New CEO can't stop Xbox from killing any studio within reach.

There's speculation that Arkane will be shuttered soon as well

Pretty scary, my desktop had the libgdata package left over as an orphan from something I had installed in the past. Thankfully I hadn't updated on the day of the attack, my package logs show my build of libgdata was from a February update instead.

People using the aur on steamOS probably are doing so through distrobox. Distrobox doesn't sandbox as far as I know, so the infostealer part of the malware would still be a risk. The rootkit part I'm guessing would fail, since I think distrobox on Deck usually runs in rootless mode.

It also seems like there was a fairly short window of time before the infected packages were caught, anyone who didn't update one of the compromised packages on that exact day should be fine.

Considering plausibility

People are most susceptible to false claims when they back up or collaborate something they already believe. So most of the time people who fall for fake news/AI slop/etc will consider it plausible by default, they're only giving it attention because it seems plausible based on their current beliefs.

A lot of stuff like this spreads in echo chambers as well, so there will often be a community of like minded people, who all agree with it, talking about how true it is. In those circumstances it's pretty easy to assume that if it matches you and your community's beliefs/knowledge, and no one else has identified it as false, that it's probably true or mostly true.

AI slop is getting better, a class on it from a year ago would focus heavily on counting fingers and things like that, but that's becoming rarer and rarer.

If people took a class on it now, a lot of what they learned might not matter in a year or two.

Especially with this, I would fully expect the game to be playable on Deck.

That said, I've seen devs preview their game on Steam Deck before, and then have anticheat that won't actually allow it to run on SteamOS

I respect that.

That's definitely costing them more than running it on their own hardware, but it doesn't mean AI is costing them more than the AI startups. Anthropic for example is already paying SpaceX 1.25 Billion a month for compute, and has agreed to pay Google 200 billion over the next 5 years for access to Google's compute and TPU chips.

Google's deal with xAI specifically lets them terminate the deal with 90 days notice after the end of the year. Google is also investing heavily in building new data centers with their hardware. I'm assuming this deal means they've eclipsed their current TPU capacity, and are just looking for a short term bandaid until they can catch up with their new constructions.

They have big plans to build more data centers for themselves, so they definitely want more compute than the have access to right now. But even if they're paying more to rent xai compute, they're still paying less overall for hardware/access than their direct AI competition.