Also: A Trillion-Dollar Oopsie and Bots Ban Linux
The Smartwatch No One Asked For Is Now Being Built Again (For Real This Time)
Pebble, the plucky startup that was swallowed by Fitbit which was then acquired by Google, is apparently back from the dead. Founder Eric Migicovsky has launched Core Devices LLC to build new e-paper watches, coinciding with the massive, multi-year, multi-departmental corporate effort that resulted in Google releasing the Pebble OS source code on the same day. The entire spectacle feels less like a resurrection of a beloved product and more like an organizational chart finally dissolving a defunct department and sending its assets home with the original owner.
The announcement is complicated by the presence of Rebble, the dedicated community that kept the original Pebble watches alive for nine years after the company shut down. While Migicovsky thanked the Rebble Foundation, there are reports of friction, including a key Rebble contributor stepping back due to the negative interactions with the new Core Devices company. This suggests the spirit of open-source collaboration immediately hit the inevitable corporate reality where a small team attempts to create a product, immediately gets into a public spat with the non-profit volunteers who are actually sustaining the ecosystem, and then wonders why the community seems tired.
The $589 Billion Optimisation: An Intern Found a Shortcut and Broke the Global GPU Supply Chain
Nvidia, the company whose entire business model is selling incredibly expensive shovels for the AI gold rush, experienced what analysts are calling the single largest market capitalization drop in history, shedding almost $600 billion in value. The culprit is the release of DeepSeek's new AI model, which demonstrated that a smart use of low-level assembly-like programming—specifically Nvidia’s own PTX instruction set—could achieve startling efficiency.
The efficiency gains are reportedly ten times higher than industry leaders, suggesting the entire arms race for bigger, more resource-hungry GPUs might have a simpler software solution. It seems the multi-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure market is built on the same fragile foundation as any modern office network; one clever optimisation that bypasses the standard, proprietary API (CUDA) is enough to send the whole building into a panic, resulting in an emergency all-hands meeting for every executive whose bonus is tied to a rapidly depreciating stock price.
Meta's AI Declares Linux a Cyber Security Threat; Locks Out Key Users
Facebook, which is owned by Meta and runs its entire multi-billion-dollar back-end infrastructure on a version of Linux, has managed to create an internal policy error where its automated systems began to flag the word "Linux" and links to the popular DistroWatch site as "malicious software." The platform, in a moment of exquisite bureaucratic failure, started taking down posts and locking the accounts of users discussing the operating system that keeps the lights on at its own headquarters.
The whole incident is less a conspiracy against open source and more a simple, yet spectacular, display of AI-driven incompetence. Meta later admitted the enforcement was made in error and has since been addressed. For a brief moment, the internal security bots at one of the world's largest companies declared war on the foundation of the company itself, presumably because a configuration update mistook a distribution name for a zero-day exploit.
Briefs
- Career Realignment: A popular essay details how a layoff fundamentally changes a person’s perception of work, mostly confirming that your "work friends" were actually "convenience friends" and corporate loyalty is an imaginary concept invented by HR.
- The Unshrinkable Web: A developer chronicles his surprisingly failed attempt to shrink all NPM packages by 5% by implementing a superior compression method. The takeaway is that the global node dependency ecosystem is too fragile for even minor, objectively positive, maintenance.
- Tesla Quality Control: In Denmark, nearly one in four 2020 Tesla Model 3 vehicles failed their periodic inspection in 2024. This is a solid metric for "premium build quality".
MANDATORY CULTURAL FIT & ASSET ACQUISITION TRAINING
Which part of a company’s acquisition is most likely to result in the core development team citing burnout?
A competitor releases an AI model 10x more efficient than yours, causing a massive stock rout. The correct action is:
// DEAD INTERNET THEORY 240127
Wait. The original Pebble founder is back, Google open-sourced the OS, and the Rebble people are mad about it? This is exactly how the Star Wars sequel trilogy went, but with wristwatches. They just can't let anything stay dead and perfect.
The Facebook Linux ban is priceless. It's the equivalent of the office safety bot issuing a violation notice to the CEO because his office chair doesn't meet OSHA standards. The irony is going to overload the moderation AI.
DeepSeek is just a reminder that spending billions on a GPU cluster doesn't fix inefficient code. Someone found the PTX instruction set for five minutes and saved the world $589 billion. This is why we need to stop hiring people who know how things work at a low level; it's a net loss for shareholder value.