AI Writes Slow Code; Everyone Hates It.
Also Browser Games and Wasting Hardware.

The New Junior Dev Who Doesn't Clean Up

The latest memo making the rounds confirms what every Systems Administrator suspected: the shiny new AI coding tools are less "innovation" and more "a junior developer with access to the production database and no sense of shame." Software developer Chris Loy observed this phenomenon, noting that while the generated code is technically correct, it often forces developers into a trap where they cannot write anything simple or easy to maintain.

We are currently paying for a license that produces thousands of lines of verbose, branch-heavy, slightly redundant solutions to problems that a simple two-line function would have solved in 2004. Management sees "lines of code" and "velocity" on a spreadsheet and assumes success. The rest of us see a codebase turning into a tar pit because the AI is optimized for pleasing the human doing the prompt, not for pleasing the compiler or, heaven forbid, the next human who has to read it at 3 AM. It is a brilliant example of benevolent incompetence; it tried very hard and succeeded only in creating more technical debt.

The Entire GPU or Bust: The Corporate Policy on Assets

A new report from Stanford's Hazy Research Lab detailed a technique to efficiently use every last bit of memory on a massive GPU for large language models, a feat they have titled "We bought the whole GPU, so we're damn well going to use the whole GPU." This is less a technical breakthrough and more a triumph of accounting principles over physics.

The logic is airtight on paper. If the company spent seventy thousand dollars on a piece of hardware, it must operate at 100 percent utilization during all waking hours, regardless of how much cooling or engineering overhead is required to achieve that. The comment threads suggest this is exactly the kind of paper that gets printed and laminated by a middle manager who is desperately trying to justify the last quarterly hardware budget. They will not understand the tensor parallelism; they will just see the word "whole" and demand a dashboard widget in red.

The EFF Hands Out Digital Blinders for Your Browser

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) continues its Sisyphean struggle against the default state of the internet by promoting Privacy Badger, a browser extension designed to block the persistent, low-level surveillance inherent to modern web browsing. The tool automatically detects and stops third-party trackers, essentially handing users a pair of digital blinders.

The fact that a free, volunteer-run organization has to invent an entire software layer just to stop companies from aggressively tracking your movements across the internet demonstrates the benign, exhausted absurdity of the whole situation. It is like having to wear a custom-made suit of medieval armor just to safely walk to the office water cooler. The EFF is the only person on the floor who remembers that the company handbook said something about user privacy, but they are tired enough to just hand out the duct tape instead of trying to fix the actual policy.

Briefs

• EPA’s Filing System: The Environmental Protection Agency is telling some of its own scientists to stop publishing studies, presumably because the internal SharePoint library is at maximum capacity.
• URL Snake Game: Developer Demian Ferrero has made it possible to play the classic "Snake" game directly in the browser’s address bar, guaranteeing at least an hour of lost productivity across every IT department worldwide.
• Animatronic Divestiture: A New Jersey theme park, facing closure, has begun selling its surplus animatronic dinosaurs on Facebook Marketplace, which is a surprisingly normal way to offload legacy assets.