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Saturday, May 16, 2026

Hey buddy, Long time no talk! Just wanted to quickly tell you about some wild stuff I saw on Hacker News from yesterday, Saturday. Grab a coffee, this is kinda nuts.

CSS Frameworks and the Basics

First off, there was this big article about someone moving away from Tailwind and trying to really learn CSS structure. You know how everyone's all about frameworks these days, but this guy was like, 'Nah, I gotta understand the basics.' One comment even compared it to how people used to just know jQuery but not actual JavaScript. Pretty interesting take on really knowing your stuff versus just using tools.

Check it out: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Package Manager Security Shenanigans

Then there was this super sarcastic article titled, 'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens. Clearly a jab at NPM or something similar, about how often malicious stuff sneaks into packages. People in the comments were talking about how companies should maybe block the public registry and use their own, stricter proxy. Kinda makes you think about how much trust we put in these things, huh?

Here's the link: 'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens

AI Breaks Hacking Competitions

And get this, AI is apparently so good now that it's broken the whole 'Capture The Flag' hacking competition scene. The article was called 'Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format'. Basically, AIs can just solve the challenges too easily. Someone in the comments said AIs can explain things to you, but you still can't actually do it yourself, which is kinda true. Another one said it's like how chess had to adapt to engines.

Read about it here: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

AI Generating Video

Speaking of AI, there's this new open-source 'world model' called SANA-WM, a 2.6 billion parameter model that can generate 1-minute 720p video. Like, full-on video generation from just a model. Imagine the possibilities there! People were discussing how interacting with these visual models might be totally different from just chatting with text-based LLMs.

The details: SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video

Wild Medical News: Fecal Transplants for Autism

Okay, this next one is wild, totally out of left field. There was an article talking about 'Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials.' Yeah, you heard that right. It's from 2019, but it was trending again. Super controversial, as you can imagine. Comments were really divided, with some people bringing up skepticism and others comparing it to ethically dubious therapies like ABA. Definitely a head-scratcher.

If you dare: Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)

Accelerando: Still Relevant!

Also saw a link to 'Accelerando' by Charles Stross, that old sci-fi novel from 2005. It's all about how the world speeds up with advanced AI. People were saying it hits way differently now, given all the AI stuff happening. Like, it was fiction, but now it feels a bit too real.

The classic: Accelerando (2005)

The Great Smartphone Duopoly Escape

Last one for now: a piece titled 'Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone.' It's about how hard it is to escape the duopoly and how much power we've given them. Someone in the comments mentioned their bank in France won't let them 2FA without a Google/Apple phone, and another pointed out that our 'representatives' ceded this power, not us directly. Makes you think about digital freedom, eh?

The struggle is real: Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

Anyway, that's the quick rundown! Just thought you'd find some of that interesting. Gotta run, talk soon!

All Stories from Today

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS (jvns.ca)

'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens (kevinpatel.xyz)

Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format (kabir.au)

Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust (crates.io)

SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video (nvlabs.github.io)

HTML Lists (blog.frankmtaylor.com)

Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019) (refractor.io)

Accelerando (2005) (www.antipope.org)

We've made the world too complicated (user8.bearblog.dev)

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone (www.theregister.com)

DeepSeek-V4-Flash means LLM steering is interesting again (www.seangoedecke.com)

δ-mem: Efficient Online Memory for Large Language Models (arxiv.org)

OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens (openai.com)

US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI (www.bloomberg.com)

A nicer voltmeter clock (lcamtuf.substack.com)

OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days (twitter.com)

Technofascism (third-bit.com)

Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server (www.blocksandfiles.com)

Halt and Catch Fire (unstack.io)

Fisker went bankrupt and owners built an open source car company from the ashes (electrek.co)

PART Telescopes – Bringing radio astronomy within reach of rural schools (mag.openrockets.com)

Greek Alphabet Cards (labs.randomquark.com)

Futhark by example (2020) (futhark-lang.org)

NYT and vaping: How to lie by saying only true things (2022) (gwern.net)

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Forgot about the processors (www.theregister.com)

Japan’s robot wolf sells out as record bear attacks drive demand (www.independent.co.uk)

A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there (sfstandard.com)

My Favorite Bugs: Invalid Surrogate Pairs (george.mand.is)

Show HN: Epiq – Distributed Git based issue tracker TUI (ljtn.github.io)

MCP Hello Page (www.hybridlogic.co.uk)