AI browser rejects all web content
Also API verification and rock tumbler instructions

The New Employee Refuses To Read The Wiki

OpenAI, the firm that built its entire business model on scraping the public internet, has now unveiled its own web browser called ChatGPT Atlas. The browser’s primary feature is apparently to act as a barrier to the “messy” web it was trained on. Instead of navigating to a website, the Atlas AI simply summarizes it, a move critics have dubbed an "anti-web browser" for actively fighting the user's connection to the source material. It is less a tool for discovery and more an expensive internal filter; the classic corporate move of replacing a functioning process with a more convoluted one that generates a summary for the CEO.

This new software, which is based on the Chromium engine just like almost everything else, also heavily pushes users to enable "browser memories." This feature allows ChatGPT to track and store everything you do, turning your private browsing session into an extensive, personalized training dataset for the company. It is the digital equivalent of an office drone who keeps a detailed log of all your side conversations, which is then uploaded to a central server every night. Security researchers have already found a vulnerability allowing malicious instructions to be injected into the AI’s memory, meaning your new digital assistant can now be gaslighting you with persistent, pre-approved errors.

The Accounts Payable Team Locks The Cash Register

In an entirely unsurprising but entirely tedious development, OpenAI is now demanding mandatory government ID verification for access to certain advanced API features. This is the latest in a long line of requirements that treat developers like suspicious, possibly money laundering third parties. The real corporate genius, however, is the subsequent refusal to refund prepaid API credits to users who are unwilling to hand over their personal documents.

OpenAI's official Service Credit Terms state that all sales are final, meaning the company gets to keep the money whether you use the service or not. It is a textbook bait and switch, locking thousands of dollars in "meaningless fun-bucks" onto the platform with a surprise bureaucratic firewall. Developers are left to either comply with the ID scan or watch their pre-purchased credits expire after one year. The only good news is that the CEO, Sam Altman, is not using his own iris-scanning WorldCoin tech for the verification, presumably because even he draws a line somewhere, which is probably at the cash register.

California Finally Solves The Air Conditioning Problem

The state of California has achieved the ultimate anti-climax: making it through another extreme heatwave without rolling blackouts. For decades, the annual summer heat was a reliable source of grid panic, resulting in the dreaded "Flex Alerts" asking the public to please, for the love of all that is holy, stop using their microwave. Now, due to a massive, years-long investment in battery energy storage, that summer ritual is apparently over.

Energy storage in California has grown by over 3,000 percent since 2020, allowing the grid to capture solar power during the day and discharge it when everyone gets home and turns on the AC at 6:00 PM. It is a genuine, monumental infrastructure success that simply means the lights stayed on and nobody had to deal with the passive-aggressive email from IT about "critical resource consumption." The failure of blackouts is, predictably, the least sensational news of the week.

Briefs

• Budget Update: Synadia and TigerBeetle are committing $512k USD to the Zig Software Foundation. The funds will be allocated to "growing the ecosystem," which is corporate jargon for "buying a new ergonomic chair for the lead dev."
• Real Screen Addicts: The elderly are spending more time on screens than teenagers. Management is now updating the marketing slide deck to target the "Retirement-Age Digital Native," a demographic with significant free time and an appetite for misinformed Facebook reels.
• Hardware Refresh Cycle: The upcoming Windows 10 retirement deadline is boosting Mac Sales. Users, terrified of the mandated Windows 11 upgrade, are quietly swapping out their Dell laptops for shiny Apple devices, demonstrating that user-hostile corporate policy is the most effective marketing strategy.
• Uncategorized: Someone posted the full Rock Tumbler Instructions. It received nearly 200 points on the Hacker News front page, which is 59 points more than the new UK Online Safety Act compliance note.