Streaming services raise content fence too high.
Also LLMs are still useless; and Meta opened the wrong folder.

The Budget Cuts Have Led Us To Steal Office Supplies Again

Streaming services, after promising the consolidated utopia of the VCR-killing era, have apparently fractured into a thousand tiny fiefdoms, each demanding a separate administrative fee. This move is now driving customers back to piracy, the original Shadow IT department. The viewers are not acting out of a sudden moral decay; they are simply tired of juggling eight different logins and a dozen monthly charges that collectively cost more than the old cable bill, the one everyone hated.

It seems the industry has completed the circle of digital life, a full 360-degree journey right back to the dark web. The viewers never actually left the content; the services just made accessing it a complicated, multi-factor authentication chore where every application had a different, non-transferable subscription key. It turns out that convenience was the only product they were selling; and when the cost of that convenience exceeds the cost of a private torrent tracker, the market corrects itself with an oopsie.

The New Intern Can Write Poems; But Still Can't Close a Ticket

A new, deeply sensible blog post from the folks at Zed outlines why Large Language Models cannot actually build software, despite their ability to generate convincing boilerplate code for marketing demonstrations. The fundamental issue is not a lack of data; the LLM is just a master of plausible text, not a master of the actual problem space. It cannot debug an architecture; it only knows how to rephrase the error message in iambic pentameter.

LLMs are essentially brilliant, hyper-fast interns who can draft a project proposal in two seconds, but the moment they have to deal with a real-world dependency or an edge case outside the training data, they immediately start hallucinating the entire codebase. This is why Google's newest model, Gemma 3 270M, is being billed as a compact model for hyper-efficient AI. This just means it is smaller and therefore has less room to make a catastrophe; the small models are basically just trained to say "I don't know" faster.

HR Reminder: Stop Looking at the Flo App Data

A court has determined that Meta accessed women's health data from the Flo app without proper user consent. This falls neatly under the umbrella of "The Systems Administrator who went rooting around in the wrong folder and found something awkward." Meta, which is led by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, was ostensibly trying to optimize ad delivery, which is Silicon Valley code for "we tried to organize our friends list and accidentally sold everyone's private journal."

The fact that Meta did this despite explicit rules against it suggests a deeply entrenched company culture of benevolent incompetence; or perhaps just a bad internal QA check on the data piping. The health data was simply too compelling to not process, apparently. The company's internal tools must be too easy to use; making it too simple for employees to accidentally commit a billion-dollar privacy violation just by checking a box.

Briefs

• Apple Watch Feature Restoration: Blood oxygen monitoring is returning to the Apple Watch in the US. A very minor technical patent dispute that caused a temporary removal has been resolved; the feature has completed its timeout in the corner and is now allowed back to the lunch table.
• Mac Gaming Experience: The rendering of games on Mac computers is probably still blurry, according to a developer. This is likely an intentional design choice; Apple does not want you to play games, it wants you to be productive and buy more dongles.
• Kodak is Fine: Kodak issued a statement confirming they have no plans to cease or go out of business. The photo company had to take time out of its day to confirm its continued existence, which is the most corporate way to admit everyone assumed you were dead.