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TMWNNon Archive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks

"Hey, why are activity rates up 2000%?" —Tumblr executive

TMWNNon I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy

... while Europe did not allow the Ukraine War to interrupt its longstanding massive purchase contracts for gas from Russia.

The United States is, contrary to what many subreddits' denizens seem to believe, not actually at war with Russia. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Anything the US does, or does not, regarding sanctions on Russia is up to the US to decide.

TMWNNon I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy

Tesla is gaining share in Europe despite Chinese EVs, <https://www.kansas.com/news/business/article317450876.html> and benefited from Canada cutting import duty on Chinese EVs. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-19/tesla-vol...>

TMWNNon I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy

>The Internet also told me Europeans were boycotting Tesla and Elon, but I didn’t see that either.

And indeed, Tesla is gaining share in Europe. <https://www.kansas.com/news/business/article317450876.html>

TMWNNon Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue

Only if revenue grew quickly enough.

When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.

TMWNNon New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6

Put another way, it is a peculiar naming regime when M(n-[2-4]) Pro/Max/Ultra is superior to M(n). This is very visible right now because of the demand for running local AI on Macs.

TMWNNon UK to charge universities $1,200 per international student

>to required grades being higher for local students, which is a problem in subjects where there is a limited intake

I saw many courses in Clearing listed as being only for foreign students.

TMWNNon Zotac RTX 5090 graphics cards worth $470k disappear at Brazilian airport

Title edited by me from "NewsTwo pallets of ZOTAC RTX 5090 graphics cards worth $470,000 disappear at Brazilian airport"

TMWNNon Germany's 17M Immigrants: Where They Come From

https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...

TMWNNon AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary

>For older "abandonware" games, this is a huge positive. Especially for all the Flash ones.

I look forward to AI decompiling and making available on modern MacOS all the Intel 32-bit games that aren't compatible with Intel 64-bit, let alone Apple Silicon.

Heck, extend that to PowerPC and even 68K games. Yes, emulators have been available for such for a long time. But that's not the same thing as recompiling natively onto Apple Silicon (or whatever comes along in the future) and adding support for modern resolutions along the way.

TMWNNon Taco Bell drive-thru AI bot increased employee retention by making jobs easier

Title edited by me from "Yum! Brands executive pushes back against AI hate: Taco Bell drive-thru bot has helped increase employee retention by making jobs easier".

HN removed the Fortune-provided referral tag that bypasses the paywall. If necessary, use https://fortune.com/2026/10/14/yum-brands-executive-data-cen...

TMWNNon Webster’s Dictionary: The pleasure of finding things out (2014)

Thank you. I found the dictionary file elsewhere, but the above indeed has superior formatting, as per its description.

TMWNNon Webster’s Dictionary: The pleasure of finding things out (2014)

DictUnifier crashes on current MacOS. Is there an alternative?

TMWNNon Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program

My understanding is that Canadian FAANG offices are staffed mostly with those who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa, plus the odd local who doesn't want to move to the US for personal or family reasons.

TMWNNon Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program

>Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?

Netflix as a whole, no.

Ethnic Indian Netflix people whose departments suddenly become 100% ethnic Indian, yes.

TMWNNon The Mathocalypse

Quoting DCKP <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49989738>:

>I have had this conversation with my PhD students yesterday. I am 100% sure that all of their problems can be solved by publicly-available models now (I solved a case of one myself as a test, it took 15 minutes). So the challenge for them is to see how much they can accomplish in their allotted period, and still pass a defence on at the end of it all. The PhD defence is going to become all about a test of understanding, not a test of quantity of publication.

Also, Ted Chiang's 2000 short story "Catching crumbs from the table" <https://np.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1wzu5gf/this_mi...>.

TMWNNon OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI

>How many "prompts" from our parents, teachers, bosses, etc. it took for all of us to come here and discuss this? Or for that human to think of that prompt for that LLM?

>These are clearly rhetorical questions

No, they are not.

Reading Doesn't Fill a Database, It Trains Your Internal LLM <https://tidbits.com/2026/02/28/reading-doesnt-fill-a-databas...>

TMWNNon How Singapore's government-run dating service works

mfw the 4chan "state-mandated girlfriend" meme[1] becomes reality

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/state-mandated-girlfriend

TMWNNon Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots

Ugh. I have always used an RSS reader (currently Inoreader) to follow various subreddits, as opposed to just going to reddit.com.

TMWNNon U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels

>UPS is also full of holes. No verifications whatsoever.

I've had one of my UPS account numbers used to purchase some labels for someone else (I have no idea who). No way to report this to UPS since I can no longer get in touch with my account rep (who was great, until he disappeared).

TMWNNon Allegations of US interference in Quebec election

Correct on all counts. I don't know how much control Quebec City has over international[1] tariffs, however.

So the shocking allegations boil down to

* US attempt to talk to Quebec City about tariffs, and

* a US think tank publishing something in February 2026 about how the US might benefit from the (meaningful, longstanding, legal) Quebecois pro-sovereignist sentiment.

Meanwhile, no shortage of announced Canadian intentions, in the first Trump administration and during the current trade war, to "target the red states" with tariffs to influence US politics, and no shortage of self-hating American Redditors cheering this on because Trump = bad, so anything that other countries do against the US = good.

[1] I have to specify this, because Canada does not have internal free trade! In some ways, trade with the US is freer than intra-Canada trade. Yet more proof of how as Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>.

TMWNNon Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners

>A shocking number just decided to move elsewhere, primarily the US.

85% of University of Waterloo software engineering graduates move to the US. <https://x.com/danluu/status/1351785083598893062>

This is a longstanding trend, of course. One million people born in Canada <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...> live in the US, or about 2.4% of the 41.5 million total Canadians, while 260,000 people born in the United States <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...> live in Canada. The US's population of 338 million is eight times that of Canada's, so a Canadian is about 30 times more likely to move to the US, than an American is to move to Canada.

1.3 million Canadian-born live outside Canada, or about 3% of the Canadian population. 3.2 million American-born live outside the US, 1% of the US population.

TMWNNon Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners

>Somehow this mass immigration has made us older, and less competitive, moving in exactly the opposite direction of the magical solution it promised while giving away the country. It has led to massive lines for every job, downward pressure on wages, and oversubscribed services at every level.

Context for others: Already much wealthier on a real GDP per-capita basis, the US increased its lead over Canada from 2000 to 2025 <https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1YbGu>. The US began the period 28.2% higher, and finished 49.5% higher. Note the lack of growth in the Canadian line that began c. 2015.

Put another way, 100% of Canadian GDP growth since 2015 has been from population growth. Now that the latter has been significantly (not completely) cut back, the country is in a recession (which the bien-pensant media never fails to adding the word "technical" before saying so).

>Here in Canada we've been pitched this same scary argument for decades, leading to outrageous levels of immigration, coupled with a growing entitlement among the class (which leads to a complete refusal to integrate in any meaningful way, often while incanting the laughable pablum about mosaic versus melting pot while dragging regressive, destructive habits and cultural norms to Canada, tragedy of the commons behaviour, etc).

If Trump announced that after annexation the US would deport every TFW/"student" that has arrived since 2015, public opinion would massively swing toward joining the US ASAP.

TMWNNon Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners

>I moved from the USA to Sweden about 6 years ago. Sweden has also been tightening its immigration laws

Context for others: Until 2026 Sweden had no language, income, employment, or skills requirement for citizenship. It now has some basic requirements in these areas.

* 2025 citizenship requirements: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250315034218/https://www.migra...>

* 2026: <https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...>

>in ways I believe have been and will be detrimental to its future.

In completely unrelated news, Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden after Swedish. <http://web.archive.org/web/20210511231225/https://digitaledi...>.

Also completely unrelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

TMWNNon Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners

Every single person who came through Ellis Island <https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle-...>

* was a legal immigrant

* had passed a medical inspection

* had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same

* was turned away if failing any of the above tests, with no possibility of appeal

Shipping liner companies were charged to return ineligible passengers to their origin (the same is true with airlines today), so they had every incentive to verify ahead of time that they could enter the destination country. The "only 2% of immigrants were rejected at Ellis Island" statistic often bandied-about by the pro-open borders side elides the restrictions that caused the rate to be so low in the first place.

I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US.

TMWNNon ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

>Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it.

The top 100 wealthiest Austrian families own two thirds of the country's wealth <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755835>, and none of the wealth came from tech companies. The same is likely true of Germany with one exception: SAP.

Put another way, the two wealthiest German-born tech people (except the founders of SAP) are Peter Thiel and Andy Bechtolsheim, both of whom earned their billions in the US.

TMWNNon Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

>Anything with a parallel port dongle?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849567

TMWNNon Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

>So this is how, in 2007, during a tour of the facility, I stumbled across a Pentium 1 system running an AmigaOS emulator on Windows NT 4.0 that was responsible for displaying the status of the control rods of a nuclear power plant.

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.gareth...>

(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)

TMWNNon Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

>Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!

mfw

>I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.

And here you were questioning my need to speak to the mentally reddited.

Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield. (And before you say it, Starlink was turned down for the FCC rural subsidy.)

>Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?

As I said,

>Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.

TMWNNon Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

No, I'm saying that when the Post puts out an article shouting about "$38 billion" going to Musk, many, many people are going to take away from that that "Musk received $38 billion in grants, gifts, and otherwise free money from taxpayers". What was your purpose in insta-citing that article, as opposed to pointing to the one NASA program for funding promising booster designs, complete with strict standards at various milestones, that helped fund (in addition to $100 million, essentially every cent of Musk's PayPal fortune) resulted in the Falcon 1 two decades ago?

I'll answer my own rhetorical question. Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago. If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.

And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote

>> Starlink didn't get any subsidies.

>If you don't count the launcher it rides on, and the company that owns both.