Guess what? Just skimming through Hacker News from Saturday, and there's some wild stuff. Lemme hit you with the highlights:

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

First up, big news from Europe. It looks like the EU is really pushing for its companies to stop using US cloud services and switch to local, EU-native providers. The article from The Register said it's about making them ditch "Uncle Sam's clouds."

Some people in the comments were saying this is a pain for startups because of all the extra rules, but others pointed out that European options like Scaleway and OVH are actually cheaper than the big US ones once you're past the free trial stuff. One comment even brought up some heavy political stuff about Trump and Putin, which was a bit out of left field for a cloud discussion!

Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

Then there's this kinda scary privacy thing. Apparently, mobile carriers can actually get your exact GPS location. The article on an.dywa.ng was pretty clear about it.

The comments went deep into whether you can even live without a smartphone anymore. Some folks were talking about how they still manage everything from a desktop and print maps, and how you can do most 2FA without a phone. But others were like, "Seriously? No 'where are you?' texts or looking up stuff nearby? That sounds like a hassle!"

Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

And get this, Finland is thinking about doing an Australia-style ban on social media. The YLE article mentioned it. This is a pretty big deal.

A lot of comments were talking about how social media content isn't "organic" anymore, with state-level resources pushing propaganda. Someone even said these platforms are like a drug, just trying to keep you hooked. People were wishing for features to fight addiction, like YouTube having "no shorts" or "no recommendations."

Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

On the tech side, this dude built something pretty cool. He trained a 9 million parameter speech model to help him fix his Mandarin tones, which is apparently a super tricky part of the language. Check out his blog post here.

What's wild is that one commenter, who usually HATES AI projects, said this was the first "legitimate" one they'd seen in a long time. There was also some debate in the comments about what makes a language "hard" and whether kids really struggle with tones.

The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice

Big AI drama! A massive $100 billion deal between OpenAI and Nvidia is reportedly on ice, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's a huge chunk of change.

The comments were full of people debating the future of LLMs. Some think there's only so much data in the world, so models can't get *that* much better. Others argued that all the new input data and conversations should lead to better next-gen models. It sounds like there's a lot of uncertainty about where the AI boom is headed.

YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

Also, YouTube is being YouTube again. They're apparently blocking background video playback on browsers like Brave and even Samsung Internet. The PiunikaWeb article suggests they're really cracking down.

People in the comments were talking about how these "large information pipelines" are almost like public utilities now. Many are still using Firefox and uBlock Origin to get around these restrictions, which seems to be the ongoing cat-and-mouse game.

US reportedly investigate claims that Meta can read encrypted WhatsApp messages

Oh, and guess who's being looked at for privacy again? Meta with WhatsApp. The Guardian reported that US authorities are investigating claims that Meta can actually read encrypted WhatsApp messages. Yikes.

Naturally, the comments were full of people asking why anyone still uses WhatsApp when Signal exists. There's a lot of speculation about Meta's history with privacy and whether governments have compelled them to put in backdoors. Pretty concerning stuff if it turns out to be true.

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