Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • Kinda shooting for the feel of like an old school Lenovo laptop keyboard

    If you’re specifically set on that, there used to be a USB-attached version of those. Dunno if they still make them. Wasn’t really interested myself, since I don’t like low-key-travel keyboards if I can avoid them, but I distinctly remember seeing them.

    searches

    Apparently it was called the “Ultranav”. I don’t see new ones on Amazon (other than someone trying to sell one at an exorbitant $400), but there are used ones:

    https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ultranav

    EDIT: Well, some of those say that they’re new. shrugs











  • 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.






  • I’m not really understanding what it is you are concerned about.

    If it’s that the Javascript might be malicious, then a browser should be able to sandbox it. IIRC — and you probably want to confirm this, if you’re actively concerned — the Firefox security model is that if you open a file locally, it has local access, but if you open it from a webserver, it doesn’t. Like, Javascript running in your browser downloaded from a web server shouldn’t have local filesystem access.

    If you want to examine some code, but don’t want the code to phone home in some way, I’d remember that at least DNS is probably also a potential side channel. I’d maybe run the stuff in a VM without network access, if I were concerned about that.