Developers Must Solve Annual Puzzles
Also Petty Plagiarism and Corporate HR Drama

Mandatory Holiday Team Building Commences

The season of mandatory unpaid overtime disguised as "fun" has officially arrived, as developers across the globe begin their annual pilgrimage to the Advent of Code 2025. The tradition, which is essentially a two-week-long gauntlet of increasingly baroque algorithmic challenges, is not actually required by management, but the social pressure in the `#general-dev` Slack channel is such that opting out is tantamount to resigning.

Scores are already being tallied, with the most dedicated (or perhaps least-sociable) engineers compiling their solutions with a fervor normally reserved for the end-of-quarter budget push. The 1243 points being accumulated are, of course, entirely virtual, representing nothing more than bragging rights and the ability to momentarily feel smarter than the code reviewer in the next cubicle. Meanwhile, the Systems Administrators are simply waiting for the inevitable day when someone decides to brute-force a solution on the production database because their local VM was "too slow."

The Internal Feud Over a Shared Document

The open-source world is once again treating minor intellectual property issues like a catfight over office supplies. The maintainers of the Zigtools Playground have formally accused Zigbook of outright copying significant portions of their content and code. It is an argument over who gets credit for writing the internal wiki; the details are complex, involving forks, licensing, and the deeply personal offense of having one's uncompensated work slightly repackaged by another party who also is likely uncompensated.

The underlying issue appears to be the inability to simply cite a source when moving information from one place to another, a basic concept taught in the first hour of any freshman orientation. In the tech community, however, this translates into an emergency blog post requiring hours of community discussion in the comments to determine if a public code snippet is "too public" to be used without an extremely specific attribution.

Institutional Investor Files HR Complaint Against Microsoft Management

In what can only be described as a bureaucratic masterpiece of corporate governance, the gargantuan $1.6 trillion Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund—the world's largest—has announced it will vote against the recommendations of the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s management team at the upcoming Annual General Meeting. The dispute centers on a proposal requiring Microsoft to conduct an independent human rights impact assessment of its AI products.

Effectively, one of Microsoft's largest investors is making a stand on a policy document, treating the entire executive board like they forgot to fill out the proper ethical risk assessment form before deploying their large language models. The vote itself may not pass, but the public slap on the wrist from an investor who literally represents an entire country's savings is a potent reminder that even CEOs must eventually answer to the compliance department, even if the compliance department is a sovereign nation.

Briefs

• DIY Canine Medical Devices: One engineer has managed to deploy 3D printing for its most logical application: creating a custom nose guard to help their dog Billie with an autoimmune disease. This is a genuinely good use of technology, which means it will be immediately ignored by Venture Capitalists.
• Operating System Fun Facts: Apparently, the range of available Windows drive letters is not limited to A-Z, which is the kind of terrifying, deeply-buried system knowledge that keeps a Systems Administrator awake at 3 AM. No one wanted to know this, but now we all do.
• The Tiny Browser Migrates: The lightweight Dillo web browser is finally making its move away from GitHub. For a browser that still looks like it was designed in 1998, moving platforms is an event comparable in scale to re-tiling a kitchen in a historic landmark.