perihelions

"aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests"" is a direct quote from one of their top politicians. I'm not going to pretend I didn't read that.

There's bad-actor misinformation in every country (Iran too!)—it's cynical, and specious, to say that excuses governments who take away their citizens' internet access. New Caledonia admitted specific intent to target "organizing protests". That's exactly the reason why they shouldn't have the power to do that (no one should). They shouldn't be in that position of power over the protesting faction, because their disagreements are so strong they can't help but abuse that power. They rationalize their battle (which is political) and their censorship by painting their opposition as illegitimate.

It's an anti-pattern, all over the world right now, that groups of people who start off with irreconcilable political differences, devalue the legitimacy of the other group's speech and their right to speak it. To call them "mislead by propaganda" is an extension of that delegimitization. This needs to be pushed back against, when it's used to promote silencing dissent.

An even more apt analogy is France in New Caledonia. A couple years back, the French territorial government used an "anti-terrorism" law to enforce DNS blocks in that overseas territory, for the express purpose of suppressing political protests (by New Caledonians angry at the French mainland government).

> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-tiktok-ban-new-caledo...

This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[0])

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)

> "interesting new phenomenon"

Pardon me, but summary executions in the United States taking place in broad daylight, with seeming impunity, is very much a new and novel phenomenon, and incredibly interesting to many of us.

These are events of historic significance.

Here's the source for that one (just in case anyone is living under a rock or something),

https://www.startribune.com/border-patrol-greg-bovino-smoke-... ("A federal agent sprays a man being pinned to the ground by other agents following the detention of at least two teenagers in south Minneapolis on Jan. 21. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune)")

That's a summary execution in broad daylight. I have no words.

> "Not sure what he would gain from that."

Besides the ~$1 million a head he's openly selling[0] pardons for?

Why wouldn't he pardon a white-collar felon fraudster? This president has pardoned dozens of those[1]—frauds who had no reason at all to be deserving of clemency, other than being incredibly rich. He's pardoned fraudsters who defrauded thousands of victims[2]. He's pardoned a fraudster convicted of fraud, who committed fraud again, and he pardoned them a second time[3]. There are no limits.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-presidential-pardo... ("Inside the New Fast Track to a Presidential Pardon / Lobbyists close to Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executi... ("List of recipients of executive clemency from Trump")

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-david-g... ("Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence / David Gentile had been found guilty for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.")

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/us/politics/trump-fraudst... ("Trump Sets Fraudster Free From Prison for a Second Time")

> "The crypto community largely backed him in the last election"

Gee golly; I wonder why.

More discussion,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633574 ("Found: Medieval Cargo Ship – Largest Vessel of Its Kind Ever (smithsonianmag.com)", 54 comments)

edit: Also, I think this domain (medievalists.net) is suspect. This article has no author byline; and its text is highly similar to other published articles (like [0]), with only minor word changes. Here's an A/B of an excerpt:

> [vikingeskibsmuseet.dk] "Dendrochronological analysis shows that Svælget 2 was built around 1410 using timber from two regions: Pomerania, which is modern-day Poland, and the Netherlands. By comparing tree-ring patterns with reference data, researchers were able to date the wood and determine its origin. The planks were made of Pomeranian oak, while the frames – the ship’s ribs – came from the Netherlands. This construction pattern suggests that the heavy planking timber was imported, while the frames were cut locally at the building site, reflecting a practical approach and a complex trade network where large quantities of timber moved across Northern Europe."

> [medievalists.net] "One of the most striking results so far comes from dendrochronology (tree-ring dating). Researchers report that Svælget 2 was built around 1410 using timber sourced from two different regions: Pomerania (in modern-day Poland) and the Netherlands. The planks were made from Pomeranian oak, while the ship’s frames (ribs) came from the Netherlands—an arrangement the team interprets as evidence of complex material supply and specialised shipbuilding capacity."

[0] https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/news/archaeologists-rev... (author byline Rikke Tørnsø Johansen)

> "think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing"

Anna's Archive made threats in writing to distribute, concretely and specifically, the plaintiff's copyrighted works as torrents.

This thing, I guess,

https://old.reddit.com/r/brutalism/comments/8qs066/this_park... ("biggest parking structure under one roof in North America")

An even better source, imho:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/blue-origin-we-want-to... ("Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation")

(Mercosur*, for "Mercado Común del Sur"[0]; Mercator was a geographer from the 16th century[1]).

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... ("Glossary:Mercosur")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator ("Gerardus Mercator")

This is a clear plagiarism of a Reuters article[0], which should be submitted instead.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/science/italy-uncovers-basilica-desi... ("Italy uncovers basilica designed by Vitruvius, the 'father of architecture'")

(edit: To be precise, it plagiarizes off of the London-based "Asharq Al-Awsat", whose English-language edition syndicates Reuters (legitimately). I'm inferring this because the thearchaeologist.org also clones al-Awsat's choice of hero image, and the idiosyncratic language in that image's caption. That image, in turn, originates (as attributed) in an Italian government press release[1]).

[1] https://www.regione.marche.it/News-ed-Eventi/Post/114291/Sco...

    character: l (displayed as l) (codepoint 108, #o154, #x6c)
    LATIN SMALL LETTER L

Why did you replace the "I" in "AI" with its homoglyph "l"?

Discussed here at the time,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604313 ("Chat-GPT becomes Sex-GPT for verified adults (twitter.com/sama)")

If you zoom out and look at the big picture, the whole article is little more than a summarization of a different article, published in Fortune.

https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/google-founder-sergey-brin-hi... ( https://archive.is/fefa9 )

If it is AI, this is the easiest type of AI content to generate: a summary of a small, delimited text corpus, with some generic filler added.

If it isn't AI, it's still nevertheless low-effort and (IMHO) doesn't belong on HN. The primary journalistic source (Fortune) should replace it.

Look at this before/after comparison, how lazily they (or it) paraphrased the source material:

> [Primary] "Between 2017 and 2022, the share of job postings at Google requiring a degree dropped from 93% to 77%, according to analysis from the Burning Glass Institute."

> [Derivative] "Data from the Burning Glass Institute shows that in 2017, degree requirements were part of 93% of job postings at Google. By 2022, that figure had dropped to 77%."

Or this:

> [Primary] "And Google isn’t alone: companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco have reduced degree requirements in recent years, signaling a broader industry shift toward skills-based hiring."

> [Derivative] "Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates."

You misread the article; this is a $2,000 product. An unrelated 32-inch 8k monitor from Asus is $8,000—it's mentioned in passing to disclaim that the LG isn't, technically, the highest-DPI monitor on the market.

There's not that much they can do. It's often discussed that if the extreme August 1972 solar storm had overlapped with an Apollo mission (it didn't), it would have acutely sickened the astronauts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1972_solar_storms#Human...

> "Had a mission been taking place during August, those inside the Apollo command module would have been shielded from 90% of the incoming radiation. However, this reduced dose could still have caused acute radiation sickness if the astronauts were located outside the protective magnetic field of Earth, which was the case for much of a lunar mission. An astronaut engaged in EVA in orbit or on a moonwalk could have experienced severe radiation poisoning, or even absorbed a potentially lethal dose."

The Orion capsule's contingency plan looks something like this:

> "To protect themselves, astronauts will position themselves in the central part of the crew module largely reserved for storing items they’ll need during flight and create a shelter using the stowage bags on board. The method protects the crew by increasing mass directly surrounding them, and therefore making a denser environment that solar particles would have to travel through, while not adding mass to the crew module itself."

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/orion/scientists-and-e...

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this discovery. I noticed when this story was posted on HN earlier, that this "news" domain (thedefensenews.com) is an LLM product; and it hallucinates direct quotes from experts who do not exist.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260119203631/https://www.thede... ("Pentagon Places 1,500 Arctic-Trained Airborne Troops on Standby as Greenland Dispute Escalates")

I.e., a quote it attributes to a CSIS analyst, "A domestic mission provides legal cover to load aircraft, marshal equipment, and place units on short notice. The moment of truth is the flight plan", is actually unique to this domain.

And: "This is an Arctic hammer being readied for an urban nail" has no results anywhere else on the internet. Nor even just the substrings, "arctic hammer" + "urban nail".

The LLM nature is subjectively obvious, too, even without the verifiably fake quotes.

(Self-reply): This LLM slop is the current #1 story on r/news, if anyone else wanted to share in my abject despair at the state of AI disinformation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/news/