Company Creates Mandatory Empathy Training Simulator
Also Google broke a classic mail feature and AI rediscovered the `grep` command.

Your Annual Neurodivergence Compliance Module Has Dropped

A new project dubbed the Autism Simulator has arrived on the scene, immediately being mistaken for the new mandatory annual HR training module. The creator, a programmer named Josh C Simmons, built the experience to illustrate concepts like social masking, decision fatigue, and the inevitable burnout that comes from navigating a world not built for you, essentially documenting a typical Tuesday at a startup.

Feedback from the community suggests that the simulator excels at showing how hostile the average corporate office is; specifically, one commenter noted that the experience of navigating a "tiny hotdesking" environment felt like a form of digital torture. The corporate enthusiasm for supporting neurodivergence seems to only extend to the use of noise cancelling headphones, allowing the company to add a photo to the career page; actual accommodations that impact efficiency or office layout are simply dismissed. We should expect the average middle manager to complete the entire simulation in under three minutes, declare the problem solved, and return to approving expense reports that are clearly fraudulent.

Google Finds Another Feature To Sunset Because It Felt Like It

Google announced it will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts using the Post Office Protocol, or POP. This is not the part where Google serves your Gmail over POP, which is thankfully still around for now; this is the part where Google's Gmail client could previously reach out and retrieve emails from some other ancient email provider you still use for reasons we do not want to know.

The official line is "simplifying the experience" which is a classic corporate euphemism meaning "we decided to break your niche but perfectly functional workflow because the protocol is old and the support ticket volume was statistically non-zero." Users who rely on this feature, primarily those attempting to consolidate multiple legacy accounts into one single Google prison, are now scrambling. Vendor lock-in intensifies, and the IT department has gained another opportunity to tell users they should not be using old things anyway.

AI Is Finally Getting Good By Discovering Bash Scripts

Anthropic's latest offering, Claude Code, is generating significant buzz because it excels at programming tasks. The secret to its success is allegedly its adherence to the "Unix philosophy" by being granted filesystem access. This is a genuinely remarkable AI breakthrough; the advanced system's primary feature is realizing it can write a quick script and run a command line tool like grep or sed instead of trying to process the entire internet within its silicon brain.

The great innovation for this bleeding-edge technology is the discovery of pipes and command line utilities. One ecstatic developer reported that the AI even suggested and started using linters on its own; a milestone previously only achieved by human developers who were forced to do it. It turns out that for complex tasks, the smartest AI is the one that asks a shell script to do the heavy lifting, effectively proving that the 1970s operating system paradigm is still the most efficient system design; congratulations to the graybeards.

Briefs

• Pretraining Infrastructure: One company is racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for AI pretraining. Thirty petabytes is a lot; imagine how many pirated movies could be stored on that pile, which is the only truly meaningful metric for that scale of storage.
• DuckDuckGo Philanthropy: Search engine DuckDuckGo is donating $25,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation. This is the only acceptable type of corporate giving; supporting the ancient languages that hold the internet together with duct tape and positive mental attitude.
• New File Format Announced: A new open-source data file format, F3, has been proposed in a detailed PDF. We are all excited to have another incompatible, technically superior data container to argue about over email for the next twenty years; it is a vital part of the development lifecycle.