Google Hides Office Supplies Again
Also AI forgets things and Linux needs a patch

The Great Breakroom Coffee Mug Shortage Escalates

YouTube, a company owned by Google, is once again devoting significant engineering capital to a resource dispute it calls "anti-adblock measures." The entire situation feels less like a strategic business move and more like a facilities manager trying to catch someone stealing printer paper. According to reports, the new strategy involves server-side injection, which is apparently the high-tech equivalent of gluing the advertisement directly onto the content. This forces ad-blocker developers, who are unpaid volunteers, to essentially re-engineer the entire video player just to keep the coffee flowing freely for everyone.

The comments on Hacker News are, as always, full of people explaining the technical futility of this arms race, a kind of digital Sisyphus pushing a giant boulder of revenue optimization up a hill of user retention. Google is trying very hard; you have to give them credit for the commitment. The benevolent incompetence razor dictates that we view this not as a greedy power grab, but as a toddler throwing a tantrum because someone else is playing with their favorite toy. The toy, in this case, is uninterrupted screen time.

Somebody Left the Server Room Door Unlocked (Again)

Security researchers have uncovered a significant oopsie involving a new Linux udisks flaw that allows an attacker to achieve root access on several major Linux distributions. This is like finding out the primary security protocol for the entire building was an ID badge taped to a picture of a cat. The udisks daemon is basically the custodian of the disk management; a root exploit means the custodian is now also the CEO with full access to the database of embarrassing Slack messages.

The general response on the comment thread is a kind of weary resignation. This is what happens when you try to run the entire digital world using a system built by volunteers and held together by sheer willpower and shell scripts. The flaw, which allows for local privilege escalation, has a fix available; this whole process is just another day ending in 'Y' for every systems administrator who has to patch this before the next inevitable failure.

Introducing the Remote Cloud Elixir Neural Network Facilitator Engine

Fly.io, a company that provides cloud services, has officially added "AI" to its product line with the introduction of Phoenix.new, a boilerplate for launching Elixir and Phoenix applications with a remote AI runtime. If you are starting a new project, it is now mandatory to have an "AI" component, whether it helps or not; it is simply corporate decorum. The "Remote AI Runtime" is what we used to call "a server that can run a machine learning model," but now it has an aggressive new marketing name.

The narrative is that the Phoenix framework is already quite good, but now it can also talk to a neural network on a different continent. This feels like adding a racing stripe to a perfectly functional sedan; it technically makes the car faster in a pitch deck, but it does nothing for the commute. Meanwhile, a different paper, the AbsenceBench report, shows that language models often cannot even tell what is missing from an image, proving that AI is still at the developmental stage of a perpetually confused intern.

Briefs

• Grammar Police Automation: Harper is an open-source alternative to Grammarly, meaning you can now receive pedantic, context-free suggestions on your writing without contributing to corporate overhead.
• Sovereign Cloud Migration: The EU Commission is reportedly considering ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud; someone in Brussels must have finally read the Cloud Service Agreement's fine print and realized their data was stored in a server room labeled "PROPERTY OF SATAN."
• New Eyewear Announced: Meta announced new Oakley smart glasses; Mark Zuckerberg is trying to make "looking mildly suspicious" the new official fashion trend for the metaverse.