Purple Heart here, it’s just because your worker is not yet “trusted”. More on that later.

Click OK, then pick a desired scenario (KoboldGPT is the easiest for testing, I think) and submit a chat request. You know your worker is running when you get a message back and it shows your worker name and model name in the bottom of the client, like this:

If you ended up here and all looks well, congratulations, your worker is running and racking in the kudos.

Troubleshooting

“Where are my kudos? I’m not getting the right amount of kudos.”

To prevent abuse of the horde by bad actors, when you first start running a worker, half of your earned kudos are held in escrow. After a week or two of running a worker without issue, you’ll become “trusted” and receive all kudos owed to you (the kudos held in escrow plus all future earnings). (By “without issue”, I just mean that your worker is returning proper generations and there is no monkey business happening.)

“What was all that about layers and how can I run models larger than how much VRAM my GPU has?”

When you are configuring Koboldcpp, it asks you how many GPU Layers to use. This can be useful if you want to run a model that is just slightly too big for how much VRAM your card has. But how many layers does each model take up? There is a way to guess this yourself, but I like to just try to load the model in Koboldcpp and see what it says. For example, the 8bit quantization of Fimbulvetr I’m using displays this in the console when loading.

You’ll see it says that this model had 49 layers that it is loading in the GPU memory. If we didn’t have enough memory to store the full model, we could configure Koboldcpp with GPU Layers set to 40, and then it’ll load most of the model to the GPU, and the rest to system memory for the CPU to use. This can be very slow, so it’s recommended to only offload as many layers as needed to run the model at all. The more layers on the GPU, the better!

“I need more help!”

Not a problem at all, there are a lot of people who are willing to help you over on the KoboldAI Discord. There are lots of people far more knowledgable than I am, and if you decide you like running a worker a lot, they can help you level up your hosting game. Remember, this is just the most basic guide, there are more robust methods (like aphrodite) that allow you to run several models at once if you have the hardware capable of doing it. Feel free to ask about that in the Discord.