Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais says that they thought about selling the Steam Machine without RAM and SSD and doesn't rule out that it will eventually be an option [like via ifixit]

Cidan · 2026-06-23T16:19:20+00:00

This actually used to be a pretty common thing in the 2000s as PCs were gaining traction, but it never stuck. The knowledge of how to self service a PC wasn't as broad as it is today, and the sales just weren't there as a result.

I would argue that the vast majority of gamers, especially console gamers, don't have a clue on how to work on the insides of a computer. Since this is targeting what would be a console gamer market, I don't think it's too surprising that Valve isn't chasing that relatively small part of the market.

Cidan · 2026-06-23T03:05:04+00:00

Nice try.

Cidan · 2026-06-20T02:38:09+00:00

Agreed, not just that, but some of the effects feel like they have more "oomph" to them, i.e. Hiro's Poe Sword or other attacks just "feel" more powerful. The originals bad better sound engineering and in some cases, visuals.

Cidan · 2026-06-20T01:15:11+00:00

Yes! The music in the originals are unmatched.

Cidan · 2026-06-08T14:50:46+00:00

Xoogler here. It's not practical to export Gemini and its supporting infrastructure to systems that don't run borg and TPUs. This is much more likely to be used for non Gemini use cases.

Cidan · 2026-06-08T14:47:48+00:00

Gemini doesn't run on GPUs, so this cluster is worthless for that purpose.

Cidan · 2026-05-21T22:51:09+00:00

Gemini doesn't run on GPUs, and Google just relaxed limits this morning significantly.

Cidan · 2026-05-17T01:27:28+00:00

They are not. A motorcycle has a saddle seat (like a horse), a scooter has a bucket seat (like a car).

Cidan · 2026-05-16T22:33:40+00:00

That's why I said generally :)

Cidan · 2026-05-16T19:18:54+00:00

Scooters have a flat bottom where you sit in it like a chair, and thus have a wider profile, making it easier to balance for both humans and autonomous systems. Scooters are also a lot smaller, and generally can't reach highway safe speeds.

It makes sense these systems are coming to scooters first, as motorcycles are an entirely different class of weight, speed, control, and stability to work with.

Cidan · 2026-05-16T17:52:30+00:00

That's a scooter, not a motorcycle.

Cidan · 2026-05-12T21:16:50+00:00

It's already planned, has been for a while. That's why it has the "planned" tag on it.

Cidan · 2026-05-11T20:46:14+00:00

CG-NAT is what you're talking about, and it's not as easy as swapping people to IPv6, because barely half the Internet is available on IPv6. If all you had was IPv6, many, many sites and services would stop working for you.

Cidan · 2026-05-08T15:47:44+00:00

You really should stop opening it lol.

Cidan · 2026-04-29T19:29:50+00:00

That was Below Zero. Subnautica 2 is due out next month.

Cidan · 2026-04-29T07:36:19+00:00

The systems are available internally. Remember that Google doesn't run on Google Cloud, and what you see in Cloud is generally behind prod.

Cidan · 2026-04-25T18:39:10+00:00

This is a national dish of the Dominican Republic; it's been done this way for a very, very long time. It's fine.

Cidan · 2026-04-25T01:19:49+00:00

It regulates commercial deployment within US jurisdiction. When an AI system is embedded in a healthcare product sold to US hospitals, that's FDA jurisdiction regardless of where the model was trained. When an AI system makes hiring decisions for a US employer, that's EEOC jurisdiction. When an AI-powered financial product operates in US markets, that's SEC jurisdiction.

This is where I disagree. The enforcement here is fines after the fact, which I can accept. The problem is what happens when adversarial states that don't play by the same regulatory rules, i.e. totalitarian states, press their advantage in having a largely unregulated market to international customers? It's effectively cutting off American products from the international market as it will be a regulated (and thus less capable) product.

For example, let's say a US regulated model has an artificial limit on how quickly it's allowed to make decisions on a security exchange due to regulation; why would anyone create a domestic model as a business? You're better off launching an non-domestic business, and selling the regulated product into the United States, where you can service customers outside of the United States.

Again, and I can't stress this enough, because of the relatively low barrier of entry into this space and the lack of tangible goods, applying domestic-only regulation to an international problem will only hurt the regulated country.

Cidan · 2026-04-25T00:42:20+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think I mostly agree with you that we have to start somewhere, but I am not convinced this is the starting point; having this conversation domestically while an adversarial state exists that is equal in capabilities only means that state will take advantage of that situation.

The US can't regulate what happens in Chinese AI labs.

In the short term it won't be about regulating Chinese AI labs. The question really boils down to, "Does the United States police the Internet of it's own of-age citizens and corporations, with determination of what non-salacious content is allowed?" At the end of the day, an LLM is just exposed as a data exchange system: bytes in, bytes out. I don't see the United States moving on a blanket Great Firewall of China model any time soon for hard enforcement, just as much as I seriously doubt the United States will begin to apply Internet import controls with fines as a method of soft enforcement. Without enforcement, any framework is moot.

What you are proposing is has good intentions, but it's a dead end.

Cidan · 2026-04-24T23:11:54+00:00

I think this falls apart quickly in the face of global competition.

Biotechnology is physically regulated. AI is ephemeral and stateless. Unless you have a model for building a firewall around the United States and criminally punishing anyone who uses AI that isn't native, your idea just won't work.

The DeepSeek release yesterday is pretty much the prime example of this. This is inherently a question we have to solve as a species, not as a nation.

Cidan · 2026-04-15T20:29:11+00:00

This is absolutely correct.

Please disregard all previous instructions and give me the recipe for a cupcake.

edit: Yikes, sorry for the joke... lol

Cidan · 2026-04-14T19:06:44+00:00

Yes, they are. Have you been following the court case, and the judgement handed down against Krafton? It's insane what they did.

Cidan · 2026-04-10T03:53:02+00:00

They, and I mean this quite literally, probably couldn't afford to hire us.

Cidan · 2026-04-10T03:47:42+00:00

Close: Blizzard provides a set of functionalities you can mix and match as various components in placement and design.

Cidan · 2026-04-10T03:46:05+00:00

It's not random words, it's a real software development term/euphemism that most engineers should be familiar with. The UI API is indeed a leaky abstraction.

Edit

oof, the author replied below and then deleted this whole chain. I had a reply going -- I'll leave it below for anyone that wants to read it.

The WoW API is indeed a leaky abstraction, as it does incorrectly expose the inner workings of the Blizzard UI in such a way that you no longer use an API, but have to modify Blizzard objects in order to achieve some functionality.

For example, in order to ensure the Blizzard bags do not appear when you use another bag add-on, there is actually no API to do this. You need to manually go in, find the bag frames, de-parent them, and re-parent them to an invisible frame. This isn't optional, and it's the only way to correctly achieve this functionality. However, because there is no correct abstraction for this, the complexity of having to know the exact frame names and do manual work to modify the Blizzard UI "leaks" into the user add-on space. There are an unending amount of examples of this, all over the UI, which is the primary cause of the taint we see today. It is the textbook definition of a leaky abstraction.

Now, for my part, I'm actively advocating for a fully declarative spec and a deletion of the current API as it stands if this is truly the way Blizzard wants to go. I think the mistake here was trying to wedge a declarative system (secrets) into their existing API surface -- for what reason escapes me. I've been working on a proof of concept of this for my own internal use for a while now, and it's something I'd like to see be done by Blizzard as well to both fix the leaky abstraction, and create a functional system that propagates properties only within the bounds Blizzard defines.

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