I think that its more difficult for a stable, persistent, nonmonogamous, romantic/sexual situation to persist mainly because there are more people involved.

Everything that would be a one to one discussion, is now A to B and A to C and B to C, and potentially A to BC and AB to C and AC to B… this gets more complex, geometrically, with more members.

With more people and no mandatory/imposed hierarchy, It complexifies, with more chances for miscommunication, with all the intensity of emotions that comes along with a serious relationship… which can often lead to drama.

I don’t think that this is conceptually difficult to do ethically, if everyone involved communicates very well.

But that almost never occurs in practice, in mono or nonmono setups.

I think it is difficult to do ethically in practice, moreso when there are more members, because people have emotions that cause them to do irrational things, they have limited amounts of time and energy, imperfect information, because people can change their minds about things, because sometimes people don’t really know why they do some things.

The more people you have in a persistent arrangement like this, the more complex and thus unstable the entire situation is.

Granted, that reasoning only applies to certain kinds of non monogamy, others are or can be less complex…

But basically my whole thrust here is that more people = more complicated = more chances for drama / intentionallly or unintentionally hurting other people.

There are just more potentially shifting sets of boundaries and rules, that may or may not apply equally to all others in the group, and those boundaries themselves may or may not be problems for other members of the group.

And I appreciate your reply, though I do disagree.

(and for what its worth, i didnt downvote you)

I follow your food allergy metaphor, but this makes sense analogously only if you essentially do not view sex as any more sacred, or complex and meaningful, than food… you view it only as basic human need that is not entwined with the very emotional structure of a relationship.

Say that you’re both ostensibly members of a religion that forbids eating pork, or you’re both fairly hardcore vegans, and you in particular are also allergic to pork.

If your partner goes out and eats pork, away from you, yes this is not literally directly harmful to you, but it betrays the values that you both ostensibly claim to believe in.

Furthering the analogy, the partner could just say they’re not a member of that religion, or they’re not a vegan, or they have different interpretations of the concepts of those… and then you could say:

‘well, the beliefs that I have are important to me, and I thought that you had those same beliefs, and that they were important to you to… so if you do not have those beliefs, we should probably not be a couple.’

So, you have clarified your line of thinking, your preference or worldview or what you want to call it, but you have not explained how the preference or worldview that I explained is unethical.

I don’t inherently think that ENM or poly or relationship anarchy are inherently impossible to do ethically… I think they are difficult to do ethically, without causing a ton of drama, a lot of emotional distress and complexity… but i do not think they are just de facto unethical in concept.

I do agree with you that monogamous relationships very often are problematic in that they come with baggage by way of people having unstated assumptions of what the roles and rules are.

But this can be solved with forthright communication and actually discussing with the partner what those roles and rules are or should be.

That goes the same for nonmonogamous relationships, they’re just inherently more complex as they involve more people.

Tons of people are, imo, not emotionally mature enough, not honest enough with themselves, do not have the communication skills required to be in any kind of a serious relationship, monogamous or otherwise.

How is consensual monogamy unethical?

Like really, you seem to genuinely hold the opinion you do, please explain to me how two people mutually agreeing to trust, support, love and fuck just each other … how is that unethical?

Yes, of course historically the concept is full of examples of other practices that get attached to it that are definitely harmful and bad.

Yes, there absolutely are a good deal of people who force monogamy on others as a means of control, who are hypocrites that don’t even follow the same rules or standards they impose on others.

But how is it inherently unethical for a fair and mutual relationship between just two people to exist?

Some people are into open relationships, ENM, polycules, just being a single stud or unicorn, etc.

Some people, arguably most people, either strongly prefer or can only emotionally handle having a single serious romantic relationship with one other person at a time.

The entire thing about cheating in a monogamous relationship is that it is lying, it is a massive breach of trust and respect.

If everyone involved is informed and onboard with expanding the relationship, that’s one thing… cheating is another.

For quite a lot of people, its not primarily that they want to posses or control their partner’s genitals.

Its that they want to be able to very thoroughly trust and relate to a single other person, to be the sole person that their partner also sees that way.

For these kinds of people, if their partner asked to open up the relationship, and they weren’t comfortable with it, they’re totally able to just realize at that point that their partner doesn’t want what they want, and just end the monogamous relationship, let their now former partner go pursue what they want.

So… how is this unethical?

Oh no!

I will continue not paying a dime for any media I see ever, unless I really support the creators, as I have been doing for … 20 years now?

In addition to broadly prevalent ‘traditional’ norms promoted and espoused by men in many, many parts of the US, that assert that caring for a child is innately feminine…

Tons of American women also actively promote patriarchy, they’d call these guys gay and not real men, for taking care of their kids, for being stay at home dads.

To be fair, there absolutely were Christian servers back in the old days, that absolutely would ban you for cursing or taking the Lord’s name in vain.

I saw this in … shit, Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2, Garry’s Mod before it was even sold for money, various source games and mods… Red Orchestra… all kinds of games that had dedicated servers back in the early 00s, there would usually be a couple that were explicitly Christian and would ban you for swearing.

This is objectively the correct thing to do if you are from an abusive family that has aggressively attempted to destroy your life, same thing if you are essentially the cuck/punching bag of a friend group.

If you’ve been surrounded and gaslit by horrible people your whole life, yeah, running away and hiding is actually the right call, at least untill you develop an actually healthy sense of self.

Its also just fine to be an introvert, just try to mix that up with at least a smidgen of regular socializing.

Yeah, this aggresively does not make sense.

There are a ton of eggs that have been broken by way of playing New Vegas.

Wow, its like… direct action works, when complaining loudly and formally doesn’t!

I can still hardly believe that the tech industry at large just decided to broadly roll out LLM integration into essentially every element of their businesses, having just no idea what they actually do.

Like 2 years ago now, I was figuratively pulling my hair out, reading the discussion panel schedule for Microsoft led conferences on LLMs and cybersecurity.

Literally every topic was a different kind of way that smashing an LLM into a complex business system… increases potential failure points, broadens attack surfaces… because networked LLMs literally are security vulnerabilities.

Not a single topic about how to use LLMs defensively, how to use them to turbocharge malware signature recognition, nothing like that.

All just a bunch of ‘make sure you don’t do this!’ warnings, and then everyone did them anyway.

Well you got me there.

https://github.com/SteamTracking/SteamTracking/tree/master/ProtobufsWebui

There’s the directory with the file in the screenshots, service_steamgpt.proto, updated 4 days ago along with a number of others, seems like it and a whole batch of related files did not exist before then.

I am uncertain if this … basically scraping operation is tracking the main Steam client or the Beta or what.

There is not a very helpful description of what exactly is being pulled here, in the readme/project description.

EDIT:

Perhaps if you are more familiar with Protobufs, you can take a gander at these and come away with a guesstimate as to what these are doing?

This is not meant to be a chatbot.

It is meant to evaluate gaming sessions of CS2 (and/or potentially any VAC enabled game, maybe).

Its an experimental, prototype of improving VAC’s serverside, backend analysis capabilities, to better detect cheaters and hackers.

You don’t need kernel level access into everyone’s pcs.

You can run analytics on what the server records as happening in the game session, to detect odd patterns and things that should be impossible.

LLMs are … the entire thing that they do is handle massive inputs of data, and then evaluate that data.

The part of an LLM that generates a response, in text form, to that data, is a whole other thing.

They can also output… code, or spreadsheets, or images, or 3d models, or… any other kind of data.

Like say, a printout of suspicious activity in a game session, with statistically derived confidence intervals and timestamps and analysis.

The you have another, differently tuned LLM, ingest the data the first LLM produces, and turn it into something else.

You see the ModelEvaluation and then MetaModelEvaluation?

That looks like what they’re doing to me.

Detailed Server Logs -> Model Evaluation -> MetaModelEvaluation.

If you’ve ever run a dedicated multiplayer server and had to deal with hackers… you’re gonna be looking through server logs to sniff out nonsense.

Server-side cheat detection, very oversimplified, is having automatic systems do that.

The file and class or function name or w/e literally has .proto in it.

As in prototype.

Valve’s customer service responses have always been mostly a canned series of bot messages.

Their in-house support has always been 99% automated.

Its very obvious if you’ve ever interacted with them at more than an occasional, superficial level.

You have to be quite persistent to get a message from an actual human being.

Yep, the automated messages often have the name of ostensibly a human attached to them.

So do all kinds of other bots, since way before ChatGPT and LLMs took off.

What, did you a think a human person actually read every single complaint report of a hacker or cheater in a video game with any kind of a massively used anti cheat system?

No! You have bots, analytic systems, screen that shit, just the same as all our resumes on Indeed, or our activity and profiles on dating apps have been being analysed and evaluated by bots, again, since way before LLMs got as prevalent as they are today.

Then you filter. Humans only see the odd ones that defy categorization, basically, or trigger a certain set of flags that are designated as ‘probably needs an actual human to handle this one’.

This has been a tech industry standard for almost two decades.

Valve is just now overhauling that system to use an LLM, because those are actually better than a very complex series of chained regex searches.

The alternative would be to do what Meta or Google or Amazon do: Hire armies of tens to hundreds of thousands of offshore contractors and give them all PTSD for pitiful wages, manually evaluating everything.

Apparently this is not widely known, by people who’ve never worked in an entreprise level tech company?

Using LLMs to evaluate and assist a massive anti-cheat system is actually a great way to be be able to do an anti-cheat system… without hooking directly into your kernel.

These things are very good at pattern recognition, and if you tune them to specifically only work with inputs from the server from gaming sessions, you can significantly improve server-side/backend detection of players/clients doing things that are highly suspicious or outright impossible given the actual rules of the game.

I think it was just one guy, but basically yeah, iirc, he was originally building it in Unity, then switched to Godot.

Yeah see this is my whole main problem.

The writing and story are just… ok?

I could identify the racist tropes and body shaming just interwoven into the whole series before I hit puberty.

Oh then of course slavery is good sometimes actually, here I invented a scenario where this is true.

I got bored of Harry Potter, and just reread Animorphs.

Which certainly has problematic characters and moments and events… but … they are bad things, that the characters have to actually deal with, its a much more complex and engaging story overall, imo, though of course the serial format means that some books are not so great in comparison to others.

Kinda the same thing with Redwall.

It is a name people have.

Like Jesús, or Mohammed.

Yeah, I appreciate those games as technical endeavors… I do not appreciate them as a player, as its very clear that they are essentially designed to troll you, the player.

I’m not that much of a sweat/masochist, christ.

For other genre-flavored Godot fans:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1963610/announcements/detail/538883150377388601

Road to Vostok is made in Godot, just went Early Access.

Godot can do more than cutesy/2D games.

Its somewhere between Escape from Tarkov and Stalker, single player.

Oh, also, at least for the vast majority of the development, if not still currently: Just one dude.