I would guess that users of the Steam machine would mostly be as locked-in to Steam purchases as PS5 users are to PS Store purchases.
I stopped PC gaming about a decade ago and my current daily driver is a Macbook. I periodically play games on my a PS5 or XBOX, but there are a ton of great games on my Steam wishlist.
I feel like I'm the exact target market for this (although I'm not going to buy at this price point at this time). I don't want to bother with Windows and would love a 'console' allowing me to play most Steam games without a lot of hassle.
And here I thought my being a murder victim was bad.
I looked up the city and year cited by the model for my untimely demise, and it turns out the crime is real, but the real victim was a female sharing my last name, with a middle name loosely resembling my first.
> was pushing the envelope of "interplanetary" travel/species
I don't think they were. All the Mars stuff is just dressed up version of The Boring Company - a distraction by Elon to better position his other interests.
There's no money in going to Mars and there's no reason to, from a financial perspective, and Elon doesn't care about anything beyond wealth and power.
Much in the same way that the company selling tickets and taking a percentage of all ticket resales shouldn't also own the venues which can then force artists to use a specific ticketing provider, thus creating a monopoly.
We have antitrust laws in the US but they do us absolutely no good when the government refuses to even consider enforcing them, which seems to be the case in the past few decades.
Not covered in the article are two critical reasons:
1. They're breaking environmental laws in order to meet power demands. xAI has already been busted on this [1], but they keep finding willing accomplices in rural parts of the country to bypass public opposition or speedrun through regulatory exceptions [2].
2. Companies seem to be fudging their numbers when it comes to GPU capacity & current workloads [3], likely to inflate their IPO valuations. I know Ed Zitron is a divisive figure but I've not seen any journalist on the other side of the argument provide the volume of data that he has.
Many of us recognize that the days of nearly-free tokens is quickly drawing to a close, and at some point humans may very well have to dig their keyboards out of cold storage and return once again to the code mines.
Have you tried drilling into the reasoning when this happens? This is why I usually leave it in "Plan Mode" and when it proposes a solution that seems unusual or unexpected, I point out why I think it is and ask it to justify it's position.
Sometimes I get the "you're right!" response, but often it will also explain why it made the decision it did, and it's rational enough that I accept the new approach.
It's still very much like a junior dev in this way - pretty good at 'just make it work', pretty good at monkey-see-monkey-do, and occasionally surprises you with something novel (to you).
Depending on the rate difference, I'd be tempted to setup a 'burner' checking account at a separate financial institution and just auto-transfer the loan amount from my primary bank to the burner every month.
I've read the same, but for me, a newly-formatted microSD will overheat as soon as it's plugged into the MBP. The OS may be reading/writing something to cause that, but it's automated as part of the mounting process from what I've seen.
Anecdotally, and as a big fan of Apple laptops, I've had so much trouble with their USB and SDCard hardware when it comes to data transfer that I wonder if I'm cursed or if I'm crazy.
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
I've been through a handful of SOC2 audits and they've never asked us to _prove_ that we aren't storing passwords in plaintext or with reversible encryption (we weren't).
This is why so much of vetting & compliance is toothless. You can have robust change management, physical security, network security, identity management, etc. policies but absolutely nobody wants to spend enough on audit & enforcement to make them meaningful.
The gov't will make you _claim_ that you do all of these things before awarding a contract, but they won't ever check.
Good actors will do the right thing regardless because they know the consequences of cutting corners.
Microsoft forces AI usage down everyone's throats.
AI bot usage takes down github.
I have to assume that there are some serious fights going on between the poor SRE teams wanting to throttle bots, and MS not wanting to do anything to dissuade AI usage.
I'm having a similar issue with Volvo. It occasionally sees a gate track on the ground as a 'hazard' and will hard-brake when slowly backing over it. It's inconsistent but happens regularly.
+1 to that and I'll also add Cotopaxi and AER (quite expensive but built like a tank) to the list.
My year-ish old backpack gave out so I recently committed to extensively researching and buying a new set of travel + tech bags that will last me basically forever, and I've been very happy with my purchases from these brands.
> If they're out of state, prepare to deal with an expensive legal process
> you won in a small claims court - good luck collecting
While these statements are generally true, it shouldn't dissuade anyone from pursuing these remedies.
Years back I took a small programming contract with a 'friend of a friend' that ended with me delivering what was asked and them suddenly not having any money, claiming the company was going under.
They were in another state. I filed small claims by mail and they never responded, so I got a default judgement without ever needing to travel, for under $500 in total fees. The judgement is worthless though, right? Probably...
Fast forward about a month and they had an investor willing to float the company for a while longer, but now my judgement is a giant wrench - the investor won't give them money as long as this is hanging around. I got the cofounders to jointly take on the debt personally (after consulting with a lawyer that this was possible - he didn't even charge for the consult!) and I vacated the judgement against the LLC.
A short while later the LLC went under anyway, but since I had both founders' personal finances under my thumb (which would allow garnishing wages, obtaining leins, etc.) I was able to recoup the entire contract amount from them personally.
I wouldn't have spent more than about $1,000 chasing that money down, but a few hours of paperwork and a few hundred dollars ended up making it easily worth my while.
It can't be solved 100%, but it can be _mostly_ solved with systemic buy-in to the safety culture. Commercial aviation is a great example IMO.
We've spent the last several decades making sure that every single person trained to participate in commercial aviation (maintenance, pilots, attendants, ATC, ground crew) knows their role in the safety culture, and that each of them not only has the power but the _responsibility_ to act to prevent possible accidents.
The Swiss Cheese Model [1] does a great job of illustrating this principle and imparting the importance of each person's role in safety culture.
A big missing piece with manned space flight IMO is the lack of decision-making authority granted to lower staff. A junior pilot acting as first officer on their very first commercial flight with real passengers has the authority to call a go-around even if a seasoned Captain is flying the plane. AFAIK no such 'anyone can call a no-go' exists within NASA.
I stopped PC gaming about a decade ago and my current daily driver is a Macbook. I periodically play games on my a PS5 or XBOX, but there are a ton of great games on my Steam wishlist.
I feel like I'm the exact target market for this (although I'm not going to buy at this price point at this time). I don't want to bother with Windows and would love a 'console' allowing me to play most Steam games without a lot of hassle.