Google's third Flash model in six weeks now matches Opus on some benchmarks, and people are noticing.
What the article says
- Google released two new models, a general purpose one and a cybersecurity specialist offered to trusted defenders.
- The main model brings big gains in coding and reasoning while keeping the same low price as its predecessor.
- Google says the improvement came from long running agent loops that let the model refine itself, plus heavy training on security tasks.
- This is the third Flash release in about six weeks, an unusually fast pace.
- The model's knowledge cutoff barely moved since last year, suggesting Google is holding back compute for a bigger future release.
What HN is saying
- Simon Willison shows the model writing slick html and javascript fast and cheap, and people are impressed by the speed.
- Commenters split on whether flash actually beats Anthropic's top model. Some benchmarks say it ties Opus, others say Opus still wins clearly once you account for how many tokens each uses.
- Several people say the model is excellent for non coding work like trip planning, document extraction, and even Chinese essay writing, but weaker and more reckless for serious production coding.
- A recurring theory is that Google skipped a mid tier Pro release and is quietly saving its best work for a much bigger Gemini 4.
- One sharp gripe, real world latency often feels worse than the benchmarks claim, and nobody can fully explain the gap.
A writer fact checked every dated prediction from AI's loudest skeptic and found almost none came true.
What the article says
- Dan Luu went back through years of Ed Zitron's predictions that AI companies and tech giants like Meta and Google were dying, and checked them against real revenue and profit numbers.
- Almost every specific prediction turned out wrong. The companies Zitron said were desperate and out of ideas kept growing revenue and profit strongly instead.
- Luu argues Zitron's numbers often don't even support his own arguments, and that he leans on weak data, like third party traffic estimates, instead of official company figures.
- The essay draws a line between being broadly right that AI spending looks shaky and being right about the specific, checkable claims Zitron actually made, which mostly didn't pan out.
What HN is saying
- Commenters argue about whether to judge Zitron by what he literally wrote, or by a friendlier version of his claims that fans reinterpret after the fact.
- Even people who distrust the AI spending boom admit his specific predictions were sloppy, while still defending his bigger worry about circular financing and inflated revenue.
- Simon Willison says Zitron sometimes surfaces real leaked numbers first, but wraps them in bias so thick that it is hard to trust his framing.
- The best running joke is a line where Zitron vowed to keep writing until proven wrong. He kept writing after being proven wrong, and nobody agrees whether that counts as losing.
LWN scared its readers with a vague headline about a price hike, and the comments turned into a love letter.
What the article says
- LWN is raising subscription prices about 20 percent starting September 15, matching inflation since its last increase in 2022.
- The site has only raised prices twice in 24 years and says subscriber growth has stalled, making cheap and high volume no longer workable.
- Money from the last increase paid for two new writers and features like EPUB articles, markdown comments, and a kernel source database.
- Existing subscriptions keep their old price until they expire, and current monthly subscribers get six months at the old rate.
- The original headline was vague enough that readers thought the site might be shutting down, so the editors rewrote it.
What HN is saying
- Commenters are overwhelmingly happy to pay more, many saying they are upgrading their tier or resubscribing after letting it lapse.
- A recurring joke is that the vague original title gave people a minor heart attack, fearing LWN was closing or its editor was ill.
- Several readers call LWN the best or only trustworthy publication they read daily, crediting its reader funded model for the quality.
- One thread asks for cryptocurrency payment support, and an LWN editor replies that it is technically possible but not yet worth the engineering effort.
- A few suggest new revenue ideas, like selling an archive of past issues or licensing content to AI companies.
Firefox on iOS finally gets a built in ad blocker, but it quietly leaves the ads that matter most alone.
What the article says
- Firefox on iOS now has a built in ad blocker you turn on in settings, no extension needed.
- It uses Apple's content blocker system and the standard EasyList filter to strip out many third party ads and trackers before they load.
- It will not touch ads the site itself serves directly, or ads shown in search results, so a lot of the worst offenders slip through.
- Mozilla frames it as giving people a choice while still protecting the advertising money that funds the open web.
- It works alongside Firefox's existing tracker blocking rather than replacing it.
What HN is saying
- Commenters keep hitting the same wall, it does not block Google search ads or YouTube ads, which many read as Mozilla protecting its Google funding rather than protecting users.
- Several people say the malicious search ads are the real danger, pointing to scam phone numbers running as top search results that trick people into handing over bank details.
- A recurring complaint is that this is a slow, unannounced rollout, some users still cannot find the toggle weeks after the blog post made it sound live.
- Plenty argue uBlock Origin Lite on Safari, or the Orion browser with real extension support, already does a better job and makes this feature feel late and underpowered.
- One thread digs into why Firefox on iOS cannot use full browser extensions at all, since Apple restricts that capability to Safari itself.
Aurora Store, the workaround for installing Android apps without a Google account, suddenly stopped working for a lot of people.
What the article says
- This is a bug report, not an article, so the details below come from the report and comments.
- Aurora Store lets people install apps from the Play Store without signing into a Google account.
- It has started throwing a server busy error whenever someone tries to install anything anonymously.
- The problem shows up across degoogled phones, including GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, LineageOS and e OS devices.
- Nobody knows the exact cause. It could be tighter rate limits, flagged accounts, or a changed API, and it comes and goes.
What HN is saying
- The person who posted this later admitted the title was a bit of clickbait. Nothing confirms Google deliberately blocked the app.
- GrapheneOS itself doesn't actually recommend Aurora Store. It tells users to sign into the real Play Store instead, so this mostly hits other degoogled users.
- Several commenters say this happens roughly every six months, usually from quiet rate limit changes, and the Aurora developers always find a way around it.
- The real complaint underneath is that Android has no official way to install apps without a Google account, which is why people lean on tools like this for basics like updating WhatsApp.
- One person noted their downloads mysteriously started working again right as this thread hit the Hacker News front page.