I like reading books, but with any other medium than games you are limited to a passive role. They can’t make a story your story the way a game can.

Depending on what it is, publishing on i2p could just be a way to get it out there initially after which other interested parties would seed it elsewhere

There reaches a point with vaporware projects where it’s like, actually release something or I don’t care anymore, it doesn’t deserve to keep getting press

I upvoted because I’m generally excited by the idea of software that lets you interact with different social media via one interface. Idk if the project itself is good but it seems like a neat idea.

Even if they tried I don’t think they have the leverage to make that work. What games or publishers are big enough that such a move would go worse for Twitch than it would for them? Most of the time indie games make for better content anyway. Twitch could just ban games that don’t include an unconditional free streaming license in their terms of service and not lose much of any popularity, while the game publishers trying to extort them would absolutely lose popularity.

Each server would likely have to utilize a payment service.

Yeah but that would mean each server has to take custody of funds, have their own individual contractual agreements with game companies, handle refunds, bear all the legal and tax burdens of this, and get people to trust they won’t scam them. It’s just too much of a burden, these are all things that benefit heavily from centralization and economies of scale, due to the legalistic nature of payments. You would end up with one dominant instance and unused federation, if there was even anyone willing to deal with all that stuff to begin with.

I feel like you could solve this stuff pretty well with crypto, having payment go directly to the game devs, and a no refund policy or something to simplify things, but crypto is too hated so that wouldn’t work right now.

hm that is a good point

Why don’t people? Because steam is just better

I am skeptical that this is the main reason (even though it’s true and is a reason). I think people don’t like the idea of having their games library split across multiple services, and don’t like using/learning software they aren’t familiar with, or that other people aren’t using.

Nope genuinely never heard of him, thanks for the info

Main problem I see is payments

Otherwise why would anyone use software they aren’t used to? Steam is really good, they’ve been putting massive resources into making it better for many years, and it has all the network effects.

idk who it is either, I’m guessing he plays sports because of the logos

I don’t mind it, Steam is nice but I don’t want them to have a monopoly on PC games

Seems reasonable, at least it’s not a ban and probably won’t be

Itch.io hasn’t yet addressed that inquiry directly, but one possibility is simply that generative AI is already in widespread use: 31% of respondent to a GDC study published earlier this year said they’re personally using generative AI in their work, and 18% said they’re not using it themselves but have colleagues who are—though not necessarily to create anything players actually see. Given those numbers, and the fact that they’re inevitably going to grow, a straight up ban on generative AI may not be workable.

Well if I was doing it I probably would be trying to focus on browser emulation to avoid having to dig into those sorts of details. It sounds like OP is a beginner and needs a simple method.

IIRC it should be able to be made to work since it does everything a browser does, found this search result, though it has been a while since I used it myself at all. Another thing you might try that has worked for me is iMacros, that’s a little simpler and more basic than Selenium but should work for what you say you want to do.

The reason to use Selenium is if the website you want to scrape uses javascript in a way that inhibits getting content without a full browser environment. BeautifulSoup is just a parser, it can’t solve that problem.

But I think the point is, the OP meme is wrong to try painting this as some kind of society-wide psychological pathology, when it’s rather business people coming up with simple reliable formulas to make money. The space of possible products people could want is large, and this choice isn’t only about what people want, but what will get attention. People will readily pay attention to and discuss with others something they already have a connection to in a way they wouldn’t with some new thing, even if they would rather have something new.

that is not the … available outcome.

It demonstrably is already though. Paste a document in, then ask questions about its contents; the answer will typically take what’s written there into account. Ask about something you know is in a Wikipedia article that would have been part of its training data, same deal. If you think it can’t do this sort of thing, you can just try it yourself.

Obviously it can handle simple sums, this is an illustrative example

I am well aware that LLMs can struggle especially with reasoning tasks, and have a bad habit of making up answers in some situations. That’s not the same as being unable to correlate and recall information, which is the relevant task here. Search engines also use machine learning technology and have been able to do that to some extent for years. But with a search engine, even if it’s smart enough to figure out what you wanted and give you the correct link, that’s useless if the content behind the link is only available to institutions that pay thousands a year for the privilege.

Think about these three things in terms of what information they contain and their capacity to convey it:

• A search engine

• Dataset of pirated contents from behind academic paywalls

• A LLM model file that has been trained on said pirated data

The latter two each have their pros and cons and would likely work better in combination with each other, but they both have an advantage over the search engine: they can tell you about the locked up data, and they can be used to combine the locked up data in novel ways.

Ok, but I would say that these concerns are all small potatoes compared to the potential for the general public gaining the ability to query a system with synthesized expert knowledge obtained from scraping all academically relevant documents. If you’re wondering about something and don’t know what you don’t know, or have any idea where to start looking to learn what you want to know, a LLM is an incredible resource even with caveats and limitations.

Of course, it would be better if it could also directly reference and provide the copyrighted/paywalled sources it draws its information from at runtime, in the interest of verifiably accurate information. Fortunately, local models are becoming increasingly powerful and lower barrier of entry to work with, so the legal barriers to such a thing existing might not be able to stop it for long in practice.