Hey, do you ever think about medieval tech news? Like a town crier talking
about advancements in trebuchets. Instead of liking the video, they'd
throw tomatoes and stuff. Whether it's good or bad, you know, you ever think?
So, [snorts] Valve announced three new hardware products today. And wait, three
three. Amongst those announcements were a new Steam controller and Steam
machine. The controller is essentially the controls from the Steam Deck with no
screen, but with some improvements like magnetic joysticks and a controller
puck, a wireless transmitter that provides a fast, stable connection to
the controller and doubles as a magnetic charging station, which imo is a much
better innovation than the original Steam controller from 2015, which made
its giant trackpads its whole personality. As for the new Steam
machine, it's a little cube- shaped Steam OS PC powered by a six core 30W
AMD Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA3 GPU, which is
apparently powerful enough despite being last gen to play games at 4K60 when
AMD's FSR features are enabled. It will
come in 512 gig and two TBTE variants. And thankfully, Valve has given it
interchangeable face plates and a programmable LED light strip to help it
look a little bit less like the Xbox Series X had a baby with a Nintendo
Gamecube. Not to say that's a bad thing
at all. I mean, folks are already calling this new Steam machine the Gabe
Cube, which this guy's custom Steam Deck
boot animation was already prepared for 3 years ago. So, come up with something
else. I don't know. But his holiness Lord Gabin's work was not yet finished,
for he walked across the water from his yacht to also reveal the long rumored
and long leaked Steamframe VR headset.
[gasps] It's got a resolution of 2160x 2160 per eye, an FOV of up to 110°, and
is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. Valve says the headset is a
streaming first experience with a 6 GHz
wireless adapter included in the box. Although wireless VR using 6 GHz
adapters has been the high-end home VR standard for a while now, not many, if
any, VR headsets have described themselves that way. Yet, Valve also
reiterates a couple times that Steam Frame is a PC and runs Steam OS, so it
can play a growing number of games all by itself, which could eventually grow
even more if developers grab the developer kit. Possibilities are
endless. The Steam Frame comes with a couple new controllers which can be
tracked entirely by the frames inside out tracking system Quest style. So, no
need for the Valve Index's external tracking stations. Unfortunately, that
also makes Steam's older VR controllers obsolete. It won't work with this one.
LT put up a video so you can hear Linus' thoughts if you want. Although, one
thing that wasn't covered in that video or in Valve's announcements is a price
or release date for the new hardware. What? We've only got a vague promise of
shipping in early 2026. Uncertainty, however, is nothing new for
Valve dieards. There also wasn't any mention of HalfLife 3, but that hasn't
stopped the folks on the subreddit from losing their minds about once again
being left in limbo. Please don't hurt us, Gabin. Like buying a lottery ticket
on your birthday. The hope is at an all-time high. Germany has ruled that
OpenAI violated copyright law by training chatbt on the lyrics of popular
songs and reproducing those lyrics in
response to user prompts. Now, that might not seem very infring
about who is allowed to officially distribute music lyrics. The court
decided that even short excerpts generated by Chat GBT count as
infringement, ordering the company to pay an undisclosed amount in damages to
German artists. Now, this music related AI ruling comes just as AI generated
music is horrifically becoming way more popular. A fake AI country band called
Breaking Rust just hit number one on
Billboard's digital song sales chart with its new song, Small Town Dreams.
>> More like Breaking Wind, >> cuz it's a digital fart.
>> Yeehaw. >> Small town Dreams. What does AI know about small towns? It lives in a data
center surrounded by concrete and the soothing roar of jet turbines nowadays.
However, it's not the end of real music just yet. Unlike the more well-known
Billboard Hot 100, the company's digital song sales chart only counts digital
downloads, not radio plays, keeping our grandparents ears just a little bit
safer after a dieser survey found that 97% of listeners couldn't tell AI
generated songs from human ones. [snorts] So, I guess that we all deserve
the slop. But human ears are one thing not possessed by the robots running the
show and our sponsor Dbrand. They make custom skins, cases, and screen
protectors for a ton of popular devices that look super super cool and protect
you from looking like an idiot when you drop and scratch your devices because
you didn't have a Dbrand skin, case, or screen protector on it. [gasps]
Oh, I'm sorry. You might not be an idiot, but if you are, Dbrand actually
made a screen protector just for you. They care about you, like your family.
The kind of family that is scared of intimacy, so they signal their love by
insulting each other every chance they get. You know, it's not dysfunctional.
It's just different. Okay. Like getting 50% off the entire Dbrand site and
getting a free custom deck of playing cards with every order. That's not
normal. Check them out. B. Now, to be
clear, the Quickbits were around during the medieval ages, but all they'll say
about it is that they missed the mutton. I keep asking. Hackers are reviving
Google's discontinued Nest thermostats with an open- source project called No
Longer Evil. The custom firmware reroutes traffic to a reverse engineered
server, tricking the devices into thinking Google turned them back on.
Meanwhile, Google's fighting a Chinese fishing ring called Lighthouse, suing
the group for its fishing as a service campaigns that may have compromised up
to 115 million credit cards in the US alone with just one operation. So, for
once, Google's the good guy, and so are
the thermostat hackers for fixing the bad guy thing that Google did. Okay,
Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davaluri
said on Twitter this week that Windows is evolving into an agentic OS that will
use AI to proactively act on your behalf. The internet unsurprisingly
pushed back with a collective please don't. The post got absolutely cooked in
the comments with some people saying that nobody wants this while others took
the time to beg for Microsoft to just bring back Windows 7 wasting keystrokes.
I mean, let's be So, yeah, Microsoft wants Windows to predict your questions
before you ask, but will it be able to predict everyone switching to Linux
instead? Gotcha. [laughter] Sony just announced a
cheaper Japanese languageonly PS5
exclusive to Japan. It's the first time they've region locked a console since
segmenting different models of the PS2 way back in 2000. Now, like Nintendo's
Japan-only Switch 2 model, this special
PS5 is an attempt by Sony to make the console more affordable domestically.
Meanwhile, Sony also revealed a new 27in
PlayStation branded gaming monitor, boasting a truly unremarkable 1440p
panel at 240 Hz that somehow drops down to 120 Hz if you plug it into a
PlayStation. But it does have a new snazzy charging hook for your
controller. At least something's getting plugged in because it sure isn't that
your imported PS5 because you can't get it here. Researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology just unveiled research showing proposed
needle injectable chips that zip through your veins and park themselves in your
brain. No cranottomy required. These
wafer thin devices hitch a ride on immune cells. Sneak past the bloodb
brain barrier, okay, and deliver targeted electrical therapy to stubborn
conditions like Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and even brain tumors. I
mean, hey, Neo used needles, too, didn't he? When can we get the kung fu update?
That's what this is for. And a humanoid robot built in Russia made its stage
debut earlier this week, briefly stumbling like an inept drunkard before
crashing onto the stage, scattering its parts on the floor. It was actually sad
to watch. It wasn't a great introduction to the rubberfaced robot, but at least
AI dolls. Aid dolls. Okay, promotional
images show the bot got some smooches.
The clankers are stealing our potential partners now. Honestly, predictable. A
robotics company that does seem to be doing well is China's UB or UBTEK, who
announced over 112 million in orders
this year for its Walker S2 humanoid
robot model. But they announced it with a terrifying Star Warsesque droid army
video. Begun the Clone Wars have. And
China apparently thinks that's totally fine. I I guess. ended. This tech news
episode has come back on Friday for more. All this talk of armies in the
medieval ages has me wanting to play wanting to watch Excalibur and play Age
of Empires. So, I'm out of here to absolutely do those two