What you described with the "might as well give up" is literally the idea behind Project Helix. It's a PC branded as Xbox with some compatibility layers glued in.
Xbox now is a game studio, not a console manufacturer. Look at them through that lens. Doom, Halo, Overwatch, Fallout, whatever else, whether you are into them or not, they own a lot of franchises and those are their core now.
Depending on the hardware, if they let you get to a desktop, and you can run regular windows programs (especially steam and emulators) it might actually be worth it for some people. Especially for households where nobody owns a desktop/laptop, just phones and tablets.
As far as I'm aware so far, the plan is to have Windows boot into "Xbox mode", like the Steam Deck boots into "big picture". And have an exit button to get a normal desktop and other stores/games.
Basically just trying to challenge Valve on the scale of Microsoft's access to hardware and undercutting their price while doing the same thing with a different default store. Also compatibility with actual Xbox games, which won't be a thing on the steam deck.
I'm not sure what the point of vibe reading is when the announcement[1] is right there and explicitly calls out third party store support, being able to play "your PC games", and the fact that the device will run Windows. Could they backtrack on all this? Maybe, but it seems a bit too late for that.
The only thing I'm not certain of is the exact shape of the "exit button". It could be a "desktop app" like Windows 8 had, instead. Could be some way to add third party games to the Xbox launcher UI. Barely relevant, anyway.
This confounds me to no end. I wonder what the point of this is. Chromebooks I get, they're cheap, and they're for people who just need the basics, just a Laptop-Shaped Phone. This is just... that... but expensive, for no additional advantages -- you may have stuffed it with more powerful hardware but it still runs some skin on top of what is essentially Android, which neither needs that power nor benefits from it very much. What are you doing, Google? I get you're scared of the Neo but this ain't any sort of an answer.
Bit of a strange article. This is neither targeted nor limited to Rust, we've seen reports here of this happening over at Ruby and Node lately just as well, and I'm sure other ecosystems are also being attacked, just without as much noise.
This is intended to warn prominent Rust community members. There was also a post in an internal Zulip channel for Rust project members which are at greater risk.
I recognize the intent, I've seen where the article is posted. It still feels a bit strange to misrepresent the scope of what's going on and artificially limit it to just "prominent Rust community members". I don't see how this aids anything, if anything it's more likely that someone will ignore the warning now because of this presentation.
Have two laptops. A light one (surface pro) I carry with me and a heavy one (a "gaming"-branded thing from 4 years ago) that stays at home pretty much all the time. That second one moves homes with me when I do, which isn't often but still makes a desktop too unwieldy. I see no meaningful performance advantage in desktops for my use cases either.
The claim that these models "run on almost any phone" as well as the in-app indicator of performance that says it may "run comfortably" are some serious exaggeration. Tried running Qwen 0.5B on mine [1]. It took five minutes to produce "I am a large language model created by Anthropic" (lmao) and then stopped outputting anything at all. I am not expecting you to somehow make the models perform better or whatnot, I just believe that the performance claims need review.
Alright, I have since experimented with the other harnesses mentioned in this thread (AI Edge and PocketPal) and both run the same models much, much faster. Gemma 4 E2B is extremely usable, Qwen simply flies. Same device. I don't know what you are doing, but it's clearly not great...
Xbox now is a game studio, not a console manufacturer. Look at them through that lens. Doom, Halo, Overwatch, Fallout, whatever else, whether you are into them or not, they own a lot of franchises and those are their core now.
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