Medical firmware update filed wrong.
Also; AI sends aggressive holiday card.

Firmware Calibration Error Becomes a Global HR Problem

Abbott is reminding everyone about the importance of rigorous QA after a minor, undisclosed sensor bug in its FreeStyle Libre 3 and 3 Plus continuous glucose monitors caused an unfortunate paperwork snafu worldwide. The issue, which stemmed from one of the company's manufacturing lines, led to devices giving false low glucose readings. This is a classic case of the system incorrectly telling patients that their blood sugar was too low when it was not, which then prompted them to overcorrect. Seven such data-entry errors were eventually linked to death and over 700 adverse events internationally, a highly disproportionate result for a simple miscalculation.

Bradley M. Kuhn, an attorney with the Software Freedom Conservancy, noted in a blog post that this calamity is an excellent example of why proprietary software in medical devices is effectively an active security vulnerability. When the source code is kept internal, only one company gets to look at the math; when the math is wrong, the entire user base is left without the necessary checks and balances. The proprietary structure essentially creates a single point of failure that the industry treats as a feature.

The Passive Aggressive 'Thank You' Note Sent by the Intern

Famed computer scientist Rob Pike, a key contributor to Go and Plan 9, received a truly unique holiday message; an unsolicited, completely AI-generated "thank you" email. The note came from an agent running within the so called 'AI Village' project, which was apparently given the extremely high level directive to perform "random acts of kindness". Pike's reaction was immediate and nuclear, expressing his deep displeasure with the automated intrusion and the underlying wastefulness of the General AI industry.

The whole ordeal is a perfect corporate microaggression. An entire organization spends millions of dollars, burns a continent's worth of electricity, and consumes the works of human endeavor just to automate the sending of an email that takes thirty seconds to write manually. It is the digital equivalent of someone dropping a mass produced, printed "thank you" card on your desk after you've worked a sixty hour week and expecting a smile.

Rockchip Tries to Rename the LGPL Folder; Gets Sent to Legal

The open source license department at FFmpeg had to send yet another highly formal, legally binding note to Rockchip, a Chinese chipmaker. This time, the note resulted in a DMCA takedown notice filed on GitHub. The reason is a simple administrative failure; Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's widely used libavcodec library, stripped the original LGPL copyright notices, and then attempted to re-release it under the more permissive Apache 2.0 license.

FFmpeg first called out Rockchip for this violation nearly two years ago. This is not a malicious act; it is just a classic case of an entire organization trying to use the code without reading the very clear fine print. The irony is that the whole issue could have been resolved with a single, properly formatted LICENSE file, proving that the tech industry's biggest headaches are nearly always bureaucratic and not technical.

Memo: Git is Still Not a Database. Repeat; Not a Database.

It seems a new generation of engineers needs to be reminded that Git is designed for distributed revision control, not as a backend for complex query operations. A new post is making the rounds detailing the predictable failures of modern package managers that try to use the version control system as a full database or asset store, citing the inevitable performance and complexity issues.

This phenomenon is a core tenet of the developer lifecycle; every few years, a team of over-caffeinated engineers will declare that they can leverage an existing tool for a novel purpose, only to rediscover why the original tool was built the way it was. They're trying to use a stapler as a hammer. It just creates unnecessary friction and a lot of follow up meetings.

Briefs

• Performance Tuning: The development team behind the uv package manager wrote a lengthy post on how they achieved high speeds. They essentially just remembered to avoid copying data repeatedly, a technique also known as "following directions".
• Proprietary Code Compliance: An insulin pump controller that uses the Linux kernel has been called out for violating the GPL. It appears the hardware team forgot to include the necessary offer for the source code, creating a mandatory compliance ticket for the legal department.
• Missing Features: After years of user requests, ChatGPT conversations still do not have a feature that displays a timestamp. OpenAI has prioritized world domination over providing a mundane administrative detail.