Last week on Hacker News, a strange trio of stories fought for attention. A 2011 SMBC comic joked about programs writing programs writing programs. A manifesto for "permacomputing" argued that software should be durable enough to outlast its creators, using minimal energy. And the Vatican's Latin website—a digital fossil rendered in straight HTML, no JavaScript, no tracking pixels—drew 49 comments from people arguing about whether it was "good design."
The comic got 10 points. The permacomputing principles got 45. The Vatican's Latin site got 73.
That ratio tells you something about the mood right now. Tech professionals are exhausted by complexity. They are hungry for simplicity, for things that work without constant updates, for systems that don't require a data center the size of a football field to render a menu.
Meanwhile, Barry Diller told a reporter he trusts Sam Altman, but that "trust is irrelevant" as AGI approaches. And a 20-minute pitch in India just landed a startup called Pronto backing from Lachy Groom—a firm that usually writes checks for billion-dollar companies.
These stories are not unrelated.
The permacomputing manifesto reads like a prayer for a world drowning in software. Its principles: design for longevity. Use less energy. Make things that can be repaired. It is, essentially, the opposite of everything modern AI requires.
OpenAI's latest models need clusters of GPUs that draw enough power to light a small town. The company is reportedly spending $7 billion a year on inference compute alone. Permacomputing says: your laptop should be enough.
The Vatican's website—a Latin-language portal with no CSS framework, no lazy-loading, no cookie banner—is the purest expression of this philosophy alive on the modern internet. It loads instantly. It works on a 15-year-old phone. It will still work in 2050.
And yet, the same week this gets celebrated, a startup that processes 26,000 bookings a day raised money after a 20-minute meeting. Pronto is not permacomputing. Pronto is speed.
The real tension is not between old and new. It's between two different ideas of what "sustainable" means.
Barry Diller understands this. The media mogul has seen enough technology cycles to know that trust is a luxury good. He trusts Sam Altman as a person, but he knows that AGI—if it arrives—will not care about trust. It will care about capability. And capability, right now, is measured in compute, data, and speed.
The permacomputing crowd is asking: what happens when the compute runs out? What happens when the data centers can't get enough water for cooling? What happens when your AI-powered booking system relies on a cloud provider that raises prices by 300%?
Pronto's answer: we'll figure it out. That's the startup ethos. Move fast, break things, raise the next round before the bill comes due.
The Vatican's answer: build something that lasts 2,000 years. Use Latin. Use HTML. Don't change.
The SMBC comic from 2011 is the punchline. "We programmed a program to program new programs." That's exactly what's happening. AI writes code. Code writes more AI. The system is recursively generating complexity at a rate humans cannot track.
Permacomputing says: stop. Simplify. The Vatican says: this website is older than the internet itself. Diller says: I trust the guy running the race, but I don't trust the race.
And Pronto says: the race is real. There's $18 billion waiting at the finish line.
What this means for you, the person reading this at 2 AM with a backlog of 47 unread newsletters and three AI tools you haven't tried yet: the industry is fracturing.
One faction wants to build AGI at any cost. Another wants to build websites that run on a potato. Both are right. Both are wrong.
The smart play is not to pick a side. It's to stay informed enough to know when the balance shifts. That's why tools like Reportify AI exist—not to replace your judgment, but to surface the signal from the noise. The Vatican's Latin site and Pronto's 20-minute pitch are both telling you something about where the industry is headed. You just need to see both stories at the same time.
The rest is noise. And trust, as Diller noted, is irrelevant.