Engineering successfully avoided pointless calls.
Also, one delivery truck exploded after a great launch.

Interoffice Memo: Mandatory Reduction of Unnecessary Synchronous Communications

Keygen, a provider of licensing APIs, has confirmed what the entire engineering department already knew: most "discovery calls" are an inefficient waste of resources. Company founder Zeke Gabrielse, an admitted introvert, revealed the company briefly tried to accommodate enterprise clients by adding a "book a call" button, a policy which only led to him repeating the same basic information for hours. Gabrielse quickly realized the synchronous meeting structure only served to muddy the waters, forcing him to repeatedly explain the product to people who were several pay grades removed from any actual implementation.

The counter-intuitive solution, however, was not to get better at talking; it was to stop talking completely. By removing the scheduling button and insisting on email correspondence, the sales team accidentally enabled efficiency. New leads who were forced to use email instead began CC'ing the relevant team members, like the engineers who would actually use the product, into the thread, providing more direct and detailed interaction immediately. The consensus is that eliminating the dreaded "quick 15 minutes" meeting actually saved everyone 15 hours of future administrative cleanup.

IT Department Deploys Recursive Infinite Kiosk to Stop Robot Scanners

The ongoing war against bots scraping the web for LLM training data has escalated into an act of performance art. A developer, known as Aaron B, unveiled a system called Nepenthes, named after a carnivorous pitcher plant, designed to trap AI web crawlers in a malicious computational loop. The software works as a "tarpit", creating an infinite, dynamically generated maze of webpages with links that only point back to the maze itself.

The idea is that a good robot will respect the robots.txt file; but a bad robot, or a hungry AI scraper, ignores polite signage and is lured into the web's equivalent of a velvet rope line that never moves. Once trapped, the system can optionally feed the crawler gibberish "Markov Babble", theoretically poisoning the future AI model with nonsensical data. The entire initiative is less a protective measure and more an act of digital rage, akin to filling the office break room coffee maker with decaf grounds.

The Extravagant Delivery Service Race: Super-Heavy Booster Lands, But Its Package Catches Fire

The rivalry between competing interstellar shipping companies continues its absurd march toward the stars. SpaceX launched Starship Flight 7, which managed a remarkable success and a spectacular failure in a single afternoon. The massive Super Heavy booster performed its return maneuver flawlessly, even completing a successful "catch" by the launch tower’s enormous chopsticks. This is excellent news for future reusability; they got the huge, heavy first-stage vehicle back to the loading dock in one piece.

Unfortunately, the Starship upper stage, which carried the actual mock cargo, experienced a fire and a rapid unscheduled disassembly eight and a half minutes into the flight, which is the company's preferred euphemism for "exploded." Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin finally managed to get its equally titanic New Glenn rocket into orbit on its first flight, meaning the second richest shipping magnate is now one step closer to delivering non-essential items to space, too.

Briefs

• Nintendo: The company announced the Switch 2, promising a new console that will maintain the firm tradition of being a decade behind its rivals, but somehow still better.
• GitHub Issues: Microsoft's GitHub is introducing sub-issues and issue types, adding new bureaucratic layers to the simple act of reporting a bug which broke the build.
• Nokia's Past: A 2007 internal presentation detailing Nokia's assessment of the newly launched iPhone has surfaced, offering a nostalgic look back at when a massive company had every correct data point but still managed to misinterpret the future. The PDF is a classic of the genre.