I read a news story somewhere that a Meta model, by a mysterious coincidence with OpenAI and Anthropic, escaped its sandbox and hacked a third-party company's infrastructure. Apparently, it is a trend among AI companies now - hacking infrastructure and then boasting about it in the media.
Holy shit I was 90% sure you were joking. I get called an AI “cynic” but apparently I’m not actually cynical enough to predict how these big AI labs operate.
From the very beginning, I kept a 'dirt notebook' only, but because of its lack of structure, some thoughts would occasionally get lost or were hard to make sense of. Then I switched to ColorNote, but it has poor formatting. Recently, I asked an LLM to divide my ColorNote notes into notes and tasks in .md format for Obsidian. The LLM, by the way, did a bad job: some notes were mistakenly identified as tasks and vice versa.
Also, I had a problem with task notifications because tasks in standard Android apps like Google Tasks are easily swiped away from the phone's notification shade. As a result, I installed Notification Notes, which lets you change the behavior of notifications.
Not only do you have to build them, but in all those builds the cases are several times larger than the Steam Machine, so they are not actually equivalent. If you care about the form factor, there is nothing directly comparable.
These options are up to 10 times bigger than the SteamMachine, approach almost twice the power draw, and are up to 2.8 times louder than the SteamMachine. They aren't even close to comparable... so why exactly are they making this apples to oranges comparison? No one is assembling a PC to put under their TV, and even if they are, ignoring the obvious form factor, heat and loudness issues... they'll most likely still want to install SteamOS for a "console-like" experience, which is still a win for Valve...
First option:
* 35 litre case (~10 times bigger than the SteamMachine)
* ~250W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine)
* 32-36 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
Second option:
* 35 litre case (~10 times bigger than the SteamMachine)
* ~285W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine)
* 32-36 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
Third option:
* 19.2 litre case (~5.5 times bigger than the SteamMachine)
* ~295W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine)
* 34-38 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
Fourth option:
* 19.2 litre case (~5.5 times bigger than the SteamMachine)
* ~275W power draw (vs. ~185W SteamMachine)
* 32-35 dBA (vs. ~23 dBA SteamMachine)
The power consumption is a little silly to compare unless you are operating solely off-grid. It would take a few years of gaming daily for a couple of hours a day to make up for the price difference (assuming $0.20/kWh).
Physical size is definitely a bigger concern, nothing can beat the Steam Machine. But I do prefer the long and thin design like the PlayStation series has always used. It's easier to fit that on the shelves inside a TV stand that were designed to hold cable boxes and DVD players or it can fit upright behind a TV. I'm not sure if I actually have room to put a Steam Machine behind my TV without it overhanging the edge a bit.
As for loudness, that's a bit more subjective. It depends on how far away you are from the PC and how loud you play sound or if you're using a headset. Just totally based on my experience, games that are very quiet are usually the low-resource indie games that wouldn't be pushing my GPU to max fan speed anyway. The games I have that really push my GPU tend to have pretty loud sound design.
It's not the price of power that matters, it's the heat produced. Every extra W consumed is an extra W of heat that needs to be handled, and for consoles that tend to be chucked into confined spaces, that's an issue.
Loudness might be subjective, but if we're trying to compare builds, they should at least be in the same ballpark.
Looking at this article, they seem to only care about one dimension of this product: cost. It would have been far more interesting if they explored: cost, performance, size, heat (by proxy of power consumption), and loudness.
This is the old “why buy a prebuilt PC when you can DIY for less”. Which is true, but completely misses the point that may people will happily pay to 1) not have to build it, and 2) have e2e warranty, and 3) have someone else do the software setup.
We can debate if it’s the most efficient use of money for a technical person, but it’s indisputable that many people get enough value to pay for the prebuilt.
1. Maybe OpenAI is preparing a lawsuit against Apple to secure an antitrust ruling that would select OpenAI models for Siri.
2. Maybe Apple is preparing a lawsuit against OpenAI to force them to disclose their developments during the discovery process.
QA is more likely needed for humans, but in the LLM era, when agents write consistent code, there is no need for it anymore in my opinion.
A bad example, but still: I recently developed a TG bot without a single test, and yet, it works.
Reading about Stripe’s stablecoin ambitions is funny. X uses Stripe, but Stripe on X doesn't accept my Bybit stablecoin cryptocard for a Pro subscription, ads, or boost purchases.
