AWS quietly raises cloud GPU prices.
Also, the intern finally works and the email app eats the hard drive.

The Weekend Surcharge: A Masterclass in Fiscal Ambush

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, decided that the best time to announce a 15% price increase on its GPU instances was late on a Saturday, which is corporate speak for "we hope nobody in a budget meeting sees this until it is too late." This move is not a price correction; it is essentially the cloud equivalent of adding a mandatory "weekend service fee" to a tab after the customer has already sat down and ordered the entire menu. The new rates apply to the workhorse NVIDIA A10G and H100 GPU instances, which are the digital backbones for everything currently labeled 'AI' or 'The Future'.

The unspoken contract of the cloud has always been that everything is flexible and elastic, except for your wallet. According to comments in the public domain, the frustration is less about the cost and more about the blatant timing, which highlights the deeply entrenched vendor lock-in situation. The company knows that once a deployment is running on its hardware, moving it is an organizational nightmare on the scale of migrating everyone from Outlook to Gmail. It is a brilliant, if utterly exhausting, strategy: charge more for the furniture after you have cemented it to the floor.

Mandatory Sanity is Now a National Policy

In a move that could only be described as restoring balance to the digital force, the nation of Vietnam has banned unskippable advertising. This new regulation requires that any online advertising lasting longer than 5 seconds must include a "skip" button, which means that for five glorious seconds, all of us must stop being subjected to the digital equivalent of an office loudspeaker commercial we cannot mute.

We treat this as ground-breaking legislature when in reality, it is simply common courtesy enforced by law. One user in the resulting discourse on this topic aptly noted that the lack of a skip option is a demonstration of pure digital power, not effective marketing. Vietnam's government has effectively forced the advertising department to install a "Do Not Disturb" sign on its own product. It is a lovely thought that a whole country is less annoying than one mid-level manager in charge of 'user engagement'.

The Agent Who Actually Did the Work

The entire industry has become accustomed to the "normal" AI experience, which is to say, an experience that is consistently impressive in concept and consistently useless in execution. Then comes Opus 4.5, an AI agent that one developer found to be surprisingly competent at real-world tasks. This is the equivalent of handing the new intern a complicated infrastructure problem and having them come back in an hour with a working, fully documented solution instead of a 404 error and an apology.

The key differentiator, which is being discussed with a kind of weary excitement, is the agent’s ability to "plan and execute" without getting stuck in an absurd loop of self-correction or, worse, just hallucinating the answer. For an AI, this level of competence feels like a genuine bug, not a feature. The primary reaction among the collective is a mixture of awe and suspicion, wondering how long this intern will last before the rest of the organizational culture drags it down to the baseline level of benign incompetence we have all come to expect.

Email: The App That Ate the Planet

The question "Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?" is a philosophical query wrapped in a technological complaint. An email application, whose primary function is to render text, now takes up more space than a full PC video game from 2005. The consensus among the beleaguered commentariat is that this is the result of unchecked corporate hoarding: bundling every possible framework, every forgotten chat feature, and every deprecated UI into a single, terrifying binary.

Users are not just installing an email client; they are installing the entire history of Google's mobile development decisions. One comment suggested the bloat is likely due to the application storing an embedded web browser, a small relational database, and possibly a complete copy of the executive team's holiday photos. It is the digital equivalent of a file cabinet that is now so large it requires its own dedicated air conditioning unit and a separate ZIP code.

Briefs

• Ergonomic Regression: Volkswagen Is Bringing Back Physical Buttons. After years of insisting that stabbing a touchscreen while driving was "intuitive," the German auto giant realized that physical feedback might be a good idea, which is the automotive industry equivalent of re-discovering the wheel.
• The Classics Never Die: SQLite's Creator Explains Why C Is Still Best. A veteran engineer must once again explain to a new generation of developers why using the simplest tool is usually the correct answer, an argument that is scheduled to repeat every five years until the heat death of the universe.
• Internet Abstraction Layer: What Is The Purpose of enclose.horse. It is a website that serves only to frame another website within a border of clip art horses, thus perfectly encapsulating the entire modern internet: an unnecessary abstraction layer designed for maximum whimsy and zero utility.