can’t say for sure but I know mine are doneskies ✂️🍆

To be honest I’ve never tried this on a PC.

Also as a heads up sorry if you know already what I’m about to say, I don’t know what your background is so I’m kinda assuming it’s “tech literate but hasn’t done a project like this before”. If it is too complex or too patronizing please correct me by asking questions or telling me what to skip next time, respectively.

I think most companies handle training by renting an instance on a cloud service provider and then running the training there. That’s the expensive part of development but can be mitigated by being smart with how often & what sort of training you choose. At minimum, a lot of debugging can be done on a PC.

Inference tends to be cheaper, so perhaps that could be done on a PC. I’ve never tried personally but could help look into it.

An application like this is usually referred to in industry as a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) LLM. The premise is you have an external database—such as a wiki, training materials, or set of news articles—and you teach the LLM how to reference that database when generating it’s replies. The database does not need to be large and you can also put in place measures such that it says “I don’t know” if unable to come up with satisfactory grounded answers.

Something to consider would be what sort of database you’d like to reference. I know someone who has a complete backup of the Transgender_Surgeries wiki including the posts it links to for example. I think that would help that community as there is an outstanding issue of most users finding it hard to read the wiki or simply not doing it. If you wanted to create an MVP I would be down to help advise with that and provide guidance/support if stuck or possibly if in need of funds.

I’d do it myself but my free time is mostly taken up by doing some online community organizing & having a boyfriend who exists in meat space. Would rather support/advise instead. I might also be able to pull some IRL contacts from my workplace (with connections to the trans community) as needed, can’t speak for them though.

It’s a really great idea tbh. It’s well defined & frankly I wish more clients came to us with projects this well defined with this good of a dataset. Usually it’s not so straightforward. If you decide its something you wanna keep working on please keep me in the loop. Otherwise I might circle back to it myself & will definitely ping you.

EDIT: some more notes re: the dataset. Once a working MVP is up using something like the wiki, we could figure out how to increase the scope of the database by e.g. ingesting subreddit data (look up Arctic Shift project on GitHub for ways around the API issue) or, better yet, using Lemmy’s APIs since those are all still open (as far as I understand it—still new to Lemmy). Compiling such a dataset and self-hosting a chat bot like that could be a way to ensure community knowledge lives on even if, say, Lemmy instances go dark as the platform evolves.

Yeah… you people are nice. Thank you all fr it’s so refreshing and rare to meet nice people on the internet these days

Honestly, it could be centralized for sure! Though I was also thinking more of just handing them a list of links to distribute on their own pages.

I think for most communities the first step is probably to have any sort of website (even a super basic HTML one) self-hosted outside the US for their members to bookmark. Even if they don’t migrate until a ban, their members can at least visit the site and see where the mods decided everyone should internet-meet up.

If they then wanted to link a list of additional backup resources, that could help spread by word of mouth where to go if other resources are down. I’m basically thinking some members will get lost and isolated if one day their main safe spaces vanish & we should try to limit that problem so long we have time on our side.

re:LLMs it’s an interesting idea IF you use an open weight model and take steps you’re not sharing the data with tech companies. I don’t for example think we want to help ChatGPT find out where all the trans.

But it is certainly possible to do a RAG LLM system IF you use an open weight model AND you have a dataset of trans resources! I’ve done these things before and don’t consider it too hard. You do need to have the dataset already compiled which can be a fair amount of work to begin with—after that it’s straightforward.

Right now there are efforts to back up a lot of resources in trans spaces that might go dark. I could see it being nice to for example convert the wikis and subreddit dumps into chatbots you can ask questions and get back answers with citations to where the info comes from.

It could help solve some of the issues faced by people e.g. not checking the wiki and then being confused…

EDIT: the more I think about it that’s a great idea and I’m adding it to my backlog. I could do it myself, don’t have much time, but could definitely advise on it and maaaybe pull in some real life contacts who do it as their career. Let me know if the LLM thing is a project you want to work on & I’ll try to facilitate

I think Canada, Mexico, & EU should coordinate so that a tariff on any of us is a tariff on all of us. Hit back dollar for dollar on any tariff affecting any of our economies.

Nice to see the EU joining in

Woohoo thanks! Hope you’re having a lovely holiday

Thanks so much! It’s great to hear from you. I have a few concerns about some of the details of how that might work & could use your advice. I sent you a DM :)

Big changes! HRT and surgeries are often inflection points for breakups. Sounds like you’re on the right track. Breakups are hard during any time let alone during second puberty. Good luck 🫶

I remember that feeling so clearly. Mood boost is one of the earliest benefits of HRT, or at least it was for me. Congrats!

Also for what it’s worth, I could never really date all that much before hormones. A month into HRT I had a cute little fling and later that year I met my boyfriend. 5 years and going strong.

Gotcha no worries thanks for the heads up

Thanks 🫡

Thank you! 😊

Thank you for tagging her for me! If she doesn’t see it I’ll reach out to her soon ❤️

Do you know who I would even talk to in order to find out if this instance is comfortable hosting them? In the long run I am working on setting up my own server but that won’t help if the sub is banned tomorrow for example

Yeah personally I think linking to a Reddit thread is fine because it can be deleted on Reddit still. And then just replying to it here with info so the people have to click through and poke around to get the info they need until eventually they decide to join, etc.

All the more reason to work with the communities to establish a backup.

Right which is what brought me here 😅

Tbh I think that Lemmy is not ideal for archiving existing knowledge. There are people already doing that and I suspect a mirror to wikis and such will be up and running shortly.

The ethics of mirroring the Reddit posts are also ethically dubious. The norm there is that people delete their shit all the time and move on with their lives after surgeries are done. That’s okay because the knowledge lives on via word of mouth about which surgeons are good, etc.

To my mind the much bigger risk here is that the community itself has nowhere to go when a ban happens so everyone just scatters. The data can all be backed up but it’s useless sitting on a hard drive with nobody to share it with.

I have talked to the mod at Transgender_Surgeries and the vibe is they’ve worked tirelessly for years doing a thankless job and are too burned out but are open to others taking the lead—probably more likely they would add it to a list of resources if someone else takes the lead on this

I agree with getting off of simply mirroring Reddit content but I think we need a bridge in order to get people posting here. Like if I reply with helpful info here then people have follow up questions maybe they’ll ask me here instead of there type of thing & slowly migrate over