Apple updates chips with mandatory AI sticker.
Also, fake interviews and cheap poet-bots.

Annual Silicon Performance Review Concludes with "More"

Apple has finally concluded its annual hardware refresh cycle for the second half of the fiscal year, confirming the existence of the M5 chip. This is not a new revolutionary architecture; it is simply the next number in the sequence, much like the employee ID badge you get when you start. The company claims the M5 represents the next big leap in AI performance, which is the corporate equivalent of saying the new office water cooler has a better filter. It is now mandatory in the MacBook Pro, the iPad Pro, and even the Vision Pro headset, ensuring no corner of your digital life is spared the marketing collateral.

The announcement is less about performance and more about mandatory compliance. All the old devices are suddenly "legacy," like a printer that still uses parallel port cables. You can now buy a MacBook Pro with this chip, which is reportedly five percent faster at generating blurry AI photos than the previous version. The real question is not what the M5 can do, but rather how much longer the employees who actually built the chip can maintain eye contact with the marketing department after reading the press release. The cycle demands a new neural engine number; therefore, a new neural engine number is delivered.

HR Department Rolls Out New Phishing-as-a-Service Onboarding Program

It turns out that the next big step in corporate recruitment is almost getting hacked. One developer, David Dodda, nearly fell victim to a sophisticated scam where the attackers impersonated an entire hiring process, complete with scheduled interviews and a mandatory software install for a "coding challenge." This is the pinnacle of social engineering; the attacker did not need to break into the company, they just needed to mimic the painful, slow bureaucracy of the Human Resources department.

The great irony is that the whole point of a legitimate job interview is to assess a candidate's technical and social competence; the scam, however, is designed to test their security awareness by having them voluntarily download a remote access trojan. The fact that the process was elaborate and required multiple "sessions" is a testament to the fact that people are more willing to endure a lengthy, awkward interview than they are to question a questionable security prompt. We have trained ourselves to obey the calendar invite, and the hackers have learned to exploit this deeply ingrained corporate obedience.

Anthropic Releases LLM Optimized for Corporate Poetry and Budget Constraints

Anthropic has announced the next iteration of its smaller, cheaper AI model, dubbed Claude Haiku 4.5. Haiku, as the name suggests, is a model focused on brevity, speed, and maintaining an air of quiet contemplation while it summarizes your sales meetings into three lines of highly-compressed jargon. The company is leaning hard into the idea that sometimes you do not need an entire supercomputer to generate a passive-aggressive email; sometimes you just need something fast enough to justify the quarterly SaaS budget line item.

The main selling point is the efficiency; it is a budget LLM. This is the AI equivalent of the office coffee that tastes like slightly burnt paper, but you drink it anyway because it is free. It proves the market is finally moving beyond chasing raw, existential intelligence and is now optimizing for the mundane tasks, such as generating the five bullet points for a management slide deck. It is a win for the long-suffering project manager, even if it is a loss for existential truth.

Briefs

• Government Transparency: The IRS open sources its fact graph on GitHub. The move is great for accountability, but it also means the government’s internal logic is now subject to the same pull request review process as a weekend side project.
• Security Leak: F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws and source code. F5 has confirmed a leak, reminding everyone that all complex security appliance source code is merely "undisclosed" until it is not.
• The Engagement Economy: Bots are reportedly getting good at mimicking engagement. This means most e-commerce businesses are just selling things to other people's scripts, proving that the digital economy is a closed loop of AI models performing transactions for an audience of more AI models.