I think it would be enough to say that I looked for a server with a good bandwidth in torrent-neutral countries not too far away from me.

Plenty of good deals here: https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers

Edit: also some offers provide test IP so that you can check the ping - I didn’t use that, but in case you’re looking for something far away or overseas - very helpful

Early this month my Proton subscription ended. Instead of paying for one year more I decided to rent a VPS for 20$ per year (my Proton subscription costs 80$ per year now). It took 4 hours to setup wireguard server, configure port forwarding and update my clientside stuff accordingly. So far I’ve transferred 1.7 TB of data through this VPS (in a bit less than 2 weeks). It might be slightly slower than some Proton VPN servers, but it’s still very fast and decent enough for me. It’s easier than it seems and you get much lower prices, decent speeds, and more flexibility. You need to be a bit careful with VPS selection though: country where it’s hosted, their bandwidth and hardware.

I personally wouldn’t call 1:2 “overwhelmingly”, but even so, if there was just a single male Venti in the whole game, it wouldn’t in any way make the claim “Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such” untrue, because these games combined have a lot of sexy twinks to pick from.

Genshin has plently of male characters (F to M is ~1:2 iirc), and there is a variety of niches covered: cute twink-like types like Venti, hot tall guys like Diluc, etc. Anyway, vote with your wallet. It’s only natural there are more girl characters if that’s what larger chunk of playerbase want.

Imposing the ban and a 10 pm to 8 am curfew for 15- to 18-year-olds would “send a signal both to children and parents” that social media “is not harmless” for the young

The signal I’m reading there is that the concept of statesmanship should be seriously reevaluated.

A sexy twink.

Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such, imo.

We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke”

I think in heated discussions about “DEI slop” people mostly complain about women being desexualized rather than anyone else being sexualized. Do you have any examples of games where in addition to women being sexualized there were twinks or someone else being sexualized and people insisted that only women should be sexualized but not those other groups? Think of BG3 - it goes beyond regular “male gaze” but it’s still widely beloved because it’s more inclusive to wide range of appeals including regular ones.

This is meta-analysis.

More people gonna get their porn from darknet. And discover its wider selection of genres…

you won’t be able to tell if something is wrong

When you run it, test it, and it doesn’t work as expected (or doesn’t work at all), that means most likely something is wrong. Not all fields of work require programs to be 100% correct from the first try, pretty often you can run and test your code infinite number of times before shipping/deploying.

This is phenomenal, I’ve been switching through countless EU countries and servers, and catbox just kept becoming inaccessible in every single one day by day, and even after abandoning Proton VPN altogether and moving to obscure VPS provider with my self-hosted VPN, it worked for like 2 days, and now it’s blocked again.

what VPN service was that?

Proton VPN

be sure to run shellcheck for your scripts though, it can point out issues. aim for it to have no output, that means all seems ok.

It does some logging though, and I read what it logs via systemctl --user status. Anyway, those scripts/services so far are of a simple kind - if they don’t work, I notice that immediately, because my torrents not seeding or my tor/i2p proxy ports not working in browser. In case when error can only be discovered conditionally somewhere during a long runtime, it needs more complicated and careful testing.

We’re a bit off from the ability to have models which can tackle large projects like coding complete applications, but they’re good at some tasks.

I believe they’re (Copilot and similar) good for coding large projects if you use them in small steps and micromanage everything. I think in this mode of use they save a huge amount of time, and more importantly, they prevent you wasting your energy doing grindy/stupid/repetitive parts and allow you to save it for actually interesting/challenging parts.

This “dopamine hit” isn’t a permanent source of happiness, just repeatedly clicking “randomize” button not going to make you feel constantly high, after 3 maybe 5 hits you will start noticing a common pattern that gets old really fast. And to make it better you need to come up with ways to declare different structures, to establish rulesets, checklists, to make some unique pieces at certain checkpoints yourself, while allowing LLM to fill all the boilerplate around it, etc. Which is more effort but also produces more rewarding results. I like to think about it this way: LLM produces the best most generic thing possible for the prompt. Then I look at it and consider which parts I want to be less generic and reprompt. In programming or scripting, I’m okay with “best generic thing” that solves the problem I have. If I were writing novels, maybe it’s usable for some kind of top-down writing where you start with high-level structure, then clarify it step by step down to the lowest level. You can use AI to write around this structure, and if something is too boring/generic it’s again simply a matter of refining this structure more and expanding something into multiple more detailed things.

I agree, I should have clarified I actually meant setting up a wireguard server on a vps, not developing and alternative to wireguard or openvpn.

I’m happy for your successes and your enthusiasm! I’m in a different position, I’m kinda very lazy and have little enthusiasm regarding coding/devops stuff specifically, but I enjoy backsitting the Copilot. I also think that you’re definitely learning more by doing everything yourself, but it’s not really true that you learn nothing by only backsitting LLM, because it doesn’t just produce working solution from a single prompt, you have to reprompt and refine things again and again until you get what you want and it’s working as expected. I feel myself a bit overpowered this way because it lets me get things done extraordinarily fast. For example, at 00:00 I was only choosing a VPS to buy and by 04:00 I already had wireguard server with port forwarding up and running and all my clientside stuff configured and updated accordingly. And I had some exotic issues during setup which I also troubleshoot using LLM, like for example, my clientside wg.conf file getting wrong SELinux context and wg-quick daemon refusing to work because of that:

unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0

I never knew such this thing even exist, and LLM just casually explained that and provided a fix:

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t etc_t "/etc/wireguard(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -Rv /etc/wireguard

Oops, I meant self-hosting a wireguard server, not actually doing an alternative to wireguard or openvpn themselves…

and, port forwarding… I don’t know where are you running that, but linux iptables can do that too, in the kernel, with better performance.

With my previous paid VPN I had to use natpmpc to ask their server for forwarding/binding ports for me, and I also had to do that every 45 seconds. It’s nice to get a bash script running in a systemd demon that does that in a loop, and also parses output and saves remote ports server gave us this time to file in case we need them (like, for setting up a tor relay). Also, I got another script and demon for tor relay that monitors forwarded port changes (from a file) and updates torrc and restarts tor container. All this by Copilot, without knowing bash at all. Without having to write complex regexes to parse that output or regexes to overwrite tor config, etc. It’s not a single prompt, it requires some troubleshooting and clarifications and ultimately I got to know some of the low level details of this myself. Which is also great.

doing something wrong is worse than doing nothing.

Is this a general statement right? Try to forget about context then and read that again 😅

I actually think the moments when AI goes wrong are the moments that stimulate you and make you realize what you’re doing and what you want to achieve better. And when you do subsequent prompts to fix the issue, you essentially do problem solving on figuring out what to ask to make it do the exact thing you want. And it’s never going to be always right, simply because most of cases of it being wrong is you not providing enough details about what you actually want. So step-by-step AI usage with clarifications and fixes is always going to be brain-stimulating problem solving process.

I’m in the same boat with many things I’m using AI for. I would never write natpmpc port-forwarding demons, I would never create my own DIY VPN, etc, if I had to do this all by myself. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t enjoy spending my time diving into tons of manuals for various utilities, protocols, OS level stuff, networking, etc. I would simply give up and use some premade solutions. But with AI, I was able to get it all done while also quickly getting to know some surface-level things about all of this stuff myself.

I think they meant it doesn’t return to non-AI-user levels when you do the same task on your own immediately afterwards. But if you keep doing the task on your own for some time, I’d expect it to return to those levels rather fast.

I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.

Free advertising for their product, free efforts to keep the fandom alive. Don’t downplay marketing - marketing is king. Marketing drives the money. Even when it’s unintentional. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion most private server players would never have bought a subscription if they hadn’t first gotten hooked by playing for free on pservers for a long time. And this is a game where people who enjoy it keep coming back for decades. I’d be very interested to see statistics on “how many players who started on free pservers eventually bought a subscription.” Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story - it’s especially common among people from the third world, Eastern Europe, and so on. Without pservers, WoW might never have become as popular as it is today, and it could have been long dead by now.

They have the resources to be more unethical than you.

What does this even mean in context of deregulation? If nobody has to pay for lawsuits because there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money.

Specifically training it on content without permission?

Under current legal framework, it probably should be illegal, because it’s unfair and inconsistent that derivative works by people are illegal when derivative works by AI are not. But under my perfect legal framework, it all should be legal, and avoiding training on works of people who ask not to, should be a choice not enforced legally, which should be transparently communicated and affect which models people prefer to use or not to use.

AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs,

Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources. And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.

The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool.

Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine. It might not be the game you actually wanted though, if you care about any details at all. Because it’s all in the details to the lowest level, to the level how exactly strokes are made, how colors are blended, etc, and when you start going into the details you need a granular model that you can use step by step, interwined with your manual work, manual sketching, etc - just like it works in programming now. Just like it programming some details and intricacies are pointless trying to describe in words because it’s easier and faster just to write few lines of code yourself, do some strokes yourself, etc.