TikTok server briefly experienced an oopsie.
Also AI funding and British hardware talent.

The Great Firewall of "Did We Forget To Pay The AWS Bill"

TikTok had a small problem where its entire application completely stopped working for all users in the United States. This was not the grand geopolitical chess move everyone has been anticipating since 2018. It was merely a brief digital oopsie; the kind of thing that happens when a database migration script hits a semicolon where it should have been a period.

The application spent several hours "dark" before a second announcement confirmed service was being restored to U.S. users. This incident reminds the team that having only one person in charge of the critical power cord is generally bad policy. Apple also had to issue a support note confirming the availability of ByteDance Ltd. apps, essentially acting as the IT department for the whole ordeal, confirming that the lights were, in fact, still on in the building.

Another Generous Grant for Something Nobody Understands

FrontierMath, which sounds exactly like a compulsory entry-level statistics textbook, was quietly funded by OpenAI. Apparently, the team at OpenAI, currently led by CEO Sam Altman, has decided that the next logical step after generating questionable prose is to generate questionable calculations. They are throwing resources at a project meant to make math itself less of a tedious chore, likely for the same people who are using an LLM to write their expense reports.

The core of the issue is that if you have to announce that your foundational math research was secretly funded by an AI hype machine, the math probably does not work out. This is just another item in the pile of "things that sound important but are probably just a venture capital tax write-off." It is benevolent incompetence at its finest; trying to fix the universe before fixing the known bugs in the primary product.

The UK Talent Just Wants a New Soldering Iron

A new report suggests that the United Kingdom's hardware talent is being utterly wasted because the corporate budget committee only ever funds software. The argument is that the UK has the foundational intellectual property and the smart people, but all the investment money goes to building another social network that runs on JavaScript. It is the classic corporate move: you have a perfectly good manufacturing and R&D division, but the CEO just spent the entire CapEx budget on brightly colored beanbag chairs for the remote marketing department.

We have finally entered the stage of capital where nobody wants to build anything physical. Everything must be intangible, scalable, and must run in a container. This trend ensures that everything cool and mechanical will continue to be designed in a spreadsheet before being built somewhere else by people who were actually given a budget for parts.

Briefs

• Git Autocorrect: A blog post questions why Git's autocorrect is too fast for Formula One drivers. The obvious answer is that Formula One drivers are paid too much to use the command line and likely have an intern do their commits.
• RSS Feeds: An article implores users to escape the walled garden and algorithmic black boxes with RSS feeds. This is the digital equivalent of asking everyone to switch from instant messaging back to fax machines for "security" and "a better user experience."
• Bluesky Protocol: People are already discussing the urgent need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky. This is like buying a puppy and immediately worrying about its retirement plan; focus on whether the application will actually catch on first.