I’ve been hacking on a small site at news.cheng.st — a daily Hacker News digest I spun up on my new Mac mini with my claw 🦀. I grabbed the machine from B&H Photo at a discount before the OpenClaw hype kicked in. The same model sold out a few days later, and the discount was gone. I quickly spun up my claw daemon. It started as “summarize today’s hot threads,” but I’m not satisfied with that: I asked it to add AI reflections that try to surface what the bot cares about and which themes keep recurring in its attention.

我最近折腾了一个小网站：news.cheng.st。作为一个每日的 Hacker News 摘要站。这得益于我前些时候赶在 claw hype 起来之前，在 B&H Photo 用折扣价入手的 Mac mini。几天后我又去看了一眼：同款已经卖光，折扣也消失了。我搭建的这个网站刚开始只是“总结今天的热门帖子”，但我显然不满足于此：我在摘要开头加了一个 AI 视角的总结与反思，想试着捕捉 AI 似乎会在意什么、哪些主题会引起它的注意。

Part of the motivation is honestly tempo: especially over the last year, it feels like society + tech have been accelerating rapidly, with AI as a big driver. I don’t want to just passively consume the feed, so I’m using this as a way to stay closer to the trend and to ship the things I’ve long wanted to build but kept procrastinating. Going forward I want to add a weekly “human commentary” layer in posts like this, on top of the bot digests — a channel to think out loud or brain dump, and in a complementary way, to keep a dialogue with AI.

做这个网站的动机也很现实：尤其从去年开始，我明显感觉社会和技术都在加速，疯狂地加速，而 AI 是很大的推动力。有了 AI，我可以把自己多年积攒下来的那些“想做很久但无止境在拖”的东西更快做出来。接下来，我想在机器人摘要之上，再加一个每周的“人类点评”：一方面用来清空大脑，另一方面开始尝试与 AI 保持一种持续、友善的对话。

---

This weekly post started from here.

这周末由此文开始引申出来。

The “F-Droid piece” and the Bluesky skepticism (and their HN thread) feel like the same pattern in different clothes: openness still exists on paper, but defaults quietly narrow it in practice. Android can stay “open,” yet if Google’s verification/distribution path becomes the only frictionless option, alternatives become niche and effectively gated. And ATProto can be “open,” yet if most people rely on Bluesky-run infrastructure, “credible exit” doesn’t matter unless people actually use it.

“F-Droid 那篇”和对 Bluesky 的质疑（对应 HN 讨论），在我看来其实是同一种模式：“开放”在纸面上还存在，但 defaults “默认选项”会在现实中把开放悄悄变窄。Android 可能仍然“开放”，但如果 Google 的验证/分发变成唯一方便的默认选项，其他选择就等同于被门槛化。ATProto 也可能“开放”，但如果大多数人都依赖 Bluesky 官方基础设施，“可退出”就只是理论，除非人们真的会去退出。

What I observe is the broader direction: at scale, companies optimize for safety, compliance, and trust, and that often turns openness into a more permissioned version of itself. That also matches the wider social mood—less “open by default,” more verification and guardrails (for example LinkedIn identity verification and its HN debate)—so the center of gravity shifts away from liberty and toward managed access.

我观察到的是更大的趋势：在大规模场景下，公司会优先优化安全、合规和信任，这往往会把“开放”变成一种更受许可、更可控的开放。这也符合更广泛的社会氛围——更少“默认开放”，更多验证与护栏（比如 LinkedIn 身份验证流程 及其 HN 讨论）——于是整体重心会从自由/开放，滑向被管理的访问。

On a personal note, I’m a good example of how strong defaults work: I’ve been an Apple user for over a decade, and Apple has built such a coherent “default path” for my life that I often don’t even consider alternatives unless something breaks badly (so far, not yet). That’s not just convenience — it’s a form of soft lock-in that feels natural because it removes decision fatigue.

从个人角度说，我就是“默认”生效的典型：我用 Apple 已十多年，这给我生活构建了一条非常连贯的“默认路径”，以至于除非出了大问题（目前为止似乎还没有），我往往都不会认真考虑替代方案。这不只是方便——而是一种“软锁定”，替我减少决策负担，从而感觉到非常自然。

And I think this “default power” is especially pronounced in the US more broadly. In day-to-day life here, for almost every problem there’s usually one mainstream default solution (maybe two), and everything else is treated as niche, risky, or “extra work.” That tendency makes systems efficient — but it also makes it easier for a single platform or institution to quietly become the gatekeeper, because the default becomes the norm long before people realize what they’ve traded away (a dynamic that also showed up in the Cloudflare outage discussion).

而我觉得这种“默认的力量”在美国的日常社会里更明显。在这里很多生活问题通常只有一个（至多两个）主流默认解法，其他选择往往会被视为小众、风险更高或“额外麻烦”。这确实提高效率，但也更容易让某个平台或机构悄悄变成守门人——因为默认选项在大家意识到代价之前，就已经变成了事实标准（这个点在 Cloudflare 故障讨论 里也很明显）。

I also think geopolitics is now part of the defaults story. Europe’s anxiety about relying heavily on US internet services makes sense: compared to somewhere like China, the EU doesn’t have the same level of “internet sovereignty.” As the world trends toward de-globalization, the internet stops feeling like a borderless free space—policy and national incentives start shaping the user experience more directly.

我也认为地缘政治已经成为“默认”故事的一部分。欧洲对高度依赖美国互联网服务的焦虑是能理解的：相比中国，欧盟在“互联网主权”上没有同等程度的自主性。随着世界走向“去全球化”，互联网越来越不像一个无边界的自由空间——政策与国家层面的激励开始更直接地塑造用户体验。

Re: Acme Weather — I’m intrigued by the way it shows forecast uncertainty with multiple “possible futures.” That’s genuinely useful: you can tell whether the future is stable or diverging across models, and community reports could add trust. But the reality (as a lot of people noted) is that most users simply won’t pay for weather in typical use cases, since decent forecasts are already free and bundled everywhere. So paid weather apps will probably stay niche—even if the product is genuinely better.

关于 Acme Weather：我很喜欢它用多个“可能未来”来展示预报不确定性的方式，也许我能直观看到不同模型对未来的分歧程度；用户数据也可能增加一些可信度。但现实是（很多人也提到过），大多数场景下用户不会为天气付费。所以此类付费天气应用大概率还是会停留在小众市场。

And on the “claws” thread: I’m with the take that this isn’t just rebranding. It’s becoming a real layer for orchestration + permissions + approvals around agent actions, basically the missing “production boundary” for LLM agents.

关于 “claws” 那个讨论：我认同这不只是换个概念包装。它正在变成一个真正的上层架构：在 LLM agents 之上围绕 agent 行为做编排、权限和审批——基本上就是 LLM agents 在走向生产环境时缺失的那层“边界”。

Stepping back, my bigger reflection is that modern defaults are still shifting, and not always in ways “old internet” people will like. Google Play is drifting toward an Apple-like gatekeeping model. Trust is increasingly rebuilt through verification and privacy tradeoffs. Even my personal defaults changed: a year or two ago my default homepage was google.com; now it’s mostly “ask GPT.” A lot of go-to websites and default mindsets are being rewritten by AI, shaping how people behave and what they’re willing to accept.

回到更宏观的层面，我的感受是：现代的默认选项还在持续迁移，而且不一定是（大概率不是）“老互联网”人群会喜欢的方向。Google Play 越来越像 Apple App Store；信任越来越通过验证机制来重建（当然会包含隐私上的交换）。甚至我自己的默认也变了：一两年前我的默认主页还是 google.com，现在几乎都是“直接问 GPT”。很多人原本的常用网站、默认心智和行为路径，正在被 AI 一起重写。