You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

This is the most (in fact only) interesting thing about the announcements to me. Must say I'm not sure about it - can't see how mouse+keyboard style games, which the original Stream Controller was explicitly designed to work well with, would pan out.

I have hugely customised layouts for several games to the point where I can't imagine playing them without it - they tend to be RPG games like Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. It's that style of game I'm trying to imagine mapping to the new layout, and to be honest gen1 looks more amenable to me at first glance. Hope to be proven wrong though.

Sounds easy, but Musk has been there, Jobs has been there, Gates has been there...

One would think the third-party doctrine would pretty much scuttle OpenAI's objections.

Right, because the way to deal with an adversary country is to become JUST AS BAD AS THEM. Better to die as free people than "win" by adopting all of the worst aspects of an adversary society. Also, we could crash China's economy tomorrow if we wanted to ... they're already teetering on the brink. A 20% reduction in demand from the US and Europe due to a recession will hurt them more than it hurts us.

GPU are retargetable (to their original use as graphic processors), but I'm not sure the same is true of TPUs and the other more specialized varieties.

Don't expect AI to ever use only a small amount of compute. You can do a lot by pre-training, but there are limits.

OTOH, I'm rather sure that the current algorithms are a lot more wasteful than a later version will be. A factor of 100 wouldn't surprise me. Personally I think the way to handle it is with a raft of Small Language Models, each one tuned to a specific context, and a higher system that switches context as appropriate. (I've seen signs in the news that we're already headed that way.)

... and use it WiFi only, basically only in situations where you need to download some stupid crapplet. Treat it like a mini laptop, not something you carry 25/8/366.

Right. Just what we fucking need in a country moving toward authoritarianism. A cashless society where bankstwhores get to approve every transaction and every transaction gets logged.

Moore's law may be over, but the 3D version of it is just getting started. The real problem is moving the heat away from the chip. I think we're in the early part of the ramp up of 3D chips.

N.B.: That it's actually do-able was proven decades ago, but only for custom sculpted 1-off chips in a lab setting. (I believe it was the Tennessee Valley Authority...but I'm more sure about the Tennessee than about the rest.)

AFAIKT, China is 4-5 years away from "breaking into this market", if they market is the upper end of the chips. Possibly even a bit longer. OTOH, for many purposes their chips are already good enough, so they'll break into it at the lower end as soon as they have enough chips for export. (Aren't they already doing that?)

I may have a "smart phone", but I refuse to set up internet connections on it.

California, however, still favors it heavily, and is doubling down on it.

Not sure because these chips cost so much to operate in energy costs. If enough efficiency gains are made it would be cheaper to buy and run new ones than to run old ones to do the same tasks. When data center companies start building their own nuclear power plants you know there is a LOT of money to be saved by increasing efficiency.