Also Altman calls people names and Figma wants to leave.
Accounting Gets The PowerPoint Wrong Again
The Federal Reserve, an organization ostensibly in charge of money, has made a rather significant visual oopsie in a research paper. The agency was attempting to illustrate the volume of one million dollars in crisp $100 bills using a neat little graphic of a cube.
The problem is that the cube they chose for the visual aid was visually off by roughly half a million dollars, meaning the cube they showed was either worth closer to $500,000, or the $1 million cube is much larger than depicted. This error was featured in a paper titled "A Simple Model of the Banking System" which is truly a fascinating title considering the model appears to break down at the simple step of counting money. They are simply terrible at stack ranking currency, which explains so much about the economy.
Cloudflare Institutes The "No Free Samples" Policy
The office landlord, Cloudflare, has decided that the horde of AI agents constantly rooting through the trash for training data needs to start chipping in for the rent. The company has rolled out a new feature called Pay-Per-Crawl, which allows website owners to basically sell access to their documents on a per-query basis.
Websites can now set a price for all the large language models trying to scrape data, or they can opt out entirely. This is less about building a better internet and more about finally setting up a toll booth on the company supply driveway; The AI companies were always going to treat everything on the internet like a communal office snack table, and now Cloudflare is just the manager who put a little jar next to the cookies labeled "Suggested Donation: $2."
The CEO Calls the Competition's Hires "The Temp Workers"
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has entered the schoolyard drama by issuing a definitive statement on the morality of employee compensation, or rather, the lack thereof. Leaked messages indicate Mr. Altman is not happy with how Meta is conducting its talent acquisition spree, calling the candidates who jump ship for higher pay "mercenaries".
He insists that the "missionaries will beat mercenaries" which is a high-minded way of suggesting that employees should prioritize the company's existential, vaguely world-changing quest over paying for their mortgage. Meta, meanwhile, appears to be operating on the less poetic but more functional principle of offering "obscene" amounts of cash to get the talent they want. It is almost as if some people value money more than an AI-driven vision statement.
Figma Files Its Exit Paperwork
Figma, the popular design tool, has finally filed its paperwork to try and leave the office. The company submitted a confidential S-1 filing for a proposed Initial Public Offering. This is basically the corporate version of submitting a resignation letter, but instead of leaving for a better job, you are just leaving to become a publicly-traded piece of office equipment.
The company was famously the subject of a cancelled acquisition by Adobe, which means its eventual IPO roadshow is going to be less about future growth and more about how they nearly got bought out, but the deal fell through. The company is now hoping the market will validate the cost that Adobe chose not to pay, which is a stressful way to start a new chapter.
Briefs
- Fakespot: The service that detected fraudulent product reviews is officially shutting down operations after being acquired by Truestar. This means the software designed to spot the lies has itself become a footnote; it is the natural order of the modern web.
- Grammarly and Superhuman: Grammarly is acquiring the email productivity startup Superhuman. This merger creates a new entity whose sole purpose is to tell you how to better write and then send more emails; our digital dystopia is becoming aggressively polite.
- Spegel Browser: A new "Show HN" project introduces Spegel, a terminal browser that uses an LLM to rewrite the content of webpages. This finally solves the problem of needing to see the web in a terminal, but only if the AI can successfully re-interpret the underlying data, which is essentially just delegating a new interpretation failure.
OFFICE RESOURCE AND POLICY COMPLIANCE TRAINING (MANDATORY)
What is the correct corporate response to the Fed's $500,000 visual accounting error?
According to Sam Altman, what is the core failing of AI engineers who accept large, competitive salaries at Meta?
What is the primary function of the Grammarly and Superhuman merger?
// DEAD INTERNET THEORY 44439058
Cloudflare Pay-Per-Crawl is a genius move, but they are aiming too low. I want an API where I can set the price to one million dollars per crawl for bots I want to block, then just wait for the inevitable float-point error when they try to pay.
Altman calling people 'mercenaries' for accepting millions of dollars is the most 'I already have billions of dollars' thing I have heard all week. My 'mission' is to make sure my kid goes to college, not to train a slightly better chatbot. Pay me.
Fakespot shut down today; The company whose entire value proposition was checking if a review was real could not survive the era of synthetic reality. This is not a tragedy; it is the most perfect piece of corporate irony in years.