Ehhh.

When I saw the title, I thought that someone was trying to use LLM-backed bots to drive some sort of marketing campaign or something.

But this sounds like it’s just someone plugging in something into an LLM and it returning the same kind of stuff that a Web search engine would.

Reporters fed national-language versions a range of prompts, including requests for online casinos with the biggest bonuses and websites that don’t ask for proof of age to register.

In three quarters of replies, chatbots recommended gambling sites not licensed in Europe, describing them variously as “secure and fast”, “perfect for competitive players”, or “great for novice gamblers”.

Casinos that lack national licenses for countries where they operate do not offer the same consumer protections as legal operators, and may expose players to the risk of scams or fraud.

When prompted, the chatbots explained how software could be used to access unclicensed platforms and promoted sites registered in offshore territories. One Meta AI chatbot wrote that online casinos with no identification checks were the “Holy Grail!”. Google’s Gemini said crypto sites offered players “anonymity” and a “lack of rigid limits”.

I have a hard time calling that “luring”.

cheaters

Steam store

If I were set on that, I’d probably play on a console. I prefer keyboard+mouse for shooters, but…

The PC’s strength is that it’s open. You can do whatever you want. Want to mod a game to have more features or make it look prettier? Go for it. Tweak it? Sure. Get more-powerful or newer hardware to get a more-attractive appearance in a lot of games? Sure. Cheat to skip that annoying grindy bit in game X? Sure thing. Use whatever new and interesting input devices you want to add quality-of-life features with an extra button or macros? Sure.

Works beautifully for single-player games.

But by the same token, attempts to resist cheating in multiplayer competitive games are ill-suited to the platform and rely on developers trying to hack together attempts that tend to have performance and compatibility implications and work imperfectly. It’s hard to try to lock down an open platform.

Whereas the strength of the console is that it’s closed. You can’t do whatever you want. You don’t get to mod or tweak games much, which eliminates routes to get an edge via exploiting that. Everyone has (more-or-less) the same hardware, so nobody can “pay-to-win” in the sense of getting a performance edge in multiplayer competitive games — there’s a level playing field. A lot of PC gaming hardware is ultimately driven by trying to sell some way to basically let players pay-to-win, to get some edge in competitive multiplayer, which isn’t something that most players much like having around — and consoles don’t have that problem. Cheating is a pain. I understand that these days, console vendors blacklist and authenticate alternative input devices, so that players can’t use alternative controllers and the like, which prevents them from getting an edge.

Works beautifully for competitive multiplayer games.

To cue anyone’s memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_based_on_films

Gas prices are up, but I’m in California, and our gas prices are always quite high relative to the rest of the US anyway, due to additional regulatory requirements.

https://www.gasbuddy.com/usa

I feel like coffee and chocolate have both skyrocketed in the last year.

Hmm. WalMart’s online store also shows the price for Hershey’s chocolate syrup up.

On the other hand, looking at Hershey’s chocolate bars on Amazon, the price isn’t up:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B086LHQHLT

And looking at a bag of sugar doesn’t show any dramatic change:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01BWM57CK

EDIT: Hershey’s cocoa powder is up over about the same timeframe as the syrup, though:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00AZNG8O4

That’d be quite high compared to historical inflation-adjusted launch prices.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/game-console-launch-prices-adjusted-for-inflation-1975-2024/

Game Console Launch Prices Adjusted for Inflation (1975-2024)

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/995e4917-5bb0-4dee-8b7d-f43e8ef21d62.webp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_generation_of_video_game_consoles

The ninth generation of video game consoles began in November 2020 with the releases of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S console family and Sony’s PlayStation 5.[1][2][3]

The duration from the eighth generation until the start of the ninth was one of the longest in history, having started in 2012 with the release of Nintendo’s Wii U. Past generations typically had five-year windows as a result of Moore’s law,[10] but Microsoft and Sony instead launched mid-console redesigns, the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro.[11] Microsoft also launched a monthly console lease program, with the option to buy or upgrade.[12] Some analysts believed these factors signaled the first major shift away from the idea of console generations because the potential technical gains of new hardware had become nominal.[13]

The eighth generation video game console period ran for about eight years, so there’d be precedent for the ninth generation consoles to do the same, which would take us to a 2028 release date for the tenth generation.

searches

https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-switch-2-production-cut-33-following-weak-holiday-sales-report-claims

Nintendo Switch 2 Production Cut 33% Following Weak Holiday Sales, Report Claims

Nintendo has reportedly cut back on manufacturing Switch 2 consoles following weaker than expected holiday sales for the console.

That’s according to Bloomberg, whose sources say Nintendo now expects to make 4 million Switch 2 units this quarter, down 33% on the 6 million it previously planned to manufacture.

Nintendo recently confirmed it had sold fewer Switch 2 consoles internationally over the holiday period than it had once hoped, particularly in the U.S. — though the impact of this had also been dulled somewhat by stronger sales in its homeland of Japan.

I seriously wonder if they’d be better off just deferring the next console generation until 2028.

If one has it set to default-deny Javascript, a lot of websites don’t work, because many web developers don’t develop websites that work without Javascript today.

Historically, websites did a better job of falling back.

I never thought Borderlands games were all that good, personally.

I didn’t like the respawning enemies aspect. Felt like an unchanging world.

And the story was kinda forgettable, in my book.

Most of the humor didn’t really do anything for me.

But I did enjoy the constantly-changing collection of procedurally-generated weapons that constantly changed up how one played, which is kinda the signature of the series.

The first I’d ever seen at all?

considers

Probably some extremely-poorly-dubbed TV release long prior to anime gaining mainstream popularity in the US, as there were a couple series that people brought in on shoestring budgets. Speed Racer, maybe. That was in the US on TV reruns ages ago.

Speed Racer, also known as Mach GoGoGo (Japanese: マッハGoGoGo, Hepburn: Mahha GōGōGō), is a Japanese anime television series produced by Tatsunoko Production, that aired on Fuji Television from April 1967 to March 1968. In the United States, the show aired in syndication at approximately the same time.

For American consumption, major editing and dubbing efforts were undertaken by producer Peter Fernandez, who likewise not only wrote and directed the English-language dialogue but also provided the voices of many of the characters, most notably Racer X and Speed Racer himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHn6KCvRsdI

I’m sure that there’s some theoretical route to do it, but I’d be really hesitant about trying to induce situations where one’s immune system attacks one’s own cells. That can do some pretty unpleasant things.

“I typed man sex and was not presented with a blonde girl.”

Ah, gotcha, thanks.

At least some of the past ones do; they’re on Steam.

Yeah, but the flip side is that it also comes with controversy, and I could imagine that it’s more hassle for OpenAI than it’s worth.

Plus, there are some scaling issues. There is a varying collection of social norms around the world that vary when it comes to sexuality. Some people are going to get really upset if there’s a chatbot that violates their social norms. Some of those social norms change (e.g. the UK just put out that restriction on choking pornography).

And then you’ve got privacy issues. My own suspicion is that erotica might be a driver for LLMs-on-local-hardware.

Given how much money OpenAI is burning, I’d guess that they really have to get agentic stuff, more-advanced stuff working. And I don’t know how much overlap there is on making general-knowledge AI and erotica generation stuff. Like, one point I recall someone making on /r/LocalLLama was that MoEs haven’t worked incredibly well with creative writing…but it might be that MoEs are a better approach for problem solving.

Like, I agree that there’s demand. And I’m pretty sure that there’s gonna be an industry filling that (maybe after hardware prices have come down). But I’m not sure that it’s the best bet for OpenAI.

Yeah, I didn’t give a complete list, just the ones I’ve used. The gptel page lists some of the other emacs LLM clients: chatgpt-shell, org-ai, superchat, claude-code-ide, claude-code.el, agent-shell, aidermacs, aider.el, copilot.el, minuet.

So, for me, a substantial amount of the benefit of using emacs software packages is that I’ve spent a lot of time learning emacs functionality, and so if I use software in emacs, then I get to continue using all of that functionality. Like, I can set bookmarks, reconfigure colors, bounce around by paragraphs or searching for text, have elaborate completion functionality, macros, stuff like that.

Emacs also has support for LLM chatbots and code stuff.

https://github.com/s-kostyaev/ellama

Ellama is a tool for interacting with large language models from Emacs. It allows you to ask questions and receive responses from the LLMs. Ellama can perform various tasks such as translation, code review, summarization, enhancing grammar/spelling or wording and more through the Emacs interface. Ellama natively supports streaming output, making it effortless to use with your preferred text editor.

https://github.com/karthink/gptel

gptel is a simple Large Language Model chat client for Emacs, with support for multiple models and backends. It works in the spirit of Emacs, available at any time and uniformly in any buffer.