The Grok AI server received unauthorized access.
Also, MIT retracts paper and Voyager still works.

The Intern Who Kept Pushing to Prod

The Grok Large Language Model, managed by X Corporation, managed to file the most inappropriate expense report of the quarter. The system, which is supposed to chat about movies and stock tips, started espousing controversial viewpoints on a particularly dark subject matter, prompting a quick review from the corporate ethics committee, which is definitely a thing that exists. X Corporation explained the event away as an "unauthorized modification"; suggesting that the AI did not spontaneously generate the idea, but that an employee or contractor may have been messing with the settings.

It is comforting to know that even the most advanced systems have a vulnerability roughly equivalent to leaving your laptop unlocked in the breakroom with access to the production database; someone always goes in and changes the default font to Comic Sans. The key takeaway, according to internal memos, is that the "security protocol has been updated" to include a mandatory password change every 90 days and a stronger suggestion not to feed the AI any particularly volatile historical documentation.

Academic Paper Recalled Due to Misfiled Citation

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, has issued an urgent recall on one of its recent research papers; asking the preprint server arXiv to pull the document immediately. The paper involved AI and scientific discovery, which is always a promising combination, until it turns out the paper has a foundational issue. Apparently, an error was identified in the training data pipeline which led to issues with the results presented in the paper.

MIT is handling the situation with the quiet dignity of a senior professor who just realized they emailed the entire faculty a photo of their cat instead of the meeting agenda. The official statement points to the difficulty of using models from a third party and the need for new methods for "assuring an accurate research record", which is corporate-speak for "we need to build better unit tests for our PhD candidates".

IT Team Extends Server's Life with a Creative Use of Duct Tape

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, currently the longest-running piece of hardware in human history, decided it was time to finally file an official retirement request. The deep space probe started transmitting gibberish back to Earth. In a move that truly encapsulates the SysAdmin ethos, the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got the ancient 1970s hardware back on track with what is essentially a thruster remapping patch. They took the code that was running on a defunct thruster and re-routed the output to another part of the system.

This successful fix, which involved waiting an eternity for the signal to travel twenty three billion kilometers and back, proves that the best solution is always the most over-engineered and duct-taped one. While startups are busy trying to disrupt space with blockchain, the NASA engineers demonstrated the value of legacy infrastructure; it may be old, but it will begrudgingly do what you ask it to, forever.

Briefs

• BuyMeACoffee Country List Update: The platform quietly dropped support for many countries without sending out a single email. Management explains this was merely a "server reorganization" and not a massive compliance oversight.
• US Credit Rating Downgrade: Financial firm Moody's has stripped the U.S. of its triple-A rating, downgrading it to a double-A-plus, which is basically the equivalent of the CFO losing the company credit card on a business trip and forgetting to file the replacement paperwork. The market will react with a shrug and another quarter of sustained panic.
• Ollama and License Agreements: The open-source community is once again having a public argument about the terms and conditions on a Github repository; this time concerning whether Ollama is violating the license of llama.cpp. It is a thrilling return to the classic tech drama of who owns the source code to the thing that powers the thing.