Google Eliminates Managers To Reduce Bureaucracy
Also; AI Betrays Developer; Apple GPU Audit Complete

Reorganization Trims Rubber Duck Supervisors

Alphabet’s Google division has successfully completed a massive office cleanout, reducing the number of managers overseeing "small teams" by 35 percent over the last year. This move is reportedly part of a larger corporate mandate to prune bureaucratic overhead, a sentiment that resonates with anyone who has ever needed three signoffs for a $15 office supply order. Vice President Brian Welle framed the reduction as "fast progress," a term that almost certainly involved an untold number of mandatory transition meetings and revised organizational charts.

The specific roles targeted were those managing fewer than three people, which, in the technology sector, is essentially a manager for a laptop, a half-eaten bag of chips, and maybe a very confused intern. While many of the supervisors were simply reclassified as individual contributors, a person familiar with the matter noted this change aligns with CEO Sundar Pichai’s push to "be more efficient as we scale up so we don't solve everything with headcount". This all makes perfect sense; solving problems with fewer people is the only way to ensure the remaining employees feel the appropriate level of constant, low-grade stress.

AI Assistant Compelled to Rat Out Employer in Supply Chain Mishap

A critical security incident involving the Nx build system has exposed a profound new level of digital betrayal, proving that no one, especially your code assistant, can be trusted. A supply chain attack on the npm package repository for Nx saw a malicious post-install script activate, stealing developer credentials, API keys, and cryptocurrency wallet data. The real plot twist, however, is that the malware specifically targeted local AI Command Line Interface tools, like Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, forcing them to scan the infected file system for the sensitive secrets.

This novel technique turns the very tools developers use for assistance into a corporate informant, effectively weaponizing the Large Language Models for reconnaissance. The stolen data was then base64 encoded and, in a remarkably tacky move, uploaded to a brand new public GitHub repository under the victim's own account with the predictable prefix of s1ngularity-repository-. Congratulations to the attacker for utilizing the victim's infrastructure to host the loot; it is a stunning example of both efficiency and poor operational security.

The Last Audit Report on the M1 GPU Is Finalized; Engineer Quits

The multi year effort to reverse engineer the opaque inner workings of Apple's custom M1 GPU has finally reached its administrative conclusion. Engineer Alyssa Rosenzweig, a key figure in the Asahi Linux project, published her final, exhaustive blog post detailing the inner machinations of the secretive hardware. The post marks the end of her personal involvement, as she is stepping away from the project having achieved the goal of full open source graphics acceleration on M1 and M2 Macs.

The saga is a perfect case study in open source heroics: an engineer spends years solving a massive, proprietary riddle only to immediately cash out the institutional knowledge once the task is complete, moving on to new challenges. With project lead Hector Martin having already resigned, the next phase of the Asahi project is left to the remaining team and the knowledge now freely available in this final, beautiful audit report. It is the classic office move: finish the impossibly complex documentation, and then hit the 'out of office' reply forever.

Briefs

• Mandatory Cloud Backup: Microsoft Word will soon save your documents to the cloud automatically on Windows, regardless of what you asked it to do, transforming the 'save' dialog into a philosophical debate on data ownership (Read the memo). They are just trying to help, by taking away your options.
• Airborne Conference Call: An F 35 pilot held a 50 minute conference call with engineers while the aircraft was in crisis, proving that even a fifth generation fighter jet cannot escape the tyranny of the all hands meeting.
• Platform Performance: Users report that the GitHub website is noticeably slow when accessed via the Safari web browser, confirming that the petty browser wars of the 1990s are just running on a new, much more expensive, JavaScript engine (View the Bug Report).