Meta AI remembers 42 percent of book
Also, Palantir checks your expense reports

The New Hire Who Only Read the First Half of the Memo

The research team over at Meta Platforms, Incorporated has announced that their new 70-billion parameter Large Language Model, Llama 3.1, has achieved a stunning 42 percent verbatim recall of the first Harry Potter book. This is not, they assure us, a catastrophic copyright liability, but rather a groundbreaking achievement in being able to reproduce nearly half of someone else's intellectual property when prompted.

The internal memo reveals that this is actually a significant regression from the previous iteration, Llama 1, which was kind enough to only copy about 4.4 percent of the same book. Essentially, Meta spent billions in compute power to make its AI ten times better at plagiarism. The goal was to build a brain; what they got was a colleague who insists on reading passages from The Hobbit at the wrong time in a meeting. Management is reportedly thrilled because at least the model is "really passionate about something."

Inter-Departmental Feud Forces Protocol Rebrand

For those curious about ancient, 1990s-era corporate politics, a retrospective on the SSL to TLS name change highlights the timeless absurdity of standards bodies. Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, was originally created by Netscape Communications for their web browser. When the protocol was brought over to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standardization, it was summarily rejected on branding principles.

The core issue was not a deep technical flaw between SSLv3 and the new Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0; it was apparently a purely political act to avoid the appearance of "rubberstamping" a competitor's protocol. Imagine getting pulled into a two-year, high-stakes meeting where the only outcome is agreeing that you will call the photocopier a "Multifunctional Print and Imaging Device" just so the other department does not get the credit. The result is two decades of people still calling it SSL. The victory is truly Pyrrhic.

The Only Way to Fix Space Wi-Fi is to Break It with a Spudger

It appears that after purchasing a thousand-dollar satellite dish from Elon Musk's Starlink, the only professional way to optimize it is to open it up and immediately tear out the parts that make it convenient. The Starlink Mini comes with a built-in Wi-Fi router, which is handy for normal people, but the blog of Oleg Kutkov details the painful process of surgically removing the router board.

The logic here is SysAdmin-perfect; the internal router consumes a few too many milliamps and emits a detectable radio frequency signature. If you are a casual user, you just hit "Bypass mode," but if you are an advanced user who needs a stealth drone to maintain flight time in a warzone, the correct solution is to ignore the software and use a thin, flexible knife to pry off the heatsink. This ensures maximum efficiency and the lowest possible RF signature; or, as we call it in the office, "warranty voiding done for strategic reasons."

Briefs

• Security Awareness: An uncomfortably large number of journalists are reportedly wary of travel to the US because they are convinced Palantir's global surveillance software is essentially a highly-optimized HR snooping tool. This is only news because they are surprised a company whose business is tracking people is tracking people.
• Obscure Hardware: You can now modify an HDMI dummy plug's EDID using a Raspberry Pi. This will solve a problem that approximately three people worldwide have, but those three people will consider it a Nobel-level achievement.
• Nostalgia Trip: Canyon.mid is a single-serving website that serves up the classic 90s MIDI file, which is an impressive waste of a modern server and a beautiful tribute to the sound quality of a dial-up modem.