The project's primary site should not be GitHub, and I am serious. Playstation 5 is not some historical curiosity and Sony might strike the page down any hour now.
Those projects should default to hosts less geared toward corporate governancy; custom internet domain being the first requirement.
It is just a git repository. Sure, you may lost some issues if it is stuck down and no one made a backup, but the important part, the code is now spread all over the internet. Should they want to migrate, all they need is to ask those who used GitHub as the origin to do a "git remote origin set-url".
That's one of the best things with git (among with other DVCSs), it is incredibly resilient. I remember during an interview of Linus Torvalds about backups, he says he doesn't backup his work in the traditional sense, he has no real reason to when everything he does is copied millions of time.
The real point of GitHub for such a project is because GitHub is really popular, and it has a social network aspect to it. So yes, you are going to lose it if you get kicked out of GitHub, but by choosing a lesser known platform you won't get it in the first place. Also, their website is not on GitHub, so kicking them out of GitHub won't make them disappear completely.
I'm sure Sony has an opinion of the jailbreaks that enable this, but they really don't give a shit about anyone running llama.cpp. Why would they? They're just glad you're not pirating games.
Is there a real or imagined hardware subsidy on the PS5 hardware though? In other words, is the current MSRP below what Sony would charge in a hypothetical world where they weren’t involved in any form of gaming software business, with an assumption that they will make additional margin dollars from game sales? I can see some manager making the case that repurposing the hardware for non-gaming use is taking food off his family’s table, in a manner of speaking. If so, it’s an argument that you don’t want this type of use to become popular and have PS5s start flying off shelves and never having games bought for them.
The PS5 hardware is essentially identical to the AMD BC-250 mining rig, with the major difference being that the media engine (VCN for encoding/decoding video) is disabled in the miner because it requires Sony's proprietary bios. The BC-250 was created from binned chips that didn't meet Sony's specs and had 2 of 8 cores disabled, but many users successfully re-enabled them and bumped active CUs on the GPU from 24 to 40.
To your point, it was briefly possible to buy them for under $100 until word spread that they make decent steam machines, so I'm guessing that Sony doesn't need to sell any games to turn a profit. Even at their current prices it would be far cheaper to use the BC-250 for local inference.
> To your point, it was briefly possible to buy them for under $100 until word spread that they make decent steam machines, so I'm guessing that Sony doesn't need to sell any games to turn a profit.
I don't follow your logic. If the BC-250 was made from PS5 quality control failures, then why would their pricing have any bearing on the PS5's profitability, except as an effort to increase margins? Does cost not remain independent of pricing?
As far as I cam infer from what you said, it could be that the PS5 was sold at a loss and still is even with the BC-250 helping, or that it was sold at a profit and is still is with the BC-250 helping. What am I missing?
No it implies that å ps5 hardware wise wouldnt be ordets of magnitude of å bc250 to produce, and it therefore probably dosent have negative margins at least.
Exactly, that's what I was getting at. It's similar to Intel chip production and binning. Take Skylake for example: if a 4 core i7 chip had a core that didn't pass testing, they would disable the bad core and one more and process the chip as an i3. i5 chips were just i7 silicon with hyperthreading disabled. Same chip fab, same production cost, but the failed chips became a lower tier that sold for 35% and 70% of the top tier product. In the case of the PS5 chips, the performance difference between binned and pristine chips was even less, it still had 75% of the cores usable.
There is no hardware subsidy in the traditional sense. The last time Sony was selling consoles at a loss was the fat PS3 and they learned their lesson from all the compute clusters. Every PS5 is sold at a profit.
The only way they can lose money is if their existing users stop buying games and that's not happening yet. Maybe when vibe coded community servers for online games get better and everyone jailbreaks their console because they don't have to worry about getting banned.
But even with that every unit sold is a net positive for them because they make money off the sale, and if they run out they can use it to justify higher prices.
There's no feasible way to avoid takedowns/DMCA in 2026 unless you do TOR shenanigans. Even with a custom domain, Sony could just DMCA the web host for the project.
Any recommendations for code that’ll one shot pull a GitHub repo zip from an repo url and announce and seed a magnet torrent?
Looking for similar UX to https://archive.softwareheritage.org/save/ (which archives an source control repo on demand from a url, but is still a single point of failure)
Sure you can. This repo has definitely been vacuumed into the latest training data dump, so the next generation of models will happily spit out a similar reproduction, Sony be damned!
Torrents. Got the leaked GTA6 videos by torrenting and they're still easily available on public trackers. Don't see why projects like these couldn't be distributed similarly if shit hits the fan.
>Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.
The "but don't you know git is distributed" commentary always sounds clever, but it really isn't.
GitHub isn't just used to host your actual git work tree and everyone knows that, it's an issue tracker, an easy way for projects to get contributions as everyone already has a GitHub account, an easy way to receive bug reports, CI, a website for your project, a popularity metric like GitHub stars (For better or worse).
Nothing you've said invalidates my point. I'm not saying that everyone must use it distributed, just that it is under"known" and underused this way, given other problems that centralization has caused.
Maybe so, but the Github page isn't hosting or instructing anyone to jailbreak their PS5, which in any case would be a civil matter. They're just telling you what you can do with the hardware. I'm gonna guess you could just run it on a BC-250, although this wouldn't be as aesthetically pleasing to look at as the PS5.
It'd be kind of interesting if someone started a public git host whose main value add was being judgement proof, like Anna's Archive, torrent sites, etc. The methods exist, it's just a matter of implementation and getting a critical mass. Obviously TOR-hidden-service first, but then making it available to naive hidden browsers would be its own public service.
I hate the centralization of centralized git watering holes, but it is what it is. And frankly getting older and not as able to keep up, having all the cool projects in one place would massively help my street cred.
That's why I specified open internet, because while it's possible to make hidden services, the Domain Name System will pretty much always be subject to censorship.
The problem, of course, still arises when you want to guide users to your hidden service, when sharing the link anywhere will get it taken down. This already happens with magnet links.
That was my point though. Anna's Archive maintains several "open web" domains, so when one ends up getting censored it's not a big deal, they just spin up more.
If every cybersecurity researcher starts hosting their most potent source code on a single platform, you're gonna start seeing enforcement speed up to the point where new domains are taken down in days (or faster), and there will be substantial efforts to attack the source with raids and prison time. If it gets bad enough, you will literally start to see US agents traveling internationally to perform targeted strikes. This is assuming the platform wouldn't start censoring code based on its provenance or purpose, but that would make everyone leave.
It's been proven time and time again that the only way to pull something like this off is to be completely untraceable. If the feds can ever find you, that's it. Which creates difficulty because in order for somebody to be able to visit your site with a normal web browser, they need to be able to trace something, and that can always be attacked. Even if that doesn't reach all the way to the source, it means you have to both produce infinite new traceable points and somehow distribute the knowledge to your clearweb users too.
We're talking about software that runs on the PS5, so "cybersecurity researcher[s] ... most potent source code" is a bit hyperbolic. Anna's Archive is under pretty heavy fire, and yet is basically accessible from the naive open web. I don't see Sony, even along with every other DMCA troll, being able to do better here.
> in order for somebody to be able to visit your site with a normal web browser, they need to be able to trace something
I've been thinking about these problems for a long time. A hard truth is that this statement applies to every protocol, not merely normal web browsers. For a TOR hidden service, there are six intermediaries that exist in the real world and can be traced one after another. The system relies on this being prohibitively hard for attackers (based on the rule of law with supporting laws, among other things).
The same truth even applies to content centric networking! You can go after whomever may be selflessly hosting a specific piece of content, and keep turning up the heat to crack down on it. Maybe you won't be able to find the publisher if they decide to lay low, but you can certainly make it so that a given piece of content is not easy to access - by accessing it the easy ways and applying outside-the-system pressure to whomever provides it.
The implication of this is that in addition to technical means, communications freedom also intrinsically relies on social means. Those social means are bolstered by most people having access to free communications, so they support the types of protections that allow the technical means to operate. Think of a hidden service working to make themselves accessible from the open web as public outreach.
We're talking about a centralized code hosting platform generally immune to takedowns, where yes, software that runs on the PS5 could be hosted, but also that would have far wider implications. I am not implying this particular software is so risky and illegal that the feds will be trying to personally strike the authors and uploaders. I am saying that such a service is fundamentally really really unsafe to operate because of the types of software it would inevitably attract, and how interesting that would make it for national security.
The platform itself could always censor in the case of things that are likely to draw the kind of escalated nation-state extralegal response you're envisioning. Not rolling over for DMCA notices doesn't mean they can't have their own policies.
I'm just pointing out the huge middleground of essentially legitimate activity that ends up bothering some entrenched US interests and inevitably gets squashed on Github. That dynamic itself ends up being a bait and switch that kills a lot of project momentum. It would be great if these communities developed a best practice of using some code host that simply shrugged off nastygrams from the western legal system.
Even though it only runs qwen 3.8 27b at a 2 bit quant, it's still highly viable, especially for things where you just need a constant token stream of slightly below average intelligence, ie this would be great for things like:
- monitoring server error rates
- reviewing security footage
- watching plant growth / controlling watering
etc. Any long running task you can now just slap a PS5 on it. 70 cents a day in power cost means you now get ~2M output tokens per day (~$3.50 worth of usage). It's not the worst thing in the world if you have one lying around. 2bit isn't even that terrible - it's ~80% the accuracy of 27b at full quant, which should put it at around GPT-5 levels of intelligence (which honestly is crazy in its own right).
Wonder if there is an advantage to chain multiple PS5 with this and spread the load over, or just have it stand by for an orchestrator to use it for those tasks across. Cost definitely comes in a good factor, especially leaving it just sitting at home.
I'm sure someone will point out some spec that's better on the PS5, but the extra $200 will make up the difference if you spend more time looking than the 15 seconds I just did.
>I'm sure someone will point out some spec that's better on the PS5
They're not even in the same ballpark - the PS5 is more than an order of magnitude better in GPU performance.
Despite how much it does matter, RAM is not the only thing you need for running LLMs - that N150 is not going to run anything but really tiny models at any sort of reasonable speed - certainly nothing that approaches using all of its ram. The GPU in the PS5 is ~25x faster. And if you're running games the RAM doesn't really affect performance at all once you have "enough" for a given game.
You're right that you probably could build something quite a bit faster than a PS5 for the same price though - if you can build/find everything but the GPU for ~250 USD and slap a 16gb 9060xt (~25tflops @32bit compared to the PS5 gpus ~10tflops @32bit) in it for another ~350 USD it should theoretically do a better job - the GPU in the PS5 was on par with mid-high end PC GPUs on launch, but that was like 5 years ago.
N150 isn't really what you'd want to use for a gaming machine. At a budget of mid $300s - the best (new) Mini PC you're going to find right now is probably this unit[1] with a Ryzen 7 7735U (680M iGPU) and 16GB RAM. Not the most powerful device - but I have a similar one I use to play emulator games, indie games on steam - throw Steam OS on it and it's a great living room device. Expand that budget to $530 and you can get this guy[2] with a Ryzen 7 255 (780M iGPU) - which will play modern games (on low settings for many).
It's been a little bit since any major hacks have hit the news but this is a time honored tradition partcularly with the Playstation. Way back when the PS3 arrived the US government was considering export sanctions because they were too powerful. I believe some universities even kept a cluster of PS3s for their distibuted computing courses or for research. Sony even had an approved way to run Linux.
Probably, the benefit of using PS5 for this purpose would be the same as a standalone Mac mini 16GB($900); it comes with the rest of the computer. From [1][2]:
Conceivably this should also work on the BC250 cards, which are ex-cryptocurrency mining motherboard built around AMD's "Cyan Skillfish" APU which is a cut-down version of the PlayStation 5's custom silicon. You can still pick them up on ebay for $150-$200.
I paid $150 shipped a few months ago then maybe $40-50 for all the parts to run it. The RTX 3060 sells for $400+ in my market and still needs a computer to attach it to!
Flashing the bios takes ten minutes with a thumb drive.
It’s hard to get wrong but guess some people would be nervous enough about that to pay $20 extra.
With this in mind, having LLM-powered NPCs would be a beautiful thing. There's been limited testing on PC games (PUBG Ally), but I can imagine it will be the standard.
For somebody who hasn't kept up with all the different open source models and what token rates mean, how would using this compare to something like codex or claude? I assume it would be much slower and less capable..?
Qwen3.8-27B is surprisingly effective, somewhere in the vicinity of Opus 4.6, but it needs to do a lot of inference-time computation. i.e. anything moderately involved requires xhigh reasoning and it will spend literally tens of thousands of tokens turning over a problem before emitting the answer. The answer/code/whatever is often surprisingly good, but if you’re in the low tens of tok/s you’ll be waiting a long time to get it.
As sibling said, you won’t hit the same quality using a 2 bit quant like this project, which is unfortunate but that’s the reality today.
The model they're running is Qwen 3.8 27b. It's maybe somewhere around Opus 4.6 level, it's quite good. I didn't check the benchmarks, that's from memory/vibes.
The ~issue is though that they're using a pretty low quant, 2 bit. 4 bit are _pretty_ close to full ability, maybe degraded a bit. 2 bit is _noticably_ worse. It's about as small of a quant as you can get while still pretending it works, for this model.
This won't replace claude for you, unless you baby it a lot and are okay with it being kind or derpy.
A 20 tps Qwen3.8-27B at 2 bits quantization is limited but not useless. I've been putting one on "read this codebase and figure out XYZ" for me, where the typos are less consequential.
Those projects should default to hosts less geared toward corporate governancy; custom internet domain being the first requirement.