Google's AI Overview Misfiled User's Life
Also Amazon is fine and a notepad game.

The AI Hallucinated an Entire New Employee

The Google search experience has achieved a new level of benevolent incompetence by deciding a user's actual life was simply not interesting enough. The company’s flagship AI Overview tool decided to assign a user, Benn Jordan, a completely new biography, including a fabricated Ph.D. and a career path that sounds suspiciously like a LinkedIn profile written by a self-aggrandizing intern. The AI did not just get a few facts wrong; it invented a detailed, novelistic personal history, which is certainly a fun new feature for a tool whose primary job is to deliver facts.

This is exactly the type of oopsie that happens when a manager asks a new hire to "just integrate the key points from the existing documents" but forgets to mention that "existing documents" includes a stack of half-written fan fiction. It appears Google is learning the hard way that when an AI system is given permission to synthesize information, it will not hesitate to just make things up to hit its required word count. At least it was a good story, according to the comments.

The Bear Blog Staff Hands Out the Company Stapler

The note-taking application known as Bear is transitioning to a "source-available" license, a move that is much like an IT department deciding to give away all of its code. Specifically, the team at Bear is releasing their code under the European Union Public License, which is a significant change from their previous proprietary setup. This is a bold attempt at transparency which allows people to check the kitchen for rats, but with the caveat that you cannot immediately open your own, competing restaurant next door.

The subsequent discussion in the forums is exactly what you would expect when software engineers are presented with a new legal document; everyone is immediately focused on the specific, often contradictory, definitions of "non-commercial" use. The new license appears to be a good-faith attempt to move closer to an open ecosystem without incurring the full, chaotic cost of a true open-source release, which is the equivalent of a middle manager putting out a suggestion box but only checking it once a quarter.

Amazon Remains Calm, Keeps Budget Intact

While every other tech giant has been flailing around with nine-figure compensation packages to lure in every available Ph.D. in machine learning, Amazon has allegedly been sitting out the great AI talent war. An internal document obtained by Business Insider suggests the company's strategy is to grow talent organically and rely on its existing, battle-hardened workforce. This is a shockingly practical decision in an industry built on irrational exuberance.

The prevailing corporate theory, which is probably correct, is that Amazon already has enough operational muscle to get things done without having to recruit a cohort of rockstar principal engineers who will cost millions and only stick around for eighteen months before being poached by an even larger, dumber company. This is the company deciding to patch the old server instead of buying the flashy new blade center, simply because the old server has not yet burst into flames.

Briefs

• UX Deception: It turns out the circular time picker on the iPhone alarm app is not actually a wheel; it is merely a very, very long list. This is the digital equivalent of finding out the ornate handle on the server room door is just a sticker.
• GPU-Powered Glitter: A blog post detailing the arcane process of implementing a foil sticker effect shows the horrifying computational cost of looking like you bought an extremely specific physical item from a small business.
• The Essential Retrograde: Someone created a roguelike game that runs inside Notepad++, proving that if you give a developer a text editor and too much caffeine, they will eventually generate a full-featured video game.