Stable Diffusion 2 base model is trained using what we would today refer to as a “censored” dataset. Stable Diffusion 1 dataset included NSFW images, the base model doesn’t seem particularly biased towards or away from them and can be further trained in either direction as it has the foundational understanding of what those things are.
You are correct, page 10 does say that the hook point should meet 1/8 inch above the needle eye, at the bottom of the needle’s stroke.
Missing stitches only when the fabric is in place suggests that your thread tension may be too high. Check the top thread tension, make sure that you can pull the thread through with only a slight pull at the “0” position (check page 9 of the service manual).
This sounds like a timing issue to me. The thread bunching up may be due to the hook not grabbing the thread or the take-up lever not taking up the slack at the correct time. If it’s missing stitches in zig-zag mode then that would also be due to either hook timing or possibly needle bar alignment.
Simple things to check:
Make sure that the needle is installed correctly, especially that it is oriented the right way and inserted all the way in
Make sure that the take-up lever is threaded correctly
Assuming these are both correct, you can try the following:
If possible, insert a fresh needle (at least, you will need a needle that is undamaged and not bent from the shank up to the eye)
Remove the plate, leave the machine unthreaded
On the straight stitch setting, turn the hand wheel slowly and check that the eye of the needle is exactly level with the hook as they pass each other (this should happen close to the bottom of the needle’s stroke but may not be exactly at the bottom)
On the widest zig-zag stitch setting, again turn the hand wheel slowly and check that the eye of the needle passes closely to the hook (it won’t be exact because the needle has moved, but it should be just slightly early on one side and just slightly late on the other, not noticeably early or late on one side) and also check that the needle is not colliding with any solid parts of the machine on either side
If the eye and the hook are not aligned as they pass each other, then you have either a timing or a needle height alignment issue. If they pass correctly on the straight stitch but the needle is noticeably early or late on one side of the zig-zag stitch (and fine on the other side) then you have an issue with the horizontal alignment of the zig-zag stitch.
That machine is a pretty solid choice if it works, and a worthwhile repair project if it doesn’t (it may have seized up if not maintained recently or it may have timing or alignment issues from age).
Machines like that are quite solidly built compared to modern machines, I would be surprised if it can’t get through a few layers of denim for a few stitches (I wouldn’t recommend doing 6 layers continuously, but crossing over the side seam should be OK). If you’re concerned you can always hand crank it for that part.
The lack of a free arm may be somewhat limiting for hems. The “stupid” solution would be to stand the machine up on top of a crate or similar, as long as the circumference of the leg/other fabric is large enough to fit around the bottom metal “plate” of the machine. (These machines have a metal body designed to be built into a cabinet or shelf top. I’m not sure if yours includes a wooden box around the bottom or if it is just the machine itself, but if there is any wood then the machine can be removed from this leaving just the metal body of the machine itself which may provide more flexibility in this regard.)
I haven’t come across any significant discussion surrounding this before and I wouldn’t recommend choosing a machine on this basis.
A front-loading bobbin is only an advantage for changing mid-task if you catch it before the thread runs out, otherwise you’ll be backtracking and starting again anyway once you’ve replaced it. I suppose if there is a viewing window and you can see when it is about to run out then this is an advantage, otherwise you won’t know when to stop and change it anyway until you notice that it has already run out.
In terms of speed I doubt you will find any typical sewing machine “too slow” unless you plan to sew a lot and you want it finished quickly. For a few repairs or alterations and the occasional custom piece speed is not a priority, most of the time you will want to go slower anyway for more control/accuracy.
I think you need to put less thought into what machine you get and more thought into getting some machine and start sewing without thinking so much about details like how the bobbin is loaded. As a beginner these things don’t matter, and by the time you are non-beginner enough for them to matter then you will know what aspects are important to you and if you want to upgrade. As it is, you can’t really jump to making “expert-level” choices because you don’t have the experience to know, for example, if speed is even a priority to you.
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.
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.
Yeah, I think you need to set the contextsize and ropeconfig. Documentation isn’t completely clear and in some places sort of implies that it should be autodetected based on the model when using a recent version, but the first thing I would try is setting these explicitly as this definitely looks like an encoding issue.
I would guess that this is possibly an issue due to the model being a “SuperHOT” model. This affects the way that the context is encoded and if the software that uses the model isn’t set up correctly for it you will get issues such as repeated output or incoherent rambling with words that are only vaguely related to the topic.
Unfortunately I haven’t used these models myself so I don’t have any personal experience here but hopefully this is a starting point for your searches. Check out the contextsize and ropeconfig parameters. If you are using the wrong context size or scaling factor then you will get incorrect results.
It might help if you posted a screenshot of your model settings (the screenshot that you posted is of your sampler settings). I’m not sure if you configured this in the GUI or if the only model settings that you have are the command-line ones (which are all defaults and probably not correct for an 8k model).
TBH my experience with SillyTavern was that it merely added another layer of complexity/confusion to the prompt formatting/template experience, as it runs on top of text-generation-webui anyway. It was easy for me to end up with configurations where e.g. the SillyTavern turn template would be wrapped inside the text-generation-webui one, and it is very difficult to verify what the prompt actually looks like by the time it reaches the model as this is not displayed in any UI or logs anywhere.
For most purposes I have given up on any UI/frontend and I just work with llama-cpp-python directly. I don’t even trust text-generation-webui’s “notebook” mode to use my configured sampling settings or to not insert extra end-of-text tokens or whatever.
Yes, that makes more sense. I was concerned initially that you were looking to buy a new GPU with more VRAM for the sole reason of being unable to do something that you should already be able to do, and that this would be an unnecessary spend of money and/or not actually fix the problem, that you would be somewhat mad at yourself if you found out afterwards that “oh, I just needed to change this setting”.
Fair enough but if your baseline for comparison is wrong then you can’t make good assessments of the capabilities of different GPUs. And it’s possible that you don’t actually need a new GPU/more VRAM anyway, if your goal is to generate 1024x1024 in Stable Diffusion and run a 13B LLM both of which I can do with 8 GB of VRAM.
text-generation-webui “chat” and “chat-instruct” modes are… weird and badly documented when it comes to using a specific prompt template. If you don’t want to use the notepad mode, use “instruct” mode and set your turn template with the required tags and include your system prompt in the context (? I forget what it is labeled as) box.
EDIT: Actually I think text-generation-webui might use <|user|> as a special string to mean “substitute the user prefix set in the box directly above the turn template box”. Why they have to have a turn template field with “macro” functionality and then separate fields for user and bot prefixes when you could just… put the prefix directly in the turn template I have no idea. It’s not as though you would ever want or need to change one without the other anyway. But it’s possible that as a result of this you can’t actually use <|user|> itself in the turn template…
What sort of issues are you getting trying to generate 1024x1024 images in Stable Diffusion? I’ve generated up to 1536x1024 without issue on a 1070 (although it takes a few minutes) and could probably go even larger (this was in img2img mode which uses more VRAM as well - although at that size you usually won’t get good results with txt2img anyway). What model are you using?
IMO, local LLMs lack the capabilities or depth of understanding to be useful for most practical tasks (e.g. writing code, automation, language analysis). This will heavily skew any local LLM “usage statistics” further towards RP/storytelling (a significant proportion of which will always be NSFW in nature).