Amazon's Robot Broke My Git Server.
Also, Virtual Pets Invade Source Code Editors.

The AWS Intern Who Ate The Bandwidth

Amazon's new Artificial Intelligence initiative, a crawler intended to hoover up all the public code in the world, decided to treat one poor individual's Git server like an all-you-can-eat corporate buffet. The server, maintained by Engineer Xe Iaso, immediately experienced significant instability and severe load issues. Amazon's bot, creatively named Amazonbot, seems to have a few configuration problems, primarily related to honoring the universally accepted robots.txt protocol which is essentially the digital version of a "Do Not Disturb" sign.

The core issue is not malice; of course not. Amazon is simply trying very hard to index the world's knowledge and accidentally put their elbow through the display case while doing so. It is merely a minor oversight in their grand corporate effort, a simple matter of a multi-billion dollar crawler not knowing how to follow basic office etiquette. The company should really mandate better training on how to use the shared resources. Meanwhile, the rest of the network is bracing for the eventual flood of clumsy bots that will inevitably follow.

Essential Developer Productivity Tool Finally Launched

Engineers have long complained about the sterile and unfeeling nature of the integrated development environment, or IDE. Today, the core problem facing software development has been solved. The VS Code community has launched VS Code Pets, an extension that allows developers to have tiny, virtual animals running around their source code files. These pets, ranging from cats and dogs to Clippy-esque digital assistants, do absolutely nothing to improve code quality or runtime efficiency.

The new feature does, however, add an essential, distracting layer of emotional support to the Sisyphean task of fixing CSS errors. One can now fail a unit test while a virtual cat chases a virtual mouse across a virtual desktop, which is exactly the innovation the industry needed, not better compilers. We are finally using technology to address the root cause of developer burnout, which is that one does not have enough digital hamsters running on digital wheels in the corner of their screen.

AI Assistant Tries To Date The Popular Social Media Kid

Just hours after the US Supreme Court upheld a controversial ban on the platform, Perplexity AI submitted a last-minute bid to merge with TikTok, demonstrating perfect corporate timing. Perplexity AI, the scrappy search-and-answer upstart, is attempting a high-stakes acquisition, which is less about technical synergy and more about desperately acquiring a user base with the attention span of a goldfish.

The company likely sees this as a wonderful opportunity to integrate its large language model into a video feed, thereby potentially making the video feed slightly more coherent for approximately 0.5 seconds of viewing time. The entire move is the equivalent of the quiet, hyper-intelligent kid from the Math Club showing up at the prom with the captain of the cheerleading squad; a spectacular narrative, if it manages not to fall apart under regulatory review.

Briefs

• Garmin Pivot: The Watch Company Is Now A Health Data Company. This is the part where they finally realize they have been sitting on an absolute mountain of your personal jogging telemetry.
• The RSS Re-Re-Advocacy: The Cycle Begins Anew. Every four years a brave soul declares that the feed format invented in 1999 is the future, a tradition as old as changing your password every six months.
• BitLocker Fiasco: Windows Security Hole is Hardware Dependent. Your multi-layered security plan is apparently only as strong as the one spare screw you have laying around in the dusty server rack.