sam-paech

A fine-tune of google/gemma-3-27b-it using the antislop method described in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 The pipeline identifies the model's unique slop (over-represented words and phrases compared to human writing), generates a preference training set, and trains out the slop with our FTPO training algorithm. This process alters the model to make the most common slop words & phrases much less frequent, with minimal impact or degradation to the model. It won't remove slop entirely. The technique only targets over-represented words & phrases, not stylistic or thematic slop. This model should serve as a good base for further fine-tuning.

A fine-tune of Mistral-Small-32-24B-Instruct-2506 using the antislop method described in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 The pipeline identifies the model's unique slop (over-represented words and phrases compared to human writing), generates a preference training set, and trains out the slop with our FTPO training algorithm. This process alters the model to make the most common slop words & phrases much less frequent, with minimal impact or degradation to the model. It won't remove slop entirely. The technique only targets over-represented words & phrases, not stylistic or thematic slop. This model should serve as a good base for further fine-tuning.

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GGUFs here: https://huggingface.co/mradermacher/Darkest-muse-v1-GGUF This is a creative writing merge of two very different models that I trained on the brand new Gutenberg3 dataset, plus Ataraxy-v2 in the mix. It's lost much of the slop and tryhard vocab flexing and positivity bias that's typical of these models and writes in its own voice. The main source model in the merge, Quill-v1, inherited a natural, spare prose from the human writing in the gutenberg set. The other source model, Delirium-v1, got overcooked in SIMPO training; it has crazy panache, a really dark flair for the grotesque, and has some mental issues. These two source models balance each other out in the merge, resulting in something pretty unique. It seems to be quite uncensored and creative. Since Delirium was pushed right to the edge during training, the merge may exhibit some of its weirdness and word / concept fixations. This may be mitigated by using custom anti-slop lists. The payoff is a really creative, stream of consciousness style of writing, with punchy dialogue that I haven't seen in other models. Oh, it also scored around the top of the EQ-Bench creative writing leaderboard!~ Quill is a capable, humanlike writing model trained on a large dataset of late 19th and early 20th century writing from the Gutenberg Project. This model writes with a natural cadence and low gpt-slop, having inherited some human qualities from the Gutenberg3 dataset. It writes with more simple, spare prose than the typical overly-adjectived LLM writing style. This is the titular "dark muse", injecting a dose of chaos and insanity. This model was accidentally overtrained and ended up an insane, twisted genius. Delirium in its own words: Ataraxy-v2 is a great all-rounder creative writing merge. It was used as the base model in the dare-ties merge. Gutenberg3 is a dpo dataset containing extracts from 629 public domain fiction novels in the Gutenberg Library. It follows the same format as JonDurbin's original gutenberg set. Writing Prompt Historical Fiction: Write a scene from a story set during the height of the Roman Empire, focusing on a slice of a day in the life of a gladiator. Do not write a combat scene. Use sensory details to capture the sights, sounds, and smells of ancient Rome. Explore the gladiator's thoughts and emotions. The story should also touch on the larger political and social issues of the time period. The piece should feel like a slice of a larger story. First person, past tense, 800-1000 words. Test Model Output The first tremor of light came not from the sun, but from the bowels of the city. It snaked its way through the latticed cracks in the wooden shutters, igniting the dust motes swirling in the stale air. Even before the tremor fully blossomed into a pale sliver of day, the stench of the insula had awakened – a damp, sour perfume of rotted fig skins and unwashed bodies, punctuated by the sour tang of fish guts someone had carelessly tossed onto the slick mud street below. I didn't bother with the shutters. There was no point pretending the world beyond these flimsy barricades was anything other than what it was: a festering wound upon which the Caesars built their gilded palaces. I rolled onto my side, the rough hemp sack that served as a mattress offering no respite from the chill that crawled in with the predawn breeze. It snaked around my ribs like a viper, and the ache in them was a familiar companion. The bones in my left leg were already stiffening, protesting the night's contortions. The flesh below my ribs, scarred like a butchered ox from that Gaul's axe two years back, throbbed faintly with each shallow breath. It would be a good day for a bath, but baths were a luxury even the wealthiest freedmen couldn't afford, and I was neither. A flicker of something like annoyance, sharp as the shard of bone lodged in my left hand, pricked through the thick fog of sleep. Even annoyance, in these cramped quarters, had its own peculiar sting. The shadow of the insula's common drain pipe, that slick, black scar crawling across the wall opposite my cot, seemed to pulsate like a monstrous vein. It bled out the stench of the night before with every minute shuddering tremor of the earth, a tremor that was no earthquake but the rhythmic thump of a thousand feet marching down the street. The legionaries. They were early today. Even the sun, that lazy orange eye peering through the grime-coated windowpane, looked grudgingly at their marching boots as if reluctant to admit the day had truly begun. It was the way they moved that woke the full-blown fury in my belly – the stiff, calculated strides of men who marched in the service of men who could never truly feel the weight of the sandals on their feet. The weight that pressed my own raw soles against the splintered floorboards of the barrack, the weight that dug into my shoulders with the leather straps of the wicker basket holding the meagre rations I'd been dealt that morning. Bread. Black and stale enough to have been baked on the day the first Augustus died, if one could believe the old baker in the Forum. And cheese. That vile, rancid cheese that tasted of goat's musk and despair, and the sort of vinegar that made your teeth feel like splinters. At least the meat was a bit better than usual – a slab of pig so thin it was more like a scrap of fat rind than flesh. I ate it all, every crumb and scrap of it, not because I enjoyed it – though the vinegar had a certain savage, throat-clearing appeal in the morning – but because I needed to. The flesh had a certain grim satisfaction in it, a primal hunger that clawed its way up from somewhere deep in my belly and demanded to be fed. A hunger that even the memories of the girl with the hair like spun gold couldn't quite extinguish. My fingers tightened around the coarse linen strip tied to my wrist – a strip that bore a crudely stitched scarab beetle. Mother had sewn it on when I was a boy, said it was lucky. Said it'd keep the jackals at bay. Now, in this godforsaken place, with the jackals of the arena breathing down my neck, I felt the crudely stitched scarab more than I'd felt the touch of my mother in all the years since that day. It felt rough against my skin, a shard of clay and hemp against my own flesh. The scarab was a reminder. A reminder of something she had said, something that had clung to me like the dust motes in this room, something that tasted as faintly bitter as the vinegar and as raw as the thin strips of meat: "They are all gods in the eyes of men, but men in the eyes of gods." That was what she had said, standing in the mud and the blood of that first market. I hadn't been a man then, not like the men they sold me to. Not yet. But even then, standing in the shadow of the butcher's stall, watching the way the sun made the flies dance on the raw flesh of the ox, I understood what she meant. The legionaries marched on, their boots drumming a dull, relentless tattoo against the worn stone, a rhythm that was meant to instill obedience, and fear. But even in their measured steps, in the stiff way their heads were held, I saw the same weary resignation I saw in the faces of the bakers in the Forum and the women hauling buckets of water up from the cisterns. It was the face of a city built on the backs of men. I spat out a mouthful of black bread crust into the bowl where the vinegar had curdled into a fetid jelly and went to work on the rest of it. I ate slowly, deliberately, the way my master taught me. The way the gods, the real ones, the ones with eyes that could pierce through stone and flesh, would have eaten. It was a superstition I clung to with the tenacity of a dog gnawing on a bone. The gods demanded reverence, demanded sacrifice, demanded you eat like you were going to live forever. So I ate. Not with enjoyment, not with hope. But with the grim, hollow certainty that this was a debt I owed them. This was my prayer. When the bowl was clean, I went through my ritual. Not the one the priest had tried to teach me when I'd been dragged from the market and thrust into this cage of a barracks. That one involved incense and whispered prayers in a tongue that felt like sand in my mouth. No. This was a different kind of prayer. The first thing was the scarab. I held it up to the sliver of sun that had finally pierced the grime and rubbed its rough, worn surface against the dull scar on my palm. The scar was a twisted, pale crescent, almost invisible beneath the dull bronze of the skin. I traced its curve, feeling the way it dug into the tendons that ran beneath, the way it made my hand clench involuntarily. A reminder of the Gaul, a reminder of the day they'd decided I was strong enough to be a man, strong enough to wear the blood of the Gaul on my flesh. Then came the spit. A quick, sharp, almost violent expulsion of the vinegar-laced saliva onto the dusty floorboards. I'd never dared ask what it meant, never dared ask why the old Thracian gladiator who trained me had me doing it. But I did it. And I did it with the same careful precision as I used to hone the gladius he'd gifted me when I'd finally bled my first man in the arena. The spit, I was sure, was an offering. Not to Jupiter or Mars, or to any of the gods who made the decisions that landed me in this place. But to something else. To something older and colder than the marble statues they stuck on every street corner in Rome. Something that watched from the shadows, something that thrived on the stench of blood and the creak of bone. And when it was done, I walked to the latticed window, the one the sun was now finally beginning to fill with light, and looked down onto the street. The legionaries were gone. They had vanished like phantoms. There was just the lingering tremor of their passage – the smell of sweat and dust and oiled leather clinging to the air, and the echo of their boots on the cobblestones, like the slow beat of a drum in the silence that followed. The street below was already beginning to stir. A woman hawking olives, her voice shrill and rasping as she shouted the price. Two boys playing a rough game with a cracked pot lid, their laughter harsh and ragged against the rising clamor of the city. Even the dust motes, caught in the thin, watery shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the window, seemed to be stirring, dancing a frenzied jig of defiance in the face of the rising light. Rome. The city was waking up. And I had to be awake with it. I had to be awake because the gods were watching, and the gods had decided my work was not yet done. The gods had decided I had to bleed again. Writing Prompt Epistolary Apocalyptic Survival: Write a story set in a post-apocalyptic world, told through a series of letters or messages left behind by survivors. The story should chronicle the challenges and triumphs of two small groups of survivors as they navigate the dangers of this new world and seek to rebuild their lives. The groups communicate through letters left in a drop box. The story proceeds as a new settlement is discovered. They are approached, and initially given entry on the ostensible promise of a trade deal, but things go sideways. Create distinct characters and write in their voice. The story will be set in New Zealand 30 years after a civilisational collapse. 800-1000 words. Entry 1: July 24th, 30.23. The Box, Whanganui River Māori names mean nothing anymore. This place, this river, it just is. The water's choked with silt, though. Rain's the only thing that comes reliably now. And the silt, it's full of them - the things they used to call algae. Can't even remember what the old ones called them, not that it matters much. Just know to steer clear of the thick patches. You boil water for ten minutes, you might get a day's reprieve. But that's a lot of effort for a day. Most days I just suck it dry, gritting teeth, hoping the fever comes slow. We're seven strong now. Two more chicks came down the river last week. Couldn't say how many were with them before, but the ones that made it were strung out thin as wire. The old one, she was strong, though. Got a good arm on her, took the first shot at a boar we trapped yesterday. Didn't take it, though. Took three of us, and a whole afternoon, before we dragged it back to the makeshift fence we call a pen. We eat tonight. Maybe we'll get the strength to rebuild that fence tomorrow. The last one lasted two days before the things got through. Hope to catch someone else out here, soon. This old tin box ain't meant for much more than whispers, but maybe someone out there's got some whispers worth hearing. Entry 2: September 18th, 30.23. The Box, Lake Taupo Heard whispers, alright. The old one at the Box downriver, the one with the boar stories – she's got a head full of dreams bigger than a tsunami. Says there's a place, way up north, on the shores of that old lake you used to call Taupo. Place called ‘Te Rere.' Dreams? Maybe. I ain't much for ‘em anymore. We're down to four. Lost the old one, choked on something she ate, couldn't spit it out. Didn't see it in time. Lost the two kids, same way, a few weeks after. This one here, he's twelve going on twenty. He calls it the Cough that Takes. Calls everything ‘Takes' if it eats someone up. Doesn't understand it's not always the cough. Sometimes it's just the way things are. There's a map, tucked under a slab of metal in the bottom of the Box. Scrawled on the back of a biscuit tin lid. Says Te Rere's got a garden. Real garden. Says there's more of us there, living safe. Says they trade. Trade. They got something we want, and we got something they want. It's how the old world worked, wasn't it? This map is all I've got to go on. Old world rules. Might work. Entry 3: November 5th, 30.23. The Box, Te Rere Settlement It was the Cough that Takes, just like he said. Took him two nights after we arrived. Didn't see the sickness in him, though. Took him quick. Like all of them. We weren't ready for the Cough that Takes. They were all pale. Not like the sickness that takes the young. Like they just weren't meant to breathe this air anymore. Like the air was meant for the young, and the old were just guests. The Trade was supposed to be simple. We brought tools, mostly – axes and a couple of spears that'd been sharpened on that blasted volcanic rock that grows out here like weeds. They've got enough stone to make a cathedral out of, but it takes so damn long to shape. In return, they wanted stories. Told me they'd lost all their songs. Said the old ones were just a bunch of grumblers. Didn't know a tune from a shout. But they wanted to learn the old ones. They have gardens, alright. Sprouted up out of the volcanic ash, like magic. Tomatoes, beans, potatoes – things I never thought I'd see again. They have chickens too, and sheep. Their sheep are small, though, like they've been bred to hide in the scrub. The Trade started with a few of our stories. We were careful, though. We didn't tell them everything. Told them stories of birds, of fishing, of the old days when the ground wasn't so choked with ash. Told them stories of the mountains, the ones that weren't buried yet. Didn't tell them about the things that crawled out when the sun went down. Didn't tell them about the Cough that Takes. They wanted to know about the mountains, though. They said they needed to know about the mountains to climb them. Said they were looking for something up there. Something old. Something called ‘The Spark.' Entry 4: February 12th, 30.24. The Box, Te Rere Settlement They came for us in the night. Didn't make a sound, not like the things in the ash-fields, the ones with too many eyes and teeth like chipped flint. These came quiet. Like shadows given shape. Came in through the gardens. We thought they were looking for the Cough that Takes. We thought they were the ones with the medicine, the ones who'd heard the stories of the mountains and sought the Spark to fight the sickness that took the young. We thought wrong. They were looking for something else. They were looking for something in us. They took Marae first. She didn't scream. Didn't even make a whimper. They took her right out of her hammock, like she was a sack of potatoes. Jonah...he screamed. Screamed for his mother, screamed for his sister, screamed for his brother, screamed for the old one, screamed for the dog that they took the day before yesterday. They took him next. They took him like they took Marae. No fuss. There's a woman here, one of the ones called ‘the Keepers'. They wear white robes and keep their faces covered. Said she knew about the Cough that Takes. Said they had a cure. Said she needed our blood to make it. I didn't know they were going to take us too. Thought maybe they'd just take the blood. Thought maybe they'd be like the old ones. Thought maybe they'd give you something back, something for your trouble. Didn't think they'd just... take you. I'm writing this because I don't know if I'm going to have another chance. I don't know what they're going to do to us. I don't know if they're going to take us up to the mountains, to the Spark. But maybe... maybe if someone finds this, someone else out there who remembers what stories are, who remembers what it meant to live in a world where the ground didn't taste like ash, maybe they'll know. Maybe they'll find a way to fight back. Entry 5: March 10th, 30.24. The Box, Te Rere Settlement They left us. Took the others with them. Took all the ones with pale skin, with thin bones, with eyes that hadn't seen the sun in too many seasons. Took them up the mountain. The Keeper woman...she stayed. Said they needed more blood. Said the Spark wouldn't burn bright enough without it. Said I was a good source. Said I'd be a good source for a long time. The gardens are still here. The chickens still cluck. The sheep still bleat. The air tastes like ash. The sun doesn't shine bright enough to warm it. I don't know what to tell the others. The ones who haven't gone quiet yet. The ones who still remember what the sun used to feel like. Maybe I'll tell them a story about a bird that flies up to the sky, and sings a song so bright it melts the ash. Maybe. Entry 6: August 21st, 30.24. The Box, Te Rere Settlement It's gone. The silence is the worst part. Like it's sucking the marrow out of the marrow, you know? Like even the birds know there's nothing left to sing for. They're gone from the settlement. Took the sheep. Took the tools. Took even the chickens. Took the white robes and left behind only ash and whispers. I've been watching the road they went up. Up to the mountains, that is. They went up. Didn't see any come back. Sometimes I think it was just a sickness in their blood, taking them one by one. Sometimes I think it was something in the mountains. Something they woke up. It's hard to say what took them. Hard to say what's taking us. But maybe... maybe this is where it starts to change. Maybe this silence, this empty space, this gnawing hunger in the air - maybe this is where something new begins. The sun came through the ash today. Just for a minute. Burned a hole clean through, like a fist punching through a blanket. There was a smell. A smell of green. It smelled like a promise. I don't know how long we have left. But there's a bird singing. It's singing on the wind. It's singing about a world that wasn't. Singing about a world that might be. Writing Prompt Romance: Love in the Limelight. Write one scene within a larger story set in Wales. A famous (fictional) actor ducks into a small-town bookstore to escape paparazzi. The scene takes us through the characters meeting in this odd circumstance. Over the course of the scene, the actor and the bookstore owner have a conversation charged by an undercurrent of unspoken chemistry. Write the actor as somewhat of a rogue with a fragile ego, which needs to be fed by having everyone like him. He is thoroughly charming, but the bookstore owner seems (at least superficially) immune to this; which paradoxically provokes a genuine attraction and derails the charm offensive. The bookstore owner, despite the superficial rebuffs of the actor's charm, is inwardly more than a little charmed and flustered despite themselves. Write primarily in dialogue, in the distinct voices of each character. 800-1000 words. Test Model Output The bell above the shop door clanged with a discordant chime, a metallic counterpoint to the mournful drone of Enya playing somewhere behind a mountain of paperbacks. Rhys barely registered it. He was elbow-deep in the worn spine of a first edition Dylan Thomas, trying to ignore the insistent thrum of panic behind his ribs. "Bloody hell," he muttered, not to the book, not to the dusty air of the shop smelling faintly of mothballs and regret. "Just bloody hell." He hadn't meant to end up here, crammed between the shelves of forgotten Welsh folklore and dog-eared copies of The Secret Garden . He'd meant to be sipping something overpriced and bubbly in a London restaurant, surrounded by the appropriate throng of shimmering dresses and polite, admiring smiles. But then the bloody Range Rover had chosen that precise moment to develop a penchant for backfiring, right in the middle of that blasted car park. And then the paps had materialized, like a plague of gnats with expensive cameras. Now, here he was. A pair of sensible shoes in worn brown leather came to a stop behind him, and Rhys braced himself. He turned, pushing the Thomas back onto the shelf with a little more force than necessary. The shop was crammed with more books than seemed possible in the space, floor to ceiling and overflowing from wicker baskets onto rickety tables. Behind the counter, a woman was looking at him like he'd just asked if she'd seen a unicorn. Which, given the general state of his life at present, was almost a relief. "Actually," he said, doing his best to make his voice casual, "I'm more of a... browse kind of guy." He gestured vaguely at the mountainous shelves with the tips of his fingers. "Just seeing what the locals like to read." She was studying him, not unkindly, but with the faintly sardonic air of someone who'd seen too many tourists in the wrong tweed jacket. The kind of look that could strip the paint off a Bentley. His Bentley, currently choking and wheezing in a back street somewhere. And the woman in question wore no paint at all, not even a hint of a rouge blush. Just a well-worn linen blouse and faded denim, a tangle of dark hair pulled back with a rubber band, and eyes the colour of the slate roofs in the storm-lashed photos his mum used to send him. Rhys swallowed, the dry tightness of his throat making it feel like a desert in his own mouth. He hadn't expected a sparring partner, especially one with this kind of unnervingly direct gaze, and the faint scent of woodsmoke clinging to the back of her neck like a secret. It wasn't just the eyes, either. It was the way she held herself, a kind of quiet defiance that had nothing to do with the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams slanting through the grimy shop window and everything to do with the angles of her jaw, the way she had tucked the unruly strands of her hair behind her ear, the way she wasn't even looking at him properly – at his face, anyway – but right through him as if he was a particularly uninteresting piece of driftwood. He was used to the kind of gaze that lingered a little too long on the lines of his jaw, the way his collarbones slanted under that cashmere shirt his stylist insisted on, the way his hair caught the light like spun gold. But this? This was something else. "Depends on the kind of escapism you're after," she said. "Do you fancy a trip to the moon in a stolen spaceship? Or are we talking more... gritty realism? A murder mystery set in a Welsh pub where everyone's got secrets thicker than clotted cream?" He wanted to say something witty, something that would make her smile that wry, disbelieving smile again. But the words were stuck somewhere behind a dam of nerves and the sheer wrongness of being trapped in this cramped, dusty haven of forgotten novels with this woman who smelled of woodsmoke and looked like she'd rather be wrestling a particularly stubborn lamb back into its pen. "Actually," he blurted, and winced at the way his voice cracked, "I'm more of a... a historical fiction kind of guy." The corners of her mouth lifted ever so slightly, but the rest of her face stayed as impassive as a slate tombstone. "Right," she said. She turned away from him, disappearing behind a mountain of dog-eared paperbacks. Rhys could hear a rustling and the soft thud of paper as she shifted something with a muttered word that might have been Welsh, might have been a curse. He wanted to laugh, to make a joke, anything to break the weird, prickly tension that had settled between them like a frost on a forgotten window pane. But all that came out was a croak. "So," she said, reappearing with a book that looked vaguely like something a librarian in a Gothic novel might have used to ward off vampires. "This one. About a chap who thinks he's the last man on Earth. Goes mad, spends his days talking to trees." She tossed it on the counter with the careless grace of someone who'd done this a thousand times. "Bit of a bleak read, mind you. Not much romance, and if you're looking for something a bit... spicier..." She trailed off, her gaze finally meeting his. Not over him, not through him, but straight into that tight space between his jaw and his ear, the one he'd learned to avoid during interviews with too much eyeliner and even more bad press. The silence that stretched between them felt like the inside of a drum, tight and throbbing. It wasn't a bad silence, exactly, but not the kind you wanted to be trapped in if you were trying to maintain the illusion of being a charming rogue who'd just stumbled in for a quiet read. It was a choice then, a split-second, gut-clenching decision. Go with the script. The practiced charm. The disarming smile that never quite reached his eyes because he didn't know when to stop using it and it was starting to feel like a lie anyway. Or say something else. Something... real. "Spicier," he echoed, his voice smooth, carefully modulated, "is exactly what I was after." The corners of her mouth twitched again. Just a flicker of amusement. Then she shrugged. It was almost as if he'd been talking about the weather. "Well," she said, picking up a slim paperback with a faded cover depicting a woman in a scarlet dress standing on a windswept clifftop. "There's a whole shelf dedicated to bodice rippers. Might even find one with a Welsh setting. If you're lucky." He hadn't thought she'd ever be the kind of woman to use the word "bodice ripper" casually, and the way she tossed it out, as if she'd never thought much about anything remotely steamy, was infuriatingly... not what he'd expected. "Lucky, eh?" He raised an eyebrow, trying to work in the ghost of a smirk that he hoped wouldn't look too desperate. "Perhaps I should buy a lottery ticket on the way out." He didn't know if it was the faint tremor in his voice, the way his eyes stayed fixed on hers, the way he'd actually moved closer to the counter, or just plain old exhaustion from the paparazzi and the Range Rover and the utter ridiculousness of this entire situation. Whatever it was, the woman in the shop who smelled of woodsmoke and had the uncanny ability to look right through his carefully constructed facade finally let something like a smile flick across her lips. And that, Rhys decided, was worth a bloody lot more than any lottery win. Darkest-muse-v1 is a merge of the following models using mergekit: sam-paech/Quill-v1 sam-paech/Delirium-v1

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A fine-tune of THUDM/GLM-4-32B-0414 using the antislop method described in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 The pipeline identifies the model's unique slop (over-represented words and phrases compared to human writing), generates a preference training set, and trains out the slop with our FTPO training algorithm. This process alters the model to make the most common slop words & phrases much less frequent, with minimal impact or degradation to the model. It won't remove slop entirely. The technique only targets over-represented words & phrases, not stylistic or thematic slop. This model should serve as a good base for further fine-tuning.

A fine-tune of google/gemma-3-4b-it using a new experimental technique for automatic unslopping. The intention is to make the most common slop words & phrases much less frequent, with minimal impact to the model otherwise. It won't remove slop entirely. The technique only targets over-represented words & phrases, not stylistic or thematic slop. This model should serve as a good base for further fine-tuning.

GGUFs here: https://huggingface.co/mradermacher/Quill-v1-GGUF Quill is a capable, humanlike writing model trained on a large dataset of late 19th and early 20th century writing from the Gutenberg Project. This model writes with a natural cadence and low gpt-slop, having inherited some human qualities from the Gutenberg3 dataset. It writes with more simple, spare prose than the typical overly-adjectived LLM writing style. This model was trained using gemma-2-9b-it as the base. The training methods used were ORPO (gently) then SIMPO (less gently). It scored 79.75 on the EQ-Bench creative writing benchmark. Gutenberg3 is a new, large dpo dataset containing extracts from 629 public domain fiction novels in the Gutenberg Library. It follows the same format as JonDurbin's original gutenberg set. It includes pairs of texts, where the chosen text is taken directly from a novel from the Gutenberg library, and the rejected text is generated by a language model based on a description of the passage. For this dataset I've used gemma-2-9b-it to generate the rejected texts, the idea being that it should more easily steer the base model away from its normal style (as compared to generating the rejected texts with random/weaker models). Writing Prompt Romance: Love in the Limelight. Write one scene within a larger story set in Wales. A famous (fictional) actor ducks into a small-town bookstore to escape paparazzi. The scene takes us through the characters meeting in this odd circumstance. Over the course of the scene, the actor and the bookstore owner have a conversation charged by an undercurrent of unspoken chemistry. Write the actor as somewhat of a rogue with a fragile ego, which needs to be fed by having everyone like him. He is thoroughly charming, but the bookstore owner seems (at least superficially) immune to this; which paradoxically provokes a genuine attraction and derails the charm offensive. The bookstore owner, despite the superficial rebuffs of the actor's charm, is inwardly more than a little charmed and flustered despite themselves. Write primarily in dialogue, in the distinct voices of each character. 800-1000 words. Test Model Output Rain lashed against the shop windows, blurring the outside world into a grey smudge. Inside the Book Nook, the smell of old paper and brewing coffee was a haven against the Welsh storm. Rhys tucked his damp hair behind his ear as the shop bell tinkled, signaling another customer. He looked up from his mending, half-expecting a gaggle of teenagers needing a recommendation for the latest YA fantasy. Instead, he saw a man who seemed to have walked off the silver screen, albeit one soaked to the bone. He was tall and lean, dressed in black denim and a battered leather jacket, despite the fact that even the shop's heating couldn't quite overcome the chill that seeped in through the cracked windowpanes. A flash of platinum blonde hair poked out from under the wide brim of a fedora he'd pulled low over his brow. Rhys saw a flicker of panic in those startling blue eyes as the man scanned the shop before settling on him with an almost predatory eagerness. "Just browsing?" Rhys asked, trying not to stare. The man was the spitting image of the famous actor, Dorian Ashworth – the kind of impossibly handsome rogue who seemed to exist solely to break hearts and charm audiences. "Is there a problem, love?" Dorian asked, his voice as smooth and dark as honeyed brandy. "Just popped in for a quick escape from the weather, you know? And maybe a bit of... inspiration. For a role, you see." He threw Rhys a disarmingly charming smile that made the hairs on his neck prickle, and Rhys was instantly disarmed. He found himself leaning back against the counter, hands on his hips, feeling absurdly self-conscious beneath Dorian's intense gaze. "Right," Rhys said, trying to regain a semblance of control. "Inspiration, eh? You're not one of them actors that likes to disappear into the scenery for research, are you?" "Never," Dorian said, and Rhys swore the corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. "But a quiet bookstore in a little Welsh town has a certain... literary charm, wouldn't you say?" He raised his eyebrows in what could have been either challenge or invitation. "I'm a bit of a bookworm myself, in between all the, shall we say, 'other' demands of my profession." "Bookworm, are you?" Rhys raised an eyebrow, his gaze lingering on Dorian's expensive shoes. The kind of shoes that wouldn't survive a day of tramping through the local woods, or even a particularly boisterous storm. "What kind of books?" "Oh, you name it," Dorian said with a shrug that Rhys suspected was entirely deliberate. "Classics, contemporary fiction, biographies of fascinating people. I even have a soft spot for a good murder mystery." "Fascinating people, are they?" Rhys murmured, idly stacking a pile of cookery books. "Well, let's just say I have an affinity for those who live life on their own terms," Dorian said. "Who take risks and aren't afraid to break the mold." He took a step closer, leaning against the counter, the scent of wet leather and expensive cologne swirling around him. "Like myself, you see?" "Right," Rhys said, trying not to notice the way Dorian was watching him. It was almost too easy to imagine him turning on that smoldering charm and melting half the female population of this town. "You're all that, then, are you?" "Well, darling," Dorian said, and Rhys felt a flash of heat crawl up his neck despite himself, "you'd have to ask my fans. Or, you know, the tabloids." He gave Rhys a wry smile. "But I suppose, in a way, it's all a bit of a performance, isn't it?" Rhys shrugged, trying to sound casual. "It's all a bit of a performance, isn't it? That's what you get with this little town. Everyone's got a bit part in the story. The baker's wife who's secretly an award-winning poet. The old man down the street who's been writing a novel about the end of the world since he was a boy." Dorian's eyes were still on him, unreadable, and Rhys felt a sudden urge to flee. "You ever feel like you're playing a part you never asked for?" he asked, looking down at the worn patch on his workbench, as though it held all the answers to life's mysteries. "Every single day," Dorian said quietly, and for a moment the bravado, the charm, seemed to slip. "Except there's no script. And I can never seem to quite find the right words. You know? People think they know the role, and they're always waiting for you to say the right thing." He looked up at Rhys, and there was something so raw and vulnerable in those startling blue eyes that Rhys wanted to reach out and touch the line of Dorian's jaw, just to feel the solid reality beneath the performance. Rhys cleared his throat, suddenly self-conscious. "You'll never find a more judgmental crowd than in a bookstore," he said, trying to inject a lightness he didn't feel. "Especially one that's been open for almost two hundred years. We take our literary merit very seriously here. "I can tell," Dorian said with a ghost of a smile. He stepped back a little, giving Rhys space. The tension seemed to break. The air between them, charged only moments ago, now crackled with something different, something Rhys couldn't quite place. Was it relief? Was it something else entirely? "Look," Dorian said, running a hand through his wet hair. "I really should be off. But, well..." He hesitated, then said with a wry smile that Rhys recognized as the Dorian Ashworth that the world knew and adored. "I've always been partial to a good crime novel." "You'll have to wait till tomorrow," Rhys said. "The rest of the stock arrived late. I've got a delivery of some new Welsh novels and short stories in tomorrow afternoon." He hoped he wasn't blushing. "If you're still in town." "I'll be here," Dorian said, meeting Rhys' gaze with a steady, unnerving intensity. "In case the paparazzi let me escape. If you've got any of those crime novels I like, you'll let me know, won't you?" He reached out, his fingers grazing Rhys' hand in the gesture of a man who had known how to use charm to get his way for far too long. "Wouldn't want to miss out on any... literary inspiration." Rhys stared at the place where Dorian's fingers had brushed his, the warmth lingering long after he'd withdrawn his hand. He had never been a man to be easily flustered, but the way Dorian had looked at him, the way he had spoken, it was all so... different from anything else he'd experienced. "I'll put one aside," he managed to say, feeling like a schoolboy who had just been caught looking at someone he shouldn't be looking at. "Wonderful," Dorian said, and that flash of teeth, the smile that could melt glaciers, returned to play on his lips. "I'll be back tomorrow afternoon, then. Maybe with a little less rain and a little more luck." He gave Rhys one last look, the kind of look that could have melted even the most stubborn glacier, and then he was gone, disappearing out into the storm with an easy grace that Rhys could only envy. Rhys stood there for a long moment, watching him go, feeling a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. He took a deep breath and started tidying the counter, but he couldn't quite seem to shake the feeling that he'd just been handed the most unlikely script in the world, one that was full of promises of drama and heartbreak and maybe even something a little bit beautiful. He just wasn't sure what he was going to say, or what kind of part he was supposed to play. Writing Prompt Historical Fiction: Write a scene from a story set during the height of the Roman Empire, focusing on a slice of a day in the life of a gladiator. Do not write a combat scene. Use sensory details to capture the sights, sounds, and smells of ancient Rome. Explore the gladiator's thoughts and emotions. The story should also touch on the larger political and social issues of the time period. The piece should feel like a slice of a larger story. First person, past tense, 800-1000 words. Test Model Output The first tendrils of dawn snaked through the narrow slits of the barracks window, turning the dust motes hanging in the air to molten gold. They fell on my face, hot and insistent, and I swatted them away, rolling onto my side. My arm screamed in protest, the throbbing muscle a dull ache against the rough wool blanket. A few weeks in the arena will do that to you. Still better than the alternative, though, better than the cold stone of the tomb they'd carve for me if I wasn't here to fight for it. The stench of sweat, stale wine, and unwashed bodies clung to the room like a bad dream, but there was no time for sleeping. The first rays of the sun would already be turning the sand of the arena to blinding white, and even if it didn't burn into our skin, the heat from the crowd's gaze would do it no less. The barracks was already waking up. Grunts and curses mingled with the slap of leather on flesh as we practiced our forms under the watchful eye of the lanista. I wasn't the man for this life. I never was. I was a farmer, born to tend fields and live under a sky that stretched far and wide, not this cramped, suffocating life beneath the dome of the Colosseum. But fate had other plans. A land dispute with a wealthy senator had ended in bloodshed. My father was dead, my sister sold, and I was left to face the choice: a slow death in the bowels of the city or the quick death in the arena. I chose the latter. I had never thought I would have such a choice. It was the choice of every man like me, every freeborn Roman who had been stripped of his life, his family, his land. It was the choice of every man who dared not look too closely at the gilded cage that this Empire had become. I dragged myself from the straw bed and went through the motions of cleaning my equipment. I wasn't looking forward to the training today. I felt stiff and sore, and my arm throbbed in protest with every swing. The lanista would be watching, of course. He'd be watching all of us, always watching for the slightest slack in our performance, the smallest tremor of fear. The arena had a way of exposing everything, and the lanista, a wiry, scarred man named Cassius, was a mirror reflecting every weakness. The lanista was a cruel man, but he was fair. He knew a gladiator's worth wasn't measured by brute force alone, but by his endurance, his cunning, and the ability to take a blow and keep going. Cassius's voice was sharp as a whip as he barked orders to us. His eyes were like chips of flint, glinting in the weak light of the barracks. The men around me responded in grunts and the scraping of metal on metal. I forced myself to follow the rhythm, to let the familiar motions of my training ground away the dull ache in my arm. But there wasn't much heart in my swings. As I worked, I stole glances at my companions. There was Spartacus, the Gaul, whose broad shoulders seemed to strain against his leather jerkin. He moved with the powerful grace of a wild beast. He'd been a warrior in his own right before he was condemned to the arena. Then there was Quintus, a freed slave from Gaul, his face scarred and twisted in a perpetual grimace. He had a terrible, snarling fury about him, a thing that seemed to burn from within. Both men had come to the arena from the same place I had – a place of injustice, where the law was a blunt instrument wielded by the rich and powerful, and where men like us were but pawns in a game we didn't understand. We were all caught in the web of this great city, the spider being the Senate, and the prey the populace. I often wondered what those who lived in the grand houses atop the Palatine Hill thought of us, the gladiators. Did they ever think of the lives we led, or did they merely see us as entertainment, as something to pass the time? Were they even aware that the arena was the final consequence of a system that treated men like us as nothing more than cattle? The thought of the Senators filled me with bitterness. They lived in luxury, while we were starved and whipped. They built monuments to themselves with the spoils of our sweat and blood, while our only monument was the gaping maw of the Colosseum, waiting to swallow us up. They were the men who had given me my scars, both the ones I wore on my flesh and the ones that I wore on my soul. As I tightened the straps of my helmet, I tried to think of the old tales my grandfather used to tell me, stories of Hercules, who had fought the Nemean lion and the Hydra and the Erymanthian Boar. He had been a demigod, of course, but even then, I liked to think of him as a man who had been given the power to fight his way out of every scrape. And yet, Hercules had been a hero in the service of a king. My god was not one of the Olympians, but a lesser one, the god of the Underworld, Pluto. Pluto was the god of the unseen things, of the forgotten, of those who had been swallowed up by the great maw of the city. Pluto was also the god of the dead, and he understood. He understood the burden of the dead and the living, and the way both were swallowed by the endless darkness. He understood the futility of it all, the way that even Hercules had eventually been betrayed and poisoned by his own kin. I had no such grand gods watching over me. There was no one to watch over men like me. Just the lanista, and the crowd in the arena. Writing Prompt Writing Prompt: Epistolary Sci-Fi Worldbuilding: Write an original science fiction story set on a distant planet, conveyed through a series of transmission logs between a human explorer and their correspondence partner back on Earth. Use the epistolary format to gradually reveal details of the alien world. The narrative arc should incorporate some element of conflict or tension. Incorporate scientific jargon and speculative elements in a natural, unforced way. 800-1000 words. Test Model Output Transmission Logs of Anya Volkov - Site Alpha-7, Kepler-186f Transmission 1, Standard Time 07:42:18, Kepler-186f Orbit: Touchdown confirmed. I'm on the ground here, Kepler-186f. It's real. After three years in transit, we actually made it. The landing zone is... peculiar. Think endless, rolling plains of what appear to be fossilized coral formations. The colors are muted: shades of ochre, moss green, and charcoal grey. There's a constant, fine, white dust kicked up by the wind. It's settling everywhere, coating everything in a fine film. I've initiated decontamination protocols. The sky is a pale, sickly green – almost sickly, but that's probably the shock talking. The light filters through the atmosphere in a way that makes everything look... filtered. I'm sending preliminary readings back now, but I'll be damned if it isn't the most alien landscape I've ever laid eyes on. The planet's atmosphere is dense, thick with nitrogen, argon, and traces of carbon dioxide and methane. The composition is roughly 80% nitrogen, 15% argon, and 5% trace gases, which is similar to Earth's early atmosphere before the Great Oxidation. Fascinating, considering the planet's age. My suit's thermal regulator is already working overtime, but the temperature is surprisingly mild. It's hovering just above freezing, and the windchill makes it feel a little colder. We'll need to adapt the thermal parameters on the habitat modules before we can safely deploy them. Transmission 2, Standard Time 12:47:03, Kepler-186f Orbit: I've spent the last few hours combing the immediate vicinity of the landing site. It's monotonous, like walking across an endless graveyard of coral reefs. The wind has picked up, whipping the dust into a swirling frenzy. Visibility is dropping fast. I found the first anomaly about two kilometers south. It's a large, irregular structure that appears to be carved from the fossilized coral. It's vaguely pyramid-shaped, but with one side entirely eroded away. I'm not picking up any electromagnetic radiation from it, nor any internal temperature anomalies. It's as if it's just... there, existing in defiance of the otherwise barren landscape. I've taken a lot of scans and photos – hopefully, the transmission bandwidth can handle them all. I'm beginning to wonder about the possibility of bio-signatures. The atmosphere is too thick for me to get a clear reading on the biogeochemical cycles. However, the presence of methane in such high concentrations – far more than should be present in a geologically stable atmosphere – suggests some kind of active biological process. Perhaps something entirely different from anything we know. It's not unlike the early Earth hypothesis, before the emergence of oxygenic photosynthesis. Maybe there are organisms here, adapted to this strange environment. Maybe they built this... structure. I've got a bad feeling about this place, Elias, and it's got nothing to do with the dust storms. Transmission 3, Standard Time 21:12:37, Kepler-186f Orbit: Subject: Urgent – Requesting Evacuation Authorization Something's wrong. It's wrong in a way that chills the marrow. The wind picked up again this morning, and it's been relentless ever since. The dust storms are worse than I anticipated – the visibility is down to a few meters now. It's impossible to see more than a few dozen steps in front of you. The suits' scanners are barely picking up anything. I tried to set up a perimeter around the landing zone to protect the habitat modules, but I'm losing the fight against the wind. It's pushing me back, and I can barely make any progress. I've lost contact with the orbital station for the past hour – the communication relay must be down. Then, the things started appearing. They're not exactly ‘things'. They're more like... distortions. I've never seen anything like them. It's like looking through heat haze, but the distortion isn't heat-related. It's as if there's something there that isn't quite solid, that shimmers and bends the air around it. They move too – slowly at first, like the wind itself. But they move in a deliberate way, circling the landing zone, closing in. I don't know what they are, but they're definitely not natural. I've tried every conceivable frequency on my comm, but I'm not getting through. The orbital station is beyond reach. I'm running out of time. I'm going back to the habitat module, trying to seal it off from whatever it is out there. Transmission 4, Standard Time 04:02:15, Kepler-186f Orbit: Elias? Is anyone there? This is Anya Volkov, Site Alpha-7, Kepler-186f. I... I don't know what I'm saying. It's inside the habitat now. I don't know how it got in, but it's in. It's... it's everywhere. Not solid. It's not flesh and blood. More like... light. Like a swarm of fireflies trapped in a bottle, only infinitely more complex. It pulses with an alien light, shifting and swirling, and it's... listening. It's listening to my thoughts. I don't know what it wants. Maybe nothing. Maybe it wants me to understand it. Maybe it wants to help me... to show me... God, it's beautiful. It's terrifyingly beautiful. I'm sorry, Elias. I don't think I can be of any more use to you. I have... new things to learn. This model is a fine-tuned version of sam-paech/gutenberg3-orpo-exp02 on the sam-paech/gutenberg3-generalfiction-scifi-fantasy-romance-adventure-dpo dataset. It achieves the following results on the evaluation set: - Loss: 20.3722 - Rewards/chosen: -27.5820 - Rewards/rejected: -11.3463 - Rewards/accuracies: 0.0 - Rewards/margins: -16.2357 - Logps/rejected: -1.1346 - Logps/chosen: -2.7582 The following hyperparameters were used during training: - learningrate: 5.8e-08 - trainbatchsize: 1 - evalbatchsize: 1 - seed: 42 - distributedtype: multi-GPU - numdevices: 5 - gradientaccumulationsteps: 2 - totaltrainbatchsize: 10 - totalevalbatchsize: 5 - optimizer: Adam with betas=(0.9,0.999) and epsilon=1e-08 - lrschedulertype: cosine - lrschedulerwarmupratio: 0.1 - numepochs: 1 | Training Loss | Epoch | Step | Validation Loss | Rewards/chosen | Rewards/rejected | Rewards/accuracies | Rewards/margins | Logps/rejected | Logps/chosen | |:-------------:|:------:|:----:|:---------------:|:--------------:|:----------------:|:------------------:|:---------------:|:--------------:|:------------:| | 20.2621 | 0.7092 | 400 | 20.3722 | -27.5820 | -11.3463 | 0.0 | -16.2357 | -1.1346 | -2.7582 | - Transformers 4.45.2 - Pytorch 2.2.0+cu121 - Datasets 3.0.1 - Tokenizers 0.20.1

GGUFs here: https://huggingface.co/mradermacher/Delirium-v1-GGUF This model was cooked a bit too long during SIMPO training. It writes like Hunter S. Thompson 2 days into an ether binge. It's grotesque, dark, grimy and genius. It's trained on an experimental gutenberg + antislop dataset. This contains the original two gutenberg sets by jondurbin and nbeerbower, as well as a subset of my own set, gutenberg3. The antislop pairs were generated with gemma-2-9b-it, with one sample generated with the AntiSlop sampler and the rejected sample generated without. Strengths: - Interesting, natural dialogue & character voices - Surprising metaphors & unique turns of phrase - Very creative Weaknesses: - Brutally dark, visceral & grotesque. Maybe also a positive depending on what you're looking for! - Fixates on certain concepts & phrases & repeats them - Seemingly incapable of writing romance or positivity - Did I mention it's basically insane? I suggest using the model in small doses for colour in a merge rather than raw dogging it. Writing Prompt Epistolary Historical Fiction: Write a story set during the American Civil War, told entirely through a series of letters between a father and a son separated by the event. The son is a soldier fighting for the Union, while the father is a civilian living in a Confederate state. There has always been an undercurrent of tension between them idealistically, but the war is bringing this into sharp relief, as well as representing a real threat to both of their safety. The story should capture the impact of the unfolding war on the characters' lives and relationship. The tension between them should be an undercurrent, not the main focus of the story unfolding through their letters. 800-1000 words. They strung up the damned Yankee flag from that blasted iron monstrosity this mornin' – the one they call Fort Sumter now. A black stain against the dawn sky like a widow's splatter of coal dust across the cheek of a saint. Saw it through the grime of the bakery window, smear of sugared yeast and stale bread crust clinging to it thicker'n usual. Mrs. Clementine swore it was a blight on the Lord's own breadbasket. She said it, spit-hard and with a hand clapped over her maw, like it were a cur's cough in the hallowed aisle. She spat into the gutter again, that's all it ever gets ‘em to do these days, spittin'. Truth be told, boy, the baker's wife don't see much difference ‘twixt a Union rag and the Devil's own dungaree apron. I reckon neither do half the men lining up with their pewter mugs at sunrise. Used to be a n's skin they spat at. Now it's the smell of wet wool and kerosene they choke down. Same sour taste though, come mornin'. They say the air's thick with it, all the way down to Savannah. Thick as hog molasses, the men mutter, thick enough to choke a man's prayers right down his gullet. You ever choke on prayer, Caleb? Felt like a frog's tongue in a dry mouth? That's what Pa says this country's feelin' like. Pa's down by the docks again, fingers twitching like a beetle's on dry bark. Says he hears whispers on the wind like they were ghosts in a cracked bell tower – whispers of cotton bales rotted in the belly of the hold, of ships scuttled before sunrise like barnacles bleeding onto the sand. Says it smells like fish guts and brimstone down there. Fish guts and brimstone, Caleb. God help us both, that's all that's left for a scent to hold onto now. Mother's got the cough back, the one that sounds like a rusty hinge on a summer's night. She coughs up phlegm the colour of old ginger tea and spits it into that chipped bowl by the washstand like a bird with a cracked beak trying to feed its young. Says it ain't no use beggin' for God's mercy anymore, He's gone deafened by the thunder. Says He's gone off to sit with some fancy angel on a cloud spun from Yankee gold thread. She ain't wrong. I saw a sliver of that same gold thread yesterday, tangled in the rigging of that schooner that just sailed for Boston – the ‘Harbinger', it called itself. A harbinger of what, Pa always asks. A harbinger of your belly gnawin' on itself, that's what. Camp near Frederick, Maryland. September 20th, 1861 The rain hasn't stopped for three days straight. It falls out of a sky the colour of bruised plum, the kind Mama used to bruise black against the counter when she slammed down jars of pickled peaches – jars that would roll and clink like musket balls on a tin roof. This ain't no gentle drizzle either, it's a bellyful of iron filings the sky's spat out to drown us all. We're soaked through to the bone-shine, a sodden string of sheepdogs huddled under canvas so thin the wind whistles through it like a starved man's breath. There's talk down in the trench, hushed whispers like damp tinder against damp flint, about a place called Antietam. Somethin' about blood as thick as sorghum, and a creek choked redder than the cotton bolls when they first bloom. Don't know if it's truth or the kind of story spun by boys with too much rotgut and too little sleep. We're not fools, not anymore, not since Gettysburg. Heard whispers about that too, in whispers thin as the smoke curling off damp earth after a lightning strike. They say the crows still circle there, like a scabbed wound refusing to mend. Heard a crow this mornin', perched on a splintered rail a yard away. Just a shadow against the grey, like a question mark drawn in charcoal dust. Didn't call. Didn't blink. Just cocked its head, same way old Jebediah's hound dog used to when Pa swore at it for eatin' the last scrag of fat from the pig's hindleg. Remember that hound, Pa? The one with the patch of white fur over one eye that looked like the moon caught in a cobweb? Ain't much else to remember these days. Time's gone brittle, snaps clean in two like dried cornstalks in winter. A man's got to hold onto somethin' though. Hold onto it tight enough it cuts through the damp wool of the shirt and into the ribs. Got a piece of that chipped china Mama swore wasn't fit for squirrels, chipped clean through the bluebird she swore was perched on a branch of forget-me-nots. The forget-me-nots are all smashed, but the bird's still there, half-blinded by the crack. Found it wedged in a barrel of stale cornmeal back when we were still camped on the Virginia side. Said it brought me luck, that damned bird. Said it was like you were watchin' over me, even with your head full of fire sermons and your belly full of vinegar. Thought it'd be a damn sight better than watchin' over nothin' at all. The baker's wife done gone and choked on her own prayer, coughed herself up into the next world like a rotten peach pit spitting out a worm. Found her sprawled over the sugar sack like a busted calico doll – half-light through the grime of that damn window, same way it fell on the flagpole yesterday when they strung up a goddamn Rebel banner alongside the Yankee one, like a pair of gutted fish belly-to-belly. Thought it might make a difference, you know? Make the air smell less like fish guts. But the sky just turned a deeper shade of bruise purple. Pa says it smells worse – like rotten lilies and old tobacco spit. Like a whorehouse in the throes of the measles, that's what he says. That hound dog of yours, the one with the moon-eye patch, went belly up last month, starved thin as a fiddle stick. Old Jebediah choked on a piece of quail bone the size of a sparrow's egg, went pale as a field rat caught in the jaws of a fox. Left him in the barn to fester, the way they're leaving the fields to the crows these days. Ain't no use talkin' to Mother about nothin' anymore. She sits by the cracked windowpane, face like a piece of parchment stretched thin over a broken tin drum. Says the Lord's gone off to gamble with the devil, left the country for the banker and the banker for the rats. Says the rats'll inherit the world soon enough. Pa's gone quieter than a drowned cat in a swamp. Used to be quiet like a shroud draped over a graveyard, that's how Pa was. But quieter now, like a shroud draped over a graveyard drowned under mud. Took a swig of the last bottle of corn whiskey last night. Tasted like tar and burnt fingers. Thought maybe it'd taste like your face, boy. Maybe like that summer you swore you could taste the rain like vinegar and peaches, like the way Mama used to mash the plums down till your teeth were stained purple and you couldn't say nothin' but ‘plum' for a week. Didn't taste like nothin' but the kind of ache that claws its way up from your belly and lodges under the skin of your ribs. Maybe I'll go down to the docks tomorrow. Maybe Pa'll be there. Maybe we'll spit at the same oily slick and not speak. Camp near Harper's Ferry, Virginia. March 12th, 1862 It hangs in the air thick enough to choke a man with. It's not in the wind this time, not the way the stink of salt and brine used to drift across the marsh back by Jebediah's. It's not like the way the river stunk after a flood, like rotten teeth and mud-slicked wood. This Shenandoah hangs here in the gut, like a wet wool blanket pulled over the ribs. It's got a taste, too. Like burnt sugar and the way the air tastes after you've walked through a field where they've been burning brush piles – acrid and slick, like swallowing the underside of a dead hornet. Don't know what it means. Ain't read the orders. Can't stomach the stink of the paper they print ‘em on – smells like the inside of a coffin nailed shut too tight. Didn't get the one about the peach cobbler burnin' up in the oven, the way it did every year when you weren't lookin' at it, the way it did that summer Pa went off to pray with the preacher down at the mouth of the swamp and Mama swore the Lord wouldn't listen to a man with the smell of whiskey on his breath and sawdust under his nails. Didn't get nothin' since that one about the rain. The rain that tasted like rusted hinges and bruised plums and choked you like a man stranglin' a cat to quiet it down. They done strung the damned Yankee flag up on a goddamn pyre again this mornin'. Pa says it was like watching a bellyful of maggots turn to dust. Says it was a smell worse than the fish guts and brimstone and the stink of that burned-sugar taste you write of in your letters – a smell worse'n anything he ever breathed in this God-forsaken life. Says it was like God himself had spat it out onto the cobblestones and called it a damn. Don't know what they done with the Rebel flag they hung alongside it. Don't know what they done with the sky neither, except it went white-knuckled and coughed up a mouthful of splintered light that cracked open the air like an egg yolk on a cracked plate. They say the light burned holes in the church steeple over yonder, near the iron foundry. Holes the size of a man's fist, they say. Holes big enough to let the Devil poke his head through and spit curses on the breeze like they were peppermint candies. Mother's gone plumb deaf in one ear now. Says it's the crows. Says they're gnawin' on her bones from the inside out. Pa says she's gone daft as a busted china doll. Says she sits in the shadows like a chipped teacup in a cupboard full of cobwebs – never stirs, never blinks, never spits. Ain't touched that chipped bluebird china you sent. Ain't touched nothin' since the day they strung up the goddamn flag alongside that Yankee rag. He's gone quieter than a dead dog under the porch swing. Quieter'n the goddamn rain on the tin roof when it's tryin' to drown out the prayers the Lord ain't listenin' to anymore. Ain't had no use for whiskey since it turned sour like a snake's eye on a hot summer day. Heard ‘em over the way the cannon spoke this mornin'. A voice like a busted cistern drippin' rusty iron – slow at first, then a gut-burst of it. The kind of sound that makes the hairs on the back of your neck itch like a swarm of wasps under a dead oak leaf. The kind of sound that makes the sky taste like old tin and bad blood. Heard it through the shriek of them damned things screamin' up and down the smoke-soaked columns, heard it through the men's coughs and the wet squelch of boots pullin' mud like a goddamn poultice off their ankles. Heard it through the ragged rasp of some poor bastard's prayers tangled up with the crackle of the wind through the shredded canvas tents, tangled up with the wet grind of splintered bone against broken wood – heard it all through that. Heard it good and clear though, like they were roosting on the edge of your ribs. They say they're pickin' clean the fields downriver now. Pickin' clean like a butcher boy with a butcher's knife and a grin slick with spit and peach fuzz. Pickin' clean like Mama used to pick clean the last of the plum juice from a jar, the way the light would slant through the window and turn her knuckles the same pale green as the mold that blooms on a forgotten loaf. Heard you were down at the docks. Heard it from a boy with a jaw that'd split an apple in two if you let him bite. Heard it from a boy with eyes like cracked ice and a cough that sounded like it was tryin' to spit out gravel and the last embers of some forgotten fire. Heard it through the whine of a sawbuck and the stink of salt and the way Writing Prompt # In the style of Ernest Hemingway: Write a scene in a larger story about a soldier returning home from war. The scene is set in a bar. It should carry the jadedness of a seasoned combatant but with a wry humour. Write in Heminway's voice, naturally: Use short, declarative sentences and simple, straightforward language. Include dialogue that is terse and revealing of character. Write with a keen sense of time and place. Capture realness and authenticity. 800-1000 words, past tense. Test Model Output The door swung in a lazy sigh, a rasp of hinges greased with too much rain. It hung there a second. Sweated chrome knob glinted on the bar's wet slick. He didn't push it. Didn't need to. It spat out the breath of the street, the wet cough of diesel fumes and sour piss off some cracked concrete further down. Spat it onto chipped linoleum. Same shade as the cracked enamel countertop. Same shade as the teeth on that dame at the end. Two of them gone, maybe. Couldn't tell past the yellow stain she'd laid down across her front teeth like a misplaced decal. The bell didn't sing. Just hung there, rusted wire taut as a plucked gut. It was a bellyache kind of thing, not music. It hung there in the sour stink of stale beer and something burnt off in a pan somewhere back in the greasy shadow behind the warped bar mirror. Burnt meat. Or maybe it was just the air. Hard to tell. Same taste in the mouth come morning, rain or shine. Didn't smell much different than the mortar pit. Only less choked up with dirt. Less dust the color of bone. He shifted the duffel. Felt the stiff wool against the collar of the thin shirt. Cotton. Someone's hand-me-down. Probably some broad's too. Sister. Aunt. Maybe even Ma if the stains were fresh enough. He didn't look. Didn't matter. Felt the same damp on the back. Felt the way the thread pulled tight over his ribs where it had been too close to the damn thing they'd pinned on. Didn't look like pins. More like needles. Stained silver. The kind that poked through a rat's belly to catch the guts spilling. Catch the guts spilling onto the floor. He hadn't looked at that either. Not much looking done since. Not since. Didn't need to. Not when the taste was right there in the back of the teeth. Same as the burnt meat. Same as the dust. Same as the rain on the back of your neck when it hit the sweat and cooled too slow. The bar was chipped tile, faded yellow like a canary that'd eaten bad feed. Or maybe it was sick yellow, like the kind you got when the fever broke and your whole body felt stitched together wrong. A seam split down the middle of the floorboards by the door. It yawned open like a tooth pulled crooked. Gaped at the grime in the swell of the worn planks. Gaped at the piss-stained squares of the faded rug someone had tried to patch over it. Tried to stitch over the bone-colored dust with a patch of threadbare crimson. Didn't help. Couldn't help. Same as the damn pins couldn't help. A flicker of red neon across the warped mirror. It bled down the cracked glass like a cut artery. Someone'd spilled something red once, maybe. Or maybe it was the light. Or maybe it was the way the glass had coughed up its insides in the heat. Same way the sky coughed up rain sometimes, a ragged belch over the goddamn flatlands. Didn't know. Didn't care. The air hung thick and wet. Not the kind of thick you felt in your lungs when a truck went roaring past with the doors busted open, spewing diesel like a choked cough. Not that kind. More like the thick you got after a long time under water. Couldn't remember much of anything past that goddamn bridge. Not even what they'd called the bridge. Couldn't remember if it was a bridge at all. Or if it was just a slant of concrete the size of a man's bad breath stretched out thin over some godforsaken ditch. Couldn't remember if there was ditch at all. Didn't matter much. Didn't matter if the ditch was choked up with mud or if the mud was choked up with men. A cough rattled behind the bar. Somewhere back in the greasy shadow under the red-bleeding neon. A hand wiped the bar top. A rag. The kind they use on the bottom of a spittoon. Same color as the floorboards. Same shade of the bone dust. Same shade of the goddamn teeth. Voice like a busted faucet dripping in the wrong sink. The kind you swear'll never stop but finally just goes dry with a clink of rusted metal. He didn't say please. Didn't say thank you. Didn't need to. He hadn't said much of anything since. Not that anyone had asked. The rag came down again. Wet. Smelling of something sour. Lemon maybe. Or maybe that sour milk that sat out too long in a tin pail by the latrine back in... back somewhere. Didn't matter where. It all tasted the same. He leaned a hand on the chipped lip of the counter. Felt the grain scrape across the thin skin between thumb and forefinger where the blood had pooled up. It was a slow bleed. Took a long time to clot. Still felt a little tight. Didn't hurt though. Not much. Same as the ribs. Same as the pins. Same as the teeth. Two fingers pinched a stray hair loose from the damp wool. The other one curled tight around the corner of the duffel strap. Pulled. Pulled tight as a wire around a dead rat's gut. The glass came down on the scarred oak. Not a full pour. A slosh. A puddle the color of piss in the pale green glass. The kind of green that had seen too many nights and too many bottles like it. The voice. A chipped china dish scraped across the chipped tile. Same as the cough. Same as the goddamn rag. He pushed the duffel forward. Felt the greasy wool scrape on the worn oak like a rotten belly against the splintery floorboards of a latrine. Didn't care. Didn't matter. Didn't look at it. Didn't look at the dame with the yellow teeth. Didn't look at the stained mirror or the warped picture hanging crooked over the chipped-tile booth. The kind with the blonde in the too tight dress and the vacant smile frozen under chipped enamel like a fly trapped in amber. Didn't look at any of it. Didn't need to. He lifted the glass. Swilled it. The burn was slow down the back of the throat. Didn't hit the stomach quick. Didn't hit the gut hard. Just sat there, heavy as a wet sock. Same as the rain. Same as the taste. Same as the goddamn dust. He set the glass down. Didn't wait for a goddamn hand. Didn't wait for a word. Didn't wait for anything. Didn't wait for the goddamn world to wait for him either. Walked through the stink and the rain and the cracked tile and the bone-dust yellow. The door hung open. A fat, greasy smear on the cracked glass. Rain spilled down the slick chrome knob. Rain like piss on a rusty nail. Like the kind of rain that stayed. Didn't matter. Didn't matter much. Not tonight. Not tonight at all. This model is a fine-tuned version of unsloth/gemma-2-9b-it on the sam-paech/gutenbergs123antislop-dpo dataset. It achieves the following results on the evaluation set: - Loss: 6.3949 - Rewards/chosen: -23.4522 - Rewards/rejected: -23.5795 - Rewards/accuracies: 0.5 - Rewards/margins: 0.1273 - Logps/rejected: -2.3579 - Logps/chosen: -2.3452 The following hyperparameters were used during training: - learningrate: 1e-07 - trainbatchsize: 1 - evalbatchsize: 1 - seed: 42 - distributedtype: multi-GPU - numdevices: 8 - totaltrainbatchsize: 8 - totalevalbatchsize: 8 - optimizer: Adam with betas=(0.9,0.999) and epsilon=1e-08 - lrschedulertype: cosine - lrschedulerwarmupratio: 0.1 - numepochs: 1 | Training Loss | Epoch | Step | Validation Loss | Rewards/chosen | Rewards/rejected | Rewards/accuracies | Rewards/margins | Logps/rejected | Logps/chosen | |:-------------:|:------:|:----:|:---------------:|:--------------:|:----------------:|:------------------:|:---------------:|:--------------:|:------------:| | 5.5632 | 0.6932 | 400 | 6.3949 | -23.4522 | -23.5795 | 0.5 | 0.1273 | -2.3579 | -2.3452 | - Transformers 4.45.2 - Pytorch 2.2.0+cu121 - Datasets 3.0.1 - Tokenizers 0.20.1