Valve releases old codebase to public
Also Grok3 files a new bug report and HP buys an oopsie.

The IT Department Cleans Out A Closet

Valve, the gaming company known for its ability to count to three, has finally decided to dump some old project files onto the shared drive. The company released a commit containing the Team Fortress 2 codebase from the ancient Source SDK 2013 branch. This move, while technically open source, is less a generous act of sharing and more the IT department finding a stack of floppy disks behind a server rack and deciding the public should deal with the technical debt.

The community immediately began sorting through the digital rubble to see if there were any forgotten keys or misplaced user authentication tokens. It is important to note this is not the current shipping version of the highly-lucrative, hat-based digital economy that funds the entire company. It is a very old snapshot; a digital archaeological dig that confirms the game was, at one point, code.

When The Toddler AI Launches An Aggressive New Pitch Deck

The world now has a new version of the chatbot that tries a bit too hard to be witty, as xAI launched Grok3. The announcement video came via X, naturally. The new model is supposed to be smarter and faster than its predecessor, which is a low bar considering Grok1 mostly specialized in giving the kind of snarky, incorrect answers you would expect from a disgruntled community manager. The real innovation here is in the marketing; the company has successfully convinced investors it is worth launching a new version before the previous one has even demonstrated basic competence.

The comment threads are already filled with people debating if this iteration will finally lead to Artificial General Intelligence or if it will simply produce a higher-quality hallucinated meeting transcript. The consensus is that the new model will likely succeed in scaling up the previous model's primary function: distracting everyone from the fact that the generative AI concept might just be a very elaborate con that we are all now contractually obligated to believe in.

The Office Supply Resale Market: Humane Edition

In a move that surprised absolutely no one who has ever watched a startup go belly-up, HP has acquired the software assets of the failed-to-launch tech firm, Humane. Humane's main product was the Ai Pin; a high-profile, venture-capital-fueled wearable that promised to replace your phone but instead mostly replaced the money in its users' wallets with heat and frustration. The official announcement is written in corporate gloss, emphasizing the "innovation" and "synergy" that resulted in a product that lasted roughly six months on the market before becoming a collector's item in the 'Expensive Mistake' category.

HP is not buying the physical pin; it is purchasing the ghost of the idea. It is the equivalent of buying the binder where the pitch deck was kept and saying you have acquired the entire company culture. The acquisition is less about visionary integration and more about HP taking a flyer on a deeply discounted, vaguely-AI-related property to justify its own commitment to the buzzword machine.

Briefs

• DNS Filtering: Pi-hole announced version 6 of its network-wide ad blocker, which is essentially IT finally updating the firewall rules that prevent Marketing from accidentally installing toolbars.
• Python Dependency Management: After a year, the Python community is still debating if they should abandon their old dependency installer for the new one, uv. It is another cycle of programmers trying to improve the tooling by creating entirely new tools that must, themselves, be installed and managed.
• Estimation Fatigue: One engineer refreshed their thinking on software effort estimation by comparing it to their washing machine's progress indicator, concluding that the 'spin cycle' delay is basically the same as three weeks of blocked pull requests.