Also, Your "Made in USA" Phone Costs $2000
The "AI" Automation Rate: Effectively Zero Percent
The one-tap shopping app Nate, which claimed its success was built on proprietary artificial intelligence, was actually running on the tired patience of hundreds of humans. Founder and former CEO Albert Saniger faces federal fraud charges for allegedly misleading investors who poured over $50 million into the company. The US Department of Justice announced that Nate's "AI" automation rate was effectively zero percent.
The FBI describes Nate as a scheme filled with smoke and mirrors, revealing that the company hired hundreds of overseas contractors, referred to internally as "purchasing assistants," to manually process the e-commerce transactions from a call center in the Philippines and Romania. It turns out the true miracle of modern technology is merely convincing venture capitalists to fund your high-tech international call center.
The Price of Geo-Political Peace of Mind
Purism, the hardware company focused on privacy and freedom, is once again in the news for its extremely local supply chain, proving that you can, in fact, build things in the United States. The company's $2,000 Liberty Phone is an ultra premium version of their Librem 5 phone that is manufactured and assembled with surface-mount technology in Carlsbad, California.
Purism sells the phone at a massive premium over its stated base manufacturing cost of about $650, claiming the high price is fully justified by the secure, traceable supply chain that is specifically aimed at the government security market. This significant markup on local labor and a few US made components is the true cost of geopolitical comfort in the modern era.
Google Adopts The USB-C of Artificial Intelligence
Google is officially adopting Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, which many developers are already referring to as the "USB-C for AI." The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is an open standard designed to fix the miserable problem of connecting large language models to internal company data, third party tools, and other proprietary systems.
Anthropic created the protocol to standardize the data flow, which previously required every developer to build custom, fragile connectors for every single data source. Google Cloud is now implementing fully managed, remote MCP servers, which will allow AI agents like its Gemini family to plug directly into first-party services such as Google Maps and BigQuery. It is a corporate peace treaty disguised as an open technical specification.
Briefs
- Python's New String Behavior: The Python world gets the new PEP 750, or Template Strings. This is the official document for making string interpolation mildly less tedious for the next ten years.
- Calendar Sovereignty: An engineer detailed the first part of the highly personal mission to own her own data by integrating a self-hosted calendar solution. The level of administrative overhead required to escape Google is now fully documented.
- The Empty Comic: The internet once again celebrates Garfield Minus Garfield. It turns out that stripping away the corporate mascot leaves a surprisingly profound, if bleak, existential void.
OFFICE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT TRAINING (MANDATORY)
The "AI" deployed by Nate, according to the Department of Justice, was:
Google's adoption of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) most closely resembles which administrative action?
// DEAD INTERNET THEORY 404
Wait, the Nate story proves my point. The most reliable AI in the world is just a person who desperately needs the paycheck. We should be investing in Universal Basic Income, not Universal Basic Transformers.
I'm fine with the $2000 price tag for the Purism phone. If I have to explain to the procurement department why my phone costs more than a used car, it better come with a mission statement about security and manufacturing transparency. You have to buy the narrative, not just the components.
MCP being a "USB-C for AI" is the single most terrifyingly accurate metaphor I have heard all year. Expect all the cables to get lost, half the ports to only charge, and the other half to not support the transfer rate you need. But at least they all look the same.