Speak for yourself. Only one of those communities is one I don't want to be around, and there are plenty of people who agree, apparently including the operators of Nexus.

> Removing political propaganda that got injected into a game is a better experience for the average gamer.

Let's be clear: the "political propaganda" you're referring to is more accurately described as "gender-neutral language". If you're going to assert that "the average gamer" will have a better experience playing games without gender neutral language, maybe you can back that up with some citations -- unless, perhaps, your idea of the "average gamer" is merely based on the anecdotal experience of yourself and your peers?

I'm fully aware of what a quality of life mod is, by the way. Just now I was playing a game with "Body Type A" and "Body Type B" character creation, in fact, and have no inclination to change that (even if it did bother me, it was there for about 5 seconds at the beginning of the game, never to be shown again... so what?). Just last night, though, I made my own quality of life mod to address an inventory management quirk that was frustrating me. I'm very familiar with the term, which is exactly why I found the idea of it including "removal of gender neutral language" absurd enough to comment on.

> Personally, I'd prefer the platform to remain neutral and let people ignore mods they don't like.

And you have the right to have that preference! Just as Nexus has the right to operate their site in line with their preferences. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. You could even put your money where your mouth is and start your own "neutral" site. If that's what the "average gamer" wants, perhaps it'll be wildly successful! Although it seems more likely to me that it will attract a certain crowd while repelling everyone else, you are free to prove me wrong :)

More directly, are you really using a false equivalence to counter an "ad hominem"?

"Quality of life", that's a euphemism for queer erasure I haven't heard before... and here I was thinking a quality of life mod was one that fixed a janky UI or smoothed out a grind, that kind of thing.

You certainly could complain about a "trans bar problem" if you like, and you could even go make your own nazi bar if not having one bothers you enough -- though it's pretty clear what that would say about your values.

For comparison's sake, I tried something similar with a couple other cheap models I've used lately, with the prompt "Impress me. Make something cool in HTML. Ensure that it is mobile friendly." (Added the mobile condition as I was on my phone when I did it).

Mimo-2.5 created something similar, only a bit less complex than Gemini's (though, at least the FPS counter is real!), in a minute or two for about 1/3 of a cent: https://gisthost.github.io/?740c325c21e9bfbee59c4f94d9aab0af

GLM-5.3-Flash, currently my workhorse model, spent 12 minutes (ouch) thinking about the prompt. Didn't cost me anything directly because I have a GLM sub, but I did the math and it would have cost about 1.1 cents through the API. Turned out nicely in my opinion (though in reality, it still isn't really anything special): https://gisthost.github.io/?9ef050e16cec2561e6504e725a3f0bcc

Side note: thanks for setting up that Gist Host tool, it's very convenient!

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Editing to add this bonus from Mercury-2.5-Preview, which I just learned released a couple days ago. It's much less impressive-looking than any of the above, but it cost less than 1/20th of a cent, and the response was generated effectively instantly: https://gisthost.github.io/?02f40b50aa891bf396bfaaa3a7998203

Not to be snarky or dismissive, I mean this genuinely: ask an LLM about it. I currently have a headache so I'm not up to explaining the technical details, but they are interesting and worth reading about.

Anyway, if the word confuses anyone, they're in luck: dictionaries still exist :)

Also, even if there's no way to detect what the activations are doing, we already have the ability to analyze your proposed threat statistically. If the model repeatedly uses insecure libraries in most trials, then yes, in that case it would be prudent not to trust those weights.

Assuming one doesn't get banned for violating some ToS clause about using a closed model for LLM research, it could be possible to run those evals on a closed model too (likely at much greater expense). But there's a big difference: if such a statistical anomaly is discovered in an open model, one could potentially fine-tune that behavior out of it. With a closed model, that won't be an option.

Whether it makes a difference to the US government or not is beside the point. Even with a perfect solution, the current administration could do some mental gymnastics to achieve whatever political outcome they want. I’m not trying to make a political statement here, my point is technical: open-weights at least give us the possibility of visibility into why they generate what they do; this simply isn’t true with closed models.

Also, in that case, there would likely be activations indicating that it is favoring a specific version. If that's an insecure version, sure that'd be suspicious... but again, you're only going to be able to verify that's what's happening in an open model.

Maybe you can illustrate a realistic scenario in which that would be a problem, otherwise I don't really understand what your point is in this context.

If it does have grounding, and can therefore see that it's introducing vulnerabilities to the code it's generating, yet does so anyway... I suppose we could invoke Hanlon's razor, but if the model is that incompetent, it probably isn't the right tool for the job regardless of its provenance.

That said, we aren't talking about incompetent models, we're talking about models sabotaging projects due to hidden motives. My point, again, is that those motives could potentially be revealed with open-weight models, in a way that will never be possible with closed models (barring some sort of legislation requiring independent third-party interpretability audits, which I suppose is in the realm of possibility).

Finding these kinds of activations is something Anthropic is actively researching [1] but they're the only ones who can use those techniques to see Claude's intent. On the other hand, if a model is open-weights, in theory whoever is running the model could look inside the activations at runtime to see if a hidden vector associated with "deception" or "sabotage" is being activated [2].

[1] https://transformer-circuits.pub/ [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03518

(Those sources are just a couple of relevant starting points I could find without much effort, there is also https://www.neuronpedia.org/ if one is interested in seeing interactive demonstrations of interpretability concepts)

Of course, one could retort that gathering that evidence may be nearly impossible now, but my point stands: in the future it might/probably will be possible to properly audit open-weight models. Closed models, on the other hand, will always be a black box.

I'm in the early stages of designing a world/game focused the same topics, in part because I simply want more stories like this to exist. I live an ocean and a continent away, so of course I won't be participating, but I don't know if I've ever subscribed to a newsletter so quickly. Looks like an absolutely brilliant idea and I hope it's successful!

I'd be extremely interested in participating if a version of this ever came to my corner of the world. Even if it doesn't, just knowing about it is inspiring and motivating :)

Unfortunately I do have experience with the smell, being around others working with improper ventilation... I'll be passing that advice along to my BIL too, ha.