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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Hey buddy, Man, busy day on Hacker News, but some wild stuff popped up. Lemme give you the quick rundown.

Browser Shenanigans and Firefox Fans

First off, there was this post titled "How to Firefox" that got a ton of traction. It's basically a guide to making Firefox awesome, you know, getting the most out of it. What was interesting in the comments was people talking about how Google apparently tries to mess with non-Chrome browsers and ad-blockers on YouTube. Like, "accidentally on purpose" kind of stuff. Makes you wonder, right?

US Bails on UNESCO

Big news, the "United States withdrew from UNESCO." Remember when they pulled out before? Yeah, they're doing it again. The comments section was, as you can imagine, a total dumpster fire of political debate, especially around the reasons why. Lots of back and forth on international aid and geopolitics.

Rest in Peace, Prince of Darkness

Okay, this one's a sad one: "Ozzy Osbourne has died." No surprise given his health, but still, a legend gone. People in the comments were sharing their favorite Black Sabbath and solo Ozzy tracks. Someone even brought up that hilarious clip of him trying to make breakfast on reality TV, which apparently kicked off his "charming, bumbling" era. And yeah, the pigeon/bat biting came up too, of course.

AI's Weird Hallucination Habit

This was wild: "Complete silence is always hallucinated as 'ترجمة نانسي قنقر' in Arabic" by OpenAI's Whisper AI. So, apparently, if you feed the AI complete silence, it just makes up this specific Arabic phrase. People were talking about how AI models can "overfit" and just start making stuff up, which is pretty bizarre. Goes to show you can't always trust these things, even when they're supposed to be listening.

New AI Coder and Dev Tool Talk

Speaking of AI, there's a new one called "Qwen3-Coder: Agentic coding in the world." It's an AI model designed for coding. The cool part is people are getting stoked about smaller versions of these models that you can run on your own machine. But one comment pointed out that software engineers actually spend way less time coding than you'd think – more time in meetings and learning processes. So, how much will AI coding *really* speed things up?

And for devs, there was a post about "Jujutsu for busy devs," which is like a new way to handle Git. People who've tried it are raving that it makes things like 'git stash' and 'rebase' way simpler and more intuitive. Sounds like it could be a game-changer for some folks who hate wrestling with Git.

Volvo Woes and Software Bloat

Finally, this one caught my eye: "Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience." This guy had a terrible time with his new electric Volvo, saying it's super buggy and unsafe because of all the software. The comments were full of people agreeing, complaining that modern cars have way too much software and rely too heavily on touchscreens for basic stuff. Makes you miss simple buttons, right?

Anyway, that's the gist! Gotta run, talk later!

All Stories from Today

How to Firefox (kau.sh)

The United States withdraws from UNESCO (www.state.gov)

Ozzy Osbourne has died (www.bbc.co.uk)

Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic (github.com)

Qwen3-Coder: Agentic coding in the world (qwenlm.github.io)

Jujutsu for busy devs (maddie.wtf)

Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience (www.myvolvoex90.com)

TODOs aren't for doing (sophiebits.com)

Facts don't change minds, structure does (vasily.cc)

More than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work (abc.decontextualize.com)

Swift-erlang-actor-system (forums.swift.org)

Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting (maalvika.substack.com)

Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning (research.google)

AI comes up with bizarre physics experiments, but they work (www.quantamagazine.org)

We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries (plane.so)

Font Comparison: Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono vs. JetBrains Mono and Fira Code (www.anthes.is)

DaisyUI: Tailwind CSS Components (daisyui.com)

Killing the Mauna Loa observatory over irrefutable evidence of increasing CO2 (www.theregister.com)

The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble (www.wheresyoured.at)

I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files (anuraag2601.github.io)

Replit's CEO apologizes after its AI agent wiped a company's code base (www.businessinsider.com)

Yt-transcriber – Give a YouTube URL and get a transcription (github.com)

Algorithms for Modern Processor Architectures (lemire.github.io)

OSS Rebuild: open-source, rebuilt to last (security.googleblog.com)

Subliminal learning: Models transmit behaviors via hidden signals in data (alignment.anthropic.com)

Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers (www.nytimes.com)

So you think you've awoken ChatGPT (www.lesswrong.com)

Blip: Peer-to-peer massive file sharing (blip.net)

CBA hiring Indian ICT workers after firing Australians (ia.acs.org.au)

We have made the decision to not continue paying for BBB accreditation (mycherrytree.com)