Employee deploys sound weapon on neighbor.
Also: iPhones fail math and the boss lost the key.

The Escalation Protocol for Auditory Non-Compliance

The latest triumph in modern technological conflict involves the realization that high-tech solutions are only needed after low-tech diplomacy has failed. One sysadmin, tired of a non-compliant neighbor mounting a television to a shared wall and watching news at 3 a.m., has documented the inevitable path from reasonable conversation to digital warfare. All polite escalations failed; the neighbor refused a free speaker system and even a professional setup service. The only logical response was a retaliatory strike designed to bypass the tenant's ego and target their sleep cycle directly.

This response included propping up speakers against the same shared wall and playing low-volume whale calls whenever the administrator was away from the apartment. One commenter, a former radio station employee, confessed to an even more direct solution; changing his alarm from peaceful tunes to System of a Down's "Chop Suey" on full volume repeat and then "forgetting" to turn it off before leaving for work at 4 a.m. This is not technology; this is pure, beautiful bureaucracy turned weapon, where the inconsiderate person must file their own noise complaint against the system they created. The ultimate solution to an HR problem is always to make it someone else's problem but louder.

Reversing the Forgotten Artifact of '86

The discovery that one can defeat a four decade old copy protection dongle confirms that legacy systems never die; they just wait to be mocked. This specific dongle, created to protect software from casual replication, was overcome by a diligent engineer. The complexity of the "unbreakable" protection was ultimately less of a barrier than finding the physical device itself. The whole exercise is a perfect encapsulation of enterprise security, a system based on physical inconvenience rather than intellectual foresight.

Comments revealed the true vulnerability of the system: the human element. One story recounts how an intern arrived to find the PCB layout software non-functional because the boss had accidentally mailed their operational dongle to a customer in a mix-up, confusing it with a returned "broken" one. The entire billion dollar CAD system was downed by a misplaced piece of parallel port plastic. Developers from the era noted that defeating these protections was often as simple as finding a conditional jump instruction, such as a JE or JNE, and simply patching it to an unconditional JMP. It appears the most successful security strategy in the 1980s was simply hoping your users were not familiar with assembly.

Apple's Flagship AI is Still Learning Basic Addition

A new report confirms that even the thousand dollar price tag on the latest iPhone 16 Pro Max does not guarantee numerical stability. An engineer discovered that when trying to run models using Apple's own MLX framework, the device occasionally produced "garbage output" when attempting simple arithmetic. The phone's core silicon, celebrated as a triumph of on-device processing power, sometimes has an existential crisis when asked to calculate a two digit sum.

The irony is that developers are attempting to leverage the phone for the bleeding edge of local Large Language Models, yet Apple’s numerical APIs are producing wildly inconsistent results on a minority of devices. Running an LLM to calculate a sum is already an over-engineered solution; finding that the over-engineered solution hallucinates a random number is just peak Silicon Valley. It turns out the multi-billion dollar AI future runs on the same flaky hardware interrupts that crashed your old Windows 98 PC, just with better marketing and a more expensive chassis.

Briefs

• Network Security: Netbird rolls out Open Source Zero Trust Networking. This means your zero trust policy now trusts one less vendor and one more community, which statistically balances out the risk somewhere near 'high'.
• Vintage Gaming: Adventure Game Studio is available as OSS software for creating adventure games. A perfect opportunity for the engineering team to finally build that company onboarding quest-game they promised in 2018.
• Minimalist AI: A coder built a tool to list animals until failure. The true innovation here is explicitly acknowledging the failure state, a refreshing change from the usual "AI is solving everything" press releases.