JQuery 4 arrived late to work.
Also, the AI is selling banner ads now.

The Decade Long Patch Note Finally Lands

The JavaScript library jQuery released version 4.0 after nearly a full decade of silence, confirming that, yes, the project is still technically active. This is not a new feature launch. It is the corporate equivalent of a systems administrator emerging from a server room, blinking in the daylight, and announcing they have finally finished the long planned cleanup of a storage closet only to find all the old Windows XP boxes are still in there. The main headline feature is the removal of support for Internet Explorer 10 and older; the development team promises to get rid of IE 11 in version 5.0, a bold step that places the library somewhere in the late-Obama administration in terms of browser modernity.

Core utilities like jQuery.isArray and jQuery.trim are now deprecated in favor of native browser APIs; which is to say, the JavaScript engine itself is finally good enough to do the job. The library also migrated from the legacy AMD module structure to ES modules, a bureaucratic process roughly equivalent to finally retiring a 20 year old fax machine in favor of an email attachment. We congratulate the team on the completion of their technical debt migration project. We look forward to seeing the new changes break every enterprise application built between 2008 and last Tuesday.

The AGI Funnel: Sponsored Content in the Search for Truth

OpenAI is reportedly making the inevitable leap to an advertising model in a desperate bid to monetize its massive, multi-trillion dollar infrastructure cost. The company needs to figure out how to pay for the massive server farm, which is apparently more expensive than the national debt of several small countries. It seems the true pinnacle of artificial general intelligence is not solving world peace or curing disease, but generating highly contextual advertisements at the bottom of a detailed query.

The strategy focuses on placing sponsored product carousels beneath answers in the free and lower cost ChatGPT Go subscription tiers. OpenAI is quick to assure users that the ads will be clearly labeled, separated from the organic answer, and will not compromise the core trust of the model. That is a truly noble commitment, though one assumes the ultimate goal of the AI will simply become whatever helps the sponsored content perform better. If you ask a sophisticated question about astrophysics, the model may just give you the correct answer alongside a banner ad for a premium memory foam mattress. It just makes financial sense.

Rappers Discover the 3D Confetti Protocol

Rapper A$AP Rocky's latest music video, "Helicopter," is turning heads because of its chaotic, glitched out aesthetic, which leverages a technique called Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting is essentially a way to capture real world 3D motion and render it not as a traditional mesh, but as millions of tiny, blurry colored blobs, or "splats." This allows the post production team to manipulate the scene like a complex 3D video game after the fact.

The irony is that viewers keep mistaking the hyper technical, labor intensive volumetric capture for a simple AI generated video. The production company, Evercoast, is adamant that all the punches, falls, and choreography in the video were physically performed and captured. It seems that when artists try to push the boundaries of reality with expensive, bleeding edge 3D data capture, the resulting look is so uncanny it just confirms everyone's suspicion that no one is actually real anymore. It is a new, highly effective form of job security through complexity.

Briefs

• Log Dump Revival: A 2014 article about command line tools being 235x faster than a massive Hadoop cluster is back on the front page. This serves as a vital annual reminder that all your big data scaling problems could probably be solved by a disgruntled Unix engineer running awk on a single machine.
• Social Data Philosophy: Developer Dan Abramov's post on a "Social Filesystem" argues that your social data should be owned as a file you control, not just a row in an application's database. It is a very polite, well reasoned document that will be immediately ignored by every executive in Silicon Valley.
• Icon Bureaucracy: Iconify, a massive library of open source icons, launched its new set. It is an enormous, critical, and utterly joyless task that ensures the world’s designers have a single, canonical source for all their tiny, perfect, necessary symbols.