micheal65536

So… If this doesn’t actually increase the context window or otherwise increase the amount of text that the LLM is actually able to see/process, then how is it fundamentally different to just “manually” truncating the input to fit in the context size like everyone’s already been doing?

Singer are by far the best for finding replacement parts and repair guides, followed somewhat by Brother. I would recommend avoiding the others if you want to be able to maintain or repair the machine in the future.

The stitch patterns should be documented in the manual. Otherwise they are somewhat self explanatory. The symbol looks somewhat like how the stitch will look. Straight stitch is usually a straight line (possibly dashed or dotted), and is usually the first pattern listed. Zigzag stitch looks like a line that moves from side to side in evenly-spaced triangles and is usually the second pattern.

There may also be various asymmetrical variations of the zigzag stitch, or ones that get narrower and wider over time, these are probably what you’re referring to as “all the other symbols”. Most of these will function as stretch stitches but you don’t need to use or care about them unless you specifically want them for their appearance. They make no functional difference. Some of the more elaborate ones may not stretch evenly or adequately.

If the machine has a straight stretch stitch option (as I explained in my other comment) then the symbol for this may vary so check the manual. It’s usually some sort of a straight line with dots or dashes.

Some machines also have a button hole mode which is usually listed alongside the other stitch options. Again the symbol for this can vary but it is usually some sort of a rectangle with wavy lines, and it is usually clearly marked in a different color or with a border around it or similar to distinguish it from the others.

Regarding needles, spools, etc.: Needles are completely standard and replaceable and interchangeable on all machines except antiques and this should be the first thing that you do anyway. You can get a twin needle for specific tasks but generally you won’t need one, it is not “more useful” than having just a single needle (this is not a “two is better than one” situation). The most important thing to make sure that you have is the presser foot, there should be one attached to the machine and most machines are intended to include one or two other types that can be swapped out (e.g. a narrower one that is useful for particular types of fabric or for working in tight situations) and if these are missing then you will have to try to find replacements or do without as they are mostly NOT interchangeable between machines of different brands or families. Check the manual for what accessories should be included, and make sure to look for them in the accessories compartment. It would be useful if the machine included one or two bobbins so that you can get started sooner but these are mostly standard and easy to find online (there are a few different types so make sure you work out what type you need).

I would highly recommend watching a few beginner/introductory machine sewing tutorials so that you can learn about the various parts of the machine and how it is set up and used, even if you aren’t planning on doing any actual sewing from scratch. This will make it a lot easier to know what you need and understand what you’re looking at.

It’s important to note that embroidery (and the machines that do it) is fundamentally different from sewing. Whereas a regular sewing machine or a serger/overlocker will pull the fabric through the machine in a single direction and not allow the fabric to move from side to side, an embroidery machine is designed for the fabric to move freely in both axes (forward, backward, and sideways). (Note that on a sewing machine the zigzag etc. stitches are made by moving the needle from side to side, not the fabric. On an embroidery machine, either the needle or the fabric may move under computer control, or the needle will remain centered while the fabric is moved by hand.)

There are machines that are designed to do both sewing and embroidery, which allow the mechanism that pulls the fabric to be retracted and disabled to allow the fabric to be moved freely by hand. Even a simple machine that does not have this feature can be used for embroidery by putting a cover plate over the feed mechanism (there are generic covers available for many popular machines or these can be 3D printed) and setting the machine to the straight stitch setting (which leaves the needle centered). Of course, these require the fabric to be moved by hand to create the desired design.

You would need additional components to automatically move the fabric and start and stop the needle at the correct time under computer control, which will allow automatic embroiding of a vector graphic. This is what the more expensive dedicated embroidery machines do, and what the open source projects that you have come across are attempting to recreate using a regular sewing machine plus additional hardware. This has no relation to the different “stitch patterns” that you can find on a regular sewing machine, which simply involve moving the needle from side to side as the machine pulls the fabric in a straight line.

I actually like stuff that is simple and repairable. My sewing machine is electromechanical and has no computerised operation. These machines are also a lot cheaper to buy second-hand, of course.

The only stitch types that you actually need are a straight stitch and either a zigzag stitch or a stretch stitch. The zigzag stitch is what it sounds like, and can be used for seams that need to stretch. The stretch stitch involves making 2 forward stitches and 1 backwards stitch in turn, this also allows the seam to stretch and it looks neater because visually the stitch is in a straight line.

The other stitch types that you typically find on a home sewing machine are really only used for decoration and are not essential.

I tried getting it to write out a simple melody using MIDI note numbers once. I didn’t think of asking it for LilyPond format, I couldn’t think of a text-based format for music notation at the time.

It was able to produce a mostly accurate output for a few popular children’s songs. It was also able to “improvise” a short blues riff (mostly keeping to the correct scale, and showing some awareness of/reference to common blues themes), and write an “answer” phrase (which was suitable and made musical sense) to a prompt phrase that I provided.

Someone explain to me why there are so many frameworks focused on LLM-based “agents” (LangChain, {{guidance}}, and now whatever this is) and how these are practically useful, when I have yet to find a model that can even successfully perform a simple database query to answer an easy question (searching for one or two items by keyword, retrieving their quantity, and adding the quantities together if applicable) regardless of the model, prompt template, and function API used.

To be honest, the same could be said of LLaMa/Facebook (which doesn’t particularly claim to be “open”, but I don’t see many people criticising Facebook for doing a potential future marketing “bait and switch” with their LLMs).

They’re only giving these away for free because they aren’t commercially viable. If anyone actually develops a leading-edge LLM, I doubt they will be giving it away for free regardless of their prior “ethics”.

And the chance of a leading-edge LLM being developed by someone other than a company with prior plans to market it commercially is quite small, as they wouldn’t attract the same funding to cover the development costs.

IMO the availability of the dataset is less important than the model, especially if the model is under a license that allows fairly unrestricted use.

Datasets aren’t useful to most people and carry more risk of a lawsuit or being ripped off by a competitor than the model. Publishing a dataset with copyrighted content is legally grey at best, while the verdict is still out regarding a model trained on that dataset and the model also carries with it some short-term plausible deniability.

There are only a few popular LLM models. A few more if you count variations such as “uncensored” etc. Most of the others tend to not perform well or don’t have much difference from the more popular ones.

I would think that the difference is likely for two reasons:

• LLMs require more effort in curating the dataset for training. Whereas a Stable Diffusion model can be trained by grabbing a bunch of pictures of a particular subject or style and throwing them in a directory, an LLM requires careful gathering and reformatting of text. If you want an LLM to write dialog for a particular character, for example, you would need to try to find or write a lot of existing dialog for that character, which is generally harder than just searching for images on the internet.

• LLMs are already more versatile. For example, most of the popular LLMs will already write dialog for a particular character (or at least attempt to) just by being given a description of the character and possibly a short snippet of sample dialog. Fine-tuning doesn’t give any significant performance improvement in that regard. If you want the LLM to write in a specific style, such as Old English, it is usually sufficient to just instruct it to do so and perhaps prime the conversation with a sentence or two written in that style.

WizardLM 13B (I didn’t notice any significant improvement with the 30B version), tends to be a bit confined to a standard output format at the expense of accuracy (e.g. it will always try to give both sides of an argument even if there isn’t another side or the question isn’t an argument at all) but is good for simple questions

LLaMa 2 13B (not the chat tuned version), this one takes some practice with prompting as it doesn’t really understand conversation and won’t know what it’s supposed to do unless you make it clear from contextual clues, but it feels refreshing to use as the model is (as far as is practical) unbiased/uncensored so you don’t get all the annoying lectures and stuff