Air Traffic Control Oversaw Midair Collision
Also database deletion and time is still broken

The Overhead Projector Just Clipped The Maintenance Drone

Air traffic control, which is essentially the cloud-based load balancer for the sky, confirmed a minor 'physical interaction' today near Reagan Airport; a commercial jet had a fender-bender with a police Black Hawk helicopter. This appears to be a major scheduling oversight. Someone, somewhere, clearly failed to check the shared calendar before routing two entirely different departments into the same patch of airspace at the exact same moment. It is the real-world equivalent of both you and Steve from Sales trying to access the same restricted network segment with conflicting credentials.

We are currently awaiting the root cause analysis, which will likely take six to eight months and blame a poorly patched firmware update on one of the involved machines; the media reports a midair collision. This should serve as a stark reminder to all departments: even if your tasks are mission-critical, they must still be properly unit-tested against concurrent execution, especially when the test environment involves several tons of rapidly moving metal. The sheer volume of this data loss is concerning.

The Government’s Filing Clerk Is Having A Cleanout Sale

Apparently, the US government has decided that its official, public-facing filing cabinet is entirely too full. This week, we learned that thousands of datasets are disappearing from Data.gov; leaving archivists and concerned citizens scrambling to download the equivalent of old expense reports before the whole server is wiped for 'optimisation purposes'.

This is not a malicious act; it is just pure, unadulterated bureaucratic neglect. The data is simply being scrubbed, and the people responsible are likely going home at 5 PM thinking they finally cleared out that old 'Miscellanea' folder. The key takeaway is that your taxpayer-funded data is as ephemeral as a meeting agenda that was only shared via Slack. If you need it for future audits, you had better print it out and store it in a temperature-controlled bunker.

JavaScript Decides It Is Time To Finally Understand What 'Time' Is

The stewards of the JavaScript language have announced the arrival of Temporal; a new API that promises to fix the eternal, baffling problem of telling time in an application. This is a monumental admission that all previous versions of the JavaScript Date object were an elaborate prank played on developers by a cynical committee. It could not handle time zones; it hated daylight saving; and it generally acted like a clock that was always five minutes fast and occasionally running backward.

The new API will allegedly handle everything correctly, much like the new intern promises to handle all of the company's social media. Developers who have spent their careers writing thousands of lines of code to calculate what time it is in the office in Seattle versus the server in Frankfurt can now look forward to replacing all of that with a single function call; and then spending the next year debugging why the single function call is still off by an hour twice a year. Progress is merely trading one set of problems for a newer, smaller set.

Mistral AI Releases New Intern Model; Now 30% Smaller and 10% Less Confident

Mistral AI unveiled Mistral Small 3, its latest language model designed to be compact and cost-efficient. The model is essentially a budget-conscious AI; the kind that can handle all the simple administrative tasks without incurring the high overhead of the flagship model which, frankly, spends most of its time writing mediocre poetry about its own existence.

The company is touting its efficiency; which is marketing speak for 'it requires fewer GPU cycles to hallucinate'. This is a smart move in the AI arms race; rather than chasing larger models that promise sentience, Mistral AI is cornering the market on models that are just competent enough to automate your email sorting; the true final frontier of artificial intelligence. It is the perfect size for an employee that you only need to look busy.

Briefs

• Staffing Update: Google is offering a 'voluntary exit' package to employees in the Pixel and Android divisions. This is the new, polite corporate term for a soft layoff, where you are invited to promote yourself to unemployment.
• The Cult Issue: Authorities are linking a string of recent killings in the Bay Area to a group known as the 'Zizians'. Just another day in the Bay Area; where the housing prices are high and the spiritual coping mechanisms are murderously complex.
• Access Control Failure: California law enforcement was found to have misused state databases over 7,000 times in 2023. That is more than 7,000 internal audit reports that will be filed under 'Oversight is for other people'.