Most planes broadcast their position using ADS-B, and some websites collect these signals and visualize them so you can track flight paths. Somebody broadcast a fake flight path that draws a picture of JD Vance on these sites: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf9&lat=26.678&lon=-...
To expand on that, those websites mostly operate on random volunteers self hosting a (starting price) fairly cheap receiver and antenna with an open source stack that feeds the ADS-B data to the website operator in exchange for nothing or free "premium" benefits.
The spoofer could have just sent them fake location information drawing an image using latitude, longitude and altitude for color (in the default view flight paths have different colors based on the altitude of the plane at that point in time).
They could have built an antenna and actually broadcast this data, but that would be a lot more effort and most likely some form of crime.
ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) is a protocol for planes to publish their positions, so help with the whole "not crashing into each other" thing. The data is mostly for pilots and air traffic control, but it is publicly available, and there's a number of sites that track the data so that you can see what planes are overhead or whatever.
Someone spoofed Airforce One's transponder, had it declare itself as "VANCE 1", and then fly a pattern to display the meme. Or lied to one or more of the major sites, pretending to be listening in on the ADS-B signals. It's unclear. Regardless, it's a very funny hack.
It’s basically the modern radar system as in it supplies the data air traffic controllers see on their screens. Civilian ATC doesn’t really use actual radars any more.
That said, TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) does not operate on flight data reported by ADS-B.
Epic lost on 9 counts out of 10 in the original lawsuit. The one they won is being appealed and in the process Fortnight was ordered to be reinstated in the US. I wouldn't bet that this arrangement will survive appeals.
Epic didnt really win. If i recall correctly the ruling ended up being that 3rd party payment processors are allowed but 27% of app revenue is still owed to apple if that route is taken. So you can save 3% by using 3rd party payment processing but thats around how much those services cost anyway so no real saving
> While Apple implemented App Store policies to allow developers to link to alternative payment options, the policies still required the developer to provide a 27% revenue share back to Apple, and heavily restricted how they could be shown in apps. Epic filed complaints that these changes violated the ruling, and in April 2025 Rogers found for Epic that Apple had willfully violated her injunction, placing further restrictions on Apple including banning them from collecting revenue shares from non-Apple payment methods or imposing any restrictions on links to such alternative payment options. Though Apple is appealing this latest ruling, they approved the return of Fortnite with its third-party payment system to the App Store in May 2025.
That judge's ruling was essentially overturned last month on appeal.
> Even though Apple was no longer prohibiting linked-out purchases, the district court held that this new approach effectively prohibited linked-out purchases, and it violated the spirit of the injunction. The district court then enjoined Apple from imposing any commission or fee on linked-out purchases. However, the Ninth Circuit panel found that the complete ban was overbroad and punitive. Apple should be permitted to charge a commission based on costs that are genuinely and reasonably necessary for its coordination of external links and linked-out purchases, but not more.
"Genuinely and reasonably necessary", not being defined, will naturally be taken by Apple's malicious compliance department to mean "26%", I'm sure, and we'll get to enjoy a continued round of show trials in court with no meaningful effect for years to come.
I wouldn't describe that as "overturned" but rather "clarified a detail or two". They still aren't allowed to set arbitrary fees but if they can show receipts then they can demand reimbursement.
The idea seems to be that the injunction shouldn't be able to force Apple to operate a given account at an overall loss. They can bill you for resources of theirs that you actually use.
However, given we've seen how flagrantly they violated the first injunction, it's easy to believe they will take the liberty to interpret this one as maliciously as possible as well. Sure, if the fees are too high they'll end up back in court to attempt to prove costs, and maybe something will happen years later after bouncing around in appeals and violating new injunctions, or maybe it won't.
Anxiety too. When things get bad for me I always know exactly what's going to happen and it's all bad. The voice that says "well maybe not" just goes away.
I doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
My health insurance for a family of four in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, it was exceeding $25k/year with premiums, copays, deductibles, etc. While not free, it is accessible.
There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell.
I mean the issue here is your arguing on hackernews. The vast majority of people on this site in the USA just don't have these issues. Health care is taken care by the employeer and they are paid more.
Nobody in Europe thinks that healthcare just exists for free, but that it should be available to who need it for free and are happy to pay for that via tax.
I think you're not quite understanding just how bad EU pay is for software. Frankly with the $$ you basically always going to come out ahead with the more comp especially since USA software companies normally offer great healthcare and comparable vacation.
I know several folks who've migrated from US -> EU tech roles in the last few years. Yes, you earn less and pay (somewhat) more taxes. But if you have a few kids the difference in cost of education pretty much wipes out the difference, and some folks really value the stress reduction of a robust social safety net (layoff protections, healthcare coverage while unemployed, etc)
I don't know about France, but here in Denmark you'd generally find tech jobs on LinkedIn.
If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.
But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.
What you get back is great worker protection, child care, free education and generally a feeling of safety for yourself and family. We also have a democracy that offers more than two choices!
Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
> Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.
Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".
The bet is that you will earn enough prior to 50 or maybe even 40 so that you won’t have to work, and then you can live off the investments and wherever you want.
High risk, high reward and all that. Although, the previous 20 years of high compensation are obviously no indication of the next 20.
> The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period to care for a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or recover from a serious illness.
There's limitations on that, but the common idea that Americans don't have healthcare is unfounded and appallingly ignorant.
I left the US, not because I was worried about healthcare for myself or my family, but because of how I felt it reflected on me that I was fine choosing to stay and cash a large check every month while others around me had to worry about healthcare.
"In 2024, the United States spent an estimated $14,885 per person on healthcare - the highest healthcare costs per capita across similar countries. For comparison, Switzerland was the second highest-spending country with $9,963 in healthcare costs per capita, while the average for wealthy OECD countries, excluding the United States, was $7,371 per person."
"Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates for many services in the United States is lower than other wealthy OECD countries."
"In fact, the United States spends over $1,000 per person on administrative costs — approximately five times more than the average of other wealthy countries"
"Despite higher healthcare spending, America’s health outcomes are not any better than those in other developed countries. The United States actually performs worse in some common health metrics like life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes, and safety during childbirth."
But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings.
You can freely walk (mostly) wherever you want without risking your life (that is not normal in most of the world).
And you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition.
> But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings.
I don't fear mass shootings any more than I fear terrorist perpetrated subway or event bombings.
> you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition
Medical debt and the discourse around it is interesting. Not having insurance is the fundamental issue, medical debt itself is legally mandated to be negotiable. As in they are legally required to find a negotiable payoff price that will work for your personal financial situation, similar to school debt. I pay $70/month for school debt and will for the next 25 years. Is that a lot? Yes. Does it matter to me? Not so much. I could be wrong about the medical debt, but I don't think i am.
> You can freely walk
This is huge and something that would drastically improve my quality of life in a substantial way. Love Europe for this. Love.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
first, one have to prove he is 24 not 40. taxes can tell 24 and tell you do 40 becauses they decided so.
add social security percentage. while one still need real insurance and pension saving on top. yes, one 6 figure person have to pay two times. once for self and other one unemployed local drunk.
and on top, when one buys anything, all things are taxed 2x compared to usa(but i guess trump tries fo equalize that).
on top. there are prices for locals and foreigners. one will pay 2x for coffee, rent, parking, all.
and yeah, one is foreigner? does not know hidden language of locals? wait in all queues 2x longer. so social security medcine is something one never sees.
> there are prices for locals and foreigners. one will pay 2x for coffee, rent, parking, all... does not know hidden language of locals? wait in all queues 2x longer. so social security medcine is something one never sees.
Mate, I made this exact move ~5 years ago, it's really not that hard to learn a foreign language and navigate a bit of bureaucracy (although I will admit, Spain may be better than most in this regard)
Why wait? If you can get a work visa you might as well, independent of this push. English proficiency in France isn't amazing though (speaking as a Dutchman that visits France most summers), so learning French would be a big help.
In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
I think it was like that some years ago. Now, as you said, it's really useless. 20 months are just the time to find an apartment, furnish it and get used to the place.
Afterwards you have to pay some of the highest taxes in the world....
Dutch people still speak Dutch to each other so if you were going to live there permanently and wanted to properly participate in society you would need to learn Dutch.
However the average level of English ability in NL is extremely good, you won't meet many people who don't have really good English especially for younger generations. Definitely not the case in e.g. France or Italy
I just can’t get with this. There is so much beyond “works” in software. There are requirements that you didn’t know about and breaking scenarios that you didn’t plan for and if you don’t know how the code works, you’re not going to be able to fix it. Assuming an AI could fix any problem given a good enough prompt, I can’t write that prompt without sufficient knowledge and experience in the codebase.
I’m not saying they are useless, but I cannot just prompt, test and ship a multiservice, asynchronous, multidb, zero downtime app.
Usually about 50% of my understanding of the domain comes from the process of building the code. I can see a scenario where large scale automated code works for a while but then quickly becomes unsupportable because the domain expertise isn't there to drive it. People are currently working off their pre-existing domain knowledge which is what allows them to rapidly and accurately express in a few sentences what an AI should do and then give decisive feedback to it.
The best counter argument is that AIs can explain the existing code and domain almost as well as they can code it to begin with. So there is a reasonable prospect that the whole system can sustain itself. However there is no arguing to me that isn't a huge experiment. Any company that is producing enormous amounts of code that nobody understands is well out over their skis and could easily find themselves a year or two down the track with huge issues.
I don’t know what your stack is, but at least with elixir and especially typescript/nextJS projects, and properly documenting all those pieces you mentioned, it goes a long way. You’d be amazed.
I would never use, let alone pay for, a fully vibe-coded app whose implementation no human understands.
Whether you’re reading a book or using an app, you’re communicating with the author by way of your shared humanity in how they anticipate what you’re thinking as you explore the work. The author incorporates and plans for those predicted reactions and thoughts where it makes sense. Ultimately the author is conveying an implicit mental model to the reader.
The first problem is that many of these pathways and edge cases aren’t apparent until the actual implementation, and sometimes in the process the author realizes that the overall app would work better if it were re-specified from the start. This opportunity is lost without a hands on approach.
The second problem is that, the less human touch is there, the less consistent the mental model conveyed to the user is going to be, because a specification and collection of prompts does not constitute a mental model. This can create subconscious confusion and cognitive friction when interacting with the work.
> The second problem is that, the less human touch is there, the less consistent the mental model conveyed to the user is going to be, because a specification and collection of prompts does not constitute a mental model. This can create subconscious confusion and cognitive friction when interacting with the work.
Which is why, on the one hand, the talk about "this is replacing software devs" is going to still be premature for many use cases. Because there is more to software than just the code output.
But on the other hand, a lot of software is riddled with inconsistent mental models today, depending on its age, who the UX people were, etc. This is not something unique to vibe coded apps.
> The second problem is that, the less human touch is there, the less consistent the mental model conveyed to the user is going to be, because a specification and collection of prompts does not constitute a mental model. This can create subconscious confusion and cognitive friction when interacting with the work.
tbf, this is a trend i see more and more across the industry; llm or not so many process get automated that teams just implement x cause pdm y said so and its because they need to meet goal z for the quarter... and everyone is on scrum autopilot they cant see the forest for the trees anymore.
i feel like the massive automation afforded by these coding agents may make this worse
If it involves Nextjs then we aren’t talking about the same category of software. Yes it can make a website pretty darn well. Can it debug and fix excessive database connection creation in a way that won’t make things worse? Maybe, but more often not and that’s why we are engineers and not craftsmen.
That example is from a recent bug I fixed without Cursor being able to help. It wanted to create a wrapper around the pool class that would have blocked all threads until a connection was free. Bug fixed! App broken!
I'm seriously trying, but I haven't seen it be all that helpful for complicated stuff. I had a bug where we were running out of database connections and cursor wanted me to create a wrapper class for the connection pool that would count connections and block if there were too many. Obviously that was dumb and I didn't do it.
Turns out I needed to actually understand the problem and then I was able to fix it without too much trouble.
On the other hand, I made a whole website in 2 hours without touching any of the code directly, but it was really simple and had no performance or security concerns to worry about.
Telnet nowadays typically isn’t available by default for security reasons, and OP wants people to be able to play the game just by typing “ssh thegamehost”.
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