Hey buddy,

Man, you gotta check out what was popping on Hacker News yesterday, June 10th. Some pretty wild stuff.

New AI from Mistral

First up, Mistral AI dropped this new thing called Magistral. They're calling it their first "reasoning model." Sounds fancy, right? People were saying it seems to be better at filtering out some of the weird, biased stuff you see from other models. One guy in the comments even said it was way faster than OpenAI's model for generating JSON, which is pretty sweet if you're building stuff with AI.

Meta's Huge Tracking Problem

Okay, get this. There was a deep dive into something called "localhost tracking" that Meta (you know, Facebook/Instagram) might be doing. The article says it could cost them a massive €32 billion fine in Europe! People were talking about how this hits them under like, GDPR, DSA, DMA... all those big European rules. Someone pointed out that maybe you're only safe if you use their sites in a browser *without* the app installed. Sketchy stuff.

Super Cheap Robot Arm

This one's cool – a Show HN about a robot arm that costs only $219 and can learn new skills. It's from a YC startup called Vassar Robotics. The creator posted in the comments that all 120 units they had were already sold out! People were asking how it learns, and someone explained you basically show it what to do with a "leader arm," which makes it easier for the robot to copy.

OpenAI Slashes Prices

Speaking of AI, OpenAI dropped the price of their "o3" model by 80%. That's a huge cut! The comments were buzzing. Some folks think the real game now is just having the insane amount of money needed for the computers to run these things, which is why Google is still a major player. But interestingly, a few people said they'd noticed o3's performance felt a bit worse lately, maybe right before the price drop? And someone brought up how the older GPT4-Turbo had "laziness" problems.

Software We Can Actually Change?

There was a cool article from Ink & Switch about "malleable software" – basically, software that users can actually mess with and change, instead of everything being locked down. They miss the old days where you could tweak things more easily. Someone in the comments brought up old tech like COM/OLE that tried to do similar stuff way back. Another person mentioned how Java's hot-swapping feature lets you change code while it's running, which is similar. But someone else was a bit skeptical, saying most regular people don't even use the customization options we have now.

Denmark Ditching Microsoft

Big news from Europe again: Denmark's Ministry of Digitalization is switching to Linux and LibreOffice. Phasing out Microsoft Office and Windows! This is a big win for open source. Comments were all over the place, debating if LibreOffice is good enough, especially compared to Excel (apparently finance people are super attached to Excel). But a lot of people agreed that getting IT departments to switch away from Microsoft is the real hard part because their whole careers are built on it.

Chatbots Hurting News Sites

Lastly, heard about how chatbots are starting to replace Google search for some people, and it's killing traffic for news publishers. Makes sense, right? If the AI just tells you the answer, you don't click the link. One comment had a wild idea – maybe Google *purposely* made their search results worse over the last few years to push people towards their AI stuff? Another person said they use the AI summaries but *still* click through to the original article because they don't trust the AI content yet. Good point.

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