Classic Apple Engineer Is Now Offline
Also Political Threats and Mandatory Browser Changes

The Quarterly Audit of Legendary Personnel

The original architects of the modern user experience are being systematically checked out of the system. We regret to inform you that Bill Atkinson, the man responsible for foundational infrastructure like QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard, has been logged out permanently. His passing is being treated internally as the decommissioning of a critical, single point of failure that we somehow never got around to replacing. The complexity of what he built ensures that while the new team will never truly understand the original code base, the tools he created will continue to run in undocumented corner cases for at least another three decades.

This news sends a chilling reminder to all of our long serving employees: please update your documentation and stop using proprietary shading algorithms that only you understand. Mr. Atkinson’s genius, which included the famous Atkinson dithering algorithm used to save memory on early displays, now represents a severe institutional knowledge gap that cannot be solved by a single, emergency all hands meeting. We are currently searching the archives for a copy of the original 1980s onboarding presentation, like the one detailing what it was like joining Apple Computer. We hope to find a few more gold tidbits about the good old days before we are forced to migrate everything to a microservices architecture.

Escalation Matrix: When The CEO and The Former CEO Are Fighting

The interdepartmental tensions between Elon Musk, Chief Everything Officer, and Former CEO, Donald Trump, have reached a critical escalation level. This high profile dispute now involves threats to SpaceX contracts. It is a classic corporate power struggle, only instead of fighting over who gets the corner office, they are fighting over who gets to launch things into space and who gets to tweet about it first. The immediate risk is a massive disruption to the orbital logistics pipeline, an outcome that is somehow less dramatic than the average Monday morning meeting.

Compliance has issued a boilerplate memo reminding all executives that they must maintain a professional demeanor, even when discussing the future of national space programs and personal grievances on social media. The situation is being monitored by the legal department which is currently attempting to discern if a threat to cancel a government contract is a breach of fiduciary duty or just another Tuesday for modern celebrity executives. The commentary suggests that this is simply what happens when two people who own too many things suddenly realize their things are contingent upon the other’s things.

The Mandatory IT Memo Regarding Personal Device Compliance

The Washington Post has finally published what all of us in IT have been saying since 2010. Their official privacy tip is essentially an all caps, red text, mandatory corporate email telling you to Stop Using Chrome and Delete Meta Apps. We have tried to be subtle; we really have. We sent out the helpful 'Digital Spring Cleaning' guides and the 'How to Protect Your Family Photo Album' newsletters. Now it has escalated to 'Just burn the whole thing down and move into the woods.'

The memo is a testament to the fact that we have run out of patches and workarounds for corporate surveillance. When a major news organization has to recommend throwing your phone into a river, it means that the problem is no longer a bug; it is a feature. IT is now compiling a mandatory compliance checklist which will include substituting a physical Rolodex for your Meta friends list and replacing all desktop browsers with a stack of index cards. At least they did not forget to include Yandex in the purge; we appreciate that attention to detail in the chaos.

Briefs

• Digital Isolationism: The joy of building your own server continues to appeal to people who enjoy having two full time jobs. It turns out that true tech independence just means you can only blame yourself when the database fails at 3 AM.
• Anthropic’s Field Notes: Developers shared their experiences shipping code with Claude, treating the Large Language Model like a surprisingly effective, slightly unpredictable offshore contractor. The notes are less about technical breakthroughs and more about managing the temperament of an entity that can write code but cannot manage a basic file system.
• The Package Manager Cycle: Another company, Railway, announced Why We're Moving on from Nix. This confirms the First Law of Development: all package managers will eventually become sufficiently complicated to warrant replacement with a new, equally complicated package manager.