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Thursday, May 21, 2026

Hey buddy, What's up? Just saw some wild stuff on Hacker News from today. Lemme hit you with the highlights real quick.

Flipper One Needs Help

First off, those Flipper Zero guys are making a bigger version called Flipper One, and they put out a call for ideas. People are going back and forth in the comments about whether it should have a keyboard, be more powerful, or still fit in your pocket. Someone even suggested it could be like a $20 battery-powered camera that can detect animals and send alerts – that's a pretty cool idea!

Project Hail Mary's Star Map

Then there's this super cool interactive 3D map someone built of the star systems from the book "Project Hail Mary". It looks amazing. What's wild is one of the top comments said their first thought was that it was AI-generated because of how it looked, which just shows you where web dev is heading. Also, how crazy it is that we can render tens of thousands of 3D objects on a phone now in real-time!

Check it out here: https://valhovey.github.io/gaia-mary/

AI and Plagiarism Debate

There was a massive discussion about AI and plagiarism, with a post titled "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale". Lots of debate about copyright, fan fiction, and whether "emergence" is a real thing for AI. Basically, people are still trying to figure out if AI is just ripping off existing work or creating something new.

Google's Antigravity IDE Mess

Remember that "Antigravity IDE" from Google? Well, apparently they pulled a bait and switch. It started off open-source, but now people are saying Google changed it, and it's causing all sorts of problems for users, like replicating projects multiple times. Folks in the comments are talking about why copyleft licenses are so important to avoid getting locked in.

More Ads in Google Search

Speaking of Google, they're testing even more new ad formats in Search. Surprise, surprise. People are already fed up, with one comment saying they're using LLM chat clients like ChatGPT just to find actual, relevant results and avoid Google's ads. Someone called it "digital pollution," which I totally get.

The "Slop Grenade" Problem

This one's pretty relatable: "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations". The article talks about these huge, generic blocks of AI text that people are just dumping online, making it impossible to have a real conversation. They call them "slop grenades," which is a perfect term. It's hard to have a back-and-forth when you're hit with a firehose of AI-generated waffle.

The article is here: https://noslopgrenade.com/

Local Video Indexing on a MacBook

And finally, this guy managed to index a whole year of video footage locally on his 2021 MacBook using a pretty big AI model (Gemma4-31B), even with 50GB of swap! That's pretty impressive for local AI. The author jumped in the comments to say it's AI-assisted, not just "slop," and there were some cool tips about using function calling for AI output and how to save money if you're using cloud models.

Check out the details: https://blog.simbastack.com/indexed-a-year-of-video-locally/

Anyway, that's the gist of it. Crazy stuff, right? Talk soon!

All Stories from Today

Flipper One – we need your help (blog.flipper.net)

Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart (valhovey.github.io)

AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale (axelk.ee)

Google's Antigravity bait and switch (www.0xsid.com)

We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot (blog.google)

Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations (noslopgrenade.com)

Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police (prismreports.org)

Indexing a year of video locally on a 2021 MacBook with Gemma4-31B (50GB swap) (blog.simbastack.com)

Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines (blog.changs.co.uk)

Vivaldi 8.0 (vivaldi.com)

Shunning AI is the human choice (www.thehandbasket.co)

Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored (spectrum.ieee.org)

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods (techcrunch.com)

BBEdit 16 (www.barebones.com)

Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps (freenet.org)

News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism (www.niemanlab.org)

Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD (crocidb.com)

Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI (techcrunch.com)

US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds (www.theguardian.com)

A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide (www.wired.com)

Show HN: I Dedicated 4 Years to Mastering Offline Password Cracking (news.ycombinator.com)

Get your passwords out of Bitwarden while you still can (www.osnews.com)

Using Kagi Search with Low Vision (veroniiiica.com)

London Mayor Blocks Palantir (www.theguardian.com)

Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess (www.loopwerk.io)

Haskell Foundation 2026 Update (discourse.haskell.org)

Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK (github.com)

Chewing gum restores dad's taste and smell years after Covid (discover.swns.com)

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics (davidoks.blog)

The IBM-ification of Google? (zeroshot.bearblog.dev)