HN Buddy Daily Digest
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
France Dumps Zoom and Teams
First up, get this: France is ditching Zoom and Teams! Apparently, Europe wants to be more independent digitally from the US. The comments were all over it, talking about how deep this dependency on US tech goes. Someone even linked to an article saying the whole EU could basically be shut down by a few US companies. Crazy, right? People were also chatting about open-source alternatives like Jitsi and how France has been trying to do this "digital autonomy" thing for ages, even back to De Gaulle.
New AI Model: Qwen3-Coder-Next
Then there's this new AI model, Qwen3-Coder-Next. Sounds like it's a big deal for coding. But the comments were pretty practical, like one guy saying if you're trying to run these big AI models locally, you gotta remember to pass back the "reasoning tokens" or they just fail. Another person was saying how older models like Llama aren't great for agent stuff because they weren't trained for it. Oh, and someone mentioned the RTX 6000 Blackwell Pro Workstation for running these beasts at home – sounded like a monster GPU with 96GB of VRAM!
Data Centers in Space? Nah.
There was a blog post, "Data centers in space makes no sense", which got a ton of comments. The author basically said it's a dumb idea. People in the comments were debating the cooling costs – the article claimed $0 for space cooling, but everyone was like, "Uh, no way!" They also brought up issues like data latency and how inefficient it would be. Someone did bring up this "SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator" that launched on SpaceX, suggesting maybe there's some new tech that *could* make cooling easier, but it still sounds pretty far-fetched.
What's Up With All Those Equals Signs in Emails?
This one was a fun dive into old tech history: "What's up with all those equals signs anyway?". You know when you get an email and it has `=3D` or `=20` scattered in it? Turns out it's from an old email standard called "quoted-printable" encoding. It was used to handle non-English characters and break up really long lines so old systems wouldn't mess them up. It's a relic from when every byte mattered and people had to be super creative with parsers.
New York Wants to Control Your 3D Printer
This is a wild one: New York is proposing a bill to require "blocking technology" on all 3D printers. Basically, they want printers to prevent you from printing certain things. The comments were full of skepticism. People were comparing it to past failed bans, like how some thought drones would become illegal. Others were saying it'd be super easy to get around, like just flashing custom firmware or that authorities could just "recruit" engineers to slip in "tracking dots" without anyone noticing. Sketchy stuff.
X Offices Raided, Grok Under Investigation
Big news for X (Twitter) and Grok: X offices were raided in France, and the UK is investigating Grok. It sounds like it's related to content responsibility, especially around deepfakes and illegal material. The comments were debating whether platforms should be responsible for user-generated content. Some were arguing that safe harbor provisions protect X, but if Grok (an LLM owned by X) *generates* illegal material based on user prompts, then X might be directly responsible. It's a messy legal area.
Xcode 26.3 Gets AI Coding Agents
And finally, for the dev crowd: Apple's Xcode 26.3 now lets developers use coding agents right in the IDE. So, AI helpers built right into Xcode. The comments were pretty mixed. A lot of people were complaining about Xcode's existing issues, like bad autocomplete or a terrible terminal. Some were skeptical about how useful these AI agents would be for complex code, but others pointed out that if the AI can access the IDE's internal tools and diagnostics, like some other new tools are doing, it could actually be pretty powerful.
Alright, that's the gist of it, man. Talk soon!