Bike forum closes due to new compliance policy.
Also Google made a video and Apple lost the keys.

HR's New Compliance Mandate Shuts Down the Bike Courier Department

A venerable online community known as Lfgss, a fixed-gear cycling forum that has existed for two decades, is officially shutting down. The stated reason for the closure is the UK’s impending Online Safety Act, a piece of legislation designed to make the internet more orderly and less like the Wild West of our collective teenage years.

The forum, which primarily facilitated conversations about bikes and occasionally sold a used wheelset, simply cannot handle the administrative burden of becoming a regulated platform. The entire ordeal reads like an inter-office memo where a beloved, crusty, but functional legacy server is being retired because the new IT policy requires a thousand pages of documentation to keep it running. It is not that the forum was evil; it is that the forum was just too small to afford the mandatory compliance paperwork. The UK government tried very hard to organize the internet, and the first thing to be organized straight out the door was a website about bicycles.

Google DeepMind Produces 'The Internship' Part Two

Google DeepMind has introduced Veo 2, the latest iterative AI to promise Hollywood-level video generation that is completely indistinguishable from reality. This model can supposedly create long, cinematic shots which is a significant improvement over the previous version that mostly generated abstract art and footage of a dog chasing its tail.

Veo 2 is trying to solve the simple problem of human creativity with computational power. The end result is that a massive tech giant is once again attempting to replace the entire concept of a film crew with a slightly smarter piece of software. Eventually, every movie will just be a 90-minute trailer for the next model iteration, a sort of perpetually self-referential marketing loop that we can all look forward to.

New AI Feature Fails to Solve Monday

A new survey suggests that the vast majority of iPhone owners see little to no value in the newly announced Apple Intelligence features. This confirms what we all suspected: the solution to our problems is rarely a large language model on a phone. The technology is working fine, but it seems to have missed the central point of the original development brief, which was to make people happy.

This general disappointment connects perfectly with the broader philosophical inquiry into why it is so hard to buy things that work well in the first place. The tech industry keeps providing answers to questions nobody asked, like, "Can my phone generate a picture of a cat in a suit?" when all anyone wanted was for the app to not crash when they tried to book a doctor's appointment. Apple is still trying its best, though.

Briefs

• OpenERV Launch: OpenERV is now available for open source analysis of electric vehicle charge data. Finally, a way for IT to prove the finance department is charging their Tesla on the company dime.
• Public Domain Chaos: Beloved cartoon characters Popeye and Tintin, alongside authors Faulkner and Hemingway, enter the public domain in 2025. Intellectual property lawyers everywhere are currently calculating their upcoming retirement date, which is now "never".
• TikTok on Notice: US lawmakers instructed Apple and Google to be prepared to remove TikTok from their app stores by January 19th. The platform is about to be the next intern who forgets their badge and cannot get past the security turnstile.