Stellaris, in particular, might be up your alley.

I like Stellaris quite a bit, but I should note that OP mentioned how he didn’t like spending money on DLC. Stellaris follows the typical Paradox approach of creating a lot of DLC to expand and extend the game and its gameplay as long as people are interested in buying it, and winding up with a large game that’ll cost you a lot if you want all the DLC. It may be worthwhile, but if one wants to get all the DLC, it’s gonna add a fair bit to the price.

(checks Steam)

The base game is $40. Buying every available piece of DLC (and it looks like they’re still coming out with more stuff) is another $429.

That being said, I’ve also got a lot of hours of gameplay out of Stellaris, so that does bring the cost-per-hour down quite a lot. But it depends on how much someone is going to play the thing.

Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid.

It does have a sandbox aspect, but much as I want to like the game, I always find myself dropping it and playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead instead, which is a similar “zombie survival” genre game, but has vastly more stuff and game mechanics. The big selling point for Project Zomboid, in my book, is the far gentler learning curve and lower barrier to entry; it’s got an adorable tutorial racoon, and doesn’t hit you with too much at once, but…

• The combat in Project Zomboid frustrates me. It’s very simple, not a lot going on, but because a zombie infection is incurable, a single mistake in timing can have catastrophic effects, so it requires no errors.

• The character builds. Project Zomboid has a lot of perks and such. Cataclysm’s got vastly more, plus mutations, bionics, all that stuff.

• I prefer the Cataclysm turn-based play to the Project Zomboid real-time play. I don’t have to wait in the real world for actions to complete, and I can stop and think about what my next move is.

• To try to illustrate the game complexity difference, take firearms as an example. Project Zomboid has six handguns, four shotguns, and four rifles. Each has one type of ammunition. There are ten weapon mods, each of which can be placed on some of those weapons. There is a firearms skill.

  Cataclysm has, to look at just one firearm class and caliber category, 41 rifle-class weapons chambered in .223 (and that’s by default, as chambering can be modified). Each of these can take something like six different classes of weapon mods (replacing the stock, sticking things on the barrel, adding secondary weapons like underbarrel grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc), multiple fire modes. There are 18 sight mods alone, and it’s possible to have multiple sights on a weapon. Recoil is modeled. Firearms can fit in various types of back/ankle/hip holsters, and draw time and encumbrance is a factor; these also have volume and longest-dimension characteristics, so that a large revolver can’t fit in a small holdout holster. For those .223-caliber rifles alone, there are 13 types of ammunition, including handloads, tracer rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. There are 63 different calibers of weapons. Energy weapons, flamethrower/incendiary weapons, chemical weapons, explosive projectile weapons, flechette weapons, illumination rounds, EMP weapons. There are multiple-barrel weapons, including some with barrels in different calibers. You can load specialized ammunition in a specified order. Different types of reloading mechanisms (revolver, magazine, belt) are modeled. Some weapons use compatible magazines, and high-capacity and drum magazines exist. Speedloaders for revolvers exist. Weapons can be installed mounted on vehicles (fired manually from a mount position, or with an automated weapons targeting system installed, set up to fire automatically). NPCs (friendly, and hostile) can be armed with them. Bore fouling is modeled. When you fire a weapon without hearing protection, you’re temporarily deafened to some degree. There are multiple stances one can take when firing those weapons. Some of the game’s martial arts forms permit use of firearms. There are firearm melee modifications, like bayonets. There are skills for different types of weapons. The game has all sorts of exotic real-world firearms (e.g. to pick a random one, the American-180, a submachine gun firing .22 rounds with a 180-round pan magazine); the game probably has more real-world firearms than any other video game out there; my current source tree says that there are 555 in total.

And that’s before getting into stuff like sandbox vehicle design and construction (land, water, air, amphibious), power generation and storage, nutrition (weight and its various effects on physical capabilities, body fat, vitamins, calcium intake), artifacts, magic (if you turn on some of the various magic or psionic mods), bionics, mutations, local weather systems, temperature (air and body; you can set up heaters and air conditioners in vehicles), vision in various spectra, monsters tracking scent/vision/noise, fires and building structural failures, brewing, the ability to recruit NPCs and create faction camps, quests, aliens, disease modeling, various types of parasites, fungal infections, various types of poisonings and envenomings, various types of lights, devices with removable batteries, internal-batteries, USB-style (UPS) charging and power that can run off static, vehicle, bionic, or power stations. Solar/wind/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/nuclear power generation. Multi-fuel engines. Multiple-engine vehicles (or, with appropriate electronic systems, hybrid vehicles that can automatically toggle an ICE engine to charge a battery to run electric motors). Seatbelts and harnesses (and being ejected from vehicles in crashes). Folding, portable vehicles. Bike and motorcycle racks on cars. Stimulants, depressants, alcohol. Acetylene and electrical welding. Tons of types of food to cook (looks 547 recipes currently available). The thing is just huge.

I liked ksp2

If you’re saying that you liked the (unfinished, abandoned, poorly-rated) Kerbal Space Program 2, you might play the original, which is better-regarded.

On the “factory” side, maybe some colony simulators? Someone else mentioned Rimworld. That’s got a bit of DLC, but I think that even the base game has pretty good value for money. Oxygen Not Included is another colony sim that focuses more on the building/automation/physics side; I think that you’ll get a lot of hours out of that.

Dwarf Fortress is another colony sim, has a freely-available classic version or a commercial graphical build on Steam. Steep learning curve, but lots of mechanics to explore.

I like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, though it has a pretty punishing learning curve. Open-world roguelike. It touches on both the RPG (well, not much by way of plot, but in terms of building a character) and the factory (build buildings, faction camps with NPCs, and vehicles) side. You aren’t going to run out of gameplay complexity to explore any time soon on that. Open source and freely-available, though there’s also a commercial build on Steam.

I have not played Elin, the successor to Elona, but it might be worth a look too if you are looking for a game with both a sandbox aspect and RPG aspect.

At some point in the mid-late 1990s, I recall having a (technically-inclined) friend who dialed up to a BBS and spent a considerable amount of time pinging and then chatting with Lisa, the “sysadmin’s sister”. When I heard about it, I spent quite some time arguing with him that Lisa was a bot. He was pretty convinced that she was human.

http://bbs.hmvh.net/hmvh/lisa/LISA.HTM

http://textfiles.com/bbs/install.txt

In reality, Serbia is pursuing a two-track policy: selectively engaging with the West for economic and political benefits, while at the same time deepening military, economic and ideological alliances with authoritarian powers such as China and Russia.

https://chinaobservers.eu/serbia-turns-multi-vector-foreign-policy-into-development-model-with-chinas-help/

On one hand, it’s true that there will be no near-term return. On the other hand, if nobody makes the investment because it is a large project, then it will never happen.

A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they’ll never sit.

That’s a website that was never intended to be viewed by anyone other than a 30+ year old sysadmin who owns at least one beard grooming product.

Somewhere, a !unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone denizen looks offended.

Yeah, sucks. :-/

For anyone else in the same boat, let me go see what that enclosure is with a physical power button that I wound up ultimately getting.

goes to look

This:

https://www.amazon.com/Swapable-External-Enclosure-Support-Capacity/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ

Probably others one can find — just an 8-bay JBOD enclosure with a variable speed fan and physical power switch.

But unlike the non-powering-on-after-power-loss enclosures, I haven’t had problems with it.

I have a ton of USB devices, and drive enclosures — the one thing that I really do not want to stay offline — are the only thing I’ve ever seen that doesn’t power up again on power loss. Maybe there are some USB displays that might also do so, but I don’t care about that if I’m not physically present.

If what you’re asking is “could the US hypothetically cut off the Internet in a worst case scenario”, like a war or something, the answer is “sure”. If the US were bent on destroying Internet infrastructure – submarine cable interchange stations, satellite uplink stations, major international cables, whatever, all of those are not hardened not realistically protectable targets and could be physically destroyed. Taking out communications infrastructure in Iraq was our first target in the Gulf War.

That’s probably also be true of a number of major military powers, but I’d be particularly confident of the US’s ability to knock out communications.

I was reading an article from a retired Navy officer a while back where he was talking about how submarine cables were vulnerable, and he pointed out that in past wars, we’ve destroyed them, and should also assume that an opponent would do the same.

One point: if it matters to you, you might want to confirm your enclosure’s behavior under power-loss conditions. I had one that did not come back to a powered on state or have an option to do so when power was restored. Not something I’d thought of, since I’d assumed this behavior. Eventually, after some looking, found an enclosure with a mechanical-toggle power switch that did restore prior state.

Are you using “crypto” here as being short for “cryptography” or for “cryptocurrency”?

What began as a vision of free trade and peaceful coexistence has morphed into an institution shaping nearly all aspects of governance in Europe, centralizing power at the expense of national sovereignty.

The European Coal and Steel Community was the first step on what became the European Union, not the initial vision for its end state.

https://www.churchill-in-zurich.ch/site/assets/files/1807/rede_winston_churchill_englisch.pdf

I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the recreation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany. The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important. Small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honour by their contribution to the common cause. The ancient states and principalities of Germany, freely joined together for mutual convenience in a federal system, might take their individual places among the United States of Europe.

I must now sum up the propositions which are before you. Our constant aim must be to build and fortify the strength of the United Nations Organization. Under and within that world concept we must recreate the European Family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe. And the first practical step would be to form a Council of Europe. If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can. The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit to tyranny. In all this urgent work, France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America and I trust Soviet Russia-for then indeed all would be well-must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live and shine. Therefore I say to you: let Europe arise!»

---- Winston Churchill, Zurich, September 19, 1946

Churchill was talking about a federal system analogous to the United States of America back in 1946.

Effective immediately, exporters of products containing Scandium, Dysprosium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Lutetium, Samarium, and Yttrium must apply for an export license from the China Ministry of Economy. The application requires customers to detail the final use of the material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine

The Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility, owned by MP Materials, is an open-pit mine of rare-earth elements on the south flank of the Clark Mountain Range in California, 53 miles (85 km) southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2020 the mine supplied 15.8% of the world’s rare-earth production. It is the only rare-earth mining and processing facility in the United States.[1][2] It is the largest single known deposit of such minerals.[3]

As of 2022, work was ongoing to restore processing capabilities for domestic light rare-earth elements (LREEs) and work has been funded by the United States Department of Defense to restore processing capabilities for heavy rare-earth metals (HREEs) to alleviate supply chain risk. [4] The mine was reported as operating in 2025.[5]

https://warontherocks.com/2025/04/a-federal-critical-mineral-processing-initiative-securing-u-s-mineral-independence-from-china/

After China’s 2010 rare earth elements embargo, the United States, the European Union, and Japan filed a case against China at the World Trade Organization, ultimately forcing Beijing to remove export quotas by 2015. The United States also revived rare earth mineral processing, including efforts to reopen the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California. In 2023, Washington intensified its “friendshoring” strategy by allocating additional resources to domestic mining and refining through the Department of Defense and Department of Energy budgets, while also strengthening supply chain partnerships with allies like Canada and Australia.

U.S. efforts to reduce dependence on China for critical minerals face a number of significant hurdles. First, domestic refining expansion remains slow, with new processing plants and smelters taking 10–20 years to become operational. For example, the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine, which reopened after China’s 2010 export controls, still sent 98 percent of its raw materials to China in 2019 due to the lack of U.S. processing capacity.

https://mpmaterials.com/mountain-pass

With our re-commissioned processing facilities, we now deliver separated and refined products, including high-purity NdPr oxide, the cornerstone of the world’s strongest and most efficient permanent magnets.

I don’t know what portion of processing you’re capable of doing for what materials, but I sure hope that you guys have found a way to fill that processing capacity gap and reliance at some point between 2019 and now.

EDIT: Though Russia’s been obtaining US components via shell companies in China using false pretenses, and I suppose that that’s a sword that cuts two ways, unless China intends on also cutting off the rest of the world. We’ve played the “shell company in other countries” game ourselves, and I imagine could do so again if need be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

The Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” is a retired long-range, high-altitude, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed and manufactured by the American aerospace company Lockheed Corporation.[N 1] Its nicknames include “Blackbird” and “Habu”.[1]

The SR-71 was developed in the 1960s as a black project by Lockheed’s Skunk Works division.

Titanium was used for 85% of the structure, with much of the rest being polymer composite materials.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/crazy-story-how-russia-helped-build-sr-71-blackbird-187431

The more significant problem, however, was that the United States simply did not have sufficient reserves of domestic titanium ore to construct planes from. The Soviet Union, however, did and had made it available for export.

Of course, if the Soviet Union had known that its exports were being used to build American planes, then it certainly would not have sold them. And even if the United States had not declared the purpose of its imports, bureaucrats in Moscow would likely have raised their eyebrows at the quantities of titanium that the U.S. government was suddenly interested in. This led the Central Intelligence Agency to begin a program of clandestinely buying the ore, using dummy corporations and third world countries as intermediaries.

Ultimately, the CIA was able to secure enough titanium to construct 32 SR-71s, along with more than a dozen A-12s and a handful of derivative planes—all from minerals illicitly obtained from the Soviet Union.

deleted by creator

The EV maker on Jan. 2 reported its first decline in annual deliveries last year, and analysts expect sales to fall again this year for several reasons, including damage to the brand reputation by Chief Executive Elon Musk’s close work with U.S. President Donald Trump and support of far-right European politicians.

https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/most-americans-would-not-consider-buying-tesla-new-poll/

A new poll shows that 67% of Americans would not consider buying or leasing a Tesla vehicle – with most of them citing Elon Musk as the reason why.

The results from this survey clearly point toward Tesla having an Elon Musk problem.

If he were removed from the equation, Tesla would have much better chances in the US market.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-delay-us-launch-affordable-ev-lower-cost-model-y-sources-say-2025-04-18/

Link to article rather than lemmy.ml post.

https://archive.ph/bFbVi

no matter how much you “love” your AI girlfriend she will never truly love you back because she can’t think or feel, and fundamentally isn’t real.

On one hand, yeah, current generative AIs don’t have anything that approximates that as a mechanism. I would expect that to start being built in the future, though.

Of course, even then, one could always assert that any feelings in any mental model, no matter how sophisticated, aren’t “real”. I think that Dijkstra had a point as to the pointlessness of our arguments about the semantics of mechanisms of the mind, that it’s more-interesting to focus on the outcomes:

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

— Edsger Dijkstra

Will more VRAM solve the problem of not retaining context?

IIRC — I ran KoboldAI with 24GB of VRAM, so wasn’t super-constrained – there are some limits on the number of tokens that can be sent as a prompt imposed by VRAM, which I did not hit. However, there are also some imposed by the software; you can only increase the number of tokens that get fed in so far, regardless of VRAM. More VRAM does let you use larger, more “knowledgeable” models, as well as putting more layers on a given GPU.

I’m not sure whether those are purely-arbitrary, to try to keep performance reasonable, or if there are other technical issues with very large prompts.

It definitely isn’t capable of keeping the entire previous conversation (once you get one of any length) as an input to generating a new response, though.

EDIT: I think that last I looked at KoboldAI — I haven’t run it recently — the highest token count per prompt one could use was 2048, and this seems to mesh with that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KoboldAI/comments/yo31hj/can_i_get_some_clarification_on_some_things_that/

The 2048 token limit of KoboldAI is set by pyTorch, and not system memory or vram or the model itself

So basically, each response is being generated looking at a maximum of 2048 words for knowledge about the conversation and your characters and world. Other knowledge has to come from the model, which can be trained on a ton of — for sex chatbots — erotic text and literature, but that’s unchanging; it doesn’t bring any more knowledge as regards your particular conversation or environment or characters that you’ve created.

I’ve run Kobold AI on local hardware, and it has some erotic models. From my fairly quick skim of character.ai’s syntax, I think that KoboldAI has more-powerful options for creating worlds and triggers. KoboldAI can split layers across all available GPUs and your CPU, so if you’ve got the electricity and the power supply and the room cooling and are willing to blow the requisite money on multiple GPUs, you can probably make it respond about as arbitrarily-quickly as you want.

But more-broadly, I’m not particularly impressed with what I’ve seen of sex chatbots in 2025. They have limited ability to use conversation tokens from earlier in the conversation in generating each new message, which means that as a conversation progresses, it increasingly doesn’t take into account content earlier in the conversation. It’s possible to get into loops, or forget facts about characters or the environment that were present earlier in a conversation.

Maybe someone could make some kind of system to try to summarize and condense material from earlier in the conversation or something, but…meh.

As generating pornography goes, I think that image generation is a lot more viable.

EDIT:

KoboldAI has the ability to prefix the current prompt with a given sentence if the prompt contains a prompt term that matches, which permits dumping information about a character into each prompt. For example, one could have a trigger such that “I asked Jessica to go to the store”, one could have a trigger that matches on “Jessica” and contains “Jessica is a 35-year-old policewoman”. That’d permit providing static context about the world. I think that maybe what would need to happen is to have a second automated process trying in the background to summarize and condense information from earlier in the conversation about important prompt words, and then writing new triggers attached to important prompt terms, so that each prompt is sent with a bunch of relevant information. Manually-writing static data to add context faces some fundamental limits.

I can’t imagine running a non-local sex chatbot unless you’ve got a private off-site server somewhere that you’re using. I mean, forget governments, the company operating the thing is going to be harvesting what it can. Do you really want to be sending a log of your sex chats to some company to make whatever money they can with the thing?

EDIT: Well, maybe if they had some kind of subscription service, so an alternate way to make money, and a no-log, no-profile policy.