Meta shipped a large new internal codebase.
Also elephants were successfully removed from marketing collateral.

The Llama 4 Launch: Just Add More Parameters and Hope

The Systems at Meta are expanding their internal livestock population with the release of the Llama 4 herd. Management is calling this model an "upgrade" because it is demonstrably larger than the previous Llama 3; a familiar metric in our industry for progress. Meta is touting the new multimodal intelligence which, in layman's terms, means the model can now fail equally well with both text and images. This is not malice, of course, just a dedicated and well-funded attempt to make an office intern who can access both the corporate Slack and the shared photo drive simultaneously, and with the same level of questionable judgment.

Chief Innovation Officer Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly very excited because the model is still being released "openly" to select large entities, which is the corporate equivalent of leaving the source code on a public FTP server but only giving the password to your four closest friends who all work at competing companies. The prevailing wisdom from the engineering floor is that the entire project is mostly a complex shell game designed to make the existing data centers look busy. We should treat Llama 4 not as a groundbreaking achievement, but as a new line item on the Q3 budget report that we all have to use at least once before we can delete the email.

HR Proposes Mandatory Cessation of All Marketing Collateral

The latest think piece suggests that if we simply made advertising a criminal offense, the world would be a better place. This is a naive fantasy, akin to believing that if we ban coffee, the entire engineering department will suddenly gain three hours of productivity. In reality, the moment all paid promotions are removed, the free internet collapses, and every single website instantly becomes a subscription service with three pricing tiers.

The core problem is that people want everything, but they do not want to pay for anything, which is why the Advertising department exists as a necessary evil to keep the servers running. If we fire the entire Sales team tomorrow, all we are left with is a giant cloud server bill and a very small team of developers who are now responsible for explaining why their personal word game, which their mom thinks is great, is worth eight dollars a month. The comment threads are predictably filled with people who hate being sold things, but who will immediately complain when their favorite newsletter stops showing up.

The AI Department Finally Figured Out How to Not Put Elephants on the TPS Report

A major breakthrough has been achieved in image generation; models can now listen to the word "no", a concept that eludes most junior developers. Previously, if you asked an AI for a picture of a car in a parking lot, it would proudly include a large, inexplicably present elephant playing a trombone in the background. Now, through something called "negative prompting," the AI can be explicitly told not to include the trombone elephant, which is a major victory for corporate sanity.

This entire feature is a perfect encapsulation of the industry's progress: we build an incredibly complex system that is fundamentally broken in a weird way, then we build an equally complex system on top of it to fix the first complex system's weird break. Now, instead of the elephant, we just get a slightly misshapen giraffe standing on a unicycle. We should celebrate the small victories; at least the marketing department can now get a clean photo of the product without resorting to a very expensive external vendor.

Briefs

• Kernel Architecture: Apple has released an extremely long document detailing the history and structure of its Darwin OS and XNU Kernel. You do not need to read this; your laptop will still run the same whether you know the system calls or not.
• Legacy Communications: The AT&T Email-to-Text Gateway Service is ending on June 17. The two people still using this for mission-critical paging are now scrambling to find an equally inefficient method of sending urgent one-line messages.
• HR Document Discovered: A 2016 memo titled Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer has surfaced. The primary rule remains the same: always accept the first number, but pretend you thought about it for a week.