Meta ends QA, lets users grade work
Also: Everyone gets a 'Personal Supercomputer' and Bing wears a Google mask.

The Great Resignation Hits the Reality Department

Meta is discontinuing its independent, third-party fact-checking program, choosing instead to pivot to a user-driven Community Notes model, which is a budget optimization strategy we have all seen before in various forms of corporate retreat. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg suggested that external fact-checkers were too politically biased and had "destroyed more trust than they've created" which is an impressively meta critique for a company trying to manage truth at global scale. It turns out the solution to a complex, multi-billion-dollar content problem is to crowdsource it to the same people who cannot stop arguing in the comments section.

This shift, which starts in the United States, is about allowing "more speech" and reducing the number of "mistakes" the previous system made, which is corporate speak for cutting the compliance budget ahead of a major political cycle. Mr. Zuckerberg did acknowledge the "tradeoff" means the platform will simply "catch less bad stuff," which is fine, because what is an occasional small-scale societal destabilization compared to achieving optimal quarterly metrics. We can look forward to seeing how the Community Notes feature scales to its new purpose, which is to say, we are about to learn what happens when you ask the interns to police the entire server rack.

Everyone Gets a 'Personal Supercomputer,' Which is an Expensive Desktop

Nvidia, a company famous for selling graphics cards at the price of small, used vehicles, has announced Project Digits, a new "personal AI supercomputer" that can sit directly on your desk. The device starts at $3,000, runs on a standard wall outlet, and is about the size of a Mac Mini, which is the exact size and price point where we usually stop calling things "personal supercomputers" and start calling them "expensive computers".

The hardware, featuring the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, does promise 128 gigabytes of unified memory and the ability to run 200 billion-parameter models, meaning your home office is finally ready to participate in the inevitable AI singularity. For the rest of us, it sounds like Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has given us permission to turn the spare bedroom into a low-volume, high-density development center, assuming your spouse is okay with the increased power bill.

Search Engine Wears a Fake Mustache, Hopes to Pass Inspection

Microsoft is taking its long-running competition with Google into the realm of subtle visual deceit, a strategy usually reserved for the most desperate of marketing departments. When a user navigates to Bing and searches for "Google," the platform responds by mimicking the Google search page, complete with a clean white background, a colorful doodle-like graphic, and a centered search bar.

The maneuver is specifically designed to hide the Bing branding, allowing inattentive users to assume they have completed their goal of escaping Bing without ever having to click on a link. Vice President Parisa Tabriz of Google described the tactic as "spoofing" and part of a "long history of tricks," which is a polite way of saying the Bing team is still trying to get into the high school lunch table by wearing the cool kid’s jacket.

Briefs

• Job Market Reality Check: Another software developer details the experience of being laid off twice in one year. This is the new tech equivalent of winning a bad lottery, apparently.
• Stock Image Merger: Getty Images and Shutterstock have announced they will merge to create a premier visual content company. Prepare for an even greater volume of hyper-staged, emotionally vacant people shaking hands in front of a giant digital bar chart.
• Regular Expression Overkill: A programmer has managed to write a minimax chess engine using only regular expressions. This is the kind of profound academic terrorism that gets you an immediate audit in the corporate codebase, but a massive applause on the internet.