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I don't really get why people are calling it a console. It is a PC to me in all the ways that matter, and it's probably going to save me from spending 1500 euros on a mid-range gaming laptop that I don't really need. The only thing that I don't use my ipad for is playing games with my friends in other countries while we chat on discord. And the last 5 games we've played together do benefit from keyboard and mouse controls, but don't have huge spec requirements. And pretty much everything else for which I'd want a bigger screen than my ipad's can be done in the browser, which I can also happily install on the steam machine because it's just a Linux machine with some extra bells. So yeah, it will probably completely replace my need for a PC, and I'd be plenty happy to pay a PC price for it as a result.


> I don't really get why people are calling it a console. It is a PC to me

because "console" isn't what a product is (supply) - it is a name for product niche (demand)

when someone talks about buying a console, the expectations are 1)significantly cheaper than "usual" computer 2)most likely optimized for games (controller input, easy install) 3)expectation of using already existing TV as display

consoles weren't different from low-end pc all the way since x-box


Because it gives you a console-like experience. What's so hard to get about that? In their own press release, Steam notes it's "just a PC."


Well, it's kind of a new thing, isn't it.

Just like the deck popularized the idea of "handheld PCs". Maybe the Machine will do the same to "console PC". It's a PC, but also a console.


To me, PC = Windows = Microsoft's Spyware and every other game company's anti-cheat root kits

Someone might say I can install Linux on my PC but then I have to deal with maintaining it.

So, what I hope the Steam Machine is, is effectively PC based console with no Microsoft, no root kits, and no maintainence.


> Someone might say I can install Linux on my PC but then I have to deal with maintaining it.

What maintenance do you mean? I do not know of an OS that does not require allowing updates to keep secure.

It definitely meets the other criteria you want.


I don't know what Linux you're on. On mine I have to actively maintain it. I have to run something `sudo apt update` `sudo apt upgrade` every week or so and then deal with whatever breaks. Conversely, on my Switch and PS5 it does this automatically. I expect the Steam Machine will also update itself automatically. They have an incentive not to break things since it will cost them money to fix all the device they break. Linux on the other hand (not complaining) basically says "not our fault if it breaks". So, I'd prefer the Steam Machine where, I believe, it is their fault if it breaks and they will fix it.


Sometimes there are regressions in the kernel and other driver issues. My laptop is more than five years old and I had to boot an older kernel for a while until a regression got fixed. I guess that's less likely to happen on Windows. Not being as close to the hardware vendors means there are bound to be more edge cases even on boring distros like Ubuntu.


If you don't need to get an expensive gaming PC your should not get an expensive gaming PC. The steam hardware isn't magic. You can already get equivalent specs for cheap.


You can? What am I looking for?

I've tried to hit the $600 mark and in the past few years it's gotten harder and harder. The GPU invariably ruins things. And normal APUs are too asthmatic to really game on.


Good, the Steam Machine won't be 600$ most likely, either.

Also you don't necessarily need a dedicated GPU, unless you go with Intel.


> You can already get equivalent specs for cheap.

This is the context. A Steam Deck is bizarrely great value compared to anything you can buy, even without a screen, controller and battery.

Again if you know otherwise, please share.


The APU from AMD they have is pretty much magic. You will not find anything comparable, any Ryzen APU you can actually buy is pretty much trash apart from very light-weight gaming. You absolutely need a separate GPU, and even low-end will set you back at least 250$. The only way to build something comparable for cheap would be to buy used.


The APU in the steam deck isn't anything too special (the 740M is comparable but is RDNA3). For the GabeCube they are using a customized 7600M, which previously has been used in many eGPUs for Chinese handhelds (at a very high price).

AMD does have some pretty powerful APUs right now, but I don't think we'll see it on many mass market

How customized it is, I guess we'll find out closer to release, but I am guessing just based on the dimensions that it is just customized specifically for the case, for space and cooling reasons.

A similar PC without the fit and finish with just consumer parts comes in at around $900.

Curious how much pull valve has with AMD to get this into people's hands.


Just the mention of pieces of hardware we don't really need anymore (sound cards, modems, etc) triggers a flood of nostalgia. I used to spend DAYs poring over PC part catalogues dreaming of my ideal rig. And brands like Hercules, Creative, Matrox all trigger the same feelings.

Crazy contrast to me having spent the past weekend wondering if cloud gaming services like Geforce Now are matured enough that I can fully move to a thin client - fat server setup for the little bit of gaming I still do.


The technology works, but the business model doesn't, so there's the eternal risk that it might get shut down at short notice with no way to export your saves.


Yeah, that's definitely a worry. Also, the fact that you're dependent on them for adding support for future games, and that (like any cloud service) it might not be available right when you want it.


Yeah that's the issue - nobody wants to just rent you a gaming PC in the cloud, they all want a cut of game sales/licensing. But if someone were to do it, the technology is absolutely there.

You don't even need to create any internal tech - Steam Remote Play already has everything you need, and I successfully used it to play Battlefield from an AWS GPU instance (was even good enough for multiplayer).


If you don't think this tool poses any risk to these people let's try walk through a scenario.

Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit and when they write up their next ticket, the stalker pulls up this app to get the officer's ID. The next day they pull up the app to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there, and it takes them maybe half an hour to find the warden based on the lag between last-ticket-location and real-time-location. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...

See where I'm going with this?

Anything which allows someone to get ongoing location data for a person who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.


That's the example you run toward?

More likely someone gets a ticket that's bullshit, winds up paying, and this happens enough that they have their buddy wait for the person and throw a brick at them or something.


This is a wild hypothetical that tries to blame a tool for the problem of a user. Won’t anyone think of the children?

Let’s modify your post to highlight the absurdity:

Let's say someone sees a parking warden they find physically attractive. They follow them for a bit in their car and when they write up their last ticket, the stalker gets in their car and follows the officer back to the station and then to their home. The next day they pull up to the warden’s house and follow them to see where the warden is working that day - they drive over there. They strike up a creepy conversation and the parking warden eventually leaves, disturbed. The next day, the parking warden is working a night shift - they've been told to patrol a dark neighborhood where there are plenty of alleyways that nobody can see into...

See where I'm going with this?

Anything which allows someone to follow a person in a vehicle who they've just come across on the street is inherently a danger to the surveilled person.


For anyone else looking for which of these 200 words are actually different, this second post follows the person home instead of using the tracking website method


There's a gigantic difference in the ability of the surveilled person to protect themselves in the scenario you sketch versus the one that I sketch. In your scenario the surveilled person has a chance of noticing the fact that somebody is physically following them. And when they have eyes on the stalker, they can call the police to come and address the situation when they predict the stalker might escalate.

In the scenario that I sketch, the stalker runs zero risk while obtaining the information. Hell, they don't even have to log in to this tool, so there's zero record of who accessed location information for which parking warden.

And yes, it is absolutely incumbent upon the creators of tools to take into account how they might be misused. To pretend that all humans are of right mind and incapable of doing harm and only design for the case of ethical use is laughably naive.


What a strange line to draw when in both hypothetical scenarios the stalker actively engages in a creepy conversation with the target before “you see where I’m going with this?” happens.


To my knowledge reneging only applies when it's a voluntary decision. A company that has been sold by its previous owner for generating a 800k loss is not doing much of anything by choice. It's just fighting insolvency.


IANAL and I'm not making legal claims, if that's what you're getting at.

Just on the basis of fair expectations in the marketplace, if you say all you need is a fixed rate to serve me for the rest of time, then that's the deal. Anything short, insolvency or otherwise, is reneging. The mismanagement of the company is not my concern.

And before people hop on and make it sound like people with this expectation are naive for believing a company could offer this lifetime service for that fee, AntennaPod + gPodder.net provide the _exact same service_ for the low price of $0. I gave PocketCasts money, and somehow they turned that into -800K .

I don't know where this mentality that customers owe companies that fall short of their promises grace or understanding come from. When I fall short of my obligations to companies, collection agencies rather than thank you notes usually appear.


The thing is pitching your salary lower doesn’t always make you more attractive as a candidate. If you’re going in lower than market rate then many recruiters start wondering about your past performance, confidence, etc.

As a hiring manager in a big company, salary isn’t really much of a consideration for me. The company has salary bands per role that I have very little control over. If a candidate is above that band and unwilling to come down, then I probably won’t even hear from our recruiters that that person applied. So in our process, somebody wouldn’t accidentally price themselves out of an opportunity.

So it’s possible that job seekers are making themselves uncompetitive via high salary demands, but I have my doubts whether its a major factor.


I’d like to jump onto this real quick because of your last bit:

> So it’s possible that job seekers are making themselves uncompetitive via high salary demands, but I have my doubts whether its a major factor.

Generally, you’re hitting the nail on the head in the immediate. The only reason I landed on my feet after this Big Tech layoff cycle is because I ate a $25k/yr pay cut so I wouldn’t lose the remaining $150k/yr in salary at a new firm.

That being said, the job market is irreparably broken at the moment, because of what you just mentioned about high salary demands. The high demands are due to higher costs, which employers aren’t willing to compensate for in salary. As the cost of everything goes up and labor gets let go, there’s this expectation for salaries to go down due to oversupply. This was correct in the era of the Great Recession, but people in all demographics other than the tippy top are out of breathing room. Everything is too expensive to survive on the subsistence wages being offered, and employers have responded by using AI tooling to automate what should really be a fully-human process (hiring), leading to clogs in the gears of the job cycle.

Ultimately something must give, if the ruling powers don’t want to have riots. Either wages have to go up to meet the increased costs of housing, transport, food, healthcare, education, etc - the basic necessities of life - or those costs have to plummet by orders of magnitude that it’d be market-obliterating.

It’s an easier pill to swallow to pay people more, but the pressure isn’t there to do so yet.

For recruiters like yourself, I’m hoping you’re taking hard looks at the market fundamentals and cost of living, and applying pressure to compensation-makers to raise it upward now while the market is broken, rather than trying to catch up to their wiser competition when something snaps. It's cheaper to pay $20k more today, than $35k + recruiting fees tomorrow.


> As a hiring manager in a big company, salary isn’t really much of a consideration for me.

I think this happen higher up. Policies like work from home or not or how many roles to open in what region, how many H1Bs to sponsor is something that happens above the hiring manager roles. Hiring managers sort of work on standard bands or levels I think in most larger companies.

> So in our process, somebody wouldn’t accidentally price themselves out of an opportunity.

The way I had seen it work, is usually positions have to open first. They would be something like "we're opening 3 architect IV positions in Poland and/or UK". So that kind if indicates there is no point in interviewing someone from Seattle asking for a architect V salary band.


As someone with a very opinionated 11 year old nephew (so he grew up in the time of ubiquitous social media and he is getting to the age where he starts to understand its upsides and downsides) - I dare say that most children don't hold any grudges against their parents for making digital images and videos of them as babies and storing those on cloud platforms.


Totally depends - both my teenage daughters are VERY gunshy of photographs in general, and social media especially. We stopped posting anything relating to them ~8-10 years ago. If we were avidly sharing, they would hate us for it.


It sounds like they don't want you taking and sharing photos of them now, which is very fair. But it's not clear from your description if they judge you or your partner for any baby pics you took of them which ended up in the cloud. That seemed to be the statement of the person I replied to - "One day your children will be your judge when they are grown up, when they realise what you did to them."


Lol yeah but your average male tech bro doesn't even think about what this means for women. It doesn't even register.


Until a rogue staffer at said cloud platform leaks content.


your 11 year old nephew is not grown up


Did I ever say that he is?


Views might be important to get the attention of a potential advertising partner, but once the relationship has started then keeping it going will likely be dependent on much more relevant metrics for the advertiser. And those metrics will usually be tracked on their end, rather than via YouTube. I'm referring to metrics like click-through rate, propensity to order, revenue on advertising spend, etc. Personalized referral URLs and discount codes are what allow the advertisers to connect their tracking and reporting to the originating YouTuber.


For better or worse a gigantic portion of people who make their livelihoods on the internet are fully dependent on closed source platforms. Do you think people who sell things on Shopify or Etsy are any more able to scrutinize the systems they depend on to make a living?


You can sell on Shopify _and_ Etsy and make money on both (as long as you don’t cross Mastercard/Visa).

Turning a profit on video outside YouTube is a far more difficult undertaking.

My point: This problem is far worse when a monopoly is involved.


So what's your suggestion for how YouTube could be doing better here?

Especially in the scenario that (as the top level comment in this thread suggests) YouTube didn't actually make any changes and the reason the views dropped is because EasyList added an entry to their privacy filter. Should YouTube have recognized that they're in a quasi-monopoly position as you suggest, done the research to identify EasyList as the culprit behind the view metric drop, and then released a change to their client to add a new endpoint which isn't blocked by EasyList?

We don't know that the EasyList theory is what's really going on here, but if you're going to tar YouTube/Google over this ordeal, then I think you have some responsibility for suggesting how they could have done better.


YouTube can’t “do better”; the problem is the monopoly (their moat is too damn wide).


"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward."

My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?

As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).


Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love.

ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."


> ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

The translation is just as much of a word salad as the original, just with simpler vocabulary. Worse, it mangles the key point.

Prepotent responses aren't "automatic habits," but overriding responses (e.g. pain) [1]. The "sometimes" qualifier is unsubstantiated when describing "association". And the struggle isn't amplified ("especially") when avoiding something bad absent reward, the first part of the sentence is conditional upon the absence of a reward. (It's nonsense to say pool drownings are especially common in pools.)

[1] https://dictionary.apa.org/prepotent-response


And engineers don't really deal with frictionless spherical cows, but high schoolers might. All models are wrong, but some are useful.


Non sequitur. This LLM’s summary is wrong and useless. It would be like talking about frictionless spheres and then applying the wrong equations.


wow, you managed to make it more convoluted than the original.


> you managed to make it more convoluted than the original

Not relevant. I'm not trying to break down the original text, that was done adequately by the top comment. I'm showing why the LLM summary is nonsense.


When asked to provide real life examples from the paper conclusion:

Workplace Example

Scenario: An employee has a colleague who tends to send aggressive emails if they don’t receive updates on time.

Healthy Active Avoidance: The employee learns, “If I send a quick status update every morning, I avoid the stress of hostile emails.” They adopt this as a habit.

Depressive Active Avoidance Deficit: A person with depressive symptoms may take longer to make this connection or fail to act even after realizing it. They know sending updates might help, but initiating the behavior feels too effortful or pointless. As a result, they keep receiving stressful emails, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness.


> sometimes struggle to break automatic habits

The article claimed it is a failure to learn whereas the phrasing from ChatGPT results in a much wider implication. Failure in a struggle to do something could imply a moral failure. If that's the message people get from this research, then there's a real risk it could worsen depression.


Please don't post ChatGPT slop without then going through it with a fine-toothed comb, and checking whether it's correct. (It almost never is, but the criticism can be interesting… in discussion about ChatGPT. Otherwise, it's a derail.)


Your summary claims more than the original you quoted, no?

Example:

Case 1: Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, if they get less than 80% accuracy a loud annoying horn will blare. Then subject goes again and try to improve the score.

Care 2. Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, and if they get less than 80% accuracy they get notified that they didn't succeed at the test. Then they go again and try to improve their score.

The article strongly implies depression will make improvement more difficult in case 1 by the amount found in the study. But it doesn't necessarily imply that (or anything strongly) for case 2.

Your summary strongly implies that depression impedes progress in both cases at the same rate as the outcome of the study.

I'm not a domain expert but I'm going to guess "having bad outcomes" is as poor a paraphrase of "overriding prepotent responses" here as "having functions" would be to characterize functional programming languages.


I don't really know what the original is claiming, thanks to how it was written. I only offered a guess at what the authors were saying.

So, you're saying that the study was narrower in scope and that the results are only applicable to specific bad/negative outcomes?


Why not both? You mention Kagi, and I find its Assistant to be a very useful mix of LLM and search engine. Something I asked it recently is whether Gothenburg has any sky-bars that overlook Hisingen to the North, and it correctly gave me one. A search engine could have given me a list of all sky-bars. And by looking at their photos on Google maps, I could probably have found one with the view / perspective I wanted. But Kagi Assistant using Kimi K2 did a decent job of narrowing the options I had to research.


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