Government buys ten percent of Intel desk.
Also autonomous cars enter the Thunderdome and a social network quits over forms.

Mandatory Partnership for Synergistic Optimization

The U.S. government, our favorite compliance department, has just acquired a ten percent non-voting equity stake in Intel Corporation. This unprecedented arrangement is reportedly part of the massive subsidy package from the CHIPS Act. Essentially, Intel received a large envelope of cash and the government is now insisting on sitting in the corner of the cubicle farm to make sure the money is being spent on regulation-compliant pencils and not, say, a new artisanal coffee machine for the executive floor.

The stake is non-voting; which means the government has no say in the corporate direction; it just has the right to monitor the expense reports and occasionally remind Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger that they need to attend the mandatory quarterly Ethics Refresher Webinar. This is a beautiful demonstration of what happens when you try to apply the rules of an established bureaucracy to the chaos of silicon manufacturing. The comments section is predictably split between "This is the inevitable government takeover of everything" and "Wait, the government is trying to make us efficient now; the apocalypse is upon us."

Automated Pilot Program Enters Hard Mode

Google's Waymo self-driving division has been granted a permit to begin testing its fully autonomous vehicles in New York City. This feels like the part of the simulation where the difficulty setting gets ramped up from "Suburban Cul-de-Sac" to "End-of-Days Traffic Jam." New York City is not a place where logic or established traffic patterns are consistently adhered to; it is a place where every driver makes eye contact and then immediately does the opposite of what you expect.

The Waymo vehicles are known for their overly cautious, strictly rule-based driving; which is a fantastic idea everywhere except the five boroughs. The real-world test for their AI will not be navigating the lanes; it will be learning to ignore the double-parked delivery truck and then accepting the collective honking of the entire metropolitan area as an affectionate greeting. Good luck to the safety engineer assigned to the inevitable "NYC Autonomous Grinding Hault of 2026."

Bluesky Refuses to Fill Out Form, Leaves State

The decentralized social network, Bluesky, has decided that the state of Mississippi’s new age verification law, HB 1126, is simply too much effort. Rather than implement a robust, potentially privacy-violating, ID-checking system across a single state; Bluesky has just elected to turn the whole thing off for Mississippi users.

This is the ultimate corporate move: when faced with a bureaucratic obstacle, instead of working around it, you simply delete the entire regional division. Bluesky states that the law presents "unacceptable privacy and security risks," which is corporate speak for "We do not have the budget for a dedicated compliance engineer; so we just pulled the plug on the region." It turns out the easiest way to solve a complex regulatory problem is not with innovative blockchain solutions, but with the classic sysadmin move of just adding a firewall rule to block all incoming traffic.

Briefs

• FFmpeg 8.0 Release: The beloved video processing tool is out with version 8.0. It mostly contains bug fixes and stability enhancements; which means the version number is the most exciting thing about it.
• 4chan Fine Refusal: The platform's lawyer told the BBC that they will not pay daily online safety fines. The digital equivalent of a rebellious teenager refusing to take out the trash; knowing their parents cannot really do anything about it.
• Cloudflare Incident Report: Cloudflare published a post-mortem on their August 21st incident. It was not a grand cyberattack or a cosmic ray, just a "brief loss of performance" due to an internal system configuration change; also known as "Someone pushed to prod on a Friday."