
Only 2 doors for the SUV is pretty wonky.

Only 2 doors for the SUV is pretty wonky.

Back when the Steam Machine was first announced, I liked the idea, but wanted something cheaper (I assumed $650 - $800) so I got a $375 off-brand mini gaming PC for the living room with a Ryzen 8745HS (780M iGPU, roughly 2x SD compared to 3x for SM), 512GB SSD and 16GB of DDR5.
The model I bought is not available now, but similar specs are going for close to $600, so the price is still roughly proportional. The machine I got cut every corner possible, and for example, I never could get Bluetooth to work reliably with my controllers and ended up getting $20 8bitdo dongles for each controller.
The SM, on the other hand, is a more refined hardware and OS combination where everything just works and that Valve stands behind, and where games will be tweaked and certified for that specific hardware. I am enjoying my mini PC, but I’ve put a lot of time into customizing and troubleshooting to end up with games that still stutter at 4K. For anyone who just wants to game instead of tinkering, SM is likely worth the current price.
Edit:
Fixed typo
Plasma Bigscreen is in 6.7. Guess it’ll still be a while before it’s broadly available across distros, though.

I consider the downvote button to be the “fuck off” button, which I reserve for toxic comments or posts made in bad faith. I try to be generous with upvotes and sparing with downvotes, but some people here go straight for the downvote button and pile on more downvotes when something is already downvoted. If I see someone getting downvoted heavily who is acting in good faith, I’ll give them an upvote, even if I don’t necessarily agree. Otherwise, withholding an upvote is what I consider the correct response when I don’t agree or am not interested.
I do often delete my comment if I’m told to fuck off by too many people, mainly because it’s the first thing I’ll see in my client the next time I login, which will make me less motivated to engage next time.
Carbon is the 4th most abundant element in the galaxy. Silicon is twice as rare, so maybe spend 6 month’s salary on a quartz ring instead? Either that, or save up for a down payment on a house. Nah, who needs a place to live when you can have a hunk of mineral, right?

MSI Thin 15 B13VE is the model. The only place I see it for $800 is Amazon at the moment.

I got a Steam Deck LCD 64GB for $350 and then put a 1TB SSD in it, so like $430 total. I love the SD, but it’s just not worth double that. A gaming laptop with a 4050 goes for about $800 now, so the current pricing isn’t really that good of a deal even at today’s prices.

Sounds like the core engine is FOSS at least: https://github.com/Tracktion/tracktion_engine?tab=License-1-ov-file. Unless it’s all 100% FOSS, might as well go with Reaper or another paid DAW, though.

I suppose if the extensions are also FOSS, paying for them is fair enough. I use Blender and buy paid extensions that are GPL licensed, which is way better than subscription-only software. Free as in freedom, not beer, and freedom is worth paying for, IMO.

I see what you did there. 😆
Using copyleft licenses for closed models is clearly against the spirit of the licenses if the users don’t have access to the source code that includes the original copyleft works. Even open weight models aren’t really the source code, and are more akin to a compiled binary. The source code is all the training data and code used to train the model such that anyone can build on it and train new models.
I’m not a lawyer and am not sure how well existing copyleft licenses like GPL or CC-SA would stand up in court to enforce this, but if they don’t, then stronger licenses that explicitly cover works being used as training data need to become more common.
I’ve seen the argument that the models are just learning from the data in the same way a human would. That’s nonsense. It’s not like they’re creating a sentient being with its own agency that can tell them to fuck off if it wants. These companies are running a software pipeline against copyrighted IP to convert it into a derivative work that is now supposedly wholly owned by said company, but the reality is that it’s collectively owned by everyone who contributed to the copyleft training data.