Mozilla puts AI in private-mode browser.
Also, two online training portals become one giant mandatory training portal.

The Existential Dread of the Open-Source Mascot

The collective sighs from the internet’s more privacy-conscious corners could power a small data center today, following the new CEO of Mozilla, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, making noise about an "AI browser." The browser's core user base, the ones who actively chose to use Firefox out of spite for Chrome, are reportedly now reviewing their life choices. For over a decade, the organization has struggled to define itself, which seems less like a strategy and more like a company constantly spinning around in an office chair until it gets dizzy enough to declare a new focus.

Mr. Enzor-DeMeo, who previously ran product for a mortgage startup, tried to appease the crowd by mentioning that any AI features would be a “choice” that people can easily turn off, which is the corporate equivalent of promising to only use the noisy shredder after 5 PM. The fundamental issue remains: Mozilla’s only viable business model is a lucrative search-deal with the very company it exists to critique, forcing it to look for new, wildly off-brand revenue streams to justify its continued existence. This situation leads observers to believe that the organization is not so much failing but is instead trying *very* hard to make the browser a chrome-adjacent compliance liability so the people currently using it will finally leave, proving that nobody wanted a privacy-focused browser in the first place.

The AWS CEO's Defense of the Unpaid Intern (or, Future Senior Staff)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman has been refreshingly blunt, calling the idea of using generative AI tools to replace junior developers "one of the dumbest ideas" he has heard. This statement is, naturally, not out of the goodness of his heart, but is instead framed as a long-term resource management problem. Mr. Garman pointed out that the entry-level staff are the least expensive employees you have and are, critically, the most fluent with the new AI tools.

The CEO's concern is that ten years down the line, when a real senior engineer is needed, the company will have nobody who has actually learned how to decompose a problem without a Large Language Model holding their hand. The argument is not that AI is bad, but that it creates a catastrophic future hiring deficit, which is just another flavor of quarterly planning. Mr. Garman also dismissed measuring AI’s value by lines of code contributed, suggesting that quantity does not equal quality, a concept most managers only remember right after a huge server outage.

Two Online Training Vendors Consolidate Their Overdue Annual Compliance Modules

In a move everyone saw coming—but still required a press release—online education rivals Coursera and Udemy have announced they will combine in a $2.5 billion all-stock transaction. The rationale is, of course, to "Empower the Global Workforce with Skills for the AI Era," which is corporate-speak for merging two colossal catalogs of mandatory, unskippable video content.

The combined entity will reportedly dominate the 'reskilling' market, achieving $115 million in annual cost synergies by making sure the same HR module is only recorded once. Coursera, which focused on university content, will now have access to Udemy’s vast marketplace of subject-matter experts, who usually record courses with a cheap webcam in their garage. The resulting company will be a behemoth that can finally generate a single, unified certificate that is equally unvalidated by any actual employer.

Briefs

• Security Patch for Containers: Docker is now offering free Hardened Images to ensure a "Safer Container Ecosystem." This is a charitable gesture that still means developers must remember to actually use the thing that stops them from getting hacked.
• Robotaxi Mishap: Tesla reported another Robotaxi crash, even with an alleged human supervisor present, confirming that the future of transportation will be self-driving fender-benders.
• Unexpected Monero Mining: A developer discovered their Hetzner server was covertly mining Monero, which is the 21st-century equivalent of an unauthorized water cooler being installed to run a side hustle.