It seems to be more focused on business static hosting, which Neocities definitely is not. There's at least a dozen business static web hosting solutions out there and we're happy to share space with them.
Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)
I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.
I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.
It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?
The main concern isn't much about privacy, we have our share of crazy laws as well, age id, etc. sadly, that's where the society is heading, but mostly because of the worries about depending on a service where someone could decide to pull the plug because of international politics, affecting users in the process.
Can someone tell me why all of the sudden everyone's totally cool with letting political hacks choke the internet to death?
We used to make fun people like Ted Stevens for calling the internet "a series of tubes" and now we're just totally cool with letting a failed, bankrupt state in the US dictate what code needs to go into voluntary open source software. We need to fight back, now.
The post suggests that you need an rtx 5090 use it, which is currently selling for around $5,000 USD. I wouldn't exactly call that "my device", since my device costs about 25% of that for the entire computer.
For the same cost, you could run on a frontier model on a pro plan for two years. The economics dont make a lot of sense for this to me, so I would love some input on why people want to do this instead (privacy, for fun, etc).
If you’re doing breakeven math on subscriptions, consider that your own rig can run 24/7 whereas you will get a fraction of that with sub rate limits. Even if you factor in PG&E residential rates, the breakeven is a lot closer to months for overnight long-running agentic coding a couple times a week.
And in terms of interesting use cases: recently pointed an agent at Blender and gave it vision. That setup can essentially iterate on a scene forever.
Is the assumption here that inference costs will stay roughly static, or that frontier models will keep getting more expensive quickly enough to offset efficiency gains?
Because I don’t think “the subsidization train is going to end” necessarily means current pricing becomes impossible.
If capital keeps pouring into frontier AI, companies still have an incentive to subsidize access while competing for users and market share. And if that subsidization starts drying up, there’s even more incentive to bring inference costs down by making smaller and cheaper models catch up to today’s frontier capabilities.
So either way, I’m not sure you can extrapolate from the cost of serving current frontier models to what equivalent capability will cost two years from now.
I think like you mentioned, the practical reasons are disproportionately oriented around either privacy (, a clear constrained workload (need to OCR files/transcribe audio, and there isn't really a clear or meaningful reason to switch out the model to chase new incremental gains), or regulatory compliance (e.g. source code, patient data, can't leave the country).
I fully expect Meta will release other, smaller Muse models in the near future too.
The 5090 is also supposed to be a $2000 GPU, not a $5000 one. The entire market is utterly distorted right now, which will impact cloud inference more and more over time too. They are not immune to the absurdly high RAM prices, so their prices will have to go up over time too until the RAM supply chain goes back to normal.
I'm currently running it on an RTX 3090 (street price ~$1000 USD) with a long context and getting pretty good performance.
Prefill: ~1000 tok/s
Decode: 75-100 tok/s
It'll be far faster on a 5090, but I find the above performance to be acceptable. I've seen some claims that it even works OK on an AMD RX 7900XT (~$500USD)
Oh wow, they actually provided the full torrent. I was always hoping they would so it could be studied.
For those unfamiliar, 2B2T was a Minecraft anarchy server that had almost no restrictions. It devolved into roving gangs of people trying to kill each other, use cheats to find secret bases, etc. The trick to hiding on this server was to go as far away as possible from the center, which led to an enormous map size.
I joined with a friend several years ago to see if we could survive, and it took days just to get out of the spawn, which was completely destroyed, surrounded by massive walls, and flooded with Withers (very difficult to kill enemies).
Fascinating study and perhaps the biggest metaverse experiment that's ever happened (but definitely the most lawless one).
This is because Microsoft approached 2b2t, and said if they don't implement these rules, they will be blacklisted.
Blacklisting is a penalty normally given to pay-to-win or gambling servers, where the client will refuse to connect to the server's domain name or IP address. In this case, Microslop used it to force a server to censor the word "fuck", because Microslop are political extremists.
MS really hates minecraft's inherited self hosted server model. You can actually get a global ban for wrongthink commited on your own private server. (granted, someone needs to report you but still)
Also not really a censorship issue but I'm kinda bummed that the new version will default to having the server whitelist on. Going on an ip scanning site and joining random minecraft servers accindentally left on for years is an experience like no other. Some of the longer running ones are full of signs left by other explorers, or just griefed to shit. One of the few remaining wild wests on the internet.
I think broadly I'm in agreement that the censorship via blacklisting threats was unwarranted. That said, I also think we should keep in mind that this isn't some public forum made for adults to have discussions, it's a public block game server. I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children. Personally I think there was potential for some kind of middle ground, but I'm also not mourning the loss of the obsidian nazi builds too hard. The paradox of tolerance and all that. The vast majority of the anarchy spirit is still there, it's just slightly less edgy. It's hard to discuss in good faith because the advocates for lack of censorship here are largely people who want to spam the N word in chat all day or their unwitting allies. Ultimately, whatever the outcome (and I think the current outcome is at least /ok/), I've made peace with the possibility of losing minecraft as a medium for totally free speech. It's just a block game.
> I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children.
Maybe. They’ll encounter if eventually and if they are coddled too much they can’t handle it. I also think folks forget, or perhaps they were coddled, that kids already know about a lot of this stuff and when parents aren’t around say all the bad works and make very, very crude jokes. That’s what kids do. That’s what we did.
Sure, kids will encounter a lot of things, but there’s a difference between coddling and having conversations when the time is right (well, better - there’s rarely a correct time in any exact sense with kids).
Our kid is old enough now to have a good grasp on “world war 2 was bad, nazis are bad”, and if they were to hop on this server and then we have discussions surrounding ie the “obsidian swaztikas” mentioned above, I think it would go alright.
This kid is also smart, and emotionally aware, and actually a pretty cool dude. They can swear around us, and never in anger towards someone, and tbh they’ve said “oh shit” once while playing a game with us because they got spooked and last night during a run on Marathon they went “hey phatskat, I might use a swear word”. I asked what they wanted to say and why they were hesitant (since they know the rule that it’s ok generally), and they explained that swearing makes the “queasy” lol. A couple minutes later they went “ok, I’m gonna say it. Fuck yeah!”
All that is to say, I don’t feel like they’re coddled, and they also aren’t just going to grow up like I did in the Wild West of the 90’s internet. I saw a LOT of things I shouldn’t have, way too soon, and I also grew up in an environment where hiding that from my parents was the safest option. So yeah me and my friends swore and made off color jokes around each other because the adults would get mad, despite us learning a lot of the crude stuff from them and then Something Awful et al. In hiding it, I felt like the harder topics were absolutely not able to be broached with my parents, and looking back on it that sucks.
The way my partner and I are approaching it is to be up front and have the conversations we can at the kid’s level in a way that makes sense (eg age six: war bad, age ten: World War Two was a war about…).
There’s a middle ground between coddling and bootstraps, and it’s the kind of parenting I want to encourage others to do if they can.
You making the rest of the world foam padded because you don't want to control what your kid can access is gross. The rest of the world didn't have a kid. You did.
That’s a wild take tbh. In a different comment I did say that ideally the community would’ve taken action before MS had to step in. I don’t want to make the world “foam padded”, and in particular when it comes to fascism it should be stomped out wherever it appears, point blank. It’s a bummer that Microsoft came in and threatened to blacklist the server, and at the same time if you have a nazi in your bar and you don’t kick them out, you own a nazi bar.
Yes, my kids will run in to nazism in the wild, and I can’t control that, and if they ran into in a Minecraft server we’d talk about that and maybe even make an effort to clean it up ourselves - that’s what I think that community and frankly any community that doesn’t want to be a nazi community should do.
That’s a false equivalence and imo disingenuous - Nazis are understood by the broad majority to be “bad”. We, the public, don’t want nazis around - period. If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis there, I’m leaving because said bar has said “we’re ok with Nazis” and that’s a Nazi bar.
Most communists don’t hold abhorrent beliefs such as “Jewish people should be eradicated” or “the world belongs to the aryan race”, but a Nazi is a Nazi, there’s no grey area there.
1) that said bar knows everyone's political mindset, including those which haven't been made public;
2) that said bar actually treats said Nazi with decency;
Also, most communists hold the belief that there must be a violent revolution and the opposition should be executed, specially those of the tankie variety.
Edit: I have noticed you switched the count of Nazis from singular to plural ("if you have a nazi in your bar" -> "If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis") while proposing I'm being disingenuous. This might not have mattered to you, but the prevalence of an ideology is very important to whether a bar "is a Nazi bar" or "happens to have a Nazi".
3) “most” is doing some heavy lifting, and even so, you are showing the shades of communism. Nazism expresses an ideology of hate and racial superiority, it’s a completely different beast. (And yes I know that communism has been party to some ethnic cleansing such as in Stalinist Russia, however, that belief system of ethnic superiority is not inherent to communism)
1) fair enough, I was focusing on the original post;
2) disagree, the bar might be a pretty public place, so being allowed in is just the default; or they might have been personally allowed in, but is treated as the butt of jokes;
3) is it? "most" is pretty big group. If you take issue, we can replace it with "tankie". Also, does it really matter whether the motivations are racial or not? Mass murder is still mass murder, regardless of motivations.
Still, I feel like you are missing my main point. Having a Nazi, even if an obvious one, isn't enough for a bar to be nazified. It might be the trigger for that, but it might not. I argue that this "nazification process", which mirrors the "degeneration" process in libertarian literature, isn't a binary thing that should be treated this reductively.
I disagree on the “nazification” point, your main point, because fascism is the kind of insidious thing that can’t be allowed a foothold. To your point 2, even if the Nazis were allowed in to be the butt jokes, it’s still allowing them in and tolerating them.
If an establishment is aware of Nazis in their ranks and they aren’t condemning them, then they’re supporting them by way of not removing them. It’s the paradox of tolerance at play.
I don’t want to really derail into different aspects of communism, just want to say that most communists I’ve met or been exposed to only believe in violent revolution if peaceful revolution isn’t an option. Again, this isn’t, to me, an equivalent to the violent beliefs of Nazism.
I have to disagree on fascism being this insidious bogeyman. While I agree that they ought to be fought against, IMO this is reaching into red scare territory (which is fitting, given that both share a really close ideological root).
I also disagree that merely keeping a Nazi in your establishment is support for Nazism. Simply not removing a Nazi is no more than not removing a person, it doesn't speak whether the ideology will actually take root.
The paradox of intolerance, in its original form written by Karl Popper, is about discussions. In this context, intolerants are people who forego argumentation. Kicking a person, Nazi or not, who has been acting peacefully and has been engaging in argumentation isn't "intolerance against intolerance", it's intolerance proper. You may argue that you are trying to prevent a future situation with this, but unless it is a 100% guaranteed (which I argue it isn't), it's just plain intolerance.
Finally, bear in mind that there are more equivalences in beliefs than you think. Mein Kampf didn't speak anything about Jew mass murder (and it still happened), and most (as in, the ones you see "marxist-leninist" in their profile) socialists admit that a nonviolent approach is basically impossible. In the end, both ideologies share the willingness to dehumanize and murder their opposition (and for similar reasons, Nazi-brand racial hatred derives from the same core idea).
> Finally, bear in mind that there are more equivalences in beliefs than you think. Mein Kampf didn't speak anything about Jew mass murder (and it still happened), and most (as in, the ones you see "marxist-leninist" in their profile) socialists admit that a nonviolent approach is basically impossible. In the end, both ideologies share the willingness to dehumanize and murder their opposition (and for similar reasons, Nazi-brand racial hatred derives from the same core idea).
Spot on. It's interesting to me that we've failed to stomp out communist sympathies but I guess we didn't stomp out Nazi sympathies either.
Both are authoritarian ideologies that are incompatible with free expression, free trade, and free peoples. Yet people openly talk about being communists despite the above and despite the fact that tens of millions of dead precisely because of communist ideologies and failed economic policies. To claim that fascism and specifically Naziism is an insidious boogeyman means you should also claim the same about communism. Curious how some/many folks don't or don't seem to understand that.
Tbf, communism is indeed more broad than Hitler's Nazism, from pre-marxists to Proudhon ancoms (although a similar comment may be made about the common sense definition of Fascism), hence I changed scope towards traditional Marxist-Leninists.
It's more broad but I don't think that changes anything with respect to the destructiveness and need to stamp out the ideology. Nazism is just a flavor of either authoritarianism or maybe just a flavor of a broader racial/cultural superiority ideology. Typically in the west we reject the whole tree and not just some of the branches. I apply the same argument to communism. And you can certainly find more charitable interpretations where maybe some freedoms are still present, but you can do the same thing racial or cultural superiority ideologies or similar.
its sad ppl cant run their own servers without companies interfering. Was never an issue on games like CS. sure there was a lot of toxic ones but also rly nice ones. you cant moderate human nature. hiding it does no one any good either.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted for this. Microsoft should not be moderating privately-run servers.
Sure, on the realms or whatever they're called or whatever servers Microsoft do operate, fair game and good idea. But if I'm running a Minecraft server on my homelab it should be my decision what behaviour is acceptable within that server.
It's a case of some people making it worse for everyone. If people behaved on the server, MS wouldn't have intervened, which then wouldn't have made 2b2t cave on a what feels like a core ideal. It may only have chipped a corner of that ideal, but it still stings.
That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation. MS wasn't going to let one of the biggest and most famous servers of its most popular game be filled with swastikas. Even less so when it's so popular with kids.
In a funnier world, 2b2t would have said 'no', but I have a feeling MS would escalate, and that whatever email or whatever the admins got probably implied as much, so maybe that world wouldn't be funnier after all.
> That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation.
Agree, and I think it’s the community’s responsibility to decide what is and isn’t tolerable - even within anarchy. Forget MS, the (imo) proper response should have been the community actively choosing to deface and destroy the nazi stuff, or outright ban it from the moment it became a thing.
Microsoft just wants to avoid press of kids getting groomed or seeing adult content on Minecraft servers. Stuff like this is bad for a brand that primarily targets kids as new players and could get them into hot water with regulators.
I personally believe that they probably should add parental controls to Minecraft so parents can control what if and what kind of servers kids can join. I also believe more control will put more scrutiny on Microsoft since I haven't a lot of negative press about child safety in Minecraft especially in comparison with Roblox for example.
Where else would it start if not "you're not allowed to say this word because I don't like it"? Personally, I don't see why that word being banned gets a free pass. Would this proverbial slope start with speech at all? I can't imagine why one would accept one word being banned, then stand up to decry another being banned. What word would that be? Why is it more worthy than any other word?
Historically, it doesn't seem like much of a fallacy to say speech controls become more stringent after being introduced. Indeed, historically, one could remove the word "speech" and still be correct. The control doesn't go away in most cases until power changes hands, and even then it's often meeting the new boss, same as the old boss.
A lot of people run production, non-AI servers out of New York data centers. This will be a serious problem for a lot of people, including smaller companies, when they can't expand capacity in New York anymore and prices for what's left start going through the roof. It's not always easy to move servers to other data centers, not everything is an eventually consistent database.
Are you one of them? The other side of the issue is "raising power costs, straining water supplies and burdening local communities" according to the article. I guess the crux is figuring out who would suffer the most, data center expanders/builders, or the local community? If the latter, then this move seems right from my point of view, but I'm also not building/managing data centers.
I think it's reasonable to pump the brakes for a year (which is what they've done) and then see where things are in a year, even when there is just a risk to the local community. Worst case scenario, those businesses and data centers end up one year behind schedule, compared to the downsides, that seems acceptable to me.
> We run background checks on people who want to buy a gun, but we do not background check everyone at all times just in case.
And the other thing is, you can use a gun to murder people. If you try to use a porn site to murder someone, you're fundamentally hitting them with a laptop.
A major reason nobody can think clearly about this anymore is that there are people out there that genuinely believe porn sites and social media are as dangerous to human health as assault rifles and cigarettes. I'm almost as disturbed that people can't differentiate between harm risks as I am about horrible internet age checking laws.
I had a used 2016 VW Golf and it was a lemon. It would have an average of one serious problem a month. I finally gave up being a professional car maintainer and dumped it, taking a huge loss because it was effectively worthless on the car market despite only being 8 years old. Fun car to drive, but what's the point if it doesn't work reliably? I completely lost my trust for VW vehicles after that.
Not surprising to me at all that their software is a similar high quality experience, but in general I think it's weird that cars have to be connected to the Internet anyways and I doubt the competition is substantially better.
Only one major problem per month sounds like you got one of the good ones.
I've had VWs where the center console catches on fire whenever you turn on an indicator. (The obvious answer was to stick on some BMW badges so no one expects me to use indicators.)
When considering how to think about these restrictions, I turn to my 15 year old self back in the 90s and ask him "would you want the government to block you from using IRC, forums, guestbooks, and social web sites?"
His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)
Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.
Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.
I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.
Social media sites today are nothing like the forums and guestbooks of the 90s. Social media now is highly effective at developing addiction like symptoms as well as driving people to decisive topics and conspiracy theories. It has a measurable effect on teenagers wellbeing and academic performance too.
My bigger concern is the how rather than the why on this topic.
I'll agree with you that I'm far more worried about the how than the why, exponentially more worried.
I'm just not sure if "this time it's different". There was abundant decisive political smearing and conspiracy theories on Geocities. They had an entire section called Area51 (https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51). There was a politics neighborhood that had a bunch of crass political bashing (it's pretty funny to read about someone off his rocker about Janet Reno). There was also the Art Bell show playing in every radio market with him interviewing vampire experts and whatnot. The old Internet/culture really wasn't all that different than it is today.
Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)
I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.
I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.
It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?
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