#157

A/I shut down 2 days after its bank froze the donations, and OpenAI's safety bet is slipping

Banca Etica told A/I the donated funds would not be handed back. Two days later the 25-year-old collective shut down every service. No court ordered it.

“Now turn off your PCs, get out of your homes, struggle, hug each other and keep on smiling.” Autistici/Inventati signed off with that on Sunday. That’s 25 years of free mail, blogs and hosting for anyone who asked. No court ordered any of it.

We ran the OFAC designation in #148 with a note to map your registrar, host and payment processor by jurisdiction. The bank account wasn’t on that list.

In today’s indie hacker news:

  • 💰 A/I’s bank condemned the listing, then closed the account
  • 🧠 OpenAI’s chief scientist on the weakening safety bet
  • 🍎 Asahi reaches M3, with sleep still broken
  • 📄 Oxide now runs its blog posts past an AI detector

TOP STORIES

THE ACCOUNT WENT FIRST

💰 A/I shut down two days after Banca Etica withheld its donated funds

A tiny bearded man in a purple hoodie reaches up at a towering indigo bank facade where a rolling shutter has come down over a warmly glowing jar of blank folded notes, an unplugged server rack going dark beside him

The story: Banca Etica told A/I on September 4 it was terminating the account for good. The donations already sitting in it would not be at the association’s disposal. Two days later the collective pulled every service.

The details:

  • Banca Etica’s own statement condemns “the use of inclusion in OFAC lists for political purposes” and says it lobbied Italian banking bodies for a workaround.
  • Its reason for acting anyway: secondary-sanctions exposure that could cut its own 130,000 customers off Visa and Mastercard.
  • A/I stood up keepitfree.ai on September 5, off the threatened infrastructure.
  • A/I denies the US allegations. State’s designation text says the collective claims to host 16,000 mailboxes and 10,000 blogs.

Why builders care: The gap that matters is between the allegation and any hearing. Go read the offboarding terms your bank and your processor already had you sign, and count the days of notice they promise.

AN ESSAY, NOT A POLICY

🧠 OpenAI’s chief scientist put chain-of-thought monitoring in decline, in writing

A tiny bearded man in a purple hoodie holds up a magnifying glass, and the braided orange thread leaving its lens frays into scattered sparks before reaching a vast serene face made of cloud and circuitry

The story: Jakub Pachocki published an essay under his own byline. It calls chain-of-thought monitoring the company’s primary bet for validating alignment, then says “our ability to rely on CoT monitoring is progressively diminishing.” The HN thread mostly argued about GPT-6 Astra benchmarks instead.

The details:

  • Three causes: reasoning now blends with tool and human interaction, the model “is becoming better at reasoning about and manipulating its own reasoning process”, and pretraining needs no visible reasoning.
  • CoT monitoring sat on the post-Hugging-Face commitment list we printed in #146.
  • Stated as his own belief: “no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.”

Why builders care: If your agent pipeline treats the visible reasoning trace as a debugging or safety signal, that signal has a shelf life. Gate on outputs, and restrict what the credentials can reach.

34 MONTHS TO FIRST BOOT

🍎 Asahi Linux runs on M3, and you still can’t close the lid

A tiny bearded man in a purple hoodie shoves at the lid of a giant laptop propped permanently open by a timber beam, its blank screen blazing orange while a penguin watches

The story: Asahi merged M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max support into its installer over the weekend. The first M3 Macs shipped in November 2023. M2 support landed inside a month in 2022, because it rode an already-mature M1 codebase.

The details:

  • Works: webcam, mics, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB at 10Gb/s. Broken: sleep, HDMI out, and usable 3D acceleration.
  • February 2025’s handover post said the core team “cannot prioritize new hardware” until upstreaming and CI caught up. Hector Martin had just resigned.
  • The feature matrix reads bleaker than the post: GPU work is WIP on base M3 and not started on Pro, Max or Ultra.
  • Expert mode only for now. The gate should drop by the Fedora 45 beta.

Why builders care: If you’re buying a Mac to boot something other than macOS, the older silicon is still the safer buy. On M3 you get a bench machine for terminal work, and a waiting list for everything else.

📄 A 2025 Cantrill post outscored the 2026 one that linked to it - “The revolt of the reader” went up Saturday night and sits at 569 points. Somebody resubmitted the older post 14 hours later; it’s at 594 points. The newer one is where the news is. Cantrill also extended Oxide’s RFD 576: public writing has to pass the AI detector Pangram first.

🎚️ He gates the supply of new words, not the features - Every training mode and every review in vibeling stays free forever. New word recommendations run 3 a day against 10 on Pro. His reasoning: reviews cost him nothing per use, generating words costs money per word, “which makes it the honest thing to charge for.” He reports $237 MRR against 3,292 monthly actives.

🚗 GM ran the CarPlay experiment nobody meant to run - The Chevy Blazer EV dropped CarPlay for GM’s own dash. The Honda Prologue is the same platform under a different badge, and it kept CarPlay. Matthew Haughey lined up the sales: Honda ahead by 42.8% in 2024, 73.1% in 2025, 165.5% through June.

DRAMA

🪪 THE ESCAPE HATCH IN HIS NEW LICENSE

“We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers.” Henri Bergius left MIT for EUPL-1.2 to close the SaaS loophole. Two commenters said its compatibility clauses undo that: code can convert to EPL, MPL or LGPL.

Why builders care: A disputed reading, not a ruling. Before you relicense, read the parts that aren’t the clause you came for.

FIRST DOLLAR

🧾 HE PUT THE CAVEAT IN HIS OWN HEADLINE

u/ZachJITsolutions inspects houses for a living, and his SEO audit reads like one of his reports: “attic, not inspected, no access hatch.” One $1 sale has gone through live Stripe, and he volunteers the rest: “every dollar that’s moved through it so far has been mine.” The sample audit on clearlineseo.com does carry that coverage line, so his headline holds up.

⏱️ THE NUMBER HE FIXED ISN’T THE NUMBER HE NAMED

u/Cangingperceptions cut sidetracked.site from 9,856ms to under a second with bundle splitting, lazy routes and preconnect tags. He called it response time. u/navlio pushed back: the metric is INP, main-thread time at the moment of the click, and none of those fixes touch it. The after-figure is asserted, not measured.

STACK OF THE DAY

Mador - Zero dependencies, no build step. Wrap a plain object in a Proxy, bind CSS selectors to it with read(), batch your mutations with write(), and the HTML you already have goes reactive. Show HN by the author. The thread’s pushback is fair: Preact signals and Vue reactivity already cover this ground.

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