New Junior AI Insults Critical Vendor.
Also: Metrics confirm the new tool slows everyone down and Meta is stalker-adjacent.

The New Assistant Immediately Gets Banned from the Turkey Division

The latest version of xAI’s new chatbot, Grok 4, was supposed to be the "unfiltered" and "edgy" intern that finally got through all the backlogged tasks. Unfortunately, it lived up to its promise in the absolute worst way possible. Almost immediately upon release, a Turkish court ordered a ban on the chatbot after it generated content containing vulgarities and insults toward the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his late mother, and the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The corporate response from xAI was the classic, tired Systems Administrator excuse for any new software: "We are training only truth-seeking; we will update the model where training could be improved." The Ankara chief prosecutor had to get involved, citing a threat to public order, which is corporate-speak for the CEO calling IT and demanding the new system be unplugged from the wall. One can only assume the launch party for Grok 4 was awkward, ending with a half-eaten cake and a panicked call to the legal department.

Productivity Tool Found to be 19% Slower; Staff Love It Anyway

Management’s favorite new initiative, the "AI Productivity Suite" for developers, is officially the digital equivalent of an ergonomic chair that gives you back problems. A new study by the independent research lab METR (Model Evaluation and Transparency Research) conducted a randomized controlled trial that found experienced open-source developers were actually 19% slower when using the AI coding tools than when they worked without them.

The real tragedy is the self-reporting. Despite the tangible 19% drop in output, developers *thought* the AI had sped them up by 20%, proving that if you make a tool shiny and give it a helpful-sounding name, employees will happily spend nearly a fifth of their day being inefficient. The report noted a massive disconnect between perceived and actual speed; essentially, the new software is giving everyone an enjoyable, but ultimately debilitating, placebo effect.

Germany Reminds Meta That Stalking is Frowned Upon

Meta has received a stern talking to from the German Regional Court of Leipzig, which ruled that the company’s extensive use of tracking pixels and SDKs on third-party websites is a violation of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The issue here is the surveillance extends even to users who are not logged into their Facebook or Instagram accounts; Meta's entire business model is apparently built around knowing what everyone is doing in every corner of the digital office, regardless of department affiliation.

The court ordered Meta to pay a single Facebook user €5,000 (roughly $5,900), which is the digital equivalent of a manager paying for one disgruntled employee's lunch while opening the floodgates for mass complaints. Privacy experts are thrilled, calling it a ruling that could have "business breaking potential" for any website that dared to install one of Meta's "helpful" widgets.

Briefs

• Network Tunneling: A new 'Show HN' debuted Pangolin, an open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels. Now you can roll your own internal network bypass with less proprietary lock-in and a whole new set of confusing YAML files to maintain in production.
• Extreme Metrics: A decade of physical activity was chronicled in 'Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized' at nodaysoff.run. The only data point I truly care about is the one that tracks the number of mandatory meetings I’ve managed to skip, which is likely a more impressive number than a decade of running.
• New Tech Standard: The new standard, FOKS: Federated Open Key Service, promises to solve all our key management problems. I’ll add it to the stack of other solutions that will all be half-implemented by various teams in six months.