GPT-4.5 Is Finally Ready For Pro Users
Also IBM Acquires Your Favorite Infrastructure

The Quarterly AI Feature Bump That Cost A Quarter More

OpenAI, the startup that is currently pretending to be an infrastructure vendor with a flair for the dramatic, has announced the rollout of GPT-4.5. The main selling point for this new iteration of the company's flagship large language model seems to be a vastly improved Emotional Quotient, or "EQ". Apparently, the old model was just too good at being a robot; now it is better at being your condescending manager who starts every performance review with a non-committal question about your weekend.

The announcement details that the model has "reduced hallucinations" and "stronger reasoning on the horizon," which is corporate speak for "we fixed some of the typos and we might fix the rest later". This particular research preview is only for ChatGPT Pro users, because nothing screams democratized, world-changing technology like a paywall designed to filter out the free users asking it to write a poem about sandwiches. The key takeaway for our operations team is that the model's knowledge cutoff date is October 2023, meaning we still cannot trust it to summarize any project completed in the last four months.

IBM Successfully Completes The Blue-Washing of HashiCorp

The corporate circle of life concludes its latest grim cycle as IBM, the global tech behemoth, announced it has completed the acquisition of HashiCorp. This means the Terraform and Vault that thousands of companies rely on to actually run their cloud infrastructure are now officially integrated into a business model that historically turns innovative open-source projects into expensive, hard-to-maintain enterprise bloat.

IBM Chief Commercial Officer Rob Thomas noted the deal "infuses HashiCorp technology in every data center," a statement which has been interpreted by the developer community as a polite threat. Veteran engineers are already bracing for the shift in licensing, product support, and general corporate culture, knowing from experience that the merger will result in the immediate and permanent disappearance of all the good coffee machines and desk snacks at the HashiCorp offices.

EA Finds The Server Room Keys, Releases Two Decades of Dust

In a move of historic corporate benevolence, Electronic Arts (EA) open sourced the code for several Command & Conquer games, including Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, Renegade, and Generals. This is less an act of charity and more an attempt to get the community to deal with their legacy codebase that is apparently so old it still relies on dependencies like the DirectX 5 SDK and the Borland Turbo Assembler version 4.0.

The GitHub repository notes explicitly that the source code "does not fully compile" and requires significant effort to restore. It is the digital equivalent of inheriting a classic car with no engine, no tires, and a note taped to the steering wheel saying, "Assembly required; tools sold separately, and must be borrowed from 1997". EA is not accepting contributions or pull requests, confirming this is simply an archive of historic code, or as we call it in the industry, "unsupported garbage".

Briefs

• DIY Surveillance: A new proof-of-concept called NRoottag demonstrates how to turn any standard Bluetooth device into an Apple AirTag tracker using a simple exploit without needing root privileges. This is great news for anyone who needs to find their keys, or anyone who wants to track Steve from accounting; the tools are now democratized.
• Productivity Study: Someone wrote a surprisingly long blog post about the history and rules of Microsoft Solitaire. It is a vital research contribution proving that the distributed systems problem is indeed stalled, because all the developers are busy perfecting their FreeCell strategies.
• Shell Updates: The Fish shell project has released version 4, dubbed Fish 4. It is probably still easier to use than trying to find the good stapler in the new IBM office building.