I’d be fine if these studios just…vanished
Outside mobile, it would honestly be a boon to gaming.
Think how much attention and funding they suck up from smaller studios/publishers making great games. Folks have no idea what they’re missing.
Also, for any interested, desktop inference and quantization is my autistic interest. Ask my anything.
I don’t like Gemma 4 much so far, but if you want to try it anyway:
On Nvidia with no CPU offloading, watch this PR and run it with TabbyAPI: https://github.com/turboderp-org/exllamav3/pull/185
With CPU offloading, watch this PR and the mainline llama.cpp issues they link. Once Gemma4 inference isn’t busted, run it in IK or mainline llama.cpp: https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp/issues/1572
If you’re on an AMD APU, like a Mini PC server, look at: https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/lemonade
On an AMD or Intel GPU, either use llama.cpp or kobold.cpp with the vulkan backend.
Avoid ollama like it’s the plague.
Learn chat templating and play with it in mikupad before you use a “easy” frontend, so you understand what its doing internally (and know when/how it goes wrong): https://github.com/lmg-anon/mikupad
But TBH I’d point most people to Qwen 3.5/3.6 or Step 3.5 instead. They seem big, but being sparse MoEs, they can run quite quickly on single-GPU desktops: https://huggingface.co/models?other=ik_llama.cpp&sort=modified
There’s a whole lot of interest in locally runnable ML. It was there even before ChatGPT 3.5 started the tech bro hype train, when tinkerers were messing with GPT-J 6B and GAN models.
In a nutshell, it’s basically Lemmy vs Reddit. Local and community-developed vs toxic and corporate.
They seem to have held back the “big” locally runnable model.
It’s also kinda conservative/old, architecture wise: 16-bit weights, sliding window attention interleaved with global attention. No MTP, no QAT (yet), no tightly integrated vision, no hybrid mamba like Qwen/Deepseek, nothing weird like that. It’s especially glaring since we know Google is using an exotic architecture for Gemini, and has basically infinite resources for experimentation.
It also feels kinda “deep fried” like GPT-OSS to me, see: https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp/issues/1572
it is acting crazy. it can’t do anything without the proper chat template, or it goes crazy.
IMO it’s not very interesting, especially with so many other models that run really well on desktops.
it’s a form of private journalism, private opinion, and private art
But without any of the liability hazard.
This is my issue: the big platforms having their cake and eating it. In one breath, they claim to be little open-platform garage startups that can’t possibly be responsible for the content of their users; they’re just a utility. They need protection from Congress. In another breath, they’re the stewards of generations and children, the only ones responsible enough to tame the internet’s criminality. All while making trillions.
They want to be “private content” protected from the government? Fine. Treat them like it, legally.
It is when it warps the behavior of everyone else around you, and everything in charge of your life.
And I’m not just talking about the lost attention. The algorithms are not neutral.
Yeah, that’s going too far, but I understand the reaction to fanning over Valve.
There are a bazillion historical examples of why one should use, not trust, big businesses. They are entities to make transaction with, not people, and they will tighten the screws even if it takes decades.
This is doubly true in the software business.
And if the Valve superfans look at the world in 2026 and somehow don’t see that, I honestly don’t know what to tell them. They’re in such a completely different world than me I don’t know where to start.
Be prepared.
Don’t hate, but don’t trust Valve. Treat your Steam library like you don’t own it, and it could be enshittified at any time, because you don’t, and it could.
In practice, prioritize DRM-free stores when convenient. Or better yet, 1st party game dev stores. Archive any games or saves you actually want to go back to, just in case. Game like your Steam client install could require a subscription at a moment’s notice.
These comments…
Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.
I think you mean monitor their usage.
And to be fair, this is fairly technical. Many parents aren’t very technical. They’re unaware of parental controls they have access to, and I think that’s by design (as it would be unprofitable for social media).
Yeah. Motorsport should have been right up my alley but… what the heck are they doing with MP?
Last I played, the only half-usable race was the mixed class one, as it was medium length instead of short. It meant soft tires weren’t the uber-end-all meta, that the start isn’t such an apocalypse, and that one troll who knocks you off doesn’t end your whole race because it’s like 3 laps. And that you actually have time to pass.
I think they did away with it, and with no reason to touch the SP campaign with the stupid AI… I just quit? Kinda with the feeling you get after mediocre fast food. “Why did I eat that?”
Which sucks, as some of the cars are so much fun. I love the can am monsters, the ancient Le Mans cars, the quirky supercompacts and such, all sharing a circuit. What a waste.
Yeah. I prefer the idea of a bunch of 9-meters unless they can really perfect a cheap folding mirror to mass produce.
A small upper stage, an ion drive or something could get them to deep space. It’s not worth flying a whole Starship out there and burning more fuel to get it back; the return trip only makes sense for LEO.
I wonder how big you could get the mirror if you did it James Webb style in starship.
Presumably 7x ~8m hexagons folded up?
That is a good point though. And if one were to design a “budget” 9m space telescope, they could amortize the R&D dramatically by launching the same design many times, perhaps with different sensors for different purposes? Amortization is why the Falcon Heavy and such are so cheap, and why the Space Shuttle and JWST are obscenely expensive.
Okay, you’ve sold me. I hope this does happen.
Horizon 5 rallying feels great, but only on long-travel suspensions that don’t bounce over the road like a cartoon.
Try the RJ Anderson #37 Pro2 truck, give it 4WD, soften the suspension/tires, fatten the rear tires and take it on that downhill mountain course. It’s utter bliss. I also like the Ford Ranger T6 on flatter courses, and the Rally Fighter for RWD fun.
…But yeah, FH5 is too arcadey. Cross country is just miserable outside of the slowest class. The campaign is so sycophantic and stupid, and MP matchmaking racing is utterly broken. I’ll probably skip 6 too.
Theoretically, even if we assume SpaceX is overshooting, that’s an interesting thought:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
In practice? I’m more concerned about interest in funding astronomy in the first place.
That, and big fat telescopes are fundamentally expensive. And (at least for the optical variety) “swarming” them with a bunch of cheaper units isn’t as effective as building a big one.
I’d love to be wrong though. There are some interesting papers on swarms of optical telescopes for a larger effective aperture, but I’m not qualified to assess them.
I’m quite satisfied with LanguageTool.
It doesn’t have every esoteric variant of words, but adding a few to its dictionary over time brought it up to whatever vocabulary I know.
Also, if y’all are interested, run local models!
It’s not theoretical.
The cost of hybrid inference is very low; You can squeeze Qwen 35B on a 16GB RAM machine as long as it has some GPU. Check out ik_llama.cpp and ubergarm’s quants in particular:
https://huggingface.co/ubergarm/models#repos
But if you aren’t willing to even try, I think that’s another bad omen for local models. Like the Fediverse, it won’t be served to you on a silver platter, you gotta go out and find it.
…Without cash, though?
We’ve had an obvious, somewhat proven path to uber fast local inference (bitnet), but no one has taken it. No one is willing to roll the dice with a few multi-million dollar training runs, apparently, and this is true of dozens of other incredible papers.
It seems like organization around local model tinkering is hanging by a thread, too. Per usual, client business will barely lift a finger to support it.
So while I’m a local acolyte, through and through, I’m a bit… disillusioned. It doesn’t feel like anyone is coming to save us.
Yeah; 100%.
Ughhh, I could go on forever, but to keep it short:
Tech bro enshittification: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1p0u8hd/ollamas_enshitification_has_begun_opensource_is/
Hiding attribution to the actual open source project it’s based on: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1jgh0kd/opinion_ollama_is_overhyped_and_its_unethical/
A huge support drain on llama.cpp, without a single cent, nor a notable contribution, given back.
Constant bugs and broken models from “quick and dirty” model support updates, just for hype.
Breaking standard GGUFs.
Deliberately misnaming models (like the Deepseek Qwen distills and “Deepseek”) for hype.
Horrible defaults (like ancient default models, 4096 context, really bad/lazy quantizations).
A bunch of spam, drama, and abuse on Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit and such.
Basically, the devs are Tech Bros. They’re scammer-adjacent. I’ve been in local inference for years, and wouldn’t touch ollama if you paid me to. I’d trust Gemini API over them any day.
I’d recommend base llama.cpp or ik_llama.cpp or kobold.cpp, but if you must use an “turnkey” and popular UI, LMStudio is way better.
But the problem is, if you want a performant local LLM, nothing about local inference is really turnkey. It’s just too hardware sensitive, and moves too fast.