Posts by Alex Stuart

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

Target market?

Not sure what the target market is for the Machine, as snazzy and well-engineered as it is.

Hardcore PC gamers won't want it because it's significantly underpowered compared to modern rigs.

Console gamers might have wanted it years ago, but there are hardly any good PC exclusives these days, so why would they want one?

For games that need a kb/mouse, either you're playing them at a desk, or, if you already have a sofa setup, probably already have a more powerful rig in the living room or are streaming video from a rig elsewhere.

The pad looks not great, it's difficult to imagine it being superior to the PS5 pad.

Researchers exploit OpenAI's Atlas by disguising prompts as URLs

Not that long ago

..I remember a common response to concerns about AI going rogue was along the lines of "well of course we'd only run it on an airgapped system, we obviously wouldn't let an intelligence we didn't fully understand just have carte blanche access to the Internet, that'd be insane lol, we've all read the sci-fi stories, come on"

That aspiration does not seem to have survived the realisation that $loads of ad and subscription money is on the table.

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Re: British Fascism

They're responding with ChatGPT, I wouldn't bother debating it.

Apple and Meta trade barbs over interoperability requests

Re: go Apple

Generally, Big Tech has been running rings around governments for years. Our governments are slow, lumbering things, and by the time they've caught up to BT on naughty thing A, they've already rolled out B and C, and so on. It helps to have essentially infinite money to a) pay an army of lawyers to drag out appeals for as long as they can get away with and b) shrug off any punitive fines. They behave like they're above the law because they essentially are.

go Apple

I am no big Apple fan because I am a tinkerer, but Meta make them look like angels, they are an incomparably more moral company.

Apple are not faultless, but they make genuinely good products, care about the impression and experience people have about their products, and their security/privacy (to the kind of extent expected these days)

Meta would happily get the entire world hooked on slop for 8 hours a day from childhood if it made them extra billions in ad money. Zuck is either a sociopath or a synth. Teenage depression, addiction, political polarisation, CSAM, animal abuse, extremism, data theft? Who cares, just keep scrolling and click that ad, the lawyers will see the govts in court.

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

Re: Think of the children says Meta

> Meta accuses Australian government of failing to consider the loss of their ability to lock kids into their addictive and harmful ecosystem via network effects, and their stock price, with world-first social media ban

Fixed it for them.

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Why I am not suprised

...that Zuck is involved? He wants to know what you're doing with your air fryer because, well, of *course* he does.

People are rightfully concerned about China but let's not let that distract us from our home-grown menaces.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: damn shame

I see your point, and agree that health should be a priority, but you're baking in the assumption that it has to be either or - which may well be true in the UK right now, but is not the case everywhere - see Japan and wider Europe.

I'd rather hammer the point that we fundamentally fail at building things in general, so should fix that, then we can have both infrastructure and healthcare.

70 years ago, we built the world's first commercial nuclear power plant. That we are now paying France gazillions to build another one massively late and over-budget is...a mind-boggling timeline to have ended up in.

Likewise, we invented the steam engine and the world's first commercial railways - this stuff should be easy for us.

Brazen crims selling stolen credit cards on Meta's Threads

Zuck

Does not care one iota about bad/criminal content on his apps, so long as the line for people addicted to scrolling slop - sorry, *engaging with valuable content* - keeps going up.

Nvidia's growth slows to a mere 122 percent but it’s still topping expectations

nVidia adds a year on to the actual year, for some reason.

Re: Overvalued?

IMO buying in at today's prices is very risky. Continued huge growth is priced in, but this might not happen if LLMs turn out to not scale usefully beyond GPT-4 levels. Because then the big capex taps turn off and nVidia goes back to making mere billions as opposed to tens of billions per quarter. Plus, competition in the accelerator space from Google, AMD, Intel and other in-house designs.

On the flipside, if LLMs do continue scaling, or if some other AI technique comes into play that scales...they're going to be selling chips as fast as they can make them until the singularity/utopia/war of the machines and today's prices will look cheap in hindsight.

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

Re: Maybe I'm missing something

The calculator usage (at least, for a single calculation) isn't a good example of tool use for exactly the reasons you say.

Replace it with something like 'search the web' and now things are getting more useful e.g. 'tell me the important things to know about dihydrogen monoxide' - the LLM goes off and searches and returns a curated summary to you much faster than you could summarise yourself.

Or 'keep trying to compile code to solve problem X and tell me when you have a working solution', 'keep using this Go app to play against youself and tell me when you think you can beat Sedol', etc

(I'm not an AI fanatic either, at least not regarding LLMs. They have some utility now, but still too prone to hallucination for my liking and I doubt they can reach AGI without some sort of symbolic reasoning system built-in)

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

So late

I wouldn't mind Settings if it had all the functionality of Control Panel, but this change is almost a *decade* late.

It absolutely begs belief that with the enormous cash MS have been generating for years, they couldn't have put a couple of programmers on a task to build the entire Control Panel functionality in Settings with Win10 UI. Something is seriously wrong with how the product is managed. Possibly related to all of the 'product managers' they wheel out for discussing new features being hired in place of actual coders.

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: 3 years of updates ?

Interesting - thanks!

Re: 3 years of updates ?

Indeed.

Can someone savvy in this area explain why newer versions of Android couldn't basically *just work* on older ARM-based phones the same way Windows does? I have a 13 year old rig that runs modern Windows fine, it just uses older drivers for some of the hardware.

What is special about Android that an OS image with a bunch of older drivers couldn't just install on an older phone? The install detects the IDs of the various modules - screen size, radio/wifi module, sound processor etc, and just uses the appropriate driver. It seems like that would be minimal work for either Google or the individual handset manufacturers, but I'm probably missing something.

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

Agreed, though I've had a bad impression of them since school, in the eras of having no physical floppy eject button, a single-button mouse, and being made to stay behind and do lines of 'macs are not crap' by, in hindsight, a pathologically fanboyish CDT teacher for saying (you guessed it) 'macs are crap'.

iTunes coming along and being horrifically bloated compared to Winamp made the impression worse, as did the iPod and needing a Winamp mod to be able to drag and drop MP3 files to it (my girlfriend's, not mine, of course)

Further shenanigans of multiple flavours have done nothing to endear them to me, though I'll never deny they make excellent hardware.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Not ready

Agree completely. I've always turned this crap off in rental cars when it inevitably starts doing stupid stuff like wobbling the steering wheel because it doesn't understand junctions/sliproads.

Happy with my mostly-analog BMW that only has ABS, which I appreciate is good tech though only ever kicked in when I forced it to see how it worked. No touchscreens, no interference, proper handbrake, no other solutions for problems that don't exist like keyless entry etc.

Auto-brake is as far as I'd go as long as I could trust it to work even better than my own eyesight and reaction time - from reading comments about it, it seems like it's not there yet.

Meta, Spotify break Apple's device fingerprinting rules – new claim

> Google is worth at least a couple billion in revenue for Apple

More than a couple - circa $20bn a year in recent years just for Google search as default. Another way of putting that is Google pays for almost all of Apple's R&D expenses. An incredible deal for Apple, so any concessions would be unsurprising.

Nvidia revenue grows 265 percent with more to come as new GPUs and Ethernet near

Re: Perhaps...

Unfortunately, in a sense they are doing gamers a favour selling them GPUs *at all* when they could instead use their wafer allocations to fab more accelerators with much higher margins. So, yeah, not holding my breath either.

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

Re: I support him

> There's always the wonderful 3rd option that we are both non-deterministic and non-free because the illusion of free will arises from the action of some effectively random process along the lines of atomic decay.

That is what I believe is the case - non-deterministic yet also non-free.

Sam Harris (big no-free-will proponent, wrote a book on it) and Daniel Dennett (prominent philosopher/cognitive scientist) had a good debate on this, if you're interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J_9DKIAn48

Re: I support him

> I believe in free will because I experience it

You experience the (extremely convincing, many-layered) illusion of free will, but it's not technically possible without invoking the supernatural.

Hackers mod a Sony PlayStation Portal to run PSP games

> So, it is for when you are at home but don't want the convenience of using a real controller

It is a real controller - it's almost identical to the DualSense, that is one of its selling points vs using a third-party controller wrapped around a phone screen etc.

It also doesn't need to be on the same network as the PS5, it works remotely too.

> Other than "continuing your game while on the toilet" I can't comprehend the use case for this

Easy;

- Playing PS5 while missus watches TV/plays PS4/Switch etc

- Playing PS5 casually with TV on in background

- Playing PS5 in other rooms

- Playing PS5 remotely i.e. in a hotel, work (I've not tested this yet, but read that given a good connection it works quite well)

So, yes it's limited in use in that it's not a standalone handheld console, but for those uses, it is a nice piece of kit that does the job it says well.

AMD bagged more market share in server, desktop, mobile at end of 2023

Re: I can see why

AMD has had the better CPUs for a few years now - they are plenty fast and dominate in power efficiency. Intel's will match or slightly beat the performance, but at the expense of needing a modular nuclear reactor to power them. Intel's 'e-cores' are not necessarily a bad idea, but they have obviously been shoved in to try and make up for the dismal efficiency of the p-cores.

The next gen will be interesting - we'll be able to see if Intel's Gelsinger has managed to right the ship on architecture.

Energy breakthrough needed to build AGI, says OpenAI boss Altman

Re: Wrong way around!!!

> A human brain consumes around 20W, and even assuming the "training time" is every living moment from birth to a wise old 80 years, is a total consumption of just over 14MWh.

In a sense, the training time of a given brain is more like the history of all of its mammalian ancestors' brains, which via evolution has trained the brain matter to develop and use as yet unknown algorithms in a certain fashion to learn and reprogram itself. Which is....a lot of training.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Re: Stalking and financial abuse

Unfortunately that is quite a good recommendation to make, because loads of people - for some reason - love "reaction videos".

I've seen trailers for new videogames come out and the 'xxxx reacts to trailer' video has more views than the trailer itself....

Intel shows off 8-core, 528-thread processor with 1TB/s of co-packaged optics

I imagine there'll be areas of the CPUs switched off due to yield issues, the same as we see with GPUs (AMD may have been the first to do this with their 3-core parts in the late noughties IIRC) resulting in odd core counts.

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

> Now were at a time where even many governments don't have the required funds any more to make it happen.

I don't think that's the main issue as they can essentially just print the money. The main issue is we appear institutionally unable to build things at scale anymore. Some combination of lack of knowledge, structural government/council issues, corruption, legal issues/NIMBYism or simply the inability to take any long-term actions from a governing system that works in 5-year blocks, and it's crippling for something like nuclear power. It's bad enough for much more simple projects like train lines, or even houses - we cannot even get that right.

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

Re: Parsing the data

> The write up seems to suggest that this vulnerability affects just the vector registers, and I wondered how the vector registers were actually used.

> I'm no expert, but the way that I thought these units were used was mainly for mathematical operations, like array processing.

Me too. But, from the github page for the exploit - "The AVX registers are often used for high performance string processing by system libraries. This means that very high volumes of sensitive data pass through them."

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

> All the "motorheads" I know who say they love the speed and the acceleration and the wind in their hair, etc. won't touch electric cars or bikes. Despite the fact that they are the fastest moving things around. What they mean is "they want to make a nuisance and let everyone know they drive a flash, expensive car".

It doesn't mean that, that's a non-sequitur. I suspect you simply don't get the appeal. I'd bet the majority of sports car/bike owners are neither nuisances nor care for how expensive the vehicle is. See - popularity and reverence of classic cars like old M3s, R34 GT-R etc.

It's OK - most people see cars as simply A to B transport, don't enjoy driving, and don't appreciate any of the design or engineering of a performance vehicle. Which is why the roads are full of bloated crossovers on stilts with zero steering feel or liveliness to them. No problem, not everyone shares the same interests and hobbies.

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

Re: Speed issues

> * my kids do not understand the difference between "WiFi" and "the internet

From what I've seen, this seems to apply to most people under 30. Initially I thought they were stupid, then realised they have likely never used an Ethernet cable - to not even speak of an RJ11 - in their life, and that actually I'm just old.

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

Re: HR

> Is it possible that, taking only biological factors and not social factors, men and women tend to like different things?

It's not just possible, it is absolutely the case, yet inevitably ignored in every single report/article of this type. Specifically, men are more likely to be interested in things, and women more likely to be interested in people.

Even without studies supporting it, this is just self-evident stuff for anyone talking to a bunch of men and women about their interests over the course of their life.

A relatively recent study on this issue - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261438 - found that not only do these differences exist, but that in countries with higher levels of female empowerment, the ratios in career choice are in fact *bigger*. It's a total repudation of the idea that if careers aren't 50/50, there's some bias or other negative effect at play.

German finance minister says nein to more Intel subsidy cash

Those are the two most important currencies in the world. The sun has long since set on the Empire, I'm afraid.

WFH mandates bad for staff morale and stunt innovation

Evidence

Every time I've read a CEO's bleating about getting back into the office for productivity etc, there never seems to be any evidence to support it.

Example - number of tickets closed per day, cadence of successful releases, etc.

Surely, especially at the same time as an org being *data-driven* being so trendy, there should be...data?

Meanwhile, my personal productivity from not having the commute and associated faff is strongly supported by many KPIs. Number of parcels not missed, average percent full of washing basket, number of trips to refuel, kilometres ran per week, videogames completed per year....

Storing the Quran on your phone makes you a terror suspect in China

Re: The plague of idolatry

> because Islam teaches that nationalism and other fake religions are alienation

Ah yes, the other fake religions.

It's remarkable that everyone who thinks this way is so lucky to have been born at the right time and place (in the last circa 200,000 years), to the right parents, that they grew up indoctrinated into the *true* religion - while everyone else has the misfortune of being born into one of innumerable fake religions, 'idolatry' or atheism nonsense.

It's really quite an astonishing stroke of luck, don't you think?

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

> lane 3 has all the Teslas and BMWs

Almost all of the bad boyz switched from BMW to Audi over the past half decade.

Try doing a mere 75mph in the outside lane and see how long it takes to see those four rings in the rearview mirror. It's comically predictable.

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

Hard problems to fix

The "plateau" (area under the tail end of the bell-curve more accurately, it's not like we're programmed to self-destruct after X years) on lifespan won't be moving significantly until we fix a few very hard problems - brain degeneration (so dementia etc), cancer and heart/artery disease to name three. Risk of all of them go up with age.

Even then, 'healthspan' won't quite improve in the same way, as a 100 year old free of major disease is, well, still 100 years old and inevitably quite clapped out.

The real, root-cause fix will be to treat the *disease* known as 'aging'. So, looking at gene therapy. Research into super-centenarians has found some gene variants in common, and of course genes are also responsible for the extraordinary longevity/cancer resistance of some species e.g. Greenland shark, naked mole rat. We need to find the right genetic software to give all cells youthful vitality/immortality, but at the same time prevent uncontrolled division AKA cancer. Very difficult task, but no reason to believe impossible. Question is only will we be able to reach that point without destroying the planet in one form or other first? And if we make it that far, the ethical questions of who gets to have their firmware patched to human 2.0...

Google stops selling its biz-grade augmented reality specs

> My experience is that the better the 3D device, the worse the nausea is. What I think is going on there is that you are successfully fooling the bodies visual inputs, but these are being cross referenced against your bodies Vestibular system in the inner ear.

This is true. But some people, at least, can get used to it to a significant degree.

My first session with Playstation VR, major vestibular disruption and I tapped out after 30 mins or so.

A few sessions later, I was doing hours at a time with no problems at all.

To this day, pulling extreme maneuvres in a fighter jet in VR induces a wave of unpleasant sensations - but then so would doing it for real!

For those who can never find their 'VR legs'...yes, value very much limited to no-lateral-movement experiences.

Windows 11 puts 'disgusting' Remote Mailslots protocol out of its misery

Re: Net Send was disgusting.

> but had the support of the vocal minority

FTFY

European Commission bans TikTok from staff gadgets

Re: Look away now. Nothing to see or hear or know here about them and those there .

Wow, good bot.

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Re: So I will hoist the inevitable "OK Boomer"

> You tell them to read a book they can't afford

Nah. These types all have iPhones, airPods, the latest trendy bodywarmer/manbag/trainers etc. Money is not the issue, it's culture and lack of policing.

Former Facebooker alleges Meta drained users' batteries to test apps

Yet another reminder

of the lengths that Facebook et al go to monitor every minute detail of your interaction with their app to make sure you, dear product - oops - customer, don't have a single wasted second of potential 'engagement' or 'value'* kept from you. After all, merely using psychological tricks, sorry, methods, as part of UI design and behaviour to maximise 'engagement'** of dopamine systems might leave some spare 'engagement' on the table.

* definitely not compulsion, addiction, etc.

** definitely not abuse

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

> But while we're on stereotypes, Brits actually have better teeth than Americans thanks to free healthcare

Yeah, that's not gonna last long. From what I can tell, NHS dentistry is basically nonexistent these days unless an existing patient/customer.

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

Re: Easy fix

> Just ban all children from social media.

This is the way. Social media is not only a gateway into all sorts of toxic content and an attention-destroying dopamine pumping device, but it's a global psychological experiment on homo sapiens that we didn't realise we were signing up for, with the consequences on society and our brains still unravelling.

But it can't be done by parents. Has to be baked into the apps - need verifiable ID to register and occasionally re-authenticate.

Won't happen though. We'll just get the token hand-waving and virtue signalling whenever something bad happens and the occasional unenforcable/impractical bill going through.

India sets USB-C charging deadline for smartphones

Re: So much for "Brexit freedoms" eh ?

Sure, but you're missing the point. Labelling a population of millions of people, of whose motivations one cannot know in entirety and will certainly include many non-racist reasons, as racists (or in this case, racist scum), is an act of group-based discrimination in exactly the same manner as racism or other biases.

To amend your analogy, in the same way a Pole doesn't choose to be Polish, a non-racist Brexit voter *didn't choose that other Brexit voters may be racist*

Re: So much for "Brexit freedoms" eh ?

The irony of disparaging a huge swathe of population as being racist scum is funny, if unsurprising. Discrimination is only discrimination if you're not *right*, of course!

Meta, Google, TikTok and friends sue California to block kids privacy law

Re: Interesting

Indeed. Think of the children, unless that thinking is 'don't let them get hooked on endless algorithmic dopamine feeds while they're young', in which case think of the damage to Zuckerbergs.

BT performs U-turn, agrees to up wages for 85% of UK staff

Re: How much???

You forgot to add 'in London'.

FTX collapse prompts other cryptocurrency firms to suspend withdrawals

Re: Consenting adults. (Consenting by default?).

I don't think it's a scam either, but I'm also yet to see a convincing argument for the use case of it vs a centralised relational database.

Your Starbucks coin example, current loyalty apps/accounts will store their users' points on a database, what is the problem with this that needs the solution of defi? Especially PoW vs PoS based which wastes massive amounts of energy vs a database.

Too bad, contractors: UK government reverses decision to axe IR35 tax reform

Re: This should make people happy

Agreed on all counts.

Japanese giants to offer security-as-a-service for connected cars

In other words

We have a solution to the problem with the solution to the problem that didn't exist - having to put a key in the car to start it.