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.

I were on the hunt for a software forge with public hosting and I was worried about policies changing down the line, I’d probably take a look at GNU Savannah. That’s not especially blingy and it’s restricted to GPL-compatible stuff, but I have a pretty solid level of trust for the FSF.

Thanks for the opt-out link.

Context for the uninitiated:

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

Fair enough, I guess, if you didn’t know. I shouldn’t grouse at you.

(a) In all seriousness, people, unless you’re specifically into that sort of thing, just don’t use lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or lemmy.ml communities. Going there, having a bad time, and then coming back and reporting on other instances how much things suck there just wastes your time and wastes the time of people who are already avoiding those instances.

(b) If you specifically want to complain about conditions there, there’s a whole community dedicated to that, !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works. Or if you want to complain specifically about moderator/admin actions, !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com.

When I got whatever it was that I got new…I think an Asus device…that I used, I think that I had to order it online, and it sounds like OP was shopping brick-and-mortar. I dunno if he’d be able to find it brick-and-mortar.

Many open source operating systems exist that can turn a computer with multiple NIC’s into a router

Minor nitpick, but if you’re planning on sticking a NIC into a machine to make it a router, it’s probably more cost-effective to get a single NIC with multiple Ethernet ports than multiple NICs.

Looking at using older hardware we have spare (a MacBook Pro 2012 or rpi4) seem to have a track record of underperforming

In what sense?

I’m having trouble finding good options particularly in regards to openwrt at least.

Everything I can get in local stores isn’t supported by openwrt (neither are the current routers).

IIRC, OpenWRT tends to support older hardware. I once bought new hardware to run it, so I know that it’s been out there, but if you want something to run OpenWRT and aren’t too fussed about having the latest hardware, you can probably grab something off eBay or something, especially if what you care about isn’t the WiFi side of things, where things have changed over time. Might be possible to run a USB WiFi adapter or something, if you want the latest WiFi protocol.

Would the MacBook Pro or rpi4 with a second Ethernet nic running a firewall before the routers also fix the issue of not getting security updates?

Pretty much, if you’re talking Internet-facing stuff. I mean, you might still want updates for, I dunno, NTP updates or something where the router talks to the Internet. And if it’s doing WiFi and there’s some vulnerability associated with that, theoretically you could be attacked locally. In general, I wouldn’t worry too much. There are probably a ton of unsupported, unupdated Internet of Things devices on LANs all over the place, so shrugs. It’d be nice to have maintenance and security updates for everything, but in practice, there’s probably a lot of stuff that is always going to be unmaintained on most LANs. Smart TVs, printers, whatever. Maybe we should change that, but as things stand, kinda the norm.

I’ve got a substantial existing backlog of owned games and am trying not to just jump on more things until I’ve worked through some of that.

Some things that I’d buy anyway:

• If Kenshi 2 comes out anytime soon. My expectation is that that’s years out.

• If something like Caves of Qud comes out. I already have some roguelikes to play.

• Additional good DLC for some games that I have been playing, like Starfield. The Rimworld DLC has been worthwhile.

• If something like Steel Division 2 with Wargame: Red Dragon’s modern setting came out. Steel Division 2 has reasonable game AI and good quality-of-life features, but I personally enjoy the newer setting of Wargame: Red Dragon. WARNO isn’t that — it’s much too fast-paced for me and has less unit variety, feels to me like mostly just directing a constant flood of units. Less of the intricate deck-building that characterized the earlier two titles.

• If Fallout 5 came out anytime soon, which I am very confident will not happen.

EDIT: If someone successfully comes out with some game that can be plugged into a local LLM backend — it’ll probably be a game in a new genre, simple ruleset run by the game with its own logic that an LLM is smart enough to reasonably play and generate text description for — I’d be interested in giving that a shot. There are some developers experimenting with that sort of thing, but I don’t think that we’re really there technically. Might not be possible to do this effectively with current LLMs.

EDIT2: I’d also go for a Noita 2 or Noita DLC. There is some developer working on an unnamed game for what looks like a Noita-alike that I discovered a bit back, but it’s in early development, and I don’t know whether the actual gameplay will wind up getting the kind of appeal that Noita has. I imagine that one could get similar mechanics but have a game that isn’t as appealing.

If you don’t want to retain it at all — like, you just want the catharsis of typing it, and definitely want it to go into the void — then I suppose you could use a laptop with no writeable storage and a live-boot Linux distro that boots off a USB key. That never gets retained. Don’t put it on a network.

I haven’t played it, but if you can’t skip the animation, that actually highlights the issue I complained about in another comment, where the animation becomes the bottleneck. Say they do this, and it’s tuned to that hard drive. Then someone decides that they’re willing to spend more to improve performance and goes out and gets an SSD for their PS4. Now the game probably doesn’t need to spend all that time hiding the loading, but the player’s still stuck with it in the game.

I kind of took the approach of not caring about achievements in the first place.

I mean, at best, they’re an inexpensive way of adding grind of some premade categories to games. At worst, they’re another source of tracking player activity in games (though I suppose that as data-harvesting goes, this is probably one of the less-objectionable forms).

I get wanting to do challenge playthroughs to accomplish certain things, but it’s not as if the game developer needs to provide support for that. It’s maybe a quality-of-life improvement, but…shrugs It just isn’t something that matters that much to me.

I think that there’s a good argument for mods disabling achievements, if one wants the achievement to be meaningful. It’s hard to reliably determine whether a mod (or an updated version of the mod) “helps” or not. You’d likely need human review, which is subject to errors and costs something. If someone permits through a mod that helps and then later there’s a re-review and achievements gotten with that mod are revoked, that’s going to piss some players off.

All that being said, if someone does care about achievements, I think that one option might be to have two lists of achievements. One is for the vanilla game. One is for the modded game. That doesn’t require human review of mods or hard calls to be made (since all mods “taint” the achievement and move it to the “modded game” achievement list) and it still lets players who just want to track their own progress do so using achievements. It doesn’t mean that a player can enjoy some quality-of-life mod and still prove to their friends that they accomplished Achievement X in an unmodified game in terms of challenge, but that might be fine for a lot of players.

I generally agree that improving mod accessibility to the public is desirable.

I just stuck maybe a couple hundred mods into Starfield this week using Creations, including a number of paid ones. I’m fine with paid mods, but Bethesda still needs to deal with some basic issues.

1. While I had fewer problems than I had with installing mods on prior Bethesda games using third-party mod managers, the need to troubleshoot hasn’t gone away. I installed some high-resolution texture mods that crashed Starfield shortly after starting up, which made the Creations mod manager inaccessible. Bethesda doesn’t detect crashes in that scenario and offer a way to “roll back” to a “safe mode” or anything like that. I poked around a bit, and, as with their prior games, Starfield has a plugins.txt containing a list of modules loaded, and one can just remove the leading asterisk to disable them. But that’s going to be unacceptable for general use if you want all players to have access to mods. Either troubleshooting has to be pretty idiot-proof, or not be necessary at all. You definitely can’t put someone in a situation where they effectively can’t access the mod manager.

2. For more-advanced users, troubleshooting tools still aren’t great. Bethesda would benefit from something that can at least do a binary-search for a breaking mod: turn off the latter half of a problematic mod list, see if the problem goes away. If it does, the problem is in the latter half; repeat for that half. If it doesn’t, the problem is in the first half; repeat for that half. Various tools that I’ve used in the past can do this, like git bisect. Conflict Catcher on the classic MacOS had a particularly good implementation that could detect multiple extensions that conflicted with each other; I’ve never seen another tool do this.

3. Bethesda doesn’t, AFAICT, do adult mods in their own mod repository, which are popular for a number of their prior games. Nexusmods carries things that Creations doesn’t. LoversLab carries things that Nexusmods doesn’t. I appreciate if Microsoft doesn’t want to be in the business of distributing adult mods. However, I am confident that a lot of people would like to use those, as with prior Bethesda games. If one wants a lower bar to use, not requiring use of external mod managers would be desirable. I do think that extending the in-game mod manager to support external mod repositories would lower the barrier there. If Bethesda wants their game to be a platform, then that means more stuff strengthens the platform.

4. Loading time still increases as mod count rises, as with prior Bethesda games. It can easily take minutes. It should be possible, at bare minimum, to have a progress bar up showing about how long it’ll take to complete load based on prior loads, if the mod list hasn’t changed. Personally, I’d like to see the load time reduced. If they have to validate content or something or build an index, only do it the first time a mod list changes and then cache the index.

5. It’d be nice to have a “recommends” option. That is, if a mod requires another mod, when installing the first mod, ask the user if they want to install the latter mod. Nexusmods can do this. Bethesda’s Creations can’t — they will keep one from enabling an installed mod with missing dependencies, but the user basically needs to read mod descriptions and install appropriate dependency mods. That’s a barrier to use.

6. Bethesda’s Creations store just has abysmal filtering options. I get that it’s for a single game, and so it’s hard to amortize costs, but browsing through what’s there is just atrocious. You don’t have the ability to apply multiple criteria when searching for games.

7. The Creations store always re-downloads the list of Creations, instead of caching it. Exit Creations and go back in and everything gets re-downloaded again. This is obnoxious.

8. I understand that there are some technical limitations associated with the Creations mod manager. The Dark Mode for Terminals mod, for example, says that the Creations release cannot work around a bug associated with changing mod load order that the Nexus release doesn’t have a problem with.

9. One popular thing to make as mods in many games is skins or cosmetic changes, like to clothing or the like. Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 had “cinematic kills”, where sometimes the camera would pan away, allowing one to see one’s own character. Starfield doesn’t do this, which means that there are few opportunities to see one’s character, unless one leaves the camera in third-person (which is generally not great from a gameplay standpoint). This is an issue that I also would say applies to Cyberpunk 2077’s clothing options — lots of work went into creating many clothing options, but one so rarely actually sees oneself in the game that it has little impact. Ditto for a number of cosmetic options, like hairstyle and the like. I think that it’d be beneficial if they could work some way to see oneself more frequently into the game in terms of people reskinning things.

10. For Fallout 76, Bethesda made money by mostly selling cosmetic items used by people who want to build themed player CAMPs. I was never personally very interested in building elaborate CAMPs just for the sake of looks, though clearly there are some people who are. However, my take is that these items were generally quite expensive compared to the cost of assets in the base game, though I’ll admit that I don’t know what volume they sell at. At least for me, the idea of paying for more content and functionality, to keep expanding that aspect of the game, is interesting. Buying cosmetic clutter items isn’t terribly interesting. I’m sure that they gather statistics on what players actually get, and Starfield’s Creations seem to me to have a different focus than the Fallout 76 Creations, so that’s good so far as it goes from my standpoint. My own interest would be in, say, getting new handcrafted cities and quests and the like. Getting a new player home or a different style of couch to put in it doesn’t really interest me nearly as much.

11. I am pretty convinced that if Bethesda wants to have a low bar to extensively-modded games for the general playerbase, they’re going to have native support for something like Wabbajack. That lets one player or team assemble a curated mod collection, and then lets other users install it en masse. I’m not saying that using mods should end there, but my experience is that, years after a Bethesda game has come out, there are many different mods in similar areas (e.g. relighting mods, say). Some of those are successor mods. Some have advantages and drawbacks. Trying to evaluate what the best “current” choice is for a wide variety of mod types is a large task. Letting someone just choose from a list of “mod collections” and easily install all of the mods in a collection would, I think, greatly reduce the bar to get players able to use many mods at once.

One thing that annoys me about loading animations designed to conceal the game needing to load is that there’s no guarantee that — especially with PC games, as the game is played on faster computers — the bottleneck may become the animation completing rather than the actual loading.

Static loading screens don’t have this problem.

I kind of like Fallout 4’s approach of putting a single model up that you can rotate and look at while something is loading. It’ll add to the loading time a bit, but at least there’s something the player can fiddle with for a few seconds.