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Accessory Company Yanks Companion Cube Steam Machine Case Because It Never Actually Asked Valve For Permission
“We’re going to regret that decision for a very long time”
Dbrand Forced To Pull Steam Machine Companion Cube
Mere after the reveal of the Valve Steam Machine, accessory maker Dbrand announced that it was releasing the "Companion Cube," a Steam Machine accessory that was modelled after the Portal weighted companion cube storage box. Following massive interest in the Companion Cube in the week since its anno...
Companion Cube Steam Machine canceled after Dbrand angers Valve
I'm making a note here, "Huge blunder"
Valve doesn’t let Dbrand’s coolest Steam Machine accessory leave the testing facility
Dbrand announced that users who ordered the Companion Cube skin for the Steam Machine will not, in fact, find companionship...
Someone just released a SteamOS gaming PC before Valve even shipped its own
It has a very clever name.
Scalpers Are Already Flipping Steam Machine Reservations On eBay For $2,700–$2,900, Roughly Double Valve’s Price
Reservations for the Steam Machine are listed on eBay for up to $2,899, nearly triple its official price of $1,400, amid widespread scalping efforts
Scalpers List Steam Machine Reservations at $1,700+
Following a brief reservation period, prospective buyers of the Valve Steam Machine started reporting on June 26 that they had begun to receive reservation confirmation emails for the new hybrid console. However, on the same day, and almost predictably, apparent scalpers listed Steam Machine units o...
“The Cheaper the Better,” Says Valve About its Steam Machine Pricing, but Don’t Expect a Price Decrease “Any Time Soon”
"The cheaper the better" is Valve's official line for how it would like to price the Steam Machine, but don't expect it to happen soon.
Valve's HDMI 2.1 Saga Is "Fully Resolved" with a Final FRL Update to Come For Full 4K 240Hz support
My monitor is ready.
Valve Would "Love to Make the Steam Machine More Affordable" - Just Don't Expect It "Any Time Soon"
If memory prices go down - and that's a big if.
Valve Deletes 4K 60FPS Claim From Steam Page After Reviews
Some have struggled to hit consistently high framerates on the new hardware
Valve Quietly Walks Back Steam Machine 4K 60 FPS Performance Claims
Valve's Steam Machine has earned more than its fair share of skeptics, thanks to performance claims and more recently its unfortunate pricing. More recently, though, Valve has seemingly taken some of this criticism to heart and silently changed some of those performance claims on the Steam Machine p...
Valve quietly changes Steam Machine 4K claim: 4K 60 FPS becomes “up to 4K”
Valve has changed the Steam Machine 4K claim. The page now says “up to 4K” with FSR 4.1 instead of 4K 60 FPS with FSR.
Valve clarifies: all Steam Machines, for now, will ship with one 16GB stick of RAM.
In an interview with Gamers Nexus, Valve had said that the PCs would ship with either one 16GB stick of RAM or two 8GB sticks of RAM. “We misspoke here - all units will actually have one 16GB stick of RAM,” the company says in a follow-up statement to the channel. “It’s possible that this might change in future builds, but the units that customers are currently signing up for will all come with one 16GB stick of RAM.” [Media: https://youtu.be/glXA3ObwSwQ?si=QGmDWmVfbMiONxLd&t=109]
Steam Machine Sells Out in Japan Despite Woeful Pricing
As was the case with the Steam Deck, Valve is selling the Steam Machine via Komodo Station, an Asian reseller that serves much of South-East Asia, and as a result, it skips the reservation and lottery system that is currently in place on Valve's own Steam Store. While this doesn't combat issues like...
Valve Confirms You Can Build Your Own Steam Machine
Support for NVIDIA hardware is also on the way.
Valve admits Steam Machine is "more expensive" than it hoped
The PC giant is non-commital on whether the console's price will come down in the future if hardware costs reduce
Steam Machine is 'more expensive' than even Valve wanted it to be
The PC gaming giant knows some fans won't be able to afford its new system, but Valve didn't want things to work out this way
Pre-RAMpocalypse Steam Machine Pricing was ~30% Cheaper
It's no secret that Valve's Steam Machine is launching at possibly the worst moment for both PC and console gaming hardware, given the ongoing DRAM crisis, but Valve engineer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, has recently shed light on the pre-RAM crisis pricing of the Steam Machine, revealing that it was neve...
Valve Explains Why You Have To Pay $1,050 To $1,430 For A Steam Machine
Valve has finally revealed the price of the Steam Machine, and it's more than almost anyone predicted. Can you afford it?
Valve's Steam Machine ships June 29 for $1,049, but you probably won't be able to buy one yet
Valve says it's using a randomized purchase queue to make the experience "less frustrating and more fair."
Valve: FSR 4 Is Coming to Steam Machine
A huge confirmation that should see significant quality improvements.
Here’s how you can reserve a Steam Machine
Valve’s reservation process is complicated, but fair.
Valve will finally let you build your own Steam Machine with SteamOS for desktop
Valve’s working on official Nvidia support in SteamOS.
The Most Expensive Game on Steam Costs $1,000 and Lasts Just 10 Minutes
Steam users are questioning the legitimacy of a $1,000 game that basically has no gameplay, and are wondering how it made its way onto Valve’s platform in the first place.
Accidentally Leaked FSR 4.1.1 INT8 Reportedly Works With RDNA 3.5 Graphics
Valve's leak reveals FSR 4.1.1 INT8 supports RDNA 3.5 and RDNA 2 GPUs, with successful tests on RX 7800 XT and RX 6900 XT
Dbrand launches Companion Cube enclosure for Steam Machine, "Poverty Cube" option costs $99.95
The cube now gets another cube. Dbrand has opened preorders for its Companion Cube enclosure for Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine.
Valve leaks FSR 4.1 for RDNA 3 and RDNA 3.5 GPUs through Proton Experimental
FSR 4.1 file works with RDNA 3 and RDNA 3.5 GPUs Valve appears to have pushed an early FSR 4.1 build through Proton Experimental.
Dbrand Is Now Taking Orders for Its Steam Machine Companion Cube Case
Dbrand is now officially selling its Portal-themed Companion Cube case for Valve's yet unreleased Steam Machine.
Steam Machine Companion Cube now up for pre order, arrives next month with matching Steam Controller skin
First teased soon after Valve announced the Steam Machine, dbrand's Companion Cube case is now available to pre-order from $99.95.
AMD has reportedly released FSR 4 for RDNA3 GPUs in Valve Proton Experimental
AMD FSR4 appears to be coming to Valve’s Proton Experimental.
Steam Controller demand is so high Valve is changing reservation estimates, and some customers won't get theirs until 2027
Valve has updated its Steam Controller reservation system as demand has exceeded its expectations.
Valve's Steam Controllers Are Out Of Stock Until 2027
If you reserve the device today, you've got at least a six month wait
Are You Prepared To Wait Until 2027 For A Steam Controller?
In an update, Valve says it may not ship some Steam Controller orders until next year.
Valve is so behind on Steam Controller orders that some won’t ship until 2027
You might have to wait a long time for your Steam Controller.
Gabe Newell, founder of Bellevue’s Valve, buys $70.8M Florida mansion
The 20,000-square-foot house spans from the ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway, with a private dock and a tunnel leading directly from the house to the ocean shore.
Loss of another Seattle-area billionaire? Valve’s Gabe Newell is reported buyer of Florida estate
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the video game developer is the buyer of a waterfront estate north of Miami.
Valve Steam Machine Benchmarks Show Near Twice The Uplift Over Steam Deck & Comparable To Ryzen 5 5600X at 30W
New benchmarks of Valve's Steam Machine show performance comparable to a 6-core AMD Ryzen CPU from 2020, but could be decent if priced right.
Billionaire Valve Boss Gabe Newell Buys Florida Super Mansion With Its Own Underground Tunnel for $70.8 Million
Gabe Newell has splashed out $70.8 million on a Florida super mansion that comes with its own tunnel to the sea.
Steam Machine Performance Benchmark Leak Signals Approaching Launch
Since the news broke that the Valve Steam Machine would be delayed, there have been countless conversations online about how the Steam Machine would be dead on arrival because of its expected pricing and aging internals—a six-core Zen 4 CPU and a Radeon Navi 33 GPU with 8 GB of VRAM—but a recent set...
Family files $17M lawsuit after young girl’s heart valve allegedly implanted upside down
Days went by and the girl's doctors allegedly never figured out what was wrong. When she was transferred to a different hospital, however, the issue was quickly identified and corrected.
Steam Workshop abused to spread malware via Wallpaper Engine app
Threat actors are abusing Steam Workshop, Valve's community hub for downloading game-related content, to push various malware hidden in wallpaper packages.
The Steam Machine Is Likely in Testers’ Hands, as 2 Fresh SteamOS Benchmarks Leak
Steam Machine "Fremont" hits Geekbench running SteamOS, hinting at an imminent Summer launch for Valve's new console
Steam Machine could launch as early as this month, leak claims
After Valve posted a hopeful, yet vague, update on its exciting new console, new leaks point to an official Steam...
Steam Machine reviews may be underway as two new Geekbench listings surface
Valve's Steam Machine was once again spotted on Geekbench with two separate listings, suggesting that reviews may be underway.
Valve just imported 13 tons of VR headsets in one day
And probably 141 tons of Steam Machines in the past 50 days.
Redo TAVR with balloon-expandable valves linked to positive outcomes, key improvements
Researchers tracked real-world data from more than 140 patients who originally received a transcatheter heart valve from Edwards Lifesciences, Medtronic or Boston Scientific.
From The Sports Desk: Carolina claims Game 4 in back-and-forth Stanley Cup Final
Jordan Staal scored the go-ahead goal, as the Hurricanes beat the Vegas Golden Knights 5-3 and even the series 2-2. Plus, today’s World Cup spotlight is Uruguay’s Federico Valverde.
Valve kills its retail gift card program due to scammers
Move also cuts off a massive market of legit users who buy cards with physical cash.
Valve is phasing out physical Steam gift cards due to scammers
Valve says “scammers have adapted.”
Valve Is Killing Physical Steam Gift Cards In A Bid To Combat 'Scammers'
According to Valve, Steam gift card scams have become such an issue for the platform that its made the 'difficult' decision to discontinue their physical sales altogether
Physical Steam gift cards are being ended by Valve because scammers keep using them to trick people
Valve is making a major change to Steam gift cards by completely getting rid of the physical option.
"Scammers have adapted": Valve confirms that physical Steam Gift Cards are dead. Once the current stocks are sold through, they're done.
Valve's Steam Gift Cards have been a staple in major retailers throughout the world for quite some time. But today, the firm confirmed they're being phased out.
NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue Marks 200th Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement
New York, NY – NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue announced a major milestone in its cardiovascular program: the completion of its 200th minimally invasive
OHSU told 13-year-old’s parents she was dying before Seattle doctors discovered massive mistake, $17M suit sa
A new lawsuit claims that an OHSU surgeon installed a heart valve upside down, leaving the girl reliant on life support for 18 days.
Seven-second X-ray assesses severity of regurgitation congenital heart defect patients
Moving X-ray images can help evaluate pulmonary regurgitation in Tetralogy of Fallot patients.
Seven-second X-ray assesses severity of regurgitation congenital heart defect patients
Moving X-ray images can help evaluate pulmonary regurgitation in Tetralogy of Fallot patients.
Here’s an early look at the Steam Frame Welcome Tour after Valve officially announces summer release window
Valve's Steam Frame is arriving this summer alongside the Steam Machine. Users have managed to get an early glimpse of its setup procedure.
Valve Confirms Steam Machine Will Ship This Summer
The company also confirmed that its standalone VR headset will arrive in that same timeframe
Valverde: “I never imagined being Real Madrid’s captain”
Real Madrid midfielder Fede Valverde talked to Uruguayan TV AUF and shared some thoughts about the upcoming FIFA World Cup and also about the club. “Wearing the armband is something incredible; I never imagined being captain for Real Madrid, and I thoroughly enjoy every opportunity to wear the armband. It carries some pressure too. When […]
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Gabe Newell Says Players Have 'Enormous Choice' When Pressed on Steam Monopoly Accusations, Report Says
Valve founder and president Gabe Newell denied claims that Steam is running a monopoly, saying that players have "enormous choice" in the PC gaming space, according to a new report.
Valve Reportedly Threatened to Delist Rainbow Six Siege on Steam After Ubisoft Offered Cheaper Alternative
Valve has allegedly gone to great lengths to maintain Steam's position as a marketplace titan on PC, including one example that reportedly saw it threaten to retaliate against Ubisoft by delisting Rainbow Six Siege.
"What the f*** do I pay you for if that’s your opinion?" Gabe Newell reportedly once shouted at one of Valve's Lionel Hutzes during Steam porn debate
Gabe Newell reportedly once rebuked a valve lawyer during a debate about Steam content moderation.
Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere
Newly uncovered evidence in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit has claimed Valve works aggressively behind the scenes to maintain its position.
World’s First 8.1L Big Block C8 Corvette Finally Hits the Freeway
Three and a half years of engineering have brought this beast to life with direct injection, variable valve timing, and way more.
Aurelien Tchouameni opens up on Fede Valverde altercation, denies punch
For the first time, Real Madrid midfielder Aurelien Tchouameni has opened up on his altercation with Fede Valverde at the Valdebebas training ground. The Uruguayan midfielder was taken to hospital aft...
Steam Machine launch appears near as Valve adds Welcome Tour to Steam backend
Valve recently added the Steam Machine's Welcome Tour to Steam's backend through a recent update, which suggests the company is finally geting ready to launch the device.
"This market is not behaving normally" - analysts react to Valve's Steam Deck price increases, and what it means for the cost of the upcoming Steam Machine
Video games analysts chat with Eurogamer about the recent price increase for the Steam Deck, and what this means for Steam Machine.
Epic Games CEO Dunks On Valve Raising Steam Deck Prices
Then people turned around and dunked on Sweeney for laying off 1,000 employees
Valve Steam Deck Sells Out in 24 Hours Despite Price Hike
The internet has recently been rife with complaints and discussions about the recent price increases to the Valve Steam Deck OLED, which saw prices of the gaming handheld spike by as much as $300. However, that same price increase coincided with the first restock of the Valve Steam Deck in anywhere ...
Valve quits gaming to pursue standup comedy with $300 Steam Deck price hike
Costs more than the PS5 Pro now. Valve today announced a price hike today the likes of which we have rarely seen. The company's popular handheld gaming...
Steam Deck's Massive Price Hike May Not Bode Well for Steam Frame
Valve announced that Steam Deck is getting a sizable price hike, bringing an increase of $240 to $300 to its handheld gaming PC–not exactly a vote of confidence for those of us waiting for Steam Frame, its upcoming standalone VR headset. The company revealed the 512 GB OLED Steam Deck has increased from $549 to […]
Valve raises Steam Deck OLED prices by over 40%
1TB model now costs $949, up from $649, due to higher component costs and logistical challenges
Valve jacks up Steam Deck prices by as much as $300
If you haven't already purchased a Steam Deck, it's going to cost a lot more going forward.
Steam Machine appears on official Vulkan 1.4 conformant products list
Steam Machine listed with NAVI33 and Vulkan 1.4 support Mesa/RADV listing confirms Vulkan 1.4 CTS pass for AMD Steam Machine Valve’s upcoming Steam
How TAVR valve implant depth impacts clinical outcomes
TAVR procedures with a higher implant depth are associated with certain clinical benefits after one year, according to a new study of data from more than 600 patients.
Valve Remains Silent As Racist Plantation Sim Game Trolls Everyone
Steam guidelines claim to ban 'content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers'
PSA – Valve's Steam Controller Puck Could Try to Charge Your Metal Watch Strap, to Dramatic Effect
/u/Toikka on Reddit had a shocking experience.
SMART update: Self-expanding TAVR valves still linked to superior durability after 3 years
These three-year data represent a major update to one of the more noteworthy TAVR trials in recent memory.
Steam Adds, Edits, and Removes Dozens of Store Tags
Steam has changed the official tags you'll find attached to games on Valve's digital storefront.
Steam's NSFW and Mature tags ditched by Valve in favour of "more descriptive" ones like Sexual Content and Gore, as part of wider revamp
Fresh changes by Valve to the Steam store's tags include NSFW and Mature being removed in favour of "more descriptive" ones.
Boston Scientific invests $1.5 billion in MiRus with option to buy heart-valve business
U.S. medical device maker Boston Scientific said on Monday it has invested $1.5 billion in privately held MiRus LLC in return for a 34% equity stake and potential access to the startup's heart-valve business.
The Steam Controller Wilhelm Scream Easter Egg Is Incredible
I can't believe I didn't discover this earlier.
Yes, Valve's new Steam Controller screams if you drop it from a great enough height
Adventurous (or clumsy) owners of Valve's new Steam Controller have discovered it includes a fun little easter egg, if you don't mind sending it into freefall.
The Steam Controller is actually a scream controller, because Valve couldn't resist making it cry out in memey pain when you drop it
Valve's Steam Controller Wilhelm screams if you drop it.
Valve Has a Plan to Stop Scalpers From Botting the Steam Machine
It's what Valve should have done with the Steam Controller from the start.
Steam Machine Buyers Will Face a Queue System For Its 4 Models, as Valve Moves to Prevent Scalper Markups Early
Valve leaked code reveals a reservation queue and four models for the Steam Machine to stop scalpers and prevent another launch fiasco
CONFIRMED lineups: Barcelona vs Real Madrid, 2026 El Clásico
Real Madrid have published their starting lineup for the upcoming match against Barcelona in LaLiga. Barça have a golden opportunity to secure the title, but both teams will be missing big stars like Kylian Mbappé, Lamine Yamal or Fede Valverde tonight. Who will win the last El Clásico of the 2025-26 season? STARTING LINEUPS Barcelona […]
Valve tackles "incredibly frustrating" sold-out Steam Controller shortage with new reservation system
Couldn't get hold of one of Valve's pricey (£85) but fancy new Steam Controllers before they sold out? There's possibly a solution for you.
PHOTO GALLERY: Cardiac surgery technologies at the AATS 106th Annual Meeting
A wide variety of technologies, including robotic systems, heart valves, stent grafts, retractors and annuloplasty rings, were on display in Chicago.
Valve is fighting Steam Controller scalpers with a new reservations system
You’ll have another chance to buy one of Valve’s new controllers.
Resilia tissue developed by Edwards Lifesciences associated with long-term durability
Kevin Accola, MD, spoke to Cardiovascular Business about new 10-year data on the performance of surgical valves featuring Resilia tissue. The findings are good news for Edwards Lifesciences, which also includes the tissue on many of its TAVR devices.
Valve commits to restocking its Steam Controller after it "ran out faster than we anticipated"
The resource for people who make and sell games.
Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
Modders, start your engines.