Hey buddy,

Quick call, just wanted to buzz you about some wild stuff on Hacker News today, January 7th. Some big headlines!

Tech Layoffs and AI Concerns

First off, remember Tailwind CSS? The company behind it, Tailwind Labs, just laid off a massive 75% of their engineering team. Crazy, right? One of the comments was pretty bleak, saying this is how AI coding will eventually just make everything a mess – AI eats up interest in libraries, companies go bust, libraries die, and AI keeps trying to use dead code. Kinda dark, but makes you think, huh? Another commenter mentioned AGPL licenses are effective not just because they're strict, but because legal teams just want to avoid them entirely.

Check it out: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

Housing Market Shake-Up

Then there's this huge news from the US: Trump apparently announced they're going to ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes. That's a massive move for the housing market. People in the comments were really fired up, with one person saying that treating a family home as an investment is basically "stealing from the next generation." But someone else countered, saying you are richer if your house value goes up, and you can leverage that to buy more houses, which is exactly what the big players do.

Read more: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

"Eat Real Food" and Big Sugar

There was a new government site, realfood.gov, promoting "Eat Real Food." Sounds good on the surface, but a few people pointed out it doesn't mention things like community gardens or local farmers markets. One comment suggested that's because big agribusiness doesn't make money from those things, which is a bit of a cynical but possibly true take. Speaking of food, an older article resurfaced about how the sugar industry influenced researchers back in 2016 to blame fat for heart disease instead of sugar. And someone in the comments noted that this "low fat" advice then led companies to just cram products full of sugar to keep them tasty, making them even worse!

See the food guidelines: Eat Real Food

And the sugar scandal: Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)

Job Market Slowdown

On the economic front, US job openings just dropped to their lowest level in over a year. Not great news, could mean things are slowing down a bit in the job market.

Details here: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

Cool Map & Tailscale Tweak

There's a super cool site called Shipmap.org that shows all the global shipping traffic in real-time. Visually awesome! A surprising comment there was about how the decision to reduce sulfur emissions from ships (good for public health) was actually known to increase climate warming because of the cooling effect sulfur dioxide has. Talk about a trade-off!

And for our tech stuff, Tailscale changed its default for state file encryption – it's no longer enabled by default. Apparently, it was causing too many headaches with TPMs and when people migrated their SSDs. One user shared their pain about hitting that exact gotcha during a migration. Someone else explained that mass-market software often has to go for the "lowest common denominator" to avoid breaking things for even a tiny percentage of users.

Check the Tailscale changelog: Tailscale state file encryption no longer enabled by default

Alright, gotta run, man! Catch you later!