CAPTCHA now demands demon-slaying skills
Also, AI forgets basic math and a visa process works too well.

The New Security Measure Is a Mandatory FPS Tutorial

The eternal battle against automated bots has escalated past identifying fire hydrants; the new front is apparently a mandatory performance review set in Hell. Security engineer Guillermo Rauch, CEO of software developer Vercel, created a proof-of-concept CAPTCHA that requires users to play a short scenario from the game *DOOM* to prove their humanity (The link to the demo is here). Users must successfully slay three enemies on "Nightmare!" difficulty, a setting one user described as frustrating, which seems to perfectly capture the feeling of the modern internet .

The whole project leverages WebAssembly to compile a minimal *DOOM* port, which is an extremely over-engineered solution for the simple task of separating the meat bags from the metal ones . It turns out that to bypass digital security, you now need to have excellent motor skills and a high frustration tolerance. The security team has essentially replaced "click the bicycles" with "attend our mandatory, confusing, high-stakes virtual reality team-building exercise." Nobody is going to finish this before their coffee gets cold.

Personnel Swap: Tesla Finds New Employees in the Old Process

Reports indicate that Tesla has been using H-1B visas to replace US staff who were part of an earlier mass layoff . Apparently, the company decided to prune the roster and then discovered they still needed people to sit in the chairs, leading to the use of a system advocated for by CEO Elon Musk . The organization requested thousands of H-1B visas around the time of the cuts, replacing more senior, highly compensated engineers with junior, foreign ones at a lower pay rate .

The company is just attempting to streamline the entire workforce process; why hire locally when you can fire locally and hire globally using the exact paperwork system you've publicly championed. This is less a malicious act and more a perfectly optimized, if morally baffling, corporate personnel churn. It is the purest form of cost-saving efficiency.

The Creator Opt-Out Button Was Found in the Backlog

OpenAI failed to meet its 2025 deadline to release "Media Manager," the promised tool that would allow creators to easily opt-out of having their work scraped for AI training . The company had initially set this target to assuage concerns from content owners about intellectual property, but alas, the "Do Not Absorb My Art" button was left unchecked on the sprint board.

One former employee, speaking anonymously, stated they did not even recall anyone working on the project, suggesting it may have been accidentally deleted along with the rest of the company's New Year's resolutions . Creators can still use a cumbersome submission form, but that is equivalent to asking them to write a physical letter to the CEO every time they post a new drawing online, proving the commitment to ethical data sourcing remains firmly theoretical.

AI Recalculates Reality After a Simple Variable Change

OpenAI’s O1-preview model, the new smart kid in math class, suffered a significant performance drop when mathematical problems from the Putnam Mathematical Competition were only slightly altered, or "variated" . The accuracy plummeted by up to 30%, which is the AI equivalent of getting an A on the pre-test, then being asked the same questions with the names changed and suddenly failing the final.

This behavior suggests the model relies more on memorization than genuine reasoning, a common issue in advanced systems . It seems the AI department has hired a new team member who is brilliant, but only if the spreadsheet headers are exactly the same as the training data. Change "Total Sales" to "Aggregate Revenue" and the whole system panics, which is, to be fair, quite human.

Briefs

• Static Search Trees: A new paper discusses a search method that is faster than binary search for static data sets. We are all pretending that our data is "static" so we can implement the cool, new algorithm.
• Databases in 2024: A retrospective on the database ecosystem shows that the primary trend is still finding new, exciting ways to eventually lose your data. Find the full report at CMU.
• Rails for Everything: One developer argues for going back to basics and simply using the Ruby on Rails framework for every single new project. This is the official start of the Post-Modern Hype Cycle where we just reinstall the software from 2008.