Hey buddy,

Guess what I was just scrolling through? Hacker News stuff from yesterday, like Friday. Saw some pretty wild things...

First off, there's this thing called LegoGPT. It's basically trying to use AI to help you design Lego builds that actually work and don't just fall over. Like, physically stable ones. People in the comments were joking about sorting two metric tons of Lego (someone linked to a funny old story about that), and also wondering if the folks who made it are even allowed to use the 'LEGO' name since it's not from the company itself. Someone else was questioning if it *really* makes sure it's physically stable or just follows the rules of the pieces.

Then there was this crazy science one: apparently, at CERN, their ALICE experiment detected the conversion of lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider! Real alchemy stuff, kind of. The main takeaway from the comments was that while cool, doing this doesn't make gold valuable, it makes gold as cheap as lead! Someone compared it to how aluminum used to be super rare and expensive. Another person who actually worked with gold deposition for tech stuff talked about how little gold is needed for some things anyway.

Big news in US science funding too – the NSF (National Science Foundation) is facing a huge shake-up. They're getting rid of all their old divisions, like 37 of them. The comments on this one were kinda intense, lots of debate about whether this is a good idea or not. People were arguing about government funding versus private investment, whether it's shifting control away from bureaucracy, and if the US military budget plays into it somehow. Pretty heavy discussion.

Saw a cool open-source project called Sofie. It's a web system to help automate live TV news production. People who work in TV production jumped in and said it looks awesome, especially for smaller studios. They mentioned it controls all the different parts of a live show – video mixers, audio, graphics, everything. Someone pointed out that even with great free software like this, the actual hardware and getting signals into the system is often the main challenge.

Looks like WebAssembly, or WASM, is getting a 2.0 version too. People were talking about how a huge win for WASM was just getting it adopted by all the browsers early on, especially by Apple. There was a little argument about whether the 'W' in WASM means it's *only* for the web, but apparently, the people who made it say it was always meant to be more general. Someone also mentioned that a security feature they were hoping for, called "Constant Time," just got paused, which is a bit of a bummer.

Someone did a teardown of the Starlink user terminal (that dish thingy). The comments got really into whether you're allowed to use your *own* modem or router with Starlink, especially with laws in places like the EU about net neutrality and terminal equipment. They were debating where the company's network ends and yours begins legally and technically. Someone gave a good warning not to just swap out the firmware on these things unless you have a really solid reason.

And finally, this weird one: a software engineer for the Doge (Dogecoin) project apparently got their computer infected with malware that steals information. You'd think the comments would be about crypto security or something, right? Nope. The top comments immediately went off the rails into a huge political argument about the war in Ukraine, US foreign policy, and even brought up Trump and Biden. Seriously, barely anything about the actual story! Wild how quickly a thread can pivot.

Anyway, that's the gist of the interesting stuff I skimmed. Talk later!