Self-Driving Teslas Misclassify Motorcyclists Again.
Also, AI Is Still Bullshit and The Apple Stapler is Gone.

The Quarterly Results for Traffic Cone Identification Are In

Internal reporting shows that Tesla Autopilot is struggling with its annual performance review, specifically in the category of not hitting the one type of traffic participant most vulnerable to a vehicle-borne oversight, motorcyclists. A new analysis reveals that self-driving Teslas are fatally rear-ending motorcyclists with a higher frequency than other comparable autonomous platforms, which is just an unfortunate way of saying the code appears to have a known blind spot. The data implies that the corporate AI is consistently classifying motorcycles as something benign, such as a rogue tumbleweed or perhaps an inconsequential blur of pixels; a classic case of aggressive filtering leading to a major production issue.

While the development team keeps iterating and pushing the latest release candidate, the rest of the industry is taking the opportunity to quietly update their internal documentation to include a new, very expensive exception case. The situation serves as a stark reminder that if you delegate all of your visual QA to an overworked machine learning model, sometimes the system will simply decide that two wheels are less important than four. It is a simple optimization problem, with unfortunate physical-world consequences, that could have probably been avoided with a single, dedicated bike-spotting intern.

Annual AI Performance Review Confirms Existing Suspicions

A mandatory internal memo has circulated, confirming what everyone in the adjacent cubicles already knew; the perceived pace of AI progress is mostly performance theater. The general sentiment amongst the technical staff is that the incremental gains are less like true innovation and more like a developer spending six months refactoring the internal names of variables just so they can claim "architectural improvement" in the next quarterly review. The paper suggests the field is hitting a temporary local maximum on a very confusing hill.

It feels like the entire team is trapped in a never-ending cycle where they have to announce a new large language model every six weeks, but they cannot actually tell the Chief Executive Officer that the models are still terrible at math. The underlying issue is a familiar one, namely that the more complex a system gets, the more energy is spent convincing stakeholders that the complexity is a feature and not an inevitable flaw.

The Server Migration: Changing The Default R-Utility

Apple is once again shuffling the contents of its digital junk drawer, this time opting to replace the venerable rsync utility with openrsync in its new macOS Sequoia operating system. This bureaucratic change, which impacts automated scripts and legacy cron jobs everywhere, is akin to corporate IT switching out the brand of coffee in the break room, only to watch half the office complain that the new brand does not respect the old settings. The move is being framed as an inevitable license compliance initiative, which is a common euphemism for "we found something we did not want to maintain anymore."

Mishaps in the Modern Cloud-Powered Office (MCP)

An internal security audit has reminded everyone that the "S" in the Managed Cloud Platform, or MCP, does in fact stand for Security, as frustrating as that may be for developers trying to meet an impossible deadline. The underlying issue is a familiar one where access controls become a layered mess of complexity; a system so baroque it is only a matter of time before someone grants read-write permissions to the entire database by checking the wrong box on a deeply buried web form. We have been informed that the new policy is now to assume all external APIs are inherently compromised until proven otherwise in a mandatory, 45-minute webinar.

Briefs

• Ebook Quality Control: Standard Ebooks is producing high-quality, liberated e-books. This is what happens when a community decides the IT department is not doing a good enough job with the corporate library.
• Digital Hoarding Costs: A new report suggests that data centers contain 90% crap data. The problem is that no one in the company can agree on what "crap" means, so the Sysadmin just keeps buying more expensive solid-state drives.
• EU Sends Another Passive-Aggressive Email to X: The European Union is preparing major penalties against X. This is the corporate equivalent of an Human Resources memo that says "We noticed some concerning posts in the common Slack channels."