Clock Needs Two CPUs to Display Time
Also Office Chair Status and Accurate Butt Washing

The Existential Dread of Nanosecond Time-Keeping

The new Precision Clock Mk IV from developer Mitxela has settled one of the tech industry's oldest philosophical debates; how much is too much. The answer, apparently, is not yet. This timepiece requires a GPS satellite connection, a Temperature-Compensated Crystal Oscillator, and, for reasons that seem to involve corporate overstaffing, not one but two distinct ARM microcontrollers just to tell you the time. We can only assume the second microcontroller is an expensive middle-management chip that simply signs off on the data from the first one.

The core innovation is a flicker-free, analog LCD driver circuit with a 100 kHz refresh rate, a feature critical for the one person in the world who owns a high-speed camera and is dedicated to filming their desk clock. The real fun begins when the conversation moves past the parts list and into the metaphysics of time. Engineers are now forced to debate if the clock should update its display when the time is accurate at the component level, or if it should delay the display update to account for the minute fraction of time it takes the light to travel from the screen to the viewer's eyeball. This entire discussion confirms the hypothesis that when you have solved all the real problems, you invent micro-problems to justify your existence.

Legacy Hardware Finally Hits Product-Market Fit in America, Forty Years Late

The long, baffling wait for Americans to accept the objectively superior bathroom technology is finally over. The Toto Washlet, a Japanese device which has been standard-issue in its home country since the 1980s, is now the new must-have appliance, thanks in large part to the supply chain crisis of 2020 which convinced people that maybe paper was not a core dependency after all.

Manufacturer Toto is seeing profit increases eight times over in the Americas, proving once again that all it takes to sell a $2,000 toilet that can keep water at a precise 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit is a little celebrity endorsement and a global health panic. While early models apparently had an oopsie where they would occasionally spray inspectors in the face, the current version is guaranteed to give you the confidence you need to crush it in the boardroom, according to at least one user comment. It is comforting to know that our high-tech self-worth is only one perfectly aimed jet of water away.

A Note on the Compiler: Stop Asking it to "Move Faster and Break Things"

Our internal audit has uncovered a critical vulnerability in the core of our business: simple arithmetic. The article, Beware of Fast-Math, details how compiler flags like -ffast-math, which is actually a collection of 15 separate flags, tell the machine to stop caring about strict mathematical precision in favor of raw execution speed. This has led to the delightful discovery that our profit margin reports are only "mostly accurate."

The real compliance nightmare is that if one of our new microservices links a shared library compiled with this single compiler flag, the subsequent loss of mathematical guarantees can corrupt the floating-point behavior for the entire program, including the section that calculates the CEO's quarterly bonus. This means a single, aggressively optimized component is silently introducing a bug that acts like a virus, changing the very definition of addition across the entire ecosystem. Please remember: precision is important, especially when we are calculating stock options.

Briefs

• AI Liability Waiver: The news that AI Responses May Include Mistakes is shocking only to people who have not been in a meeting with a new hire who confidently fabricates an answer. We already knew the new interns could hallucinate; now we just have a faster way for them to do it.
• Physical Backups: PunchCard Key Backup is back, offering a way to Store Data on Paper using QR codes or physical hole-punches. Security is enhanced by the fact that no modern tech executive owns a hole punch or understands how paper works.
• Web Development Sits Down: One developer decided to skip the entire infinite scroll framework pipeline and just wrote an article, I made a chair, detailing the satisfaction of building something that simply exists and does not require a weekly security patch.