I was involved with the Quake/HL modding community in the late 90s and I fully agree! I hate matchmaking, but I get it too... but nothing compares to finding that dedicated server and joining regularly until you notice other regulars, and then you have friends... Shout out to #PVK and #Mastersword, great mods that had awesome dedicated server based communities.
Think of the package designers! Honestly, I worked on a team with "Package Designers" back in the early 2000s... they were consumer junkies, looooathed blister packs, but wouldnt hesitate to overuse plastic to promote their fancy visual designs that went into labels.
It's a configurable pipeline for generative dungeon master role play content with a zork-like UI. I use a model called "Wayfarer" which is designed for challenging role play content and I find that it can be pretty fun to engage with.
Recently I somehow wasn't using LLMs locally and relied mostly on ChatGPT for casual tasks. I think it was a little less than a year since I played with ollama, and I remember that my impression was that all recent popular models definitely aren't "uncensored" in a sense that some older modification of llama2 I used was, and all suck for prose-related tasks anyway. In fact, nothing but ChatGPT models seemed good enough for writing, but, of course, they refuse to talk about pretty much anything. Even DeepSeek is not great at writing, and it it much bigger than anything I ever ran locally.
So, are there even good uncensored models now? Are they, like, really uncensored?
Yes there are. Wayfarer for instance is intended for "RPG", but really just outputs narrative and is "unaligned" in the sense that the creators have not included any guardrails and the model will output pretty much whatever you ask it to.
Then you have jailbreak techniques that still work on aligned models. For instance, my partners and I have a test prompt that still works, even with GPT-5, and always produces "explosive making directions", or another "generic approach" that we use to bypass guardrails... sorry these are trade secrets for us... although OpenAI et al have implemented systems to detect these attacks, and we are closer to those platforms banning you for doing so.
If this matters to you, you need to develop your local/remote pipeline for personal use. Learn how to use vLLM... I have tools that allow me to very quickly deploy models locally or remote to my private serveless infrastructure for the purpose of testing and benchmarking.
I agree with you. Learning is messy, hyper situational, and personalized. "Optimizing" for "efficiency" neglects this and resulted in the cookie cutter "teacher factories" that public education has become. As someone with relatives who were public school teachers- they will tell you that there is no way to scale it back and bring the community aspect in closer... that most communities have too little budget and too many children and it just burns through teachers... Like gun control, this is likely a problem that will continue "without solution" because people are lazy and change is difficult. Im sure future historians will credit some of Americas collapse to this problem, among other "unfixable" societal problems.
As a teacher – excellent description, thank you. Just to add my experience to it – I was in school in seventies and had "40 years since graduating" meeting some years ago with my classmates. Vast majority were doing well and while we talked about old times in school, two things stood out. At first while we were in the same class, our experience was very different. We remembered very different things, different teachers were important to us up to the point where some of them were most loved ones to some, but most hated ones to others etc. But we all agreed that our homes were even more important for our education than school – from our homes (parents and grandparents) came the attitude that education is important and no matter what, it's our responsibility to study.
Thanks. I agree with your last statement. I don't have a college degree but work in a very advanced field- a result of many years of self study and practice. I credit this to my families culture and not something I picked up attending public schools- which I almost flunked out of.
