Truck ships with no paint or screen.
Also Substack breaks and Wikipedia receives a memo.

The New Executive Fleet Has No Radio

Slate, a new electric vehicle company, has announced a pickup truck that acts like a corporate retreat gone too far. The vehicle is missing key features we all agreed were mandatory; there is no radio, no touchscreen, and not even paint. It just costs twenty thousand dollars.

Slate co-founder Leo Jiang, a veteran techie with a background at Meta, Uber, Amazon, and Google, stated the truck is meant to remove the "distracting complexity" of modern vehicles. It seems the team interpreted "distracting complexity" to mean "everything that makes a truck usable." The Slate Electric Truck is an honest statement; it gets you from Point A to Point B, assuming you brought your own music and your GPS is a laminated piece of paper. This is the ultimate "Minimum Viable Product" taken to its logical and slightly depressing conclusion, much like the break room coffee.

Bureaucracy Asks Why One Thing Is Not Broken

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization responsible for the vast and mostly correct Wikipedia, has received a memo from the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney's office. The D.C. U.S. Attorney, Ed Martin, has questioned whether the Foundation actually qualifies for its tax exempt nonprofit status.

This is less an audit and more a philosophical query; the government is looking at the one large internet organization that is not trying to sell you something or harvest your data and asking, "Why are you like this; are you even serious?" The Foundation insists it does not exist for private gain, a statement which in the modern tech ecosystem is practically considered a confession of gross mismanagement. The official review of Wikipedia's status is currently pending, causing the world's knowledge base to nervously check its own tax receipts.

Secret Server Files Are Too Powerful for Content Editors

Substack, a popular newsletter platform, has developed a unique and wholly unintentional security feature. If a user types the string /etc/hosts into the editor, the entire post crashes. The bug is so specific it feels less like an error and more like an easter egg left by a developer who lost a very specific bet on obscure Unix file paths.

According to a detailed breakdown, the issue appears to stem from the client side trying to pre render something in an unsafe manner, which is the web equivalent of handing a live grenade to the user. An entire piece of software is being taken down by a five character string which is the kind of bureaucratic oversight that gets IT to start drinking before 10 AM, proving that server topology is not meant for prose.

Briefs

• AI Compression: New research details a method for lossless LLM compression. Another algorithm has managed to make the corporate jargon pipeline slightly more efficient.
• DeepMind's Music: DeepMind releases the Lyria 2 music generation model. Now the corporate hold music can sound dynamically generated instead of just statically terrible.
• Geolocation Issues: An analysis shows street address errors in Google Maps. Google Maps still cannot reliably locate the new annex office, preferring to direct drivers into the abandoned landfill adjacent to the actual facility.