Evidence-first research

Ask HN: How is AI actively a threat to humanity if it's only online?

That's always been something that's left me confused here. Yes, an AI can be dangerous by hacking websites and company systems or flooding social media with scams or fake news. Yes, AI generated code can have security issues that a developer doesn't catch because they didn't review it properly. But isn't there a pretty big jump from that to "can destroy humanity"? Like say, a jump involving a society not run by the internet? Because if an AI takes over the systems at a factory, it can't really do much beyond what the factory could already do. The production lines use single purpose robots and machines to build a particular product, and can't be programmatically altered to build anything else. So, what exactly could a super intelligence even do with access? Only things I can picture are using it to try and hack another online system or speeding up/slowing down production rates. Similarly, I hear a lot about these systems taking over weapons or releasing bio-engineered viruses or what not, and my first thought is "how?" These systems are not accessible via the internet. There's no API endpoint that can launch nuclear weapons or set up a drone strike via a POST request. To me, it feels like all these apocalyptic scenarios only make sense if a percentage of humanity gets manipulated by AI into doing its bidding, or if humanity suddenly invents easily hackable intelligent robots with an internet connection.

Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?

I am a member of my university's game development club, which puts me around lots of talented programmers as well as artists of all kinds, and I've observed that just about everyone disapproves of AI. The sentiment is especially strong among younger people coming into the club. By "disapproves", I mean they refuse to allow AI-generated content in games and see AI use in general as something like a moral failure. At the same time, I scroll down the YC startup directory, sorting by launch date, and observe that every non-hardware company (and most of the hardware ones) are entirely based on AI. The demographic I described above, young creatives like the ones in this club, has zero chance of voluntarily using one of these products. It seems to me, then, that as the moat for most AI startups drops asymptotically to 0 with GPT-6 et al. becoming more capable, this market is mostly a blue ocean (to use the business-book term) for anyone willing to put in the work and actually code something people want. From there, network effects would work as well as they have since the dawn of the Internet. I am exploring the idea of making such a startup (it started out as a side project which I have been working on by myself for almost 2 years), but I am worried about the attitude of incubators, VCs, and investors in general. Would the lack of AI be a nonstarter for most outside investors? I know people started non-blockchain companies in 2021, but the hype around AI seems orders of magnitude m

Show HN: Swobu – Local LLM Switchboard You Can Share over HTTPS

Swobu is a local TUI switchboard for Codex, Claude Code, PI, you name it. With stateful, provider-independent session lineage and model-name-based routing across way too many heterogeneous LLM providers. The same route can be shared and revoked over end-to-end HTTPS with another machine, a friend or your phone. Hell, you can even make an LLM mesh with one Swobu swobing remote Swobus. Anyway. One <10 MB Go binary. TLS terminates locally - relay is a dumb pipe. In other words, I’ve tried to factorize LLM traffic along orthogonal client, backend and network dimensions. Looking for help with product-market fit, don’t want to go back to job-market fit :)

Steve Jobs development advice and how to pull ahead in the vibe clone age.

https://reddit.com/link/1wfi95q/video/whxjx5o1icph1/player I came across this WWDC 1997 Steve Jobs clip today, and it resonated strongly as I look at the shift in quality and user experience with apps in 2026 (irrespective of vibe coding). Here's the heart of it: >"One of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try sell it." - Steve Jobs Having moderated well over 10,000 posts/comments here in the last year, if I'd give one piece of advice, it is this: Focus on making one thing incredible from a user experience standpoint, and keep refining it. Once it is excellent, adding more will be well-received, provided you maintain the same principle. And don't just do this blind. Make sure you tested at LEAST the top 3 competitors you could find. The inverse can also be true: If you keep delaying release and run out of steam, you can miss opportunities entirely. Find a healthy balance that doesn't strangle development. Many devs keep up such a rigorous development pace, shipping new features, that they don't stop to ask if they have done it well, or even if they should. A mistake I see devs making here over and over again here is that they come up with what they think is an incredible idea. 10-apps-in-1, perhaps, or a new feature every week, but do it with such little design sense or taste, that it creates friction or doesn't ta

Raycast is deleting posts with negative feedback or concerns about their new pricing model

I'll start this post with the reasons why people are not happy with Raycast at the moment. Post examples will be at the bottom. In case you don't know, Raycast has received quite a lot of backlash with their recent changes. 1. Firstly, people are not happy with their transition away from being a native macOS app and transition towards another AI wrapper. v2 uses more memory, is slower and in general feels more sluggish, partly due to not being native. Not great for an app that needs to be always available. 2. Secondly, with the release of v2, they put BYOK behind a Pro subscription. This means if you want to use your own AI API keys with Raycast, you need to pay them a subscription. This was a free features in v1, and the team was advocating for it being free back then. 3. Thirdly, they changed their subscription model related to AI. They previously had fixed rate limits, meaning you could send 300 messages per hour to some models. Now, they have introduced "AI Credits". Long story short with this, people are using up their entire monthly limit in just a single day, myself included. They also screwed over existing annual subscribers that had subscribed to Raycast with the old limits. [The reddit post about this](https://www.reddit.com/r/raycastapp/comments/1wch0xi/we_changed_how_raycast_ai_is_priced_today_heres/) has 35 upvotes and 339 comments. The slack announcement post about this also has the most replies ever on their community. People are not happy. 4. Then they sent ou

Show HN: VibeWorld – a shared terminal world for developers and scientists

Vibeworld is a persistent cyberpunk shared world that runs in your terminal, where you can meet other developers and scientists to have company at 2 AM while screaming at your LLM :) you can connect with other scientist, chat, and includes also use vocal chat if you want to use it. There is a world and a moon, and they are completely 3D rendered and animated. In the moon there is the "complaint crater": a place where you can scream an insult against your claude or codex session and everybody from the space can see it. You can create your pixel avatar! There is also the "stargazing ledge": a place where you can see the stars and whatever happens in the sky. You can chat in the meantime if someone else is there too, or just watch our Earth. Sometimes you can see galactic wars, and there is a plant that grows but dies if nobody waters it. You can leave it on the second monitor while working (it does not use a lot of RAM): watch the sky when you want, and sometimes you may chat with some other scientist in your same situation. In the world, continents are scientific macroareas, and cities are specializations: you can create your corners where you can speak and help others (but for now it is quite empty). You can install in one command and by just typing "vibeworld" in your terminal, you are inside the world. There are some games inside and a sort of Doom where enemies says to you "Retracted" or "dedline tomorrow" when shooting you :). There is also an awkward reason why I am post

WidgetScreen: weather, music and live lyrics on my Mac’s lock screen

Hi everyone, I’m Sam, the developer of WidgetScreen. I built it so I could see things like the weather, what’s playing and reminders without unlocking my Mac. This is my current setup: weather on the left, music and synced lyrics in the middle, and a sticky note, clock and calendar on the right. You choose the widgets and arrange them in Layout Studio, so it doesn’t have to be this busy. I’ve been working on making layouts easier to customise. In 2.13.0, I added separate layouts for each display, controls for moving and resizing widgets, Apple Photos album syncing with Premium, and a native Liquid Glass option on macOS Tahoe. In addition in recent weeks I've added reminders, agent status and audio visualiser widgets. I'm working loads on the app and make regular updates. For comparison, [Alcove](https://tryalcove.com/) and [Droppy](https://getdroppy.app/) (both are incredible apps you should try!) also offer lock-screen widgets. WidgetScreen’s main advantage is its layout editor and range of widgets: you can arrange and resize individual widgets across your displays, combining weather, music, lyrics, photos and notes into a setup like the one in the screenshot. **Pricing:** The free version includes weather, music controls, photos, clocks, calendar, reminders, countdowns, pomodoro and stopwatch timers, battery and system stats, an audio visualiser and Agent Status. You can arrange your widgets in Layout Studio and use the Clear and Frosted glass styles without paying. No acco

Flock cameras used to arrest a child for playing on a swing

Raycast is deleting posts with negative feedback or concerns about their new pricing model

I'll start this post with the reasons why people are not happy with Raycast at the moment. Post examples will be at the bottom. In case you don't know, Raycast has received quite a lot of backlash with their recent changes. 1. Firstly, people are not happy with their transition away from being a native macOS app and transition towards another AI wrapper. v2 uses more memory, is slower and in general feels more sluggish, partly due to not being native. Not great for an app that needs to be always available. 2. Secondly, with the release of v2, they put BYOK behind a Pro subscription. This means if you want to use your own AI API keys with Raycast, you need to pay them a subscription. This was a free features in v1, and the team was advocating for it being free back then. 3. Thirdly, they changed their subscription model related to AI. They previously had fixed rate limits, meaning you could send 300 messages per hour to some models. Now, they have introduced "AI Credits". Long story short with this, people are using up their entire monthly limit in just a single day, myself included. They also screwed over existing annual subscribers that had subscribed to Raycast with the old limits. [The reddit post about this](https://www.reddit.com/r/raycastapp/comments/1wch0xi/we_changed_how_raycast_ai_is_priced_today_heres/) has 35 upvotes and 339 comments. The slack announcement post about this also has the most replies ever on their community. People are not happy. 4. Then they sent ou

Show HN: VibeWorld – a shared terminal world for developers and scientists

Vibeworld is a persistent cyberpunk shared world that runs in your terminal, where you can meet other developers and scientists to have company at 2 AM while screaming at your LLM :) you can connect with other scientist, chat, and includes also use vocal chat if you want to use it. There is a world and a moon, and they are completely 3D rendered and animated. In the moon there is the "complaint crater": a place where you can scream an insult against your claude or codex session and everybody from the space can see it. You can create your pixel avatar! There is also the "stargazing ledge": a place where you can see the stars and whatever happens in the sky. You can chat in the meantime if someone else is there too, or just watch our Earth. Sometimes you can see galactic wars, and there is a plant that grows but dies if nobody waters it. You can leave it on the second monitor while working (it does not use a lot of RAM): watch the sky when you want, and sometimes you may chat with some other scientist in your same situation. In the world, continents are scientific macroareas, and cities are specializations: you can create your corners where you can speak and help others (but for now it is quite empty). You can install in one command and by just typing "vibeworld" in your terminal, you are inside the world. There are some games inside and a sort of Doom where enemies says to you "Retracted" or "dedline tomorrow" when shooting you :). There is also an awkward reason why I am post

WidgetScreen: weather, music and live lyrics on my Mac’s lock screen

Hi everyone, I’m Sam, the developer of WidgetScreen. I built it so I could see things like the weather, what’s playing and reminders without unlocking my Mac. This is my current setup: weather on the left, music and synced lyrics in the middle, and a sticky note, clock and calendar on the right. You choose the widgets and arrange them in Layout Studio, so it doesn’t have to be this busy. I’ve been working on making layouts easier to customise. In 2.13.0, I added separate layouts for each display, controls for moving and resizing widgets, Apple Photos album syncing with Premium, and a native Liquid Glass option on macOS Tahoe. In addition in recent weeks I've added reminders, agent status and audio visualiser widgets. I'm working loads on the app and make regular updates. For comparison, [Alcove](https://tryalcove.com/) and [Droppy](https://getdroppy.app/) (both are incredible apps you should try!) also offer lock-screen widgets. WidgetScreen’s main advantage is its layout editor and range of widgets: you can arrange and resize individual widgets across your displays, combining weather, music, lyrics, photos and notes into a setup like the one in the screenshot. **Pricing:** The free version includes weather, music controls, photos, clocks, calendar, reminders, countdowns, pomodoro and stopwatch timers, battery and system stats, an audio visualiser and Agent Status. You can arrange your widgets in Layout Studio and use the Clear and Frosted glass styles without paying. No acco

Flock cameras used to arrest a child for playing on a swing

iOS/Macos 27 can basically let Claude become a Siri extension ❤️

iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate have private hooks for Siri Extensions.. You can use Chatgpt and Claude.. this is honestly so cool. https://preview.redd.it/n9nqxmm2ybph1.jpg?width=1312&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ea0367830522a84971a7a40657e1cb5dec111403 https://preview.redd.it/6wmy4nz2ybph1.jpg?width=1204&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac45f58b31560e95ef1f032aa31cb2455a40f2eb

[OS] OpenDisk: a free, fast, open source DaisyDisk alternative for macOS

**The problem** When a Mac runs low on space, System Settings shows a colored bar and a "System Data" blob that explains nothing. Finding the actual 40 GB folder means walking the filesystem yourself or paying for a tool. DaisyDisk has been the standard for years. It costs $9.99 and the source is closed. **What OpenDisk does** OpenDisk maps your drive as an interactive sunburst chart. It scans a full disk in seconds and streams results in as it goes, so you can start clicking around before the scan finishes. Hover a slice for its exact size. Click to zoom into a folder. Use the folder list and breadcrumbs to step back out. Drag anything into the collector, check the reclaimed total, and delete in one action. Also: * Incremental rescans replay filesystem events, so a repeat scan runs 20 to 28x faster than a cold one. * Handles APFS volume groups, firmlinks, snapshots and purgeable space. The total matches what macOS reports as used. * Purgeable space breakdown shows which caches are reclaimable. * Instant search across the whole scanned tree, including drives with millions of files. * External drives show up automatically when you plug them in. Some of this came from feedback on Reddit. File preview was one of those requests. Thanks u/*MrBiz*. **Compared to DaisyDisk** OpenDisk is free, MIT licensed, and faster. On a cold scan of a 1 TB Apple Silicon volume, OpenDisk finished in 17s and DaisyDisk took 37s. The app is under 2.5 MB because it's native Swift with nothing bundled.

Ask HN: How can I browse HN in dark mode?

For the fellow parents, some fun context: My toddler is asleep on me, and this light is blinding.

[OS] NetFluss 2.6 - See your network traffic, bandwidth, WiFi & VPN connections and easily switch your DNS directly in your menubar

It's already more than 6 months ago when I last posted something about my open source tool NetFluss. With more than 4000 downloads per version and more than 400 stars on GitHub it really got its own small community, especially here in Germany and was covered here by some of the biggest German tech blogs several times. * **Problem:** You want to see your network traffic in the menubar, but you also want to quickly switch between DNS, VPNs, see what app is using which bandwidth or is communicating to which server. You want to see if your VPN is active, even if you use some external VPN client. You want to see the current traffic of your router (supports Ubiquity Unify, FritzBox or OpenWRT). And you want to quickly see your current internal and external IPs. Or you want to measure your bandwidth and have a history for your measurements. Everything and more can be handled by this lean menubar app called NetFluss. * **Comparison:** iStat Menus is a very polished app, but follows a more general approach and there are countless other small tools that mainly only show the current network traffic. NetFluss focusses deeply on network related information. * **Pricing:** NetFluss is free and Open Source. Give it a try and download it here: [https://github.com/rana-gmbh/NetFluss](https://github.com/rana-gmbh/NetFluss) Of course you can also get it via Homebrew with the following command: `brew tap rana-gmbh/netfluss && brew trust rana-gmbh/netfluss && brew install --cask rana-gmbh/netflus