Long time no talk! Just saw some wild stuff on Hacker News today, figured I'd give you the quick rundown.

Kindle DRM Bypass

First up, someone actually figured out how to bypass Amazon's Kindle web DRM! Like, they got around the copy protection on Kindle books you read in your browser. People in the comments were all over whether it's legal under DMCA, but what's cool is some folks already have scripts out there, like one called kindle2pdf, that basically do the same thing. Wild, right?

TurboTax's Free Filing Fight

Then there's this old but gold ProPublica article from 2019 that popped up again about TurboTax fighting for 20 years to stop people from filing taxes for free. Seriously, they've been lobbying hard. The comments were pretty heated, with people comparing our tax system to places like Canada where it's way simpler, or even suggesting the IRS should just pre-fill our returns. Makes you think.

Claude AI Skills

On the AI front, Anthropic's new 'Claude Skills' were trending. Sounds like they're making their AI, Claude, way better at specific tasks. What I found interesting in the comments was this talk about how LLMs still struggle with super complex or new things. Someone also brought up "vibe coding" – basically using AI to build apps – and whether a non-programmer could actually pull off a full app with it. Food for thought there.

Windows 10 Retirement and Surveillance

Big privacy one: a story about Windows 10 retiring and Microsoft's move towards a 'surveillance state'. The article is basically saying Microsoft is pushing people to newer Windows versions that collect more data. Predictably, the comments were full of people talking about jumping ship to Linux distros like Debian or Zorin to get away from it all.

Journalists Exit Pentagon

And get this, journalists are ditching the Pentagon! They're turning in their access badges because of new rules that they say limit what they can report. The comments were all about freedom of the press and concerns over censorship. Pretty intense stuff.

Gemini 3.0 Spotted

Oh, and Google's Gemini 3.0 was apparently spotted in the wild, likely A/B testing. Someone in the comments actually tried it and got a surprisingly good, specific answer about a comic character. But then another comment just dropped a bomb, saying "AI coding is in many ways antithetical to great software engineering." Ouch!

Liquibase Open Source Controversy

Lastly, this one's a bit of drama: Liquibase is still calling itself "open source" even though they switched their license. People are not happy about it in the comments, arguing about what "open source" actually means and the whole user freedom versus developer freedom debate. Sounds like a classic open-source licensing kerfuffle.

Anyway, that's the gist! Catch you later, man.