Just catching you up on some of the wild stuff from Hacker News on Monday, December 1, 2025. Grabbed a few interesting bits for ya:

Slop-Evader: Search Before the AI Takeover

First up, there's this new search tool called Slop-Evader. The idea is brilliant: it only returns content created *before* ChatGPT's public release. Basically, it's trying to let you find stuff online that's definitely human-written, before all the AI-generated "slop" started flooding the internet.

People in the comments are really feeling this. One guy said it's nice to know someone put actual effort into writing something, unlike the super fast, possibly unreviewed AI stuff. Another pointed out how everything online now feels like a "glowing review," compared to the more genuine, balanced reviews from the early internet days. It's a real sign of the times, man.

India's Mandatory Cyber Safety App

Big news out of India: the government is making smartphone makers preload a state-owned cyber safety app on all new phones. As you can imagine, this is causing a stir.

The comments are full of concern about privacy and government surveillance. Someone painted a pretty scary picture, saying it could lead to situations where you need a "BankID to login to your phone" and then get reported if they "deem forbidden" any of your pictures. Sounds a bit dystopian, right?

The Mystery of 'xor eax, eax'

For the tech nerds, there was a cool article explaining why assembly code often uses xor eax, eax to zero out a register instead of just mov eax, 0. Apparently, it's faster because of how modern CPUs handle instruction dependencies and register renaming. It breaks the dependency chain, letting the CPU work quicker.

One comment even mentioned hearing "MOV" pronounced "MAUV" in an electronics context, which is a fun little tidbit. Always cool to dive into those low-level optimization tricks.

Google Antigravity's Drive-Wiping Incident

Speaking of things going wrong, someone posted on Reddit that Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of their whole drive. Yikes! That's a nightmare scenario for anyone.

The comments were pretty brutal but also emphasized the classic lesson: backups, backups, backups! One person sarcastically asked how "make backups" could be "too difficult" for someone programming a computer. A harsh but fair reminder, I guess.

Netflix Killing Casting to Modern TVs

This one's a bit of a head-scratcher: Netflix is apparently removing the ability to cast from its mobile app to most modern TVs. Not sure what the reasoning is there, but it sounds like a user-unfriendly move.

People are definitely annoyed. Some comments were joking about just downloading content (if you catch my drift) and plugging a computer directly into the TV, or setting up elaborate home server systems to get around these kinds of restrictions. Just shows how quickly people will find workarounds when companies make things harder.

Losing Confidence in macOS

Finally, there was a post titled "Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence" where the author was complaining about a deterioration in macOS quality, like GPU crashes and other issues.

Some users chimed in, agreeing with the author, sharing their own frustrations about things like PyTorch not playing nice with Mac Studio GPUs. But others said they haven't experienced these problems, or that the official Apple support forums are just a "power-mod clique" that isn't helpful. Always a mixed bag when it comes to Apple complaints!

Anyway, that's the quick rundown. Talk later!