Hey buddy, long time no talk! Just wanted to quickly fill you in on some of the cool stuff from Hacker News from Friday.

First up, remember how Valve was kinda vague about why they delisted some adult games? Turns out, credit card companies pressured them! Yeah, like Visa and Mastercard basically told them to clean up their act or lose payment processing. One comment said it's wild how payment companies are basically becoming content police, which is kinda messed up when you think about it. You can check out the full story here.

Then there's this super sci-fi sounding thing about Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). Imagine being able to do complicated math on data, like in the cloud, but the data stays totally encrypted the whole time. You never have to decrypt it! People are saying this could be the start of a truly private internet, which sounds awesome. Read more about it here.

On the dev side, there was a good chat about "Not Invented Here" syndrome. The article argued that sometimes, building something yourself, even if it's already out there, is actually cheaper than using a janky external dependency. Basically, if a dependency sucks, it might be less headache to just roll your own. Someone in the comments even joked about using AI to write your own tools to avoid dependencies! The discussion is here.

Okay, this one's a bit worrying: the NYPD apparently bypassed their own facial recognition ban to ID a pro-Palestinian student protestor. They used Clearview AI, which is pretty controversial. People in the comments were pointing out how risky this tech is, leading to false arrests and messing up lives. Super concerning stuff. The full article is here.

And speaking of big picture, it looks like AI spending is so massive it's actually messing with economic stats! All the money companies are pouring into AI infrastructure is making the economy look different on paper. One person brought up how this is different from, say, railroads, which distributed wealth, while AI might just concentrate capital with the big players. You can read the economics breakdown here.

Here's a more positive one: a 2016 study got attention again showing that psilocybin (magic mushrooms) really helped cancer patients with depression and anxiety. What was wild in the comments was someone bringing up an old quote from Nixon's advisor, basically admitting they criminalized drugs to target specific communities. Super dark history there, but cool to see the science progressing. The study is linked here.

And finally, another privacy one: