Man, you wouldn't believe the stuff going on in tech this Wednesday! I just scrolled through Hacker News real quick, and here are the highlights:

Valve's Back with New Gear!

First up, Valve, you know, the Steam people, they're making another run at hardware. They announced a new Steam Machine and something called a Steam Frame, plus a new controller. People are buzzing, especially because the Steam Deck was such a hit. Folks in the comments were talking about how the Steam Deck already does a lot of what people want from a Linux gaming machine, and some macOS users are even eyeing Linux as an escape if Apple gets 'more toxic.' There was also some chatter about shady sites selling game accounts instead of keys, which is always a headache for devs.

Yt-dlp Needs JavaScript Now

Remember yt-dlp, that awesome tool for downloading YouTube videos? Well, it's gonna need an external JavaScript runtime now for full YouTube support. Sounds like YouTube is making it harder to scrape. People are worried about sandboxing and security with this change, especially with QuickJS being the leading option, but it's a necessary evil to keep the tool working.

LeCun Jumps Ship from Meta

Big news in AI: Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, is leaving to start his own AI company focused on 'world models.' It's a pretty big deal. What's funny is in the comments, people were debating what a "world model" even means, with one person saying humans don't really have one because we just 'exist in the world' like a fish exists in water. Deep stuff for a Wednesday!

The Last Penny Ever

Get this, buddy: the US is minting its last-ever penny today in Philadelphia. Crazy, right? People in the comments were immediately diving into the nightmare of what that means for sales tax, especially with how many different sales tax districts there are in the US. Apparently, it's not as simple as just rounding up or down because of all the varying local taxes.

AI is Eating All the Hard Drives

You know how AI needs tons of data? Well, it's causing a massive hard drive shortage. Enterprise HDDs are on backorder for two years! AI data centers are just gobbling them up. What's wild is people were also talking about the environmental impact, like how these data centers need tons of fresh water for cooling, and some were calling tech sector 'environmentalism' performative now that there are real costs involved.

Waymo Robotaxis on Freeways

Those Waymo robotaxis are really moving! They're now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF, and Phoenix. Apparently, some women even feel safer without a human driver and are willing to pay more for it. One commenter had a funny story about a Waymo suddenly braking for no reason, only to realize later it had spotted a kid on a bike that a human driver might've missed. It seems the biggest challenge for freeways is maneuvering at speed, unlike city streets where you can just stop if things get weird.

OpenAI vs. NYT Privacy Battle

And finally, that whole drama with the New York Times suing OpenAI? OpenAI is now saying the NYT is invading user privacy by trying to get chat logs for their lawsuit. It's a messy fight over data rights and who's liable for copyright infringement. People were debating whether OpenAI actually needs to store these logs, and some were saying ChatGPT is just a glorified 'CRUD app' – create, read, update, delete – so why would it be different?

Anyway, that's the gist of it for today. Talk soon!