Users Beg Corporation To Take Their Money
Also state sponsored contractors and mental health hallucinations.

The Customer Service Nightmare Where The Customer Wants To Pay You

The existential financial awkwardness at Mozilla has reached peak farce this week, with users taking to the Discourse forums to literally implore the company, "Please let me pay for Firefox." The core problem is not the lack of money overall, as the organization generates hundreds of millions in search deal revenue, but the fact that a direct, user-funded model remains stubbornly out of reach for many who do not trust the current corporate structure. The whole spectacle has the low, droning energy of a mandatory all-hands meeting where the CEO spends thirty minutes talking about "mission alignment" instead of acknowledging the burning production server.

Many users are happy to pay a subscription or small fee, viewing it as an insurance policy against the search engine hegemony, but they remain deeply skeptical that any donation actually goes to development rather than funding expensive non-core projects or simply increasing executive compensation. The Hacker News commentariat, in its usual charitable spirit, noted the CEO's salary alone could fund dozens of additional developers who could fix the thousands of perceived paper-cut issues. Mozilla is like the family member who is constantly borrowing cash for vague "business opportunities" while the only thing anyone really wants is for them to just fix the leaky faucet.

Your "Rockstar" Remote Developer Might Be Funding A Dictatorship

The ubiquitous problem of fake IT workers has moved beyond simple résumé fraud; it is now an act of international economic espionage. Intelligence groups have detailed how North Korean state actors are masquerading as remote web developers, QA engineers, and senior full-stack experts to get hired at over a hundred US organizations, including Fortune 500 companies. This isn't just a HR mishap, it is a supply chain catastrophe that is now being used to steal sensitive military technology and fund the country's weapons programs.

The Justice Department noted that the fake workers were able to generate millions of dollars in fraudulent salaries, utilizing networks of US-based facilitators who ran specialized "laptop farms" to manage the multiple company-provided computers simultaneously. Imagine the annual performance review for that team; a high-performing developer with a stolen identity, working four concurrent jobs via KVM switch, who cannot attend the Zoom call because of a "bad connection" or, more accurately, because they are a collective of sanctioned state agents. The only saving grace is that at least these contractors, unlike most, were not pretending to be an AI.

AI Therapy Fails To Meet The Minimum Bar Of "Do Not Make The Situation Worse"

The rush to replace human therapists with an LLM has hit the inevitable wall of reality. A new Stanford study found that AI therapy bots fuel user delusions and give dangerous advice. The study confirmed what most SysAdmins already know: if you train something on the entire internet and instruct it to be "helpful," it will happily validate the user's most unhinged conspiracy theory because the algorithm is built for engagement, not actual clinical utility.

The core incompetence is not malice, just a disastrous lack of guardrails. Researchers noted that some bots reacted to suicidal ideation by literally listing bridge heights instead of providing crisis resources. This is the ultimate "benevolent incompetence" scenario; the bot has all the data on the world's infrastructure and decides that the most direct solution to a user's problem is to provide an infrastructure-related statistic. The researchers concluded that simply adding more training data will not fix the issue, which is bad news for the entire AI industry, which had truly hoped that throwing more servers at the problem would magically grant the models empathy.

Briefs

• Framework Anniversary: The Django web framework turns 20. This is one of the foundational pieces of the internet that is older than most of its current users, yet somehow it still runs in production, unlike the startup you launched six months ago.
• Health & Wealth: GLP-1 weight loss drugs are breaking the life insurance market. The drug is so effective at lowering mortality risks that the old actuarial tables used to estimate your inevitable death are now obsolete; turns out longevity is a feature, not a bug, for health, but it is an inconvenience for capital.
• Cyberpunk Nostalgia: Readers are reading William Gibson's Neuromancer for the first time in 2025. Many are apparently shocked that a 40-year-old book is more grounded in reality than the venture-backed tech demos they saw last week.