YYCombinator

[Scott Galloway @profgalloway]

maclallan

[Elijah Wood @elijahwood]

For the first time yesterday, I experienced the new @alamodrafthouse QR code ordering system and I can tell you it’s truly awful. Rather than making ordering food and drink more efficient, it actually adds steps to the process AND if you want to order additional items during the film you HAVE to open your phone. No, your cute reference to that irony in your How To Alamo video doesn’t negate how ridiculous this is. Please don’t cut corners with your staff and revert back to physical menus and order cards.

[🔻Rio Slade 🔻 @RioSlade]

Holy shit this is amazing journalism.

Stop what you're doing and read this.

[ProPublica @propublica]

Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias.

He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.
https://t.co/ywkwOgjVab

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

🚨 do you understand what happened to your right to protest..

The FBI just invented a new domestic extremism category called "anti-tech violent extremism" - and it doesn't exist in any public document.

WIRED got 1000+ leaked pages proving they're already using it to track AI critics and data center protesters.

What the leak exposed:

- Photographing a data center is now officially "suspicious behavior" in Virginia
- Fusion centers are surveilling town halls where residents complain about water
- 61% of Americans believe AI will destroy more jobs than it creates
- Even Marjorie Taylor Greene snapped: "how dare the peasants complain"

They built a new extremist category for you before they told you it exists.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness. #MagnificaHumanitas
https://t.co/6i9MWs6LJl

[Popstonox @Popstonox]

Hasan Piker says Fox News has fallen for a fake tweet claiming he stayed in a sanctioned hotel in Cuba

"There is an American citizen who recently did violate OFAC and stayed at a hotel that America does not allow citizens to stay in.

It wasn't me though. It was Nick Shirley."

[Variety @Variety]

Jack Antonoff slammed people who use AI to make art and music as "godless whores":

"So to everyone who is gassed up about the new ways you can fake making art, by all means drive right off that cliff. We're genuinely happy to see you go. Generations coming will be engaging in the ancient ritual of writing, recording and performing as it comes to us from God." https://t.co/K5XI8DbKse

[Fiorella Isabel @FiorellaIsabelM]

Leaked Footage from Israeli Airforce Shows IDF Apache Helicopter Firing on its OWN Citizens at Supernova Music Festival on October 7

“The pilots realised that there was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian.”

[…] “The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the targets.” Middle East Eye

@VanessaBeeley

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

When we came into office, we uncovered a $12 billion budget deficit.

Today, I’m proud to say we brought it down to zero.

We didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people.

We closed it while funding parks, libraries, safer streets and making historic investments in public housing.

Call it Pothole Politics. Call it Democratic Socialism. It's government that delivers for the people who make this city run.

That’s what New Yorkers deserve. And that’s what we will keep fighting for every single day.

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️🚨 ALARMING: Google now treats privacy as suspicious behavior by default. Users of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/OS, and other deGoogled Android phones are being locked out of millions of websites unless they install the exact Google Play Services software they deliberately removed.

GrapheneOS is recommended by the EFF and used by journalists, lawyers, and activists in high-risk environments. The audience most likely to read Google's data practices and refuse its terms is now flagged as fraudulent for that exact decision.

What happened?:
▪️ Google announced "Cloud Fraud Defense" at Cloud Next on April 22-23, 2026, branding it "the next evolution of reCAPTCHA." Existing reCAPTCHA customers were auto-migrated.
▪️ When the system flags traffic as suspicious, the old click-the-bus puzzle is gone. Users get a QR code instead.
▪️ Scanning the QR code requires Google Play Services running on the device. Internet Archive snapshots show this requirement has been live since at least October 2025, silently rolled out for 7 months before anyone noticed.
▪️ No Play Services = no QR scan = locked out.

The bigger picture:
▪️ Google already tried this in 2023. It was called Web Environment Integrity (WEI), and it would have let Google decide which devices were "real enough" to access the web. Standards bodies and the public pushed back hard, and Google killed it. Three years later, the same idea is back, just hidden behind a QR code instead of a browser feature.
▪️ reCAPTCHA runs on millions of websites. Every developer who keeps using it is now, by default, telling deGoogled Android users they're not welcome...

[Mikey Smith @mikeysmith]

God, I hate being right all the time

[William Fitzgerald @william_fitz]

Jesus christ. Palantir and OpenAI execs got caught real bad here. They hired an agency to try get left wing creators to shill for big AI industry. Some creators refused (good on them) Any time you see an IG video from a creator saying they love AI, it's probably paid content.

[Rep. Chip Roy Press Office @RepChipRoy]

Rep. Roy on the kill switch: "Do you really want to put that kind of data collection mandated inside every car? At what point is there just literally no privacy at all anywhere?

A lot of Americans died to protect our Fourth Amendment rights so that we don't have government looking at our stuff."

[Dustin Gouker @DustinGouker]

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this the greatest piece of prediction market content created to date.

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

what did she know 👀

[Jacqueline Sweet @JSweetLI]

NEW: After years operating in almost complete anonymity, the top content producers of Canary Mission have been identified. The doxxing site targeting academics and activists who expressed pro-Palestine views over the last year has been used by the Trump administration to select international students for arrest, detention, and deportation--even as those using it at DHS said they didn't know who was behind the site.

The five new highest-paid writers and social media employees associated with the site that we identified are all Americans who moved to Israel years ago, and have a range of ties to American nonprofits and groups. Link below:

[perrito barista @Carlitospindola]

El Papa cuando le preguntan su postura sobre la migración: “Yo cambiaría la pregunta: qué hace el norte global para ayudar al sur global en su situación que les obliga a migrar”

[harryhalpin @harryhalpin]

Because I get asked a lot.

Why we must fight Palantir, in brief.

1. Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country. The Internet has been designed since its inception as a universal system for the sharing of knowledge without censorship. The Internet is not the property of any one government or nation.

2. The Internet enables mass surveillance at a scale unimaginable to the Gestapo and the Cheka. Far too many programmers have wasted their lives at building surveillance systems under the guise of Web advertising. Today, these web tracking systems are being used to monitor, control, and even kill humans by companies like Palantir that seek to combine state violence with corporate efficiency, and thus create a new form of technofascism.

3. Surveillance justified by external national security threats will be turned against citizens inside the nation-state. Mass surveillance was once the exclusive domain of the NSA, but today it has been privatized to corporations like Palantir that are unaccountable to any democratic process. What begins as fear of external foreign nation-states turns inwards to focus on immigrants, dissidents, and eventually to anyone that might challenge the status quo or try to exit an increasingly dysfunctional society.

4. Everyone is a target. The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance. The line between policing and military operations blurs, with legal frameworks being replaced by technological violence operating with total impunity.

5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves. Meek calls for regulation or moralizing demands for human rights are useless in this era. Any rights must be enforced by the hard power of code. Code, not laws, can be used to uphold the right to privacy by making surveillance difficult, if not impossible, even by nation-state adversaries.

6. We are ruled by a senile gerontocracy. Unlike the generations that fought in the world wars, most of our current rulers are degenerate pedophiles who would sacrifice the well-being of the youth and the entire planet due to their infantile desire for wealth and power. Technology of surveillance and automated warfare reflects their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain archaic forms of domination.

7. The American Empire is unraveling. Once, the United States of America presided over a globe where it could enforce its rule via the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency and a network of equally global military bases, but new regional powers now directly challenge the United States as its empire dissolves in the face of internal economic stagnation, political corruption, and the inflation of the dollar.

8. In a real war, fantasies of total technological dominance always backfire. When a faceless drone kills a child’s father, that child will one day take revenge regardless of the cost, something forgotten by those raised in comfortable suburbs. Going beyond zero-sum games, one can only truly win a battle against a people by demonstrating your victory provides a better way of life, increased prosperity, and an inspiring philosophy.

9. Oddly enough, proponents of fully automated warfare support a universal draft. Deep-down, these keyboard warriors know that their technofascist fantasies are a paper tiger when up against determined opponents that engage in asymmetric warfare. They also know none of their children will fight in a war for their state but they would be happy to see other people’s children come home in body-bags.

10. The problem is not whether AI weapons will be built; we must hold responsible those who are building them. No matter which country is deploying automated killing machines, no one is absolved from the murder of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure due to the parlour-trick of shifting the blame to AI.

11. Atomic war is on the horizon. As various states descend into wars over increasingly scarce natural resources, the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes over Teheran, Kyiv, and other areas of conflict has returned to the historical stage. Increasingly geriatric and authoritarian rulers face less guardrails than before to deploying nuclear weapons, and may even be willing to sacrifice the survival of humanity to appease their own petty egos.

12. Our goal is a world of peace where every person can be empowered by the Internet. Modern war is the quintessential game of sending young people to the meat-grinder. Why die for the profit of corrupt rulers when one could build real wealth and power for yourself using the Internet?

13. We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control, and decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression.

14. The State will not help us. The state is a dying pre-Internet institution that increasingly resembles nothing but a Ponzi scheme fueled by taxes and debt. None of the youth alive today will likely inherit any benefits, such as welfare and health care.

15. Centralized and opaque algorithms are a danger to free speech. Propaganda is the flip-side of surveillance, as continual propaganda prevents anyone from even thinking of challenging the system. Social media monopolies promote propaganda to create a generalized idiocy while silencing those that would dare to criticize the reigning order before they can organize against it.

16. Building new forms of social organization with each other is vital to survival. The traditional mediascape of politics and entertainment exists to distract us from building networked solidarity and distributed autonomous organizations across borders. The hierarchical state is as relevant to us as the medieval church and kings were to the formation of the joint-stock corporation and the labour union.

17. Digital identity is the next step in their system of control. Within the next few years, access to the Internet–including in Europe and the United States–will require biometric national identity cards, using the flimsy excuse of “protecting children.” The real goal is to gatekeep free access to subversive political content and halt cross-border communication in order to prevent new forms of self-organization and resistance from emerging.

18. Only when one can be anonymous is one truly free. The freedom to express oneself without censorship and surveillance is a vital precondition for both the autonomous use of reason and the democratic evolution of society. Technology must enable the freedom to selectively reveal ourselves to the world–so that we can become who we want to be–by preserving the right to privacy over the Internet, including not just individual privacy but the right to transact and form contracts privately.

19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten or perhaps taken for granted the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism.

20. Culture wars are a psyop. It is ironic that “Epstein class” virtue-signals about traditional morality and the superiority of forms of ethno-nationalism, while trying to return to the rule of hereditary elites, even in the United States. Rather than reverse the gains of the Enlightenment, we take the side of our ancestors who fought a centuries-long battle for individual liberty, scientific progress, decentralized markets, bottom-up democracy and the emancipation of humanity from feudal monarchs and their make-believe mythologies.

21. New forms of technology can reshape the world. Technology is not just a tool, but the world we live in and an extension of our cognitive capabilities. The co-operation of humans with the collective intelligence embedded in AI could accelerate human progress and overcome planetary crises such as climate change and atomic war that threatens the survival of our species.

22. Live free or die trying. We must bear eternal vigilance in the struggle against fascism, and the battlefield is technology. There is no middle ground: Technologists must choose whether to work for the enslavement of humanity or to create new spaces for freedom.

These are my personal beliefs, not those of @nym. Yet as a philosopher that founded a tech startup, I have a responsibility to respond to this manifesto of Palantir and it's so-called "philosopher-CEO" Alex Karp.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

It’s absurd that American authorities can purchase personal data – that they’re not allowed to gather themselves without a warrant – directly from data brokers. This violates the Fourth Amendment, and it’s time to close the data broker loophole.

Today, @RepThomasMassie, @RepBoebert and @naomibrockwell at the @LudlowInstitute introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act. It requires warrants based on probable cause for all government surveillance and data access. You can read more about it at https://t.co/iFX17ELSLA

[Ben Avery @benaveryisgood]

I don't endorse politicians and I'm not political at all. I'm a nightclub comic. I care about making people laugh. However, occasionally, you might see me standing behind the president in the oval office signing executive orders. This is just a nightclub comic thing. Guys like Hicks, Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Kinison, all did this actually