AI Intern Spent Entire Quarter Budget
Also Office Supplies, App Lockouts, and Bad Fonts

The $50 Billion Pizza Party That Nobody Attended

According to The Economist, the entire operation at OpenAI is now being viewed less like a tech company and more like a high-altitude balloon leaking helium. The primary concern revolves around the sheer, industrial-scale amount of money it costs to simply keep the lights on for the models, which is a very polite way of saying the power bill is larger than the GDP of a small country. The article suggests this cash burn will be the primary source of anxiety for senior management throughout 2026, a timeline that suggests no one is quite sure what the Return on Investment is supposed to be, or when it plans to arrive.

It is not an insolvency issue; it is a resource allocation issue, like buying a forklift to move a single paperclip. Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman keeps assuring everyone that the business model is simply "scale, and then scale some more," a strategy that has traditionally only ever worked for bacteria and maybe Amazon Web Services. The company is, for all intents and purposes, a venture-capital-funded utility provider for a product that is not yet ready for mass consumption, yet is being consumed on a truly frightening scale anyway.

Mandatory Office Sharing: Netflix Releases Its Old Tools

The streaming giant Netflix decided to surprise everyone by launching an Open Content portal, which sounds like they are giving away free movies. They are not. The content in question refers to the kind of internal tooling and software infrastructure that keeps their digital conveyor belt running. This move has been framed as a community benefit; however, anyone who has ever been through a corporate "reorganization" knows this is simply the IT department clearing out old project files to make room for the next big thing that will be deprecated in eighteen months.

The internal memo must have been truly exhausting, explaining to engineers that they are now expected to maintain code for the entire internet for free, when they could barely get Steve from QA to file his Jira tickets. The comment section on the announcement is a beautiful mix of gratitude and passive-aggressive complaints about missing documentation, which is the perfect summary of any open source project.

Security Bans "Tiny Computer," Still Allows Cars

Security protocols for the NYC Mayoral Inauguration included a list of prohibited items that puts the fear of God into every electronics hobbyist. The usual suspects like firearms and explosives were present, but they were immediately followed by the Raspberry Pi and the Flipper Zero. This is the equivalent of banning a paperclip because it can theoretically be sharpened into a shiv; it is an overzealous security policy written by someone who saw a YouTube video once.

The implicit classification of a $35 credit card-sized computer as a threat equal to a pipe bomb suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of physics, but a very strong understanding of corporate liability. This incident is now mandatory reading in every IT department as a case study in how to not write an acceptable use policy. One commenter noted that the only thing a Raspberry Pi could explode is the budget of a school science project.

Briefs

• App Security Policy Violation: HSBC blocked its mobile banking application because it detected the presence of an F-Droid installed password manager. Banking apps are apparently allergic to strong security practices unless they are the ones writing the code.
• Routine Patch Required: A vulnerability in the Libsodium library has been discovered. The vulnerability is considered non-critical, meaning we only have to patch the security system that underpins the entire modern internet, not the entire modern internet.
• Language Preferences: An article titled Go away Python has sparked the predictable language war in the comment threads. It is the annual company picnic fight, only instead of debating the best BBQ sauce, they are debating memory allocation.