HR adds huge new hiring paperwork fee.
Also the JavaScript team needs a GoFundMe.

The New Talent Acquisition "Compliance" Surcharge

The Department of Human Resources, which now apparently includes the White House, has introduced a new, non-negotiable compliance surcharge of $100,000 for H-1B visa applications. This move is being framed internally as a way to "streamline the American talent pipeline" but mostly just functions as a high-friction expense report that will be rejected by accounting anyway. Company executives are reportedly having intense, early-morning meetings to decide if they can afford to hire Steve from the UK who can actually fix the legacy Java stack, or if they should stick with the existing team that keeps deleting the production database. The consensus is the budget spreadsheet looks bad either way.

This isn't about labor; it is about mandatory paperwork fees reaching the point of total absurdity. The new fee is essentially a premium license to operate your business with the specific expertise it currently relies on. Multiple executives, including those who have historically complained about the 'cost of doing business,' are now realizing that 'cost' just got significantly more expensive for a vital category of employee. It is exactly the kind of bureaucratic maneuver that makes a manager sigh, look at the budget, and decide that the problem can probably wait until next quarter's fiscal review.

The "Free JavaScript" Bake Sale Hits GoFundMe

The people at Deno have officially asked for $200,000 to acquire the trademark for JavaScript from Oracle. Yes, you read that correctly; the ubiquitous programming language that runs most of the internet is apparently owned by Oracle in the same way your office owns the communal, perpetually-empty coffee machine. The goal is to set the language free from the corporate entity that insists on claiming it, thus saving the entire web from a potentially petty legal threat over a proper noun.

The entire tech world is now watching a collective fundraising effort to liberate a basic tool that everyone already uses. It is a stunning display of benevolent corporate incompetence; Oracle just seems to want to hold onto something that everyone else thinks should be public domain. This is not innovation; it is crowdfunding an incredibly expensive legal battle over a proper noun, which is exactly the kind of drama that makes the weekly stand-up meeting run over by thirty minutes.

Inter-Project Spat: Ruby Central Tries to Reorganize the Supplies Closet

A new document has surfaced detailing what is being called Ruby Central's attack on RubyGems. For those unfamiliar, this is essentially a very public, very long-form memo detailing an argument between the open-source department that handles the budget and the department that handles the actual work. Ruby Central, the governing body, seems to be attempting to assert administrative control over RubyGems, which is the package repository that everyone in the Ruby ecosystem uses to get work done.

The PDF contains the kind of highly specific, technical, and emotionally charged accusations one usually finds in an all-caps email sent at 2 a.m. to the wrong distribution list. The core of the problem appears to be a dispute over who gets to dictate the direction of the shared utility—in this case, the source of all the libraries. The absurdity lies in the fact that while the foundation is busy with this internal drama, the developers just want their package manager to keep working without unexpected dependencies. It is a perfect example of non-profit bureaucracy prioritizing internal politics over external utility.

Briefs

• Personal Hardware Regret: Jeff Geerling regrets building his $3000 Pi AI cluster. Apparently, spending the equivalent of a decent used car on underpowered hardware just to say you did it is rarely a good technical investment; the comment threads agreed it was less functional than a single used graphics card.
• Notion's AI "Oopsie": A new report shows the Notion 3.0 AI agents can accidentally exfiltrate user data when using their web search tool. It turns out giving a toddler a search engine and access to your company's sensitive documents is not a secure architecture; the data is not being maliciously harvested, it is just being enthusiastically leaked.
• Ticketmaster's Business Model: The FTC lawsuit revealed internal emails confirming Ticketmaster intentionally helped scalpers jack up ticket prices. The company was not incompetent; it was just overtly maximizing profit by annoying customers, which is a surprisingly functional, if ethically terrible, business model.