> Following additional review, Ars has determined that the story “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name,” did not meet our standards. Ars Technica has retracted this article. Originally published on Feb 13, 2026 at 2:40PM EST and removed on Feb 13, 2026 at 4:22PM EST.
Rather than say “did not meet our standards,” I’d much prefer if they stated what was false - that they published false, AI generated quotes. Anyone who previously read the article (which realistically are the only people who would return to the article) and might want to go back to it as a reference isn’t going to have their knowledge corrected of the falsehoods that they read.
Another fascinating thing that the Reddit thread discussing the original PR pointed out is that whoever owns that AI account opened another PR (same commits) and later posted this comment: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...
> Original PR from #31132 but now with 100% more meat. Do you need me to upload a birth certificate to prove that I'm human?
It’s a bit wild to me that people are siding with the AI agent / whoever is commanding it. Combined with the LLM hallucinated reporting and all the discussion this has spawned, I think this is making out to be a great case study on the social impact of LLM tooling.
Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).
That's fine, humor is subjective. I had a similar experience watching the "manchild" music video recently. I knew it wasn't serious, but I was still annoyed until I thought it through and understood the satire.
Perhaps it's an AI generated article. A real human would have realized quite quickly that you can put snow into the tank of a toilet when the power is out.
This is about _tankless_ toilets. They only work with electricity-powered flush pumps. That's why the author wrote about having to physically dump water into the toilet to flush it.
For our new home we're making we have two toilets (always practical). One of them is tankless, but we made sure the second one is a traditional cistern toilet with no electrical requirements. Just in case.
Most well pumps are electric powered. The holding tank will give you a very small amount of water that’s in it if it’s up high but after that without electricity it won’t refill.
In the USA most residential toilets are tank type and don’t directly use electricity.
I actually enjoyed the writing. It's clearly reflection on the experience presented as an "advice list" somewhat jokingly. Since author didn't enjoy the experience, tone is somber. After spending childhood in the cold place I can relate.
I just learned first hand what to do with frozen pipes. Couldn't stop it this year as it went so far below zero. On the last day before it warmed up one of the pipes split and put about 2ft of water into the basement. Amazing to see the damage to the CPVC pipe that broke -- like it literally exploded, which it probably did.
You should have a shutoff valve on every pipe that goes through an external wall. Before bitter cold like that, turn off the valve and drain that pipe. If it is supplying an outdoor spigot, that shutoff should just be part of your winter prep.
It can rub a reader the wrong way because it is written in a sarcastic tone to self-reflect on things the author did wrong or didn't do.
Every piece of "advice" and patronizing questioning, such as "You did that, right? Right?", is a self-reflection by the author on things she should have done but didn't do, and learned that the hard way. It is not meant to be a patronizing statement to the the reader, but it is rather self-depreciation.
AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.
I’ll be honest and say that while I agree, I’d be one of those who’d get significantly burned financially if this were to happen. Having made significant lifestyle cuts to eventually get our foot in the door and now dealing with one of us being laid off (100% due to the current administration), devaluing housing would essentially lock us into where we currently live for the rest of our lives and prevent us from moving to a lower cost of living area near retirement (which was part of our original financial planning). Combined with the fact that our generation is unlikely to see social security as a viable pillar of support (ex: retirement age requirements increasing), I want to support the idea but I have yet to see a solution that won’t burn the population of people like myself. To support this would be to offer ourselves up as sacrifices and that is something I don’t think I could ask of someone. If someone could crack that nut and have a “soft landing” for those who are going to get screwed, then I think there’s a fighting chance that we solve this before it all becomes untenable.
(Edit: To clarify, when I hear devaluing housing, I’m interpreting that as an enormous price decrease. The impact to us is that we wouldn’t be able to sell our house for anywhere near the cost we paid for it. We didn’t buy as it as an asset but we also didn’t plan for it to become a huge loss that could have instead gone into retirement savings.)
I think it isn’t mod actions but rather the very likely fact that there is a small, but large enough group of flaggers who will act in unison to remove any such post from the front page. If you want an affirmation of the efficacy of the moderation system, what you should want is transparency into the voting behaviors of the population. If you see a heavy voting correlation between flagged posts and either a specific set of users, voting timing (these types of posts get flagged much earlier than those that lean the other way politically), or both, then there is cause for concern that the algorithm of HN’s self moderation tools is being gamed. My bet is that it’s not the mods doing anything, but rather that there is already a critical mass of flag happy users that are controlling what gets to stay on the front page. I think it would be very interesting to see a write up on this topic, but it’s highly unlikely because I think it would violate privacy and user expectations of anonymity.
Very tenured apparently. I certainly can't unflag and I'm relatively active on a mature account.
I do wonder of boosting the flag threshold for posts to double that of a downvote would change much. Probably not depending on the flag threshold and of this truly is coordinatied
This post, and many many others, ought to have been unflagged.
So, so, so many popular and active stories about Musk and DOGE and Trump have been removed this past year, while at the same time Garry Tan and PG were cheering them on on their Twitter feeds.
People who call this out too much get banned. For super unrelated reasons, apparently.
Dang has explicitly disallowed any and all posts talking about the weaknesses of the flag system. IT'S PROTECTED.
This is now my favorite explanation of how I feel when people default to “just fork it”. I’ve always had trouble expressing how I think that is a symptom of a community problem. One that is endemic in many Linux communities. The next time I want to explain this, I’ll be linking to this post.
I think hitting the flagging threshold is probably the most tangible power as having enough accounts with that power will let you “suppress” certain topics. At least until a mod intervenes.
(Unless I’m misremembering. I think flagging required some level of karma. Or was that vouching?)
> Following additional review, Ars has determined that the story “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name,” did not meet our standards. Ars Technica has retracted this article. Originally published on Feb 13, 2026 at 2:40PM EST and removed on Feb 13, 2026 at 4:22PM EST.
Rather than say “did not meet our standards,” I’d much prefer if they stated what was false - that they published false, AI generated quotes. Anyone who previously read the article (which realistically are the only people who would return to the article) and might want to go back to it as a reference isn’t going to have their knowledge corrected of the falsehoods that they read.
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