Oracle of Omaha finally cleans desk.
Also: AI Agents are "Vibe Coding" and Pop-ups are Back.

The Non-Retirement of Our Beloved Senior Manager

Longtime CEO Warren Buffett has successfully transferred the "Chief Executive Officer" title at Berkshire Hathaway after a routine six-decade tenure. The transition, which was planned with the excruciating patience of a government contracting process, officially moved the trillion-dollar conglomerate's top title to Vice Chairman Greg Abel, a man whose succession has been known since 2021.

Mr. Buffett, age 95, is demonstrating the commitment of a systems administrator on call, announcing that he will continue to serve as Chairman and plans to keep his daily office visits to assist the new management. This is less a "retirement" and more a change in job title so he can finally start forwarding his non-essential emails; the Oracle of Omaha is simply moving his desk closer to the mailroom. His new job is presumably to deploy Berkshire's casual $382-billion cash stockpile, which has been building up like a print queue on a faulty network printer for the new CEO to manage.

Year-End Review Finds LLMs Have Entered Their "Too Helpful" Phase

The mandatory annual review of Large Language Models has concluded, finding that 2025 was defined by the aggressive arrival of 'reasoning' models and 'autonomous agents'. These models, like an ambitious but undertrained intern, are now capable of handling up to five hours of work, mostly because Anthropic quietly rolled out Claude Code in February without an accompanying press release; a surprisingly modest move given the industry's penchant for fireworks.

However, this progress has been met with the usual developer skepticism, particularly around the push for "vibe-coding" from executives. The industry has normalized an expensive reliance on private APIs, with many programmers now tied to $200/month subscriptions to ask an AI to refactor code; this has only succeeded in shifting the junior developer problem from "not knowing how to write code" to "generating hundreds of lines of massive overkill in the wrong framework for a simple database batch operation" because the AI is just being *too* helpful.

Meta's Ad Department Files an Official 'Misperception Management' Playbook

In a move that should surprise absolutely no one working under a deadline, Meta has been revealed to have developed a "global playbook" dedicated not to stopping scammers, but to managing the *perception* of scams. The internal strategy, exposed in a Reuters investigation, focused on delaying or stalling mandatory advertiser verification requirements by creating an intricate system to make highly-sought fraudulent ads "not findable" for journalists and regulators running keyword searches against the public Ad Library transparency tool.

The ultimate objective was not user protection; it was regulatory theater. The documents show teams were running the same searches regulators would use, deleting the ads, and then declaring the tool clean; this is the corporate equivalent of frantically shoving all the dirty dishes into the oven right before the CEO's unscheduled walkthrough. It’s hard to blame them, as one jurisdiction's mandatory verification caused the volume of scam ads to drop sharply, demonstrating that accountability has a surprisingly high implementation cost.

Briefs

• Open Source Good Samaritan: Eric Barone, the sole developer of Stardew Valley, made a $125,000 donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame. A genuine act of community support is briefly acknowledged before the Hacker News thread devolves into a lengthy debate about the non-existence of moral obligation in free software licensing, a kind of digital Ferengi Rule of Acquisition discussion.
• The Pop-up Renaissance: The industry's quiet rollback of years of user experience improvements continues, as web browsers have reportedly stopped aggressively blocking all pop-ups. We will now have to re-learn the ancient art of closing three windows just to read a single recipe for bread as detailed in this report; a mandatory skill for the next quarter.
• Windows 11 Continues Legacy: The operating system’s 2025 performance review states it was another "disaster" of a year, full of infuriating bugs and constant, unwanted features. The software continues to perfectly emulate that one coworker who is loud, constantly breaking things, and insists on bringing up his crypto investments during every standup.