Hey buddy,

Man, you gotta check out Hacker News from Friday. Some interesting stuff popped up. Lemme give you the quick run-down.

Okay, first off, there's this wild story called Ground control to Major Trial (https://virtualize.sh/blog/ground-control-to-major-trial/). It's about some virtual machine company getting stiffed by a big "Rocket Company" that used their stuff for free way past the trial and wouldn't pay up. People in the comments were ripping into the "Rocket Company" for bad ethics, even guessing if it was SpaceX or maybe BlackSky. One guy was like, "This is what capitalism wrought!" and another suggested just sending them a bill and threatening collections. Wild stuff about companies using and abusing free tiers or open source.

Then there was one called Thoughts on thinking (https://dcurt.is/thinking). This one's more philosophical, talking about how maybe AI is changing how we think or making us less creative because we rely on it. The comments had some cool points, like one guy saying he's actually gotten *more* done on old ideas since using AI, kinda the opposite of the article. Another person used the GPS analogy – how we used to navigate ourselves, but now the system tells us what to do. Makes you think.

Good news from space! NASA pulled off another miracle with the old Voyager 1 spacecraft (https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/15/voyager_1_survives_with_thruster_fix/). Remember how it was sending back gibberish? They figured out a way to fix it using some old thrusters they hadn't planned on using this way. It's like a total Hail Mary pass that worked! Comments were talking about how crazy it is that it takes like 46 hours just for a message to go there and back, and how they have to fight for antenna time on Earth. Amazing engineering.

Saw a post from a developer titled After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain (https://albertofortin.com/writing/coding-with-ai). He was basically saying coding with AI assistants wasn't as great as he hoped and he's going back to doing it himself because he spent too much time fixing the AI's mistakes. The comments were a big debate! Some agreed, saying AI hallucinates too much or only helps juniors. Others pushed back, saying it's a great tool if you know how to use it right, and even compared debugging AI output to dealing with other people's code errors. Interesting split there.

Here's a frustrating one for users: BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024) (https://zverok.space/blog/2024-08-08-bmac-snafu.html). Apparently, that platform creators use just stopped working for people in a bunch of places without really telling anyone clearly. Comments were full of people annoyed, talking about how companies do this kind of thing and debating capitalism and platform risk. One comment got super weird talking about "bull sperm or diarrhea" when discussing getting "a cup of something" unspecified. Yeah, comments got weird on that one.

More AI drama, this time about open source stuff: Ollama violating llama.cpp license for over a year (https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185). So, Ollama, that tool for running models locally, is getting called out because people are saying they used a core piece of technology (llama.cpp) but didn't include the required license text in their distribution for a long time. The comments are debating license compliance and whether Ollama has been downplaying how much they rely on llama.cpp. Classic open source license spat.

Finally, a cool historical note: Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew with Duct Tape, Dies at 95 (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/space/ed-smylie-dead.html). This is the guy who led the team that figured out how to use materials they had on the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft – including duct tape – to fix the air filter situation and save the crew. A true legend. Comments were remembering the story and even got into a debate about whether it's "duct tape" or "duck tape" (apparently it was originally "duck" because of the cloth). Cool little history rabbit hole.

Anyway, that's the main stuff I saw. Talk later!