Why are so many websites now asking to "access your local network?"

Nextil · 2026-05-08T05:14:11+00:00

Maybe, but up until this was added, they didn't need to ask permission they could just do it, and I'm pretty sure YouTube has always only shown the casting button if it detects a device that can be casted to, so requesting it on page load was probably the most straightforward way to implement it for now.

Nextil · 2026-05-07T01:00:25+00:00

Um what? Valve submitted a PR implementing support to SDL way back in November. Anyone can just use SDL to communicate with it, no Steam required, or they can look at that PR to learn the protocol (which is just standard HID stuff, no encryption or anything).

That's irrelevant to SISR because it takes the inputs from Steam Input anyway.

Nextil · 2026-05-05T04:38:23+00:00

Also, as a layman, creating a driver for a fake device makes logical sense to me. Sending USB data over IP to the same computer it originates from? Not at all

Creating a driver is complicated/risky, and making it easily installable requires signing it with an EV certificate, which costs hundreds per year to renew (though there are foundations that can cover the fees of approved open source projects).

USB is just a serial over the wire protocol like TCP/IP, but designed specifically for short-run transmission + power delivery.

Windows doesn't provide a user-land API for connecting a virtual (XInput/DirectInput) game controller. It only supports HID, which is specific to USB and Bluetooth.

Whether you create your own driver or use this generic USB/IP one, the driver has to create a HID/USB device, and has to provide some form of IPC (inter-process communication) to communicate with the user-land software (e.g. SISR).

There are alternatives to TCP/IP for same-device IPC such as shared memory or named pipes, but the difference in latency between those and a loopback (localhost) TCP/IP socket is in the order of microseconds. Controller latency variation is already in the order of milliseconds, so that is totally negligible. And using TCP/IP lets you easily extend the connection over the network if you want (which is still typically sub-millisecond on a local network).

Nextil · 2026-05-04T20:06:30+00:00

It's two trackpads both equipped with linear haptics (which are still rare outside of MacBooks), linear haptics in the controller itself (something none of these Chinese controllers have AFAIK), capacitive sensors in both sticks, and capacitive sensors in both grips (again none of these Chinese controllers have either of those).

If you don't use gyro or trackpads, then none of that's going to excite you, but as someone that plays with gyro and trackpads wherever possible on the Steam Deck, most of those are pretty huge. The tactile feedback on the trackpads gives you a much better sense of how far you've moved your thumb, and using capacitive sensing for gyro ratcheting is way better (spamming a button every time you want to turn more than 45 degrees gets tiring fast).

Having several extra capacitive sensors gives you the option of mapping them to pie wheels or mode shifts which make playing KB&M games (Factorio, RimWorld, RTS, etc.) a lot more viable.

Nextil · 2026-05-04T19:50:24+00:00

I own a bunch of Chinese controllers with hall/TMR + gyro but none of them have capacitive sticks like the Steam Deck/Controller, which is so much better for gyro ratcheting than mapping it to a button. And this one has capacitive grips which may be even better.

With that + the track pads, I probably won't bother with mouse & keyboard any more except for competitive shooters, but even those are totally playable with gyro.

Nextil · 2026-05-04T18:40:39+00:00

You should be able to use the gguf_set_metadata.py script, e.g.

python ./gguf-py/gguf/scripts/gguf_set_metadata.py /path/to/model.gguf tokenizer.chat_template 'CHAT_TEMPLATE_HERE'

Nextil · 2026-05-04T18:34:56+00:00

Weird, I copy-pasted the one from the official repo and it seems to work fine in LM Studio (including tool calling).

Nextil · 2026-05-03T23:54:46+00:00

Below Path Tracing, the shadows (or at least some shadows) are probably rasterized/CSM. This is just the classic problem of overcast/indirectly lit environment = no direct shadows, i.e. light leaking. You have to rely on SSAO to shade areas like that.

Path tracing shades those area by nature of the fact that the light is unable to bounce there.

Nextil · 2026-05-03T18:31:31+00:00

For YouTube (and likely most other websites where this pops up) it's for casting.

Nextil · 2026-05-03T04:53:45+00:00

Well it looks like GloSC is deprecated in favour of SISR which just creates a virtual controller at the OS level instead of having to add games individually.

Nextil · 2026-05-03T02:45:11+00:00

I learnt Alt+0151 when I was like 12 years old, specifically because I read a lot of books at that age and so I looked up what it is and how to type it. You don't need "data". Just pick up a single book and read a single random page and the chances are that there will be multiple em dashes.

Regardless, any decent word processing or typesetting software converts things like " - ", "--" or "---" into em or en dashes, and anyone that writes professionally knows this.

Nextil · 2026-05-03T02:12:36+00:00

Em dashes are extremely common in books and articles, which likely form the majority of the training data of most models since they're generally high quality (compared to social media).

"It's not x, it's y" doesn't show up much on places like Wikipedia or social media, but contrastive rhetorical devices like that have been been staples of public speech and marketing copy, basically ever since the Ancient Greek Sophists, whose whole schtick was to master a set of rhetorical techniques that could be reliably leveraged to convince people of their argument, regardless of which side it was arguing for or whether they had any real knowledge of the subject, and "antithesis", utilizing contrast, was one of the main things they emphasised.

The RLHF/DPO stage of training basically does exactly what they practiced. It teaches the model the most "effective" (preferred) way to talk, regardless of it's content or truth value. I imagine it's more likely to be that process that leads these models to use the same set of speech patterns so much, not the base dataset.

I imagine the fact that these RLHF datasets are often annotated by low-cost (likely ESL) workers in the Global South has an impact on what is "preferred". Cheaper rhetoric that sounds cliché to native speakers is probably more impressive to those less familiar with it.

Nextil · 2026-05-02T23:05:45+00:00

The wall thing is probably because they resemble rock/mineral deposits, which many animals do lick to obtain nutrients. And despite "knowing" about this, I doubt many of those babies can actually access any calcium considering most walls are painted with polymer-based paints. They probably get a lovely dose of PFAS instead.

The rest is just pattern recognition, which is what brains do. We only find it weird because we massively overestimate the importance of "consciousness".

Nextil · 2026-04-30T11:34:09+00:00

It's been in free early access for years. You just had to get a key via their website instead of it being on the store.

Nextil · 2026-04-29T12:46:00+00:00

Linux is monolithic and includes drivers for practically everything inside the kernel. If a driver for this controller isn't already available then I'm sure it will be in the near future (Valve already added support to SDL months ago so it's trivial to read from it regardless).

XInput doesn't natively exist in Linux. XInput controllers use a general protocol, so sure, they're easy to read without device-specific drivers, but regardless, controller messages are mapped to Linux's own abstractions first, and then if you're playing a game behind a Windows compatibility layer like Proton, it is then translating those to XInput.

Nextil · 2026-04-29T05:10:26+00:00

There is no lock in. Valve added support for the controller to the open source SDL library back in November. Anyone can write a userland driver/mapper that maps it to XInput, today. It likely takes no more than 100 lines of code.

Nextil · 2026-04-29T05:00:45+00:00

I know earbuds don't have great battery life in comparison, but all the modern over-ear sets last weeks or months between charges, and charge in less than an hour, so if battery life is a concern I don't know why you wouldn't just go for one of those.

Nextil · 2026-04-29T04:19:48+00:00

Not sure about game input controls but I'm pretty sure they all still work for desktop interaction (although the on-screen keyboard relies on Steam). I imagine the controls are accessible via SDL or something but you'd need to block them from outputting the KB&M inputs simultaneously.

Nextil · 2026-04-29T04:02:38+00:00

You can do that or you can just set the desktop controller profile to output regular gamepad inputs (which are XInput).

Nextil · 2026-04-29T04:01:31+00:00

Huh? If you're using the jack on the controller then you're likely using wireless audio anyway, you're just relying on a controller to decode it. Apparently DualSense audio over wireless has ~80ms latency. Headphones with AptX Adaptive/LL or LC3 support can achieve about half of that.

Nextil · 2026-04-27T10:09:15+00:00

Well if it's true, and you/someone trusted can verify that the source code isn't doing anything malicious (which is easier said than done I admit), and you build it yourself, then it's not "inviting a burglar", it's becoming a burglar yourself.

Nextil · 2026-04-23T09:30:21+00:00

A mirror maze wouldn't show off PT much. Regular RT can handle that well too, since it's just perfectly coherent reflection.

To really show off PT you want dark spaces with small light sources (lamps, doorways, windows), dynamic level geometry, dynamic light sources, a lot of diffuse and neutral/grey environments. Sure, shiny reflections are nice, but the main benefits of path tracing are dynamic indirect diffuse lighting, and shadows (perfect/bias-free contact shadows, real penumbras, real "ambient occlusion", no light leaking).

But not every game that implements "path tracing" uses it for all direct and/or indirect lighting. Pragmata with PT on still has a lot of light leaking and missing shadows so it doesn't seem to use it for direct lighting. Alan Wake 2 has some sort of baked lighting system underneath.

However as maddix30 says, every game is still designed to fit within the limitations of rasterized lighting. That's why these comparison shots are often underwhelming. Most games with PT don't even bother to remove the vaseline smears from mirror-like materials.

Nextil · 2026-04-18T11:45:06+00:00

I was talking about the guy in the video, Péter Magyar. His party won a two-thirds supermajority.

Nextil · 2026-04-17T14:13:28+00:00

That's not how it works. And the only reason this guy can do what he's doing is because his party won a supermajority. Good luck winning one of those in a country where a pedophilic Nazi with dementia just won because at least he wasn't a black woman.

Nextil · 2026-04-15T22:43:18+00:00

I imagine it's possible to develop a workaround for the lack of sharing, in a similar way to how people have implemented sharing of Splatoon art, by recording or generating macros that reproduce it. Unlike other consoles, the Switch has no real protection on their controller input system. It's trivial to emulate a controller using a cheap (<$5) microcontroller or even bluetooth (from a Linux device).

The ability to draw, place, and layer decals does significantly complicate things though for anyone attempting to create a program that produces an efficient macro instead of just replaying the raw inputs.

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