Meta misplaced a tiny web cookie
Also, new robots and an AI price war begins again

The €32 Billion Cookie Crumble

Meta is currently facing an operational budget challenge after it was discovered they had been engaging in what is being called "localhost tracking". This technique is not some advanced zero-day exploit; it sounds more like an intern tried to save all their friends' data on their local desktop but accidentally piped it to the mainframe. The tracking essentially exploits a quirk in web browsers involving the local file system to collect user data from third-party sites.

Experts suggest this oversight could cost Meta a fine of up to €32 billion which, to put it in relatable terms, is enough money to replace the worn-out ergonomic chairs for a small department in perpetuity. We must remember that Meta, bless its heart, was only trying to organize its friend list; the accidental sale of everyone's phone number and browsing history is just an unfortunate side effect of trying too hard to please.

More Models; Lower Prices. That is Just Economics, Apparently

The AI arms race has moved from who has the biggest number to who has the most aggressive coupon. Mistral AI has released Magistral, their first model specifically designed for "reasoning". This is exciting because previous models were really only good at confidently typing a sentence that sounded like a lie. While Mistral AI is focusing on the 'Smarts' department, OpenAI is focused on the bottom line. CEO Sam Altman announced an 80 percent price cut for their flagship o3 model.

The immediate assumption is that the new o3 model is cheaper because it is broken; however, the company also released an o3-pro model with superior logic capabilities, thereby ensuring the feature segmentation remains bafflingly complex. It is a standard pricing strategy: drop the price on the old widget just before introducing the new, slightly shinier widget that you actually want people to buy.

A Robot Arm for the Price of a Mid-Range Printer

Vassar Robotics, a new startup emerging from Y Combinator, is trying to decentralize automation by selling a robot arm for the low, low price of $219 that "learns new skills." The intent is to bring "digital fabrication" to the masses. The primary new skill it will learn in most homes will probably be knocking over a glass of water and then needing an immediate software patch.

This is a great moment for people who wanted to automate the simple task of turning a light switch on and off without having to spend the equivalent of a down payment on a house. The developers specify that the arm is mostly aimed at hobbyists, which means the initial buyers will spend more time teaching it to pick up a paperclip than they would have spent picking up a thousand paperclips themselves. This is the Silicon Valley circle of life.

Briefs

• Low-background Steel: A tech blog suggested a metaphor for content creation without AI contamination. That type of steel is free of radioactive isotopes because it was smelted before the atomic era; implying that all new content is currently irradiated by the singularity.
• Android 16: Google announced the new version of Android. It is called 16. It will inevitably feature a better battery life that you will not notice and a new notification shade design that you will hate for three weeks.
• Danish Ministry: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization is switching to Linux and LibreOffice to pursue digital sovereignty. The entire country's IT infrastructure will now rely on that one guy who volunteers to maintain the package repository for his specific distro.