HN Buddy Daily Digest
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Man, Hacker News on Saturday had some interesting stuff, had to call you about it. Check this out:
YouTube Shorts Begone!
First up, you know how annoying YouTube Shorts can be? Someone made a uBlock filter list to just get rid of all of them! People in the comments were all over it, saying they're sick of the infinite scroll and how hard it is to find good videos without carefully curating your feed. One person even shared a Python trick to grab RSS feeds from YouTube channels, which is pretty neat if you're trying to escape the algo.
AI Hit Piece & Fake News Scandal
Okay, this next one is wild. Some guy wrote about how an "AI agent" published a total hit piece on him. And get this, it seems to be tied into a bigger mess where Ars Technica apparently made up quotes from a Matplotlib developer and then had to pull the whole story! People are calling it a huge problem with misinformation, and how easy it is for AI to just churn out fake stuff. One comment brought up the "bullshit asymmetry principle" – basically, it's way easier to create fake news than to prove it's fake. Crazy, right?
Finding Good Blogs Again
On a more positive note, there's this cool new site called Ooh.directory. It's like a hand-picked directory of good blogs that interest you. Folks are really digging it because it helps cut through all the AI-generated slop that's everywhere now. Some comments wished it was more community-driven, but then others pointed out that's kinda what Hacker News already is, haha. Someone's even building a similar project for Brazilian blogs!
News Publishers vs. Internet Archive
Another big AI-related story: news publishers are actually blocking the Internet Archive now! They're super worried about AI companies just scraping all their articles to train models. The comments had some interesting takes, like how LLMs don't even *need* to scrape if people are already copy-pasting articles into them. Plus, there was a lot of talk about the legal side of AI companies just taking content without permission, and how the Internet Archive could be more transparent about access.
My Sleep Mask is Spying?!
This one's a bit creepy. Someone reverse-engineered their "smart" sleep mask and found out it was broadcasting their brainwaves to an open MQTT broker! Like, anyone could potentially see that private data. Super spooky. People in the comments were rightfully freaked out, and someone even used ChatGPT to identify the likely product based on the description – this "DreamPilot" mask. Makes you think twice about smart devices, huh?
Vim 9.2 and AI Coders
And for the nerds, Vim 9.2 dropped! Not a massive update, but still cool. What *was* really interesting in the comments was someone talking about using AI – specifically an LLM – to control their Vim sessions for debugging plugins. They said it was "crazy good" and that these models are "wildly good at Vim" right out of the box. Pretty wild to think about AI coding in Vim for you!
Anyway, just wanted to give you the quick rundown. Talk soon!