X Prefetches Your Links; Traffic Spikes
Also: Cloud Is a Scam, and The Dishwasher Saga Continues

The Platform Decides To 'Help' By Opening Everything Ahead of Time

The social media platform X has unveiled a new, deeply unsettling technical misunderstanding of user intent, which is now being filed under "features" in the internal bug tracker. The system is now preloading the in-app webview for any linked tweet the moment the tweet appears on screen, regardless of whether a user actually clicks the link or not.

This technical oopsie has led to massive, artificial spikes in traffic for third-party websites, causing business owners to mistakenly believe their links were no longer being algorithmically suppressed. One e-commerce operator reported their traffic doubling or even tripling overnight, only to realize that the phantom clicks were simply X doing extra, unpaid work in the background. This peculiar behavior has been casually justified by X’s technical staff, including Executive Nikita Bier, with the familiar line that links get lower reach because "the web browser covers the post" and users forget to like or reply. This is a delightful rewrite of history; the fact is, the company tried to organize its friends list and accidentally sold everyone's phone number, or in this case, bought them a bunch of web traffic they did not earn and possibly did not want.

Bureaucratic Clean Up Day: Google Files 749 Million Deletion Requests

Google has successfully completed the largest clean-up operation in its history, removing nearly 749 million URLs linked to Anna’s Archive from its search results. This monumental effort was not a unilateral action but the result of a coordinated and relentless campaign by over 1,000 rightsholders, including publishing behemoths like Penguin Random House and John Wiley & Sons, who have been collectively reporting about 10 million new URLs per week.

To put this paperwork into perspective, this single purge accounts for approximately five percent of all copyright takedown actions Google has processed since 2012. The goal is to make finding pirated books through a specific search term significantly more difficult, effectively moving the content out of the first search page "office" and into a dimly lit archival server in the basement. Despite this immense bureaucratic flailing, the main domain for Anna’s Archive remains operational and easily discoverable. We have merely moved a lot of files to the recycle bin; no one actually emptied it.

The Cloud’s Metered Pricing Model Finally Gets Roasted By Spreadsheet

Another brave soul has completed the heroic, two-year task of reviewing their monthly statements and declared the inevitable: The Cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services or AWS, is simply too expensive for non-hyper-scale use cases. Author Rameerez details his journey, stating that he saved thousands of dollars by moving all his projects off of managed services and onto a simple Linux machine.

The argument states that most developers who advocate for the money-burning managed database solutions like RDS do not have to pay the monthly bill themselves, meaning there is no skin in the game. This lack of incentive leads to the common gaslighting argument that engineers who complain are "using the cloud wrong." The reality, he suggests, is that you are simply paying a 10x-100x convenience fee for an infrastructure setup that could be handled by a small, cheap server. It is essentially an expensive monthly coffee subscription when you own an espresso machine.

Briefs

• TIFF Is Still A Thing: The venerable Tagged Image File Format, or TIFF, now has a deep dive written about its persistent, complex, and unkillable nature. It is the COBOL of image formats; no one wants to admit they still use it, yet it runs everything. The TIFF article is the highest scoring link of the day, proving the industry only cares about systems we have failed to decommission.
• Security Policy Anniversary: The infamous Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm in November 1988, affecting about 10 percent of the internet. We celebrate by making sure all our passwords are still "password123" and forgetting to patch our VPNs. Read the retrospective here, and then immediately ignore the lessons.
• Home Automation Debunked: Independent lab testing confirms that the modern, expensive, all-in-one dishwasher pods are inferior to cheap, simple powder used in conjunction with a dishwasher’s original pre-wash cycle. This means the "advanced" convenience gadget is actually just a more costly way to get worse results; a perfect metaphor for most modern tech development. Watch the full video to feel vindicated.