Links | ROBOTJEANS

Links

Curated finds from Reddit, Hacker News, niche forums, and the stranger corners of the web. Short commentary. Always sourced. Always weird.

April 2026

Government Hacking Tools Are Now in Criminals' Hands (with Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai)

The tools were never supposed to leave the room, but they always do. What begins as state-sanctioned capability inevitably degrades into something more portable, more anonymous, and significantly less controlled. The distinction between government operation and criminal enterprise narrows once the software changes hands, which it appears it already has. There is no clear moment where this becomes a problem, only a slow realization that it already is.

Scientists Gave a Bunch of Salmon Cocaine. This Is What Happened Next

Environmental contamination has reached a point where even controlled lab absurdities feel uncomfortably plausible. Researchers introducing cocaine into salmon habitats observed measurable behavioral changes, reinforcing concerns about trace pharmaceuticals in natural water systems. What reads at first like a novelty experiment instead underscores a broader pattern: human byproducts quietly reshaping animal behavior at scale. The study does not sensationalize its findings, but the premise alone carries an unsettling weight. There is something distinctly modern about ecosystems reacting to substances never meant for them. The absurdity fades quickly, replaced by a more systemic unease.

Jim Carrey Won a Lifetime Achievement Award and the Internet Decided He Was a Clone

Jim Carrey showed up to the César Awards in Paris, gave a speech entirely in French that he apparently spent months preparing for, thanked his family, traced his ancestry back three hundred years to Saint-Malo, and the internet looked at all of that and said yes but what if it was a clone. The whole thing got rocket fuel when a drag artist posted an Instagram photo of prosthetics next to a picture of Carrey at the ceremony with the caption "Alexis Stone as Jim Carrey in Paris," which was almost certainly performance art but landed on a conspiracy-primed audience the same way a lit match lands on a gas leak. A source later told the Daily Mail that Carrey finds the whole thing "sad" — not because people mocked his appearance, but because, and this is a direct quote, "people are stupid." He is sixty-four years old, he hasn't been in public since November, and apparently that is now the exact amount of time it takes for the internet to decide you've been replaced by a satanist clone, which is a sentence I genuinely did not expect to type today.

Dictionary.com's 2025 Word of the Year Is Not a Word

Dictionary.com sat down this year, looked at the entire English language, and said you know what, not today, and handed the crown to 67, which is not a word, is pronounced "six seven" and not "sixty-seven," and means absolutely nothing that anyone has been able to pin down with any confidence. It started with a rap song, got picked up by TikTok, attached itself to a very tall basketball player, and then somehow ended up in the mouth of every third-grader in the country, which is how these things go now. By the time Merriam-Webster weighed in with their own pick — "slop," defined as the ocean of low-quality garbage that AI dumps on the internet every twelve seconds — the two choices sitting next to each other started to feel less like a fun annual tradition and more like a note left on the refrigerator by the English language on its way out the door.

Staunch Trump Supporters Are Now Asking If He's the Antichrist

Trump posted an AI image of himself dressed in white robes surrounded by golden light like a Renaissance ceiling painting come to life, and deleted it fourteen hours later like a man who checked his mentions and immediately regretted every decision he had made that morning. The people losing their minds over it were not the usual suspects — it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Texas pastor who fired up a livestream on the subject, and Tucker Carlson, who apparently had forty-three minutes of thoughts ready to go on short notice. A researcher quoted in the piece makes the point that's been sitting in the room this whole time: Trump spent years letting people call him chosen and anointed and sent by God, and it turns out the same Bible that has a verse for everything has several very specific verses about exactly this kind of guy.

Wisconsinites Can Keep Watching Porn After Governor Vetoes Age Verification Bill

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed a bill this week that would have required age verification to access pornographic websites, which means the great state of Wisconsin will continue to handle this the same way it always has — on the honor system. The bill's supporters argued it was about protecting children, and the governor argued it was about protecting adults from having to hand their government ID to a porn site, which is one of those debates where both sides are technically correct and nobody wins. It joins a growing pile of similar legislation that keeps getting introduced, debated with great seriousness by people who have clearly thought about this more than they want to admit, and then either vetoed or struck down in court for being a privacy disaster dressed up as child safety. Wisconsin for now remains free, which is a sentence I did not expect to write today.

‘BLOCKADE’: The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

Someone sat down, thought real hard, and came up with the acronym BLOCKADE — Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism — which tells you everything you need to know about the people running this operation before you read a single word of the actual article. The program feeds books into an AI and scores them against a list of roughly 300 words ranked by how offensive they are to conservative values, which is a definition the AI itself gets to decide, because apparently the humans involved ran out of opinions halfway through and handed the rest off to a chatbot. One school district in Texas has already pulled over 1,400 books from its shelves while the budget to buy new ones sits frozen, which is the kind of number that tends to get lost in the discussion about whether the algorithm is biased. The whole enterprise is being sold back to the same districts it helped overwhelm, at five dollars a scan, which is either the most efficient grift of the decade or proof that someone out there has been paying very close attention to how this country works.

Scientists Create Plant That Produces Ayahuasca, Shrooms, and Toad Psychedelics All At Once

Some people spend their careers curing cancer or figuring out why bridges fall down, and then there are the researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science who looked at a tobacco plant and said, you know what this thing is missing, and the answer was apparently psilocybin, DMT, and whatever it is that comes out of a Sonoran Desert toad. The whole operation produces five psychedelic compounds at once in a single leaf, which is either the greatest scientific achievement of the decade or the origin story of a very bad Tuesday. The stated reason is actually legitimate — wild populations of the source animals and plants are getting poached into the ground by demand, and the synthetic production methods are apparently a chemical nightmare — so somebody had to do something. They were also careful to make the plants sterile so the genes don't pass to the next generation, which is the kind of sentence that suggests they have already thought about what happens if they don't. Clinical use only, they said, with the kind of emphasis that tells you exactly what the next question was going to be.

Humans Finally Confirm What Your Dog Already Knew

A new therapy trend is emerging across the United States, known as 'going outside and touching grass.' Once an everyday occurrence for people, this lost pastime of our grandparents has seen a resurgence as everyday folks look toward nature for a temporary release and reprieve from modern life. Some of the more popular ways to escape the grind include playing in water, climbing trees, and running through the local wilderness. This proves once again that your dog does indeed know the secrets to happiness.

March 2026

Turns Out You're Not a Realist, You're Just Wrong

It's not you, it's me — except according to a bunch of researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center who just spent what I can only assume was a significant amount of grant money confirming that depressed people are not, in fact, the clear-eyed realists they've always suspected themselves to be, but are actually just wrong about everything, specifically the good stuff. Turns out when something nice happens to a depressed person, they'll briefly update their outlook and allow themselves a sliver of hope, which sounds almost touching until you find out that hope evaporates faster than my enthusiasm on a Monday morning. The bad news, however — that sticks around like a houseguest who doesn't understand social cues, deeply entrenched and refusing to be revised regardless of what reality has to say about it. Scientists are optimistic they can figure out how to make positive thinking actually last in depressed individuals, which is exactly the kind of cheerful, forward-looking conclusion you'd expect from people who are clearly not depressed.

The Oldest Open Question on Hacker News Has Gone Unanswered for 11 Years

Buried in the Hacker News archives is an Ask HN thread from 2013 with a precise, technical question about a specific UNIX edge case. It received two partial answers and then silence. The original poster never returned. Every few years someone finds it, attempts a response, and trails off. The question itself isn't particularly obscure — it's just never been resolved to anyone's satisfaction, including the people who tried.

A Geocaching Account Has Been Logging Finds at Coordinates That Don't Exist

Someone on the Geocaching forums noticed that an account had been logging finds at coordinates that come back as open ocean, uninhabited wilderness, and in one particularly inspired entry, a point two hundred meters underground, and the truly great part is that the logs themselves are completely normal — cheerful little notes about the walk, what the weather was like, some foliage photography, the whole thing. The account has been active for six years. Nobody has managed to get in touch with the owner. There is no explanation. There is just a six year archive of a person apparently having a lovely time in places that cannot support a person having a lovely time, and I think about that more than I should.

The People Left Behind by the Metaverse

When everyone else was busy writing the metaverse obituary and tallying up how many billions Zuckerberg lit on fire, nobody thought to check on the people who had actually unpacked their boxes in there. Artists, community managers, small business owners — people who looked at Decentraland and Horizon Worlds and said, yeah, I'll build my life here, which in hindsight is the kind of sentence that aged about as well as everything else from that era. Some of them are still showing up, still opening the virtual storefront, still scheduling events in a world the rest of us declared dead and moved on from, which makes this less of a cautionary tale about hype and more like watching the last few employees mill around after the company quietly turned off the lights and never came back to tell anyone.

Someone Is Mass-Editing Google Maps Reviews Across Rural Ohio

A Redditor noticed that dozens of businesses in a small Ohio county had suddenly received identical 5-star reviews from accounts all created within the same 48-hour window. The reviews are uniform to the point of absurdity — "excellent service," nothing else, no names, no specifics. Nobody has claimed responsibility, and the pattern has since spread to three neighboring counties. The businesses themselves have no obvious connection.

Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green

Somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, one psychologist named Faber Birren wrote a sufficiently convincing report for the US Navy and essentially color-coded the entire infrastructure of modern civilization without most people noticing. The shade was Functional Green, a muted grey-tinged seafoam that you would not pick for your kitchen, and it ended up on the walls of nuclear plant control rooms, air traffic control towers, military operations centers, and hospital operating suites because Birren made a solid case that it reduced eye strain under fluorescent light, kept people alert without tipping them into anxiety, and made it easier to spot blood and other biological materials you'd prefer to identify quickly. The recommendation worked its way into government procurement manuals and became standard spec language that apparently nobody felt the need to revisit, which means the rooms where humanity was managing its most consequential and occasionally catastrophic decisions — nuclear launches, surgical emergencies, the routing of aircraft over populated areas — were all, more or less, the same color, because one man wrote the right memo at the right time and then the bureaucracy just kept photocopying it.

This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts

WebinarTV, a company apparently founded on the principle that nobody has suffered enough, has been crawling the internet for Zoom meetings and turning them into AI-generated podcast episodes — and before you ask, no, they didn't bother telling most of the people in those meetings. The organizer technically opts in, which is a real cute way of saying everyone else in the room gets volunteered without their knowledge, including people in therapy sessions and job interviews, two situations where "surprise, you're now a podcast" ranks pretty high on the list of things you didn't need. The AI spits out a synthetic host who recaps the whole thing in that relentless upbeat tone that makes you want to put your fist through a wall, and by default the finished product is available to anyone with the link. It's the kind of innovation that really makes you step back and appreciate how nobody asked for this.

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content

Wikipedia has updated its editorial guidance to prohibit AI-generated text from being added to articles, citing concerns about accuracy, sourcing, and the erosion of the editorial voice that makes the project legible as human-made knowledge. The ban doesn't come with a detection system — it relies on editors to identify and remove machine-generated content the way they always have, through community vigilance and dispute. What's notable is the framing: Wikipedia isn't calling AI unreliable so much as calling it unaccountable. The argument is less about what AI gets wrong and more about who is responsible when it does.