Hey, do you ever think about medieval tech news?
Like a town crier talking about advancements in trebuchets?
Instead of liking the video, they throw tomatoes and stuff.
Whether it's good or bad, you know everything. So 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 track pads its whole personality.
As for the new steam machine, it's a little cube shaped steam OSPC
powered by a six core 30 watt AMD ZenFORCE CPU
and an RDNA 3 GPU, which is apparently powerful enough,
despite being the last gen to play games at 4K 60
when AMD's FSR features are enabled. It will come in 512 gig and two terabyte 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 GabeCube, which this guy's custom steam deck boot animation
was already prepared for three years ago. So come up with something else, I don't know.
But his holiness Lord Gaben's work was not yet finished,
for he walked across the water from his yacht to also reveal the long rumored
and long leaked steam frame VR headset.
It's got a resolution of 2160 by 2160 per eye
and FOV of up to 110 degrees and is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset.
Valve says the headset is a streaming first experience
with a six gigahertz wireless adapter included in the box.
Although wireless VR using six gigahertz 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 of times
that steam frame is a PC and runs SteamOS
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 frame's 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. LTT put up a video so you can hear Linus's 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. We've only got a vague promise of shipping in early 2026.
Uncertainty, however, is nothing new for Valve diehards.
There also wasn't any mention of Half-Life 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, Gaben.
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 chat GPT on the lyrics of popular songs
and reproducing those lyrics in response to user prompts.
Now that might not seem very infringy,
but the music industry makes a big deal about who is allowed to officially distribute music lyrics.
The court decided that even short excerpts generated by chat GPT 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.
Because it's a digital fart?
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 Deezer survey found that 97% of listeners
couldn't tell AI-generated songs from human ones.
So I guess that we all deserve the slop. Now, to be clear, the quick bits 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?
Ba-ba-ba-boop, ba-ba-ba-boop, gotcha.
Sony just announced a cheaper, Japanese language only 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 to model,
this special PS5 is an attempt by Sony to make the console more affordable domestically.
Meanwhile, Sony also revealed a new 27 inch PlayStation branded gaming monitor,
boasting a truly unremarkable 1440P panel at 240 Hertz
that somehow drops down to 120 Hertz 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 you're 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 craniotomy required.
These wafer thin devices hitch a ride on immune cells,
sneak past the blood 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 rubber faced robot, but at least AI dolls, AI 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 UBTECH, or UBTECH,
who announced over $112 million in orders this year
for its Walker S2 humanoid robot model.
But they announced it with a terrifying Star Wars-esque droid army video,
and China apparently thinks that's totally fine, I guess.
And ended this tech news episode has,
come back on Friday for more. All this talk of armies and 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 things.