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Hey, do you ever think about medieval tech news? Like a town crier talking about advancements in trebuchets? Instead of liking the video they throw tomatoes and stuff. Whether it's good or bad, you know everything so Valve announced three new hardware products today and wait, 3? 3. Amongst those announcements were a new Steam controller and Steam Machine. The controller is essentially the controls from the Steam Deck with no screen but but with some improvements like magnetic joysticks and a controller puck, a wireless transmitter that provides a fast stable connection to the controller and doubles as a magnetic charging station. Which IMO is a much better innovation than the original steam controller from 2015 which made its giant trackpads its whole personality. As for the new Steam Machine, it's a little cube shaped Steam OS PC powered by a 6 core 30 watt AMD Zen 4 CPU and an Rdna 3 GPU which is is apparently powerful enough despite being last gen to play games at 4K60. When AMD's FSR features are enabled it will come in 512 gig and 2 terabyte variants. And thankfully Valve has given it interchangeable face plates and a programmable LED light strip to help it look a little bit less like the Xbox Series X had a baby with a Nintendo GameCube. Not to say that's a a bad thing at all. I mean folks are already calling this new Steam Machine the Gabe Cube, which this guy's custom Steam Deck boot animation was already prepared for three years ago. So come up with something else I don't know. But His Holiness Lord GabeN's work was not yet finished for he walked across the water from his yacht to also reveal the long rumored and long leaked Steam Frame VR headset. It's got a resolution of 2160 by 2160 per eye, an FOV of up to 110 degrees, and is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. Valve says the headset is a streaming first experience with a 6 GHz wireless adapter included in the box. Although wireless VR using 6 GHz adapters has been the high end home VR standard for a while now, not many if any VR headsets have described themselves that way yet. Valve also reiterates a couple times that Steam Frame is a PC and runs SteamOS, so it can play a growing number of games all by itself, which could eventually grow even more if developers grab the developer kit. Possibilities are endless. The Steam Frame comes with a couple new controllers which can be tracked entirely by the frame's inside out tracking system Quest style so no need for the Valve Index's external tracking stations. Unfortunately, that also makes Steam's older VR controllers obsolete. It won't work with this one. LTT put up a video so you can hear Linus thoughts if you want, although one thing that wasn't covered in that video or in Valve's announcements is a price or release date for the new hardware. We've only got a vague promise of shipping in early 2026. Uncertainty, however, is nothing new for Valve diehards. There also wasn't any mention of Half Life 3, but that hasn't stopped the folks on the subreddit from losing their minds about once again Val being left in limbo. Please don't hurt us Gaben like buying a lottery ticket on your birthday, the hope is at an all time high. Germany has ruled that OpenAI violated copyright law by training ChatGPT on the lyrics of popular songs and reproducing those lyrics in response to user prompts. Now that might not seem very infringy, but the music industry makes a big deal about who is allowed to officially distribute music lyrics. The court decided that even short Excerpts generated by ChatGPT count as infringement, ordering the company to pay an undisclosed amount in damages to German artists. Now this music related AI ruling comes just as AI generated music is horrifically becoming way more popular. A fake AI country band called Breaking Rust just hit number one on Billboard's digital song sales chart with its new song Small Town Dreams. More like Breaking Wind cause it's a digital fart. Yee haw. Small Town Dreams. What does AI know about small towns? It lives in a data center surrounded by concrete and the soothing roar of jet turbines. Nowadays, however, it's not the end of real music just yet. Unlike the more well known Billboard Hot 100, the company's digital song sales chart only counts digital downloads, not radio plays, keeping our grandparents ears just a little bit safer after a Deezer survey found that 97% of listeners couldn't tell AI generated songs from human ones. So I guess we all deserve the slop. But human ears are one thing not possessed by the robots running the show. At our sponsor dBrand, they make custom skins, cases and screen protectors for a ton of popular devices that look super super cool and protect you from looking like an idiot when you drop and scratch your devices because you didn't have a dbrand skin or screen protector on it. Oh, I'm sorry, you might not be an idiot, but if you are, DBRAND actually made a screen protector just for you. They care about you like your family, the kind of family that is scared of intimacy, so they signal their love by insulting each other every chance they get. You know, it's not dysfunctional, it's just different. Okay, like getting 50% off the entire dbrand site and getting a free custom deck of playing cards with every order. That's not normal. Check' em out now. To be clear, the quick bits were around during the medieval ages, but all they'll say about it is that they missed the mutton. I keep asking Hackers are reviving Google's discontinued Nest thermostats with an open source project called no Longer Evil. The custom firmware reroutes traffic to a reverse engineered server, tricking the devices into thinking Google turned them back on. Meanwhile, Google's fighting a Chinese phishing ring called Lighthouse, suing the group for its phishing as a service campaigns that may have compromised up to 115 million credit cards in the US alone with just one operation. So for once, Google's the good guy and so are the thermostat hackers for fixing the bad guy thing that Google did. Okay, Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davaluri said on Twitter this week that Windows is evolving into an agentic OS that will use AI to proactively act on your behalf. The Internet, unsurprisingly, pushed back with a collective please don't. The post got absolutely cooked in the comments, with some people saying that nobody wants this, while others took the time to beg for Microsoft to just bring back Windows 7 wasting keystrokes. I mean, let's be so yeah, Microsoft wants Windows to predict your questions before you ask, but will it be able to predict everyone switching to Linux instead? Gotcha. Sony just announced a cheaper Japanese language only PS5 exclusive to Japan. It's the first time they've region locked a console since segmenting different models of the PS2 way back in 2000. Now, like Nintendo's Japan only Switch 2 model, this special PS5 is an attempt by Sony to make the console more affordable domestically. Meanwhile, Sony also revealed a new 27 inch PlayStation branded gaming monitor boasting a truly unremarkable 1440p panel at 240Hz that somehow drops down to 120Hz if you plug it into a PlayStation. But it does have a new snazzy charging hook for your controller. At least something's getting plugged in, because it sure isn't that your imported PS5 because you can't get it here. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology just unveiled research showing proposed needle injectable chips that zip through your veins and park themselves in your brain. No craniotomy required. These wafer thin devices hitch a ride on immune cells, sneak past the blood brain barrier. Okay. And deliver targeted electrical therapy to stubborn conditions like Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and even brain tumors. I mean, hey, Neo used needles too, didn't he? When can we get the Kung Fu update? That's what this is for. And a humanoid robot built in Russia made its stage debut earlier this week, briefly stumbling like an inept drunkard before crashing onto the stage, scattering its parts on the floor. It was actually sad to watch. It wasn't a great introduction to the rubber faced robot, but at least AI Dolls. AI Dolls. Okay. Promotional images show the bot got some smooches. The clankers are stealing our potential partners now. Honestly. Predictable. A robotics company that does seem to be doing well is China's Ubtech, or Ubtech, who announced over $112 million in orders this year for its Walker S2 humanoid robot model. But they announced it with a terrifying Star wars esque droid army video. Begun the Clone wars have. And China apparently thinks that's totally fine, I guess. And ended. This tech news episode has come back on Friday for more. All this talk of armies in the medieval ages has me wanting to play, wanting to watch Excalibur and play Age of Empires. So I'm out of here to absolutely do those two things.