The Filing Cabinet Is On Fire:
AI Given Long-Term Memory, Immediately Forgets It

The New Employee Keeps Filing Receipts From Narnia

Reports this week confirm what every project manager already knew: the large language models are suffering from an epidemic of high-level incompetence, having now submitted over fifty new hallucinations into the prestigious ICLR 2026 conference. This isn't a subtle issue; the AI has simply been fabricating entire citations, names, and data sets as if they were perfectly legitimate documents. It’s like Steve from accounting submitting a mandatory expense report where every line item is for a mythical conference in 'Gondor' and the receipt is a child's drawing of a dragon. The system is designed to look impressive, but the underlying data is less reliable than a shared network drive from 2004.

In a related but fundamentally contradictory move, Google announced its new Titans and Miras architecture, which is allegedly going to give AI "long-term memory." The prevailing corporate logic appears to be this: if your entry-level contractor keeps inventing fake data, the sensible solution is to buy them a larger, more complex filing cabinet and give them the key. Rather than fixing the core issue—the AI’s profound, structural inability to tell the difference between reality and a detailed fever dream—we are just building bigger servers for its nonsense. The hope is that with more memory, the AI will at least remember all the lies it told previously, creating a more consistent, albeit totally fictional, narrative.

A Decade of Alchemy: The Annual Reorg Memo

A former crypto venture capitalist and DeFi founder published a candid note this week under the headline, "I wasted years of my life in crypto," which really just encapsulates the collective sigh of anyone who's ever endured a 5-year corporate initiative. The writer, Ken Chang, details his realization that the entire enterprise, despite its high-flying valuations and complex jargon, ultimately failed to deliver any meaningful, non-speculative value to the world.

This is the inevitable moment in the life-cycle of every overfunded department: the sudden, cold realization that all the late nights, all the buzzwords, and all the "game-changing" new protocols were actually just a complicated way to move the same paperclips from Desk A to Desk B. It is a mandatory part of the business cycle, like the annual performance review or the quarterly re-org, where a massive amount of corporate energy is expended only to return to the baseline of zero productivity, albeit with a new, crippling sense of existential dread.

German Department Files Right-Sizing Request, Saves Millions

The state of Schleswig-Holstein, a region in Germany, has made the genuinely shocking decision to implement a common-sense cost-cutting measure, opting to migrate away from Microsoft products and toward an open-source solution like Linux and LibreOffice. The reason? It is cheaper. The audacity of this move is unprecedented in corporate history, where the procurement of the most expensive and vendor-locked solution is usually considered a sign of departmental prestige.

The press is treating this as a revolution when, in reality, it is simply a Finance department that finally bothered to look at the recurring invoice for "MS License Dept - Annual Fees" and asked a simple question. The millions saved are not a technical victory but a bureaucratic one: a rare instance where the mandatory corporate inertia failed to stop a reasonable expense reduction. We expect this story to be aggressively ignored by every other government and Fortune 500 company in the coming months.

Briefs

• Digital Sabotage: Trains were cancelled over a fake bridge collapse image that spread on social media. This is the ultimate office automation: a simple, low-effort digital oopsie causing massive, expensive, real-world work stoppage.
• F-35 Bureaucracy: The new C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet is documented, proving that even a hyper-advanced military aircraft is ultimately just a very complicated, very fast vessel for managing bureaucratic complexity.
• Garage Silicon Valley: A hobbyist fabricated an IC in a garage with lithography, confirming that the entire semiconductor industry is basically a well-funded version of a bored teenager's weekend project.