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%.

Go go China !

Bops the tankie.

Like, I have a Chinese LLM loaded right this second and follow them closely, but holy moly. Curb your enthusiasm.

Anyway, OpenAI has plenty of compute to train a Sora 2 if they want, but apparently they don’t. My guess is some combination of:

• They couldn’t figure out a more efficient architecture, like you speculated. I buy that. OpenAI’s development is way more conservative than you’d think, and video generation is inherently intense, especially if Sora 1 is the baseline.

• …Maybe they looked at metrics, saw Sora is mostly used for spam, scams, or worse, and pulled the plug for liability reasons?

• They’re focusing on short-term profitability, as other commenters mentioned.

And it can be used to verify how old you are.

How?

This is the part I’m hung up on. What actually physically happens to make me enter my real birthday in the systemd user field, and verify it’s actually my birthday?

January 1 1900 has been my official online birthday forever.

Gah, I forgot about that! It was so much fun in singleplayer.

I felt weird/guilty using mine in public, like staring down at a little rectangle was unsocial or bad for you or something…

Turns out, it’s more like digital detox! It would be cool these days.

Ugh, where is it!? I know I still have mine.

Ace Combat! Ratchet and Clank!