Anthropic accidentally copied the office library.
Also, Tesla rebrands failure and Google trashes your thermostat.

AI Settles Costly Administrative Oversight, Pays $1.5 Billion

The Large Language Model company, Anthropic, has agreed to pay a rather substantial sum of $1.5 billion to settle claims filed by The Authors Guild and several writers. The whole incident stems from what legal teams are calling an "aggressive information ingestion strategy" for the Claude model. Essentially, the AI department, bless their hearts, appears to have ingested entire copyrighted books without permission; treating them as if they were just open-source documentation found on the internet. It turns out that when you try to build a thinking machine by photocopying every textbook in the library, you eventually have to pay the late fees, and the late fees for three years of high-volume digital photocopying are apparently $1.5 billion.

A quick scan of the comment threads suggests that this settlement is less about justice for the writers and more about a simple accounting ledger entry. One user, clearly a developer, noted that this fee is likely just the cost of doing business, or as they put it, "a really expensive licensing fee after the fact." Anthropic is simply treating a massive legal defeat like a routine software update; a mandatory patch that costs more than the GDP of a small nation.

Full Self-Driving Now Means 'Mostly Driver-Assisted'

Tesla, in a move that can only be described as a cynical re-org of the Marketing department, is adjusting the meaning of its flagship feature, Full Self-Driving. The new, less ambitious definition is clearly an attempt to align the product name with what the product actually does; which is not, in fact, full self-driving. CEO Elon Musk had previously promised that the cars would be fully autonomous by now, a timeline that proved slightly optimistic, much like the promise of free pizza at the all-hands meeting.

The shift removes the term from the driver's screen interface and is seen by many as a quiet concession that the technology is still in a perpetual beta state. Rather than deliver on the promise, Tesla has decided to simply rename the feature; a classic corporate move, like renaming the "Cost Reduction Initiative" to the "Synergy Acceleration Program."

Google Cleans Out the Server Room, Old Thermostats Now Just Decorative

The dreaded End-of-Life (EOL) memo has finally dropped for the first and second generation Nest thermostats. Google announced the termination of support effective October 2025. This means that a perfectly good piece of hardware, once lauded as the height of smart-home tech, will lose most of its "smart" capabilities; essentially becoming a very expensive, Wi-Fi-enabled dial.

This move is part of the corporate ritual where a company must destroy its old, working products in order to sell you a new, nearly identical one. The underlying message is clear: when you buy a smart device, you are not buying hardware; you are merely renting the software from a company that gets bored easily and likes to deprecate things. Remember to recycle responsibly, or just keep it as a monument to vendor lock-in.

Briefs

• Career Pathing by Algorithm: OpenAI, after replacing your job with a transformer model, is now offering to help you get a new job at Walmart. The circle of life in the modern economy is complete; the machine kills your career and then sends you to retail.
• Container Wars: A prominent developer ditched Docker for Podman, claiming it is a much better experience because it is rootless and daemonless. Congratulations, you have solved the problem of a broken corporate printer by buying a new printer with a different brand of proprietary ink.
• Critical Systems Downtime: The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was shut down for a few hours thanks to a routine computer upgrade. Turns out applying a patch without testing can derail more than just your deployment; it can derail thousands of commutes.