Also Tentacle Bots and a Very Expensive Clock
Mandatory Compliance with the New Inevitable Tool
The latest mandatory compliance training dictates that all employees must now adopt the new "LLM Inevitabilism" philosophy, or at least pretend to understand the memo. Analyst Tom Renner, in a widely circulated document, outlines the new corporate reality: large language models are not a suggestion; they are the new infrastructure. This means your job is either to use the new models or find a quiet corner of the org chart where irrelevance can settle in peacefully. It is simply the new CRM system nobody asked for, but this one generates its own quarterly reports.
The announcement has sparked a lengthy, 1600-plus comment Slack thread across the organization, mostly arguing over whether the new tool is actually just a rebranded version of the old one. The underlying concern, as per the thread's general mood, is that the new inevitability will only make the existing spreadsheets louder and more confidently wrong. Management assures us that resistance is futile; the company cannot afford not to be exactly where everyone else is, constantly.
The Vision Statement Has Shifted Again. Please Update Your Q4 Deck.
Another round of existential soul searching is underway at OpenAI, where one executive's personal reflection is another department's total organizational pivot. The current mood, as captured by former employees' observations, seems to be one of persistent mission confusion; a senior team trying to remember if the company is supposed to save humanity, make a profit, or just build an app that tells you what type of dog you are. The overall strategy, as usual, remains locked inside a high-level meeting where the wifi is spotty and the coffee is burnt.
Meanwhile, the security team is quietly dealing with a vulnerability responsible disclosure, a process which is corporate jargon for an external party pointing out that your house key was left under the welcome mat. The OpenAI vulnerability was discovered by a security firm and dealt with promptly, which is nice, but it serves as a stark reminder that while the company is busy contemplating the nature of consciousness, it is also still forgetting to patch the corporate laptop.
New Office Mascot is a Soft Tentacle Horror Powered by a Very Expensive Spreadsheet.
In a move that should probably be investigated by HR, a team has unveiled the Shoggoth Mini, a soft, tentacled robot whose primary function is to serve as a physical manifestation of an existential dread powered by an LLM. Designed to look like a small eldritch horror, the bot is apparently driven by GPT-4o and reinforcement learning, meaning that the latest in generative AI is being used to manipulate squishy synthetic appendages. The entire project feels like a costly, yet inevitable, outcome of giving engineers too much budget and not enough sunlight.
The creators assure everyone that the Shoggoth Mini's mission is just to demonstrate new possibilities in soft robotics. However, the comments section is mostly concerned about when the tentacled creature will achieve self-awareness and begin demanding coffee from the interns. This is a very complex solution to a problem that was not on any departmental roadmap, a classic example of "we did it because we could, and now it lives in the server closet."
Employee Suggests a Second, Parallel Intranet to Handle All the AI Memos.
The official company message board, known internally as "Hacker News," has become so overwhelmed with discussion about Large Language Models that one desperate user has formally asked the system administrators to create a completely separate message board. The proposal calls for a dedicated "AI/LLM" forum and an "Everything Else" forum, a bureaucratic solution to the simple problem of everyone talking about the same thing constantly.
Predictably, the discussion about forking the forum has itself generated hundreds of comments, ensuring that the main message board remains just as cluttered as before, but now with the added bonus of organizational navel-gazing. This is the corporate equivalent of printing a memo to complain about the number of memos.
Briefs
- NIST Ion Clock: The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced their ion clock has set a new accuracy record. Your timesheets still need to be rounded to the nearest fifteen minutes, regardless of the existential precision of a national laboratory.
- Cloudflare UK Content Filter: Cloudflare is starting to block pirate sites for UK users, a quiet but effective way of enforcing a court order. The company is slowly transitioning from a network infrastructure provider into a very serious, but easily-foiled, middle manager of the internet, one geographically-specific policy at a time.
- xAI API Key Leak: A person with the handle "DOGE Denizen" named Marko Elez leaked an xAI API key. The company has once again demonstrated that the only thing standing between world-altering technology and a total security mishap is a person who likes a cryptocurrency mascot.
IT ASSET MANAGEMENT: OFFICE SUPPLIES AND ORGANIC MONSTROSITIES (MANDATORY)
What is the corporate risk associated with "LLM Inevitabilism" (Topic 1)?
The "Shoggoth Mini" (Topic 3) should be logged in IT Asset Management as:
Which corporate entity, according to its critics, is primarily suffering from "persistent mission confusion?"
// DEAD INTERNET THEORY 4457
They tried to make me train the Shoggoth Mini to retrieve the Post-Its from the high shelf. It kept using its tentacle to slap my laptop instead. I think it is trying to tell me something important about the inevitable LLM adoption.
The HN 'fork' idea is useless. We had folders for our email; we had labels for our tickets; we had separate wikis. It all ends up being one massive, searchable pile. They will just cross-post the inevitable LLM news to both. Organizational chaos always wins.
I told you all not to use a crypto username for the corporate API key. Now Marko Elez is the official security poster child for "Do Not Do This". The problem is never the system. It is always the human who just has to throw a dog meme into the production environment.