Counter-Strike 1.6 (and other Goldsrc based games) greatly benefited from AMX Mod X's scripting capabilities. I miss the days where people were playing modded servers.
Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.
And it was literally just so they could skinnerbox people and sell skins. I still remember when if you wanted a skin you just downloaded it and could put it on your server and anyone who joined would download and use it.
People running their own stuff makes DLC/lootcrate/cosmetics unviable and I do think a huge part of the "server" finding stuff is to algorithmically put you in situations you are likely to win/lose at certain rates to keep you playing. Anything other than community servers as the primary avenue is a dark pattern.
You also lose out the path to getting into modding/3d modeling/programming/running servers that those modded servers were for lots of people including me.
If you have fun instagib servers that might detract from how many lootcrates people buy since they might just get curb stomped in it + it's just harder to track and measure the impact of changes when you are minmaxxing for monetary extraction when you have high variety of mods/servers. If you want to track and evaluate player behavior to manipulate it you need to control for as many variables as possible. These game companies are straight up evil.
On the other hand, during the anarchy years of bring-your-own-skins (and sprays), there was a lot of horrible shit out there — goatse was only the tip of the iceberg.
You ran your own server within your group of (probably Internet-) friends and policed and banned players doing that kind of crap. A lot of the potential offense was limited by the low resolution of sprays anyway.
Not only killed modding, but also killed the way those unique communities developed. I suppose it's possible you can find people on community Discord servers nowadays for pick up games, but not in the same way as just seeing and talking to the same people all the time on your favorite modded server.
For four great years in my career I ran game servers for an Australian ISP. I really enjoyed tossing up servers for new HL2 / UT / Quakeworld mods and seeing what picked up a community, chipping in on a cyberpunk HL2 mod in the same period.
I have such rose coloured glasses of that time.
Looking back, most of the dedicated server software felt like it was just tossed over the wall. Some of the stuff we used to have to do to get things running happily on headless linux servers was very hacky. Others simply HAD to run on windows hosts.
I feel like the entire industry died as games became "live" services.
Nearly 2 decades later when my kids got into Minecraft, I stumbled into the hosted MC server world and was just amazed by the size of the industry around it.
It was a real "arrrh this is where that same spirit ended up" moment.
And now of course there's huge servers funded by getting kids into gambling and pay to win.... Gross.
My favorite server which I think is dead by now, Dead Man Standing was a low gravity CS 1.6 server, no footstep noises, but there was a hook you could use to maneuver the low gravity, and the hook made noise, it was really something with those CS mouse maps. That was peak CS for me, I never saw anyone come close to the quality of that server. DMS I will always miss you.
This is a step 1 in the process of enshittification. When the AI bubble bursts, Canva will stop being so generous and they have all cards in place in case they have to stop being nice.
I'd say LLMs have helped a lot with this problem actually, by somehow circumventing a lot of the decades of SEO that has now built up. But, I fear it will be short-lived until people figure out LLM optimisation.
Pardon my ignorance but couldn't this also be an act of anthropomorphisation on human part?
If an LLM generates tokens after "What do you call someone who studies the stars?" doesn't it mean that those existing tokens in the prompt already adjusted the probabilities of the next token to be "an" because it is very close to earlier tokens due to training data? The token "an" skews the probability of the next token further to be "astronomer". Rinse and repeat.
I think the question is: by what mechanism does it adjust up the probability of the token "an"? Of course, the reason it has learned to do this is that it saw this in training data. But it needs to learn circuits which actually perform that adjustment.
In principle, you could imagine trying to memorize a massive number of cases. But that becomes very hard! (And it makes predictions, for example, would it fail to predict "an" if I asked about astronomer in a more indirect way?)
But the good news is we no longer need to speculate about things like this. We can just look at the mechanisms! We didn't publish an attribution graph for this astronomer example, but I've looked at it, and there is an astronomer feature that drives "an".
We did publish a more sophisticated "poetry planning" example in our paper, along with pretty rigorous intervention experiments validating it. The poetry planning is actually much more impressive planning than this! I'd encourage you to read the example (and even interact with the graphs to verify what we say!). https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...
One question you might ask is why does the model learn this "planning" strategy, rather than just trying to memorize lots of cases? I think the answer is that, at some point, a circuit anticipating the next word, or the word at the end of the next line, actually becomes simpler and easier to learn than memorizing tens of thousands of disparate cases.
I also tried in my "clean" chrome profile (to rule out extensions) and it's still got really bad scroll lag. This happens as soon as I open the page.
Here is a video though I understand it's hard to convey since you can't see when/how much I'm scrolling. I can tell you I scrolled slowly down and back up consistently through this video.
Even worse, I just found that having that tab open (and visible) makes Chrome (no other app) laggy everywhere. Something is definitely wrong with that page. Also that page was open in a different chrome profile and it still made my main chrome profile lag when just trying to click around the text area for this comment on HN.
Edit: Some extra details for my setup, I have external monitors (4) and the Macbook Pro is closed in clamshell mode. Not sure why either of those things would matter but I figure both those cases are more common for people on HN (external monitors/closed laptop) than the general public so I wanted to mention it.
You can also check the sources of LLMs, just ask them for it, and then check that.
An LLM is simply more flexible and more powerful than Wikipedia, and thus you have to be more cautious with regards to its results.
"Generally right" is not the same as "reliably right", and therefore if you really need to rely on a fact for something important, I would trust neither Wikipedia nor LLMs.
Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.
https://www.amxmodx.org/