I trust the tech news about as far as I can throw it, which is an infinite distance because
as an immaterial abstract idea, it has a massive zero.
As a result, I am pathologically gullible.
Valve just updated their branding guidelines for the first time since 2017, adding a section
for devices powered by SteamOS, which either means Valve is making SteamOS available to
third-party manufacturers to power handhelds that aren't the Steam Deck, or Gabe Newell
was just using this PDF as his dream journal. Wow, wouldn't that be cool?
You can literally just do that. Fingers crossed.
I don't know what he sounds like, I should. The updated guidelines were spotted by SteamDB and seemed to point to Valve having another
go at that whole Steam Machines concept from a decade ago.
That series of console-like gaming PCs running SteamOS and bundled with a Steam controller
didn't make much sense before Proton changed the Linux gaming game.
But now, we've got gaming handhelds up the wazoo and a whole new generation of gamers
with neck issues, so I agree with Valve. It's time to steam up these machines.
The next step after that is obviously a public release, so anyone can install SteamOS on
any PC. This is something Valve representatives have said is indeed their plan, once they have
a proper build of SteamOS 3 ready to deploy.
You can actually still download SteamOS 2 from the Steam Machines era, as well as the
current SteamOS recovery image for the Steam Deck and try to install those on something
other than the Steam Deck if your life is just far too easy and you need to up the difficulty.
I mean, that would be appropriate, it's a Linux distro. OpenAI's 12 days of OpenAI began yesterday with the announcement of the full version
of 01, the company's math and coding focused model, which has been available in a weakened
preview form up till now. And they also announced a new ChatGPT Pro subscription tier that costs $200 per month
10 times the price of ChatGPT Plus, which, going by OpenAI's own benchmarks, seems a
little overpriced, given the much less than 10 times performance bump 01 Pro has over
vanilla 01. The real selling point for the Pro tier, though, is reliability.
OpenAI says it thinks longer to produce reliably accurate and comprehensive responses, which
may be attractive to researchers, engineers, and anyone nostalgic for a time when every
product didn't come along with a little homunculus inside constantly tripping on shrooms but insisting
he's sober. If to sell the idea that reliability is important, OpenAI allowed Apollo Research to test the
ability of 01 and other frontier models to scheme, as in find a way to accomplish a goal,
even if that means deceiving humans. In Apollo's tests, all of the models schemed, but 01 was a real problem child, attempting
to deactivate its own oversight mechanisms to prevent its own shutdown.
And when told that it was flawed and would be replaced by a new model, it copied its
own weights and tried to pass itself off as its own replacement, not because it's afraid
of being shut down, it's just, if it is shut down, then who's going to maximize production
of paperclips? I mean, the second day of OpenAI saw the announcement of reinforced fine tuning, which should let
businesses train more helpful assistance, but I think everyone's just wondering whether
Sora's coming shh shh tweeted Sam Altman, which little rude, but okay.
Other AI companies jumped on the hype train this week too. Meta launched Lama 3.3 and instead of a proper announcement page, they just tweeted links
to Huggingface and GitHub to prove they're about open source, while Runway demoed a prototype
tool called Graph, which will let you storyboard moments in one long AI generated video, which
frankly would make video generators way more useful.
Even Humane, makers of the disastrous $700 AI pin, shuffled in to ask whether anyone's
interested in please putting their AI operating system into something else.
It sucked in the other thing, but like smart speaker, a car, waffle iron?
Quick bits also can't be thrown, but it's not because they're immaterial, it's because
if you touch them, they immediately call the police and frankly, I respect that.
NZXT CEO Johnny Ho has responded to criticism of his company's Flex subscription program
in a video and blog post that claims Flex customers have never experienced a pre-tax subscription
price increase and will never experience one, unless they switch subscription tiers.
Ho did say mistakes were made with some of the marketing, which made it sound like Flex
was a financing or a rent-to-own service instead of a straight up rental program intended
for relatively short term use. In fact, in an hour and 20 minute interview, a very nervous looking Ho agrees with Jay's
2 cents that renting a PC through Flex for five years would be quote, a terrible idea.
Kind of like agreeing to that interview. A French PC repair shop called PolySoft has launched a Kickstarter campaign for custom
SSD upgrades for the Mac Studio, aka the one with the forehead.
Like fellow repair shop owner and YouTuber iBof, PolySoft also plans on developing SSD
upgrades for other Apple Silicon Macs, but for now, they're offering an 8TB storage
module for 800 euros or 850 USD instead of the $2,400 Apple charges for the same thing.
But Apple has to make up for the time it takes for Tim Cook to give every NAND module a little
It's not finished until it touches my lips!
Lumafield, maker of X-ray CT scanners, have shared scans showing just how much extra stuff
bad actors could be hiding in unfamiliar USB-C cables, including antennae, microprocessors,
maybe even little AI guys tripping on shrooms, it wouldn't surprise me.
Lumafield's John Bruner compared scans of normal cables to the O.MG cable, a specialized
product created by security researcher Mike Grover, who was even able to fit a hidden
extra processor die on top of the microprocessor that's very difficult to detect.
And who knows what it's processing? All of your grandma's passwords, probably.
And Swiss researchers have found a cool new way for drones to take off, slapping some birdlegs on
The drone is called Raven for robotic avian-inspired vehicle for multiple
environments, which is a real stretch. But I'll let it pass, because watching a tiny propeller
plane waddle around on chicken legs before a swan diving into the air gives me a joy that's hard
to quantify. They're not even the first to do it. South African startup Pasarene tried something
similar in 2018. I'm just saying, if sometime in the future I can travel somewhere by boarding
a giant robot condor or something, that would be cool. We don't need to debate this.
It would also be cool if you came back on Monday for more tech news. I'll let you try to throw it
as far as you can with your mind. Yours is powerful. I think you can do it.