Man, Wednesday on Hacker News was pretty wild. I gotta tell you about a few things that popped up, some of it pretty interesting, some kinda scary.

Claude Code Getting Dumber?

First up, big buzz around Claude, the AI, maybe getting dumber at coding. People are noticing its output isn't as good. What's funny is one commenter said they asked Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.6 to look at a GitHub issue, and both AIs actually sided with the *users*, not the original authors! Also, there's this weird debate in the comments about whether using "double hyphens" is an old human thing or if AIs just started doing it and now everyone thinks it's an AI tell. Super weird.

Notepad Vulnerability – Yikes!

Then there's this crazy remote code execution bug in Windows Notepad. Yeah, good old Notepad! Apparently, you can open a file and it could run bad code. Everyone in the comments is like, "Notepad is supposed to be *just* a text editor, it shouldn't be parsing anything fancy!" Kinda makes you wonder what's even safe anymore.

Age Verification Bypass for Discord/Twitch/Snapchat

Someone figured out a way to bypass age verification on Discord, Twitch, and Snapchat. The most interesting comment on this was a theory that Discord might actually be *softening* its age verification on purpose to look good to regulators, but still leave loopholes for tech-savvy people. Sounds a bit cynical, but who knows, right? There was also talk about digital identity wallets and how some countries, like Spain, already have X.509 certs in their ID cards for this kind of thing.

Amazon Ring Ad Backlash

Remember those Ring cameras? There was a story about an Amazon Ring ad for finding a lost dog that caused a huge backlash. People were freaking out because it made them think about mass surveillance. One commenter brought up how a movie director once said their work was satire about fascism, which really highlights how tone-deaf this Ring ad might have been. Another person mentioned a real-life kidnapping where a Nest doorbell was useless because the owner didn't pay for cloud storage. Kinda puts things in perspective.

Fluorite Game Engine with Flutter

On the dev side, there's a new console-grade game engine called Fluorite that's fully integrated with Flutter. Sounds pretty cool for game developers! The comments had a bit of a side discussion about LLMs for coding, with some saying they're great for "scaffolding" new code but can be a nightmare when it comes to maintaining it or debugging. Good food for thought if you're into that stuff.

Chrome Extensions Spying on You

This one's a bit scary: a report found hundreds of Chrome extensions are apparently spying on users' browsing data. People were pretty annoyed, saying Google doesn't really audit these extensions, so you're basically trusting anonymous developers with your data. One commenter compared it to buying a taxi service from an "Honest Guy" only for him to secretly sell it to a "Bad Guy" who then rips you off. Sounds about right.

El Paso Airport Shut Down by Drone?

And finally, this is wild: the El Paso airport was shut down for ten days because of a "drone incursion." But here's the kicker from the comments: an AP article mentioned that the Pentagon actually allowed US Customs and Border Protection to use an "unmanned aircraft system" there. So it might not have been some random rogue drone, but an *official* one! That's a pretty big twist if true. Someone else joked about "evil terrorist party balloons" causing mayhem. Gotta laugh to keep from crying, I guess.

Anyway, that's the quick download. Talk soon!