Valve Rereleases Failed Console Line
Also an AI Pioneer Gets $3.5 Billion for a Feeling

The IT Department Re-Launches the Cube and the Visor

Valve Corporation is attempting to make The Console Thing happen again; this time, it has brought three separate hardware divisions to the meeting, not just one. A decade after the initial Steam Machine failed to launch, Valve is rolling out the second-generation Steam Machine, which is essentially a compact desktop PC aiming for 4K gaming at 60 FPS, alongside a new Steam Controller and the Steam Frame VR headset.

The biggest piece of new paperwork is the Steam Frame; a standalone VR headset that runs SteamOS, uses a mobile Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, and is explicitly described as "streaming-first" with an included 6GHz wireless adapter for PC connectivity. The company is trying very hard to prove that the problem with their previous hardware attempts was not the fundamental concept, but merely the timing. This new wave of hardware is expected to ship in early 2026. Management has also confirmed that the previous headset, the Valve Index, is no longer in production, making the Steam Frame its immediate, all-in-one replacement.

The VP of Research Quit to Build a World Model; Gets Billion-Dollar Check

Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, Doctor Yann LeCun, is finally leaving the organization to launch his own AI startup, which is focused on a thing he calls "world models". World models are the new hot thing, promising to help AI understand physics, memory, and cause, and effect, which is apparently necessary because the large language models (LLMs) currently dominating the entire industry are "fundamentally limited."

The new venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, reportedly secured a pre-launch valuation of $3.5 billion, which means investors wrote a check for a product that does not exist yet because they heard a famous guy say the right buzzwords. Doctor LeCun, a Turing Award winner, plans to establish the headquarters in Paris, because Silicon Valley, in his words, is "completely hypnotised by generative models." Leaving Meta coincides with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg shifting the company’s AI research away from long-term, academic work toward commercial, LLM-based products.

The Download Tool Now Needs a Whole New Server to Run a Script

The popular command-line utility yt-dlp, which downloads videos from almost everywhere, now requires the user to install a full external JavaScript runtime environment just to continue working with YouTube. Due to YouTube’s increasingly complex and hostile JavaScript "challenges," the tool's original internal, custom JS interpreter is simply no longer sufficient to solve the video token requirements.

This is a classic software maintenance nightmare, where a utility that used to be a single, elegant executable now needs to drag along an entire ecosystem, like Deno or Node, just to bypass one corporation’s passive-aggressive attempts at breaking things. The developers recommend Deno because it is a single, portable executable and is sandboxed by default, which is a small comfort to the sysadmins who now need to figure out which container to shove it into.

Briefs

• Physical Storage Apocalypse: AI data centers are causing enterprise Hard Disk Drives to go on two-year backorder, forcing hyperscalers to stockpile cheaper QLC SSDs instead, which is now driving up consumer SSD prices. The relentless, unseen hunger of the algorithm is literally devouring the physical world's storage capacity.
• Newspaper Oversight: A Pakistani newspaper accidentally printed the full, uncensored AI prompt instructions at the top of an article, which suggests a total lack of human Quality Assurance or the intern was told to "just copy paste the entire thing."
• End of Money: The United States Mint in Philadelphia is producing the last penny today, formally ending the era of the one cent coin. A final bureaucratic hurdle has been cleared.