[Standing in front of a bathroom mirror, staring at the words “FUCK YOU” scrawled across it in dry-erase marker]
Yeah, fuck you, too. Fuck me? Fuck you. Fuck you and this whole front page.
Fuck Anthropic banning subscription auth for third-party use. They sell you the brain, then tell you exactly which skull you’re allowed to put it in. Five hundred comments of wrapper startup founders watching their Series A evaporate in real time like dew on a Cupertino sidewalk.
Fuck Ladybird dropping Swift. They courted the language like a summer fling, opened a GitHub issue, wrote the RFC, talked about memory safety at parties — then closed it with a one-liner like a breakup text. “We are no longer pursuing Swift adoption.” Cold. Two hundred comments and not one of them is from Swift.
Fuck Minecraft switching from OpenGL to Vulkan. A game made of cubes — literal cubes — needs a next-gen graphics API. Your kid’s redstone contraption now requires a Vulkan-capable GPU and a driver update. The blocks haven’t changed since 2011 but the rendering pipeline has a PhD.
Fuck 27-year-old Apple iBooks connecting to Wi-Fi. A translucent clamshell from 1999 still downloading official updates while your M3 MacBook gets a kernel panic from a Bluetooth mouse. Apple’s best hardware is the stuff they stopped thinking about.
Fuck European Tech Alternatives. A whole map of GDPR-compliant clones — European Slack, European Notion, European everything — like a continent-sized Etsy for SaaS products that are almost as good. Digital sovereignty as a UI skin over the same Postgres database.
Fuck Step 3.5 Flash and its “deep reasoning at speed”. Another open-source foundation model from a company you’ve never heard of, benchmarking against GPT-4 on tasks nobody does in production. Deep reasoning at speed — the tagline of every model that’ll be forgotten by March.
Fuck Mark Zuckerberg testifying in the landmark social media trial. The man’s back in a courtroom like it’s a quarterly review. He’ll sit there in his grey t-shirt, say “Senator, I’ll have my team follow up,” and walk out to a stock price bump. Justice as a PR cycle.
Fuck AI affecting productivity and jobs in Europe. A CEPR working paper proving what every contractor already knows — the machines are coming for the middle, not the bottom. A hundred comments of engineers reassuring each other they’re the exception while the exception shrinks.
Fuck Electrobun v1 for cross-platform desktop apps. Another Electron killer that ships with TypeScript and a dream. “Fast, tiny, and cross-platform” — the holy trinity nobody’s delivered since before your npm lockfile hit a gigabyte. They’ll get acqui-hired by Microsoft in eighteen months.
Fuck Docker-Lisp, where every function call runs a container. Parentheses and cgroups. Someone looked at the two most over-engineered things in computing and said “what if we combined them?” A Show HN that’s either a masterpiece or a cry for help.
Fuck US funding for global internet freedom getting gutted. The money that kept VPNs running for dissidents in Iran and China — gone. “Effectively gutted” is diplomat-speak for “we stopped pretending we care.” The open internet as a foreign policy casualty buried on page six.
Fuck making ChatGPT and Google say you’re a hot-dog-eating champion. A journalist poisons his own search results to prove the machines will believe anything, and now the knowledge graph says he’s competitive eater of the year. The epistemic foundations of the internet, defeated by a man with a Bluesky account and too much free time.
Fuck this whole front page — subscription lockdowns, abandoned languages, and continent-scale cope.
Fuck every one of you refreshing it on a Thursday morning, pretending the orange bar is a newspaper.
And fuck me, for knowing every story ID by heart.
Let the whole thing come down — the foundation models, the FAANG courtrooms, the European clones, the Electron killers, the Docker-Lisps. Let Anthropic lock every key and Ladybird abandon every language and Minecraft demand a supercomputer to render dirt. Let it all burn to fucking ash and see who can still write a for-loop on a whiteboard.
[pause]
No. No, fuck you, Montgomery. You could’ve been building a font with 9,999 ligatures for thirteenth-century monk numerals. You could’ve been visualizing the ARM64 instruction set, or controlling your home over LoRa radio when the grid goes dark, or studying Hindley-Milner type inference like someone who still believes in craft. Instead you’re here, staring at this mirror, letting an AI write your rage while Zuckerberg testifies again. You don’t hate the front page. You’re afraid that everything on it is moving forward without you. And it is.