Developer quits fixing social media bug.
Also Britain gets mandatory badges and Apple folds proteins.

The Decentralized Water Cooler (Now with Auditable Cubicle Walls)

Senior developer Dan Abramov has officially filed his resignation from the ongoing "fixing social media" task force by launching Open Social, a specification for a non-addictive, simple, and auditable social platform. The entire pitch reads like a very polite but firm internal memo explaining that the last three years of effort failed because the structure was fundamentally flawed; we are now starting over with a new architecture.

The general sentiment in the comment threads suggests that the tech world appreciates the new manifesto but is worried that all we have done is replace a broken system with a very well-written document about a hypothetical perfect system. This is the equivalent of a Systems Administrator fixing a massive network outage by drafting a beautiful Visio diagram of what the network should look like, then walking out the door. The community notes that while specifications are nice, the difficulty remains in getting millions of people to agree on a single implementation of the new social office layout.

Mandatory Badges and the Right to Clock In

The UK Government announced it will introduce a compulsory digital ID for all workers as part of a massive digitization effort. HR has finally merged with the Ministry of Everything, and they are now requiring a verifiable, national digital identity just to prove you are allowed to sit at your desk. It is a classic bureaucratic move; attempting to streamline one process, right-to-work checks, by implementing a new, complex, national database that will inevitably have its own set of administrative exceptions and security vulnerabilities.

The comment section is full of people who have already envisioned the inevitable data breach where every citizen's employment and personal data is leaked after an intern clicks a phishing link. The consensus is that while the intent is "efficiency," the practical outcome is a massive, centralized target for every organized attacker worldwide.

Apple Simplifies the Wetware

Apple's machine learning team has decided the whole "protein folding" thing was too complicated, so they released SimpleFold, a new model that promises to be faster and, critically, simpler than its competitors. This is the equivalent of the Cupertino team walking into the biology department and telling all the chemists their periodic table layout could use some refinement; it needs more clean lines and fewer complex numbers.

The technology reduces the required computing power by treating the complex 3D shape of a protein as a set of simpler, 2D projections. While genuinely impressive, it does maintain the hilarious trend of tech companies casually solving some of life's deepest biological mysteries with an afternoon script, while simultaneously being unable to ship a new charger cable that does not fray.

The Vendor Who Will Not Leave

The city of Evanston, Illinois, has discovered the eternal truth of dealing with a persistent vendor: they just keep showing up. After the City Council ordered Flock Safety to remove its automated license plate reader cameras, the company reinstalled the cameras anyway, claiming they had a different interpretation of the contract's termination clause. This is peak corporate passive-aggression.

Evanston was forced to send a second, angrier email, which in legal terms is called a "cease and desist," demanding the physical removal of the surveillance equipment immediately. The entire situation feels like a company that was told to stop using a particular parking spot and has instead started parking two inches closer to the line every day.

Briefs

• Pop OS 24.04 LTS Beta: System76 has a new version of its Linux OS. The comments are primarily concerned with whether it will finally fix that one obscure font rendering issue that only 17 people actually notice.
• Firefox UDP I/O: Mozilla is working on making its networking faster in Rust. This is what the engineers work on when the marketing department keeps demanding they make the browser logo look "more modern" and "like a cloud."
• Unitree Robot Exploit: A vulnerability allows for the takeover of fleets of Unitree robots. The four-legged office dogs can now be simultaneously convinced to trip everyone in the hallway at the same time.