Oracle engineers deleted production data, stopped hospitals.
Also Firefox reintroduces folders and Duolingo outsources to algorithms.

The Case of the Missing Database: Oracle Confirms an Oopsie

It turns out that when you try to move a very large filing cabinet, you should probably make sure you have someone holding the door open on the other end, especially when the contents of that cabinet contain the entire electronic health records for multiple hospitals. Oracle is confirming that a team of its engineers, part of the Oracle Health group which manages the Cerner system, managed to cause a five-day software outage.

The problem, according to reports, was a maintenance error where Oracle engineers accidentally deleted critical storage tied to a core database; forcing at least forty-five Community Health Systems facilities to revert to paper-based patient records for nearly a week. This is corporate-speak for "someone skipped the final checklist item and now we have to buy new toner and perform emergency surgery by candlelight." The Hacker News comment section, predictably, is a delightful mix of people confirming their worst fears about EHR stability and lamenting the structural fragility of systems that absolutely cannot fail. We wish the affected hospitals a speedy recovery, or at least a stable staging environment.

Tesla Gets the Gold Star on the Bureaucracy Pop Quiz

In a clear demonstration of knowing the corporate tax code better than your peers, Tesla has managed to secure the only exemption from the government's new auto tariffs. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that vehicles with 85 percent or more domestic content will face zero tariffs. This number, 85 percent, is fascinating because, according to the Made in America Auto Index, only certain Tesla models currently meet the specific threshold.

Other car companies are now looking around the office, wondering how they missed the memo about the 85 percent rule being the actual assignment. The general consensus from the comment section suggests this is not a coincidence, but rather what happens when a company's lobbying department gets a personal walkthrough of the legislation. It is a fantastic example of a company reading the fine print and discovering the secret bonus level.

The Owl Has Learned a New, Expensive Word: “Layoff”

Duolingo, everyone's favorite hyper-persistent green owl, has decided its human contract workers are finally being outsourced; to algorithms. The company is embracing an "AI-first" strategy, gradually stopping the use of contract workers for content creation and translation tasks that AI can handle. CEO Luis von Ahn compared the pivot to the company's early mobile-first bet in 2012, which is an encouraging comparison unless you are one of the contractors being compared to a Blackberry.

The CEO insists the shift is not about replacing employees but removing "bottlenecks," though he concedes there may be "small hits on quality" in the pursuit of scale. In a bizarre coincidence that only the tech universe could manage, this news is perfectly paired with the rise of LibreLingo, a free and open-source alternative. If the giant green owl is going to fire its human staff, the FOSS community will apparently just build its own office with better coffee, no algorithmic overseers, and certainly no streak notifications.

Mozilla Finds the Archive Box Labeled “Good Ideas”

Mozilla is happy to announce that Firefox now has Tab Groups. For those of you who have been in the browser wars for a while, you may recall this as the "Panorama" feature; a piece of organizational functionality that was so useful it was naturally removed back in 2016 due to "low usage" and "high maintenance." It is a triumphant return of a feature that allows users to organize the digital chaos they created, proving that if you wait long enough, the company will eventually retrieve the stapler you liked from the storage unit.

The announcement frames the return as a community-driven effort, which is the nicest possible way of saying the developers finally listened to the users yelling at them in the parking lot for the last decade. While the feature itself is a welcome addition to the modern web browser landscape, the whole affair feels like an IT ticket that was finally closed after nine years; and now everyone is pretending the printer was never broken. The comments are mostly relief, tempered by the kind of weary resignation only a long-term Firefox user can muster.

Briefs

• Search Engine Turf War: John Gruber recommends switching to Kagi. The quiet search engine in the corner of the internet is apparently better at finding things than the one that also sells you advertisements for those things.
• The $8000 Comma: An engineer detailed the story of a single line of code that cost $8000 to fix. The lesson here is that you do not get paid by the line; you get paid by the stress induced by the line.
• Geographic Compliance: An Indian court ordered the blocking of Proton Mail over a complaint involving abusive emails and AI-generated deepfake explicit content. This is just a reminder that sometimes the only difference between an email server and a filing cabinet is which jurisdiction has the court order to open it.