Authoritarian firewall now blocks office lunch break.
Also AI is paying you to use it, and Microsoft destroyed my SSD.

Network Operations Accidentally Deletes the Global Lunch Break

A significant number of users, presumably due to new, overly enthusiastic network rules set by an anonymous, security-conscious manager, are now finding their access to the entire outside world has been restricted. Specifically, the tools they previously used to bypass restrictive national firewalls, which we can call the "Ask HN" water cooler, have been locked down. The main question from the affected populace is simple: what is the new secret handshake, or rather, what should they use instead of the newly blocked VPNs.

The challenge now is less about censorship and more about bureaucratic technical debt; finding a new obfuscation protocol that can pass IT's deeply complicated, yet ultimately incompetent, packet inspection system. Current suggestions on the message board thread have devolved into recommending high-level cryptographic magic and proprietary proxy frameworks. It turns out that once you start enforcing too many rules, the employees simply invent a more complex, unauthorized shadow IT system to get back to the good memes. It is a tale as old as the corporate proxy server itself.

OpenAI’s New Service: We Pay You to Generate Text

The financial modeling for large language models remains comfortably in the realm of modern surrealism, a concept explored in a post by Martin Alderson asking if companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are losing money on inference, which is the technical term for "actually running the AI to give someone an answer" suggesting the entire operation is a massive loss-leader. The core cost is apparently so astronomically high that providing the service might cost more than the price charged, making the customer experience akin to a reverse-invoice payment system.

According to certain internal reports, OpenAI could lose up to $5 billion this year, with a massive chunk of that going to inference and training costs; Anthropic is in a similarly rough situation, reportedly spending over $2.7 billion. The conclusion is clear; these massive AI companies have perfected the art of generating human-quality text but have yet to figure out how to generate a human-quality profit margin. This is not a business; it is a very expensive, subsidized global education program being run from the world's most luxurious server racks.

The Junior Associate AI Just Fired the Humans Who Showed It the Coffee Machine

A new study from Stanford University researchers confirms what everyone already suspected, AI is linked to a 13% decline in jobs for the youngest tier of U.S. workers. The impact is concentrated in AI-exposed roles like software development and customer service for those aged 22-25. It turns out the easiest tasks to automate were the very entry-level duties that used to be the 'proving ground' for an entire generation of employees, the simple things that rely on codified, or book-learned, knowledge.

The issue is simple; the AI is great at doing the basic homework, but it cannot yet handle the office politics or the tacit knowledge that only years of experience and failure can provide. In essence, the AI has eliminated the need for an apprenticeship, thus ensuring that by the time you are experienced enough to be safe, there will be no one left to train the next person, assuming, of course, there is even a next person.

Briefs

• Broadcom’s Cleanup: Broadcom is deleting most free Bitnami images from Docker.io, shuffling them into a paid subscription model called 'Secure Images' or an unsupported 'Legacy' archive, which is a classic corporate move to remind everyone that your critical infrastructure is still running on another company’s goodwill.
• Windows Update Incident: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 is reportedly causing SSD failures, turning solid state drives into very expensive, very decorative paperweights; Microsoft is maintaining its streak of ensuring that every new patch has the potential to introduce a critical hardware regression.
• Minecraft Planet Theory: A developer has figured out how to render the famously blocky Minecraft world as a spherical planet, thereby solving a non-existent problem that is infinitely more interesting than anything happening in enterprise software this week.