Ask HN: Good Sites for/with AI Enthusiasts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good Sites for/with AI Enthusiasts?

126 pointswruza56 comments

As an enthusiast sometimes I feel that I get stuck in a corner and could use some overview. A newsforum about AI engineering could help. E.g. most articles about practical things (think civitai guides), some articles dive deeper into how this tech works (think 3b1b). Do you know a good one?

I only google things and am not e-social, so may miss something obvious like “civitai’s good though, why” or “there’s tech jesus but for AI on YT”.

Interested: AI tech, SD inference and training, local LLM models and prompting/settings, VLMs, TTSs, other models, scripts, experiments, popsci.

Disinterested: CEO said, politics, winter, alignment, eats us all, not a human, etc.

I can provide my lora training and automation experience, for the most part (around 100 sd 1.5 loras, few versions each).

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Simon Wilson’s (simonw on here) blog is good, lots of good notes from someone who actively plays with a lot of LLMs.

https://simonwillison.net/

AI explained. It's a youtube channel that gives a nice in-depth overview of the latest papers in the field of LLMs.

https://www.youtube.com/@aiexplained-official

They also have a free newsletter and more behind a Patreon subscription.

https://signaltonoise.beehiiv.com/p/the-3rd-era-of-ai-langua...

https://www.patreon.com/AIExplained

Like it or not, Stephen Wolfram. e.g. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-goi... and https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

https://gwern.net/#deep-learning

Gwern is the place for me. His deep dive on meta-learning is always interesting.

blog design is goat

Recommending Gwern on any technical topic is practically cheating; he always has in-depth, impeccably referenced overviews, complete with experiments he has done.

For deep learning in particular, I will add Neel Nanda's interpretability work: https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability

He's the best writer online. If you're reading this Gwern, know that you're greatly admired.

Hey I have a blog site where I write about implementing different papers and doing deep dives on the papers!

https://ym2132.github.io

I try to go for those things you're looking for. It's hard to find good resources nowadays with real people behind them.

I hope you enjoy the posts. Feel free to reach out about anything on there

Neat ! Bookmarked :)

Thank you!

You've created an account just for this two word comment?

Totally not suspicious.

Fwiw I didn't create that account, I didnt notice it was so new earlier. It is a bit weird though

random tangent: I like your input.sh website

Reading through this now. Really appreciate the knowledge sharing!

Your content is amazing and with some more polish I feel like it would really shine! (Some sentences not flowing quite right is a little confusing for me, reading the GAN deep dive)

Hey, thanks for your feedback, I'm glad you're finding it interesting!

Noted I am quite new to writing like this, where exactly was it confusing? I'll definitely take this on board and try to increase the clarity in my writing.

It’s a big field!

But if you’re in a few discords and a bunch of subreddits, you’re doing it right.

The most interesting stuff happens in GitHub PR’s, but you have to know where to look. Kohya’s misnamed SD3 branch has a ton of good flux hints, for example. It’s also where furkan gets pretty much all his content, before it gets paywalled.

Unfortunately, unless you participate full-time it’s hard to follow along. But if you really dig in and learn to modify your tooling (Comfy, kohya etc), you’ll start to come across some really impressive people who are all self-taught, and very accessible.

It’s totally possible to work your way up to the frontier with a few months of hacking. (And disposable income for GPU time.)

And the overlap between image AI’s and LLM’s is actually pretty great since they’re all transformers under the hood.

Civit, in my experience, is a good source for weights but most of the guides are written by people without much actual experience.

If you haven’t already, use tensorflow or wandb to get an intuitive understanding of your training parameters. It’s very easy to connect your tools to these services. This is by far the most helpful thing I’ve done, and something I really regret not doing sooner.

Any discords you recommend?

I'm on:

Image

- Terminus Research Group, from bghira of SimpleTuner/diffusers https://discord.gg/cSmvcU9Me9

- AI Toolkit https://github.com/ostris/ai-toolkit https://discord.gg/VXmU2f5WEU

- Stable Diffusion https://discord.gg/stablediffusion

LLM

- LLamaIndex https://www.llamaindex.ai https://discord.com/invite/eN6D2HQ4aX

- Nous research https://discord.gg/nousresearch

- LangChain https://discord.gg/hMrfPpUk

Platforms

- Replicate https://discord.gg/replicate

- Fal https://discord.gg/fal-ai

> use tensorflow

I think you meant TensorBoard?

yep!

>It’s also where furkan gets pretty much all his content, before it gets paywalled.

Who/what is Furkan?

https://www.youtube.com/@SECourses

http://x.com

You can find 99% of companies and reasearchers. Just follow them. If you need some names, just ask!

x requires an account.

LOL

A site run by a fascist transphobe? Hard pass.

But you're happy living in a country built on the bones of ??? run by warmongering ???

I hate that this is true, but it is. If you want ot keep up to date with news, following on X + hanging around on discord is the way.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity

https://paperswithcode.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI

https://genai-handbook.github.io/

https://www.latent.space/podcast

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1567233122252750848

r/LocalLLaMA

LocalLlama is the place. Really high quality people and discussion there and surprisingly collaborative. Very different than most subreddits.

How is /r/machinelearning

good but not as community-oriented I'd say as locallama

the machinelearning subreddit has a lot of great experts there.

/r/learnmachinelearning isn't moderated well enough

I like LocalLLaMA because it's not just for algorithm/math experts, it's for people who want to use LLMs locally (as the name says), so there is often practical discussion on how to use "off the shelf" models and kits. This also implies a patient crowd who will sometimes go into great detail about specific details, since there are many non-specialists.

Go to one of the AI Tinkerers events in your area?

https://aitinkerers.org/p/welcome

This one sends a fairly good (generated) summary each day:

https://buttondown.com/ainews

This is a pretty good weekly roundup of art-related developments:

https://aiartweekly.com/

Keep a broad perspective: https://pivot-to-ai.com/

https://www.lesswrong.com/ for HN-style longer AI-related posts, especially around alignment and consciousness

I think that's what OP is not interested in

Indeed, OP's "disinterested" list matches LessWrong almost perfectly.

> Disinterested: CEO said, politics, winter, alignment, eats us all, not a human, etc.

Isn't it pretty niche to not want discussions of winter or alignment? I guess you can go read Nick Land? If there's not at least a mini-winter or alignment some time soon it's going full Nick Land, right?

What I mean is, Nick Land is the only person I know of who can at least sort of credibly claim to have a theory for why alignment isn't just not guaranteed, but is in fact impossible, and there's ~no chance of a lasting winter.

what

OP wants technical discussions

Even then isn't it irresponsible to avoid talk about progress from other labs vs the probability of winter? Either way you could get wiped out hard, investment wise and product/startup wise.

This indy guy is ‘hands on’

https://youtu.be/GUVrOa4V8iE?si=OF1mLgWyr0tcrpBZ

Huggingface community

Chipp AI public discord is pretty active and folks tend to talk about the latest stuff there. It’s a mostly non-technical crowd though.

https://hype.replicate.dev/

Let me know if that’s a good fit.

I like Machine Learning Street Talk discord server.

www.machine-ethics.net if you've interested in the ethics of AI

Here's a primary literature review on Nick Land's thesis that AI and capitalism are teleologically identical and will converge on the event horizon of the techno-economic singularity.

It's AI hype to the max.

https://retrochronic.com/

Not really not "eats us all, not a human" though. Do OP's requirements really make sense?

Just simulate your own with some LLMs?

ask chatgpt about your favorite research echo chamber

This is why I'm creating https://medium.com/ai-engineers to focus on the rising class of AI engineers and practical content for devs who want to use AI to build apps.

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