UEFA just threatened to pull every European team from FIFA events rather than let a Trump linked investor buy a piece of the World Cup.
What the article says
- UEFA and all fifty five of its national federations rejected a FIFA plan to sell ownership stakes in the World Cup to private investors.
- They say the deal was worked out in secret and pushed through without real consultation with the people who actually run the game.
- Their demand is blunt. Scrap the plan and promise never to try this again, or no European national team plays in any FIFA competition.
- UEFA argues that once outside investors own a piece of the tournament, every decision starts serving shareholders instead of the sport.
- The investment group reportedly waiting in the wings is led by Josh Kushner, tying the deal to the Trump family.
What HN is saying
- Most commenters agree FIFA has been rotten for decades, going back to the Havelange and Blatter eras, so this barely surprises anyone.
- The sharpest pushback is that UEFA is no angel either. It already earns more than FIFA and has its own history of adding extra matches purely for money.
- Several people point out the irony that Infantino himself came up through UEFA before taking over FIFA.
- One popular theory is that Europe mainly wants to protect its own cut of football's revenue, not the sport itself.
- A few commenters are just amused that famously sports averse Hacker News cares this much about a football governance fight.
An open source e-reader app so good people jailbreak their Kindles just to run it.
What the article says
- The link just points to KOReader's homepage, so this is inferred from the comments rather than an article.
- KOReader is a free reading app for e-ink devices like Kindle, Kobo, and Boox, prized for handling PDFs and epubs natively.
- It syncs reading progress across devices, connects to services like Calibre and Wallabag, and supports plugins for custom fonts, dictionaries, and even asking an LLM about a tricky passage.
- Getting it onto a Kindle usually means jailbreaking the device first, which plenty of readers say is worth the hassle.
What HN is saying
- Almost everyone agrees the software underneath is fantastic but the menus are a genuine mess, several people compare figuring out the settings to learning a new device from scratch.
- Fans say once it clicks, page turns get noticeably snappier and battery life stays solid for weeks, though a few people report the opposite and see faster battery drain on Kobo devices.
- A popular fix is layering a community plugin like Zen UI on top to smooth over the rough default interface.
- One frustration that keeps coming up is that browsing books by folder feels dated compared to a proper cover view, though a hidden mosaic display mode solves it for people who find it.
- A recurring gripe is that setup guides and jailbreak instructions online are often outdated or broken, making the first install harder than it should be.
OpenAI just made its cheap model absurdly cheaper, and the comments are more interesting than the announcement.
What the article says
- OpenAI cut prices sharply on its two cheaper GPT 5.6 models, with the smallest one taking the biggest hit.
- The company says kernel level tuning shaved a fifth off the cost of running the model and made token generation notably more efficient.
- Partner quotes from Replit, Notion and Devin describe the cheap model handling far more of the routine agent work at a fraction of the cost and time.
- One partner says the model now does full tool calling loops instead of one shot outputs, reusing cached context much more often.
What HN is saying
- Commenters are stunned by the price cut and wonder if this signals AI prices falling again after a year of increases, alongside other cheap model launches.
- The sharpest disagreement is whether this is a genuine efficiency win or just an investor funded land grab, since OpenAI is still burning enormous sums overall.
- Several people push back on the framing that compute is scarce, pointing to weeks of free tokens from other providers and roughly flat total usage.
- A few users say the cheap model is now good enough to replace pricier ones for everyday agent tasks, though some still find it needs more precise prompting.
- Others question why free ChatGPT users still get an older, pricier model instead of this new bargain one.
Google's new robot brain lets humanoids walk, tidy a room, and even team up with other robots.
What the article says
- Google unveiled Gemini Robotics 2, a system meant to let robots control their whole body, not just an arm.
- It can make a robot walk, crouch, stretch, and pick things up to clean a messy room.
- One version runs directly on the robot itself and can learn a brand new robot body in just a few hours of training.
- The system pairs a model that turns vision and language into motion with a separate model that plans multi step tasks and lets robots talk to people and to each other.
What HN is saying
- Commenters were struck by how much Google is quietly doing across AI, from models to video to robotics, while getting less hype than Anthropic and OpenAI.
- Several people pushed back on the polish, pointing to a companion post showing roughly sixty percent success rates and calling the demo marketing rather than a product.
- A recurring debate was whether robot bodies themselves are the bottleneck, with one commenter arguing actuators have barely improved since Honda's Asimo decades ago.
- Others questioned running a full language model as the controller, since the delay it introduces may be too slow for real world motion.
- A teleoperated home cleaning startup came up as a contrast, with some arguing a human piloted robot today beats a flashier but slower autonomous one.
Kimi just launched a cheaper model that caps out at a smaller context window, and the pricing logic behind that is oddly interesting.
What the article says
- Kimi Code now offers a version of its K3 model capped at a smaller context size alongside the full million token version.
- Staying under that cap costs about half as much as using the bigger window.
- The catch is that switching between the two models mid conversation can force a costly reload of everything you have already fed it.
- Kimi recommends compacting your conversation before switching versions, and starting a fresh session after any model change to avoid wasting money.
- The company says answer quality does not drop within the smaller window, so it is really a cost tool rather than a weaker model.
What HN is saying
- Most commenters say they rarely need more than the smaller window anyway, so this feels like a discount rather than a compromise.
- The big debate is why the price jumps at a hard cutoff instead of scaling smoothly, with people pointing to memory and hardware allocation as the real driver.
- Several users note this model is open weight, so you are not stuck with Kimi's own servers if their waitlist is full.
- One sharp aside compares constantly running out of context to a coworker's shift ending mid task, forcing you to re explain everything to their replacement.
- A recurring theme is that Chinese labs shipping strong cheap models are eroding the pricing power of the big American AI companies.