Apple News Accidentally Sells Fake iPhones
Also TikTok gets a strongly worded memo

The Digital Mailroom is Now the Wild West

Users have come to the startling conclusion that essentially all advertisements served through the Apple News application are, in fact, scams. This situation is perfect for Apple because it neatly abstracts the company from the messy business of quality control, allowing it to focus on its core competency: releasing a slightly thinner phone next year. The ad slots feature everything from revolutionary hearing aids "doctors hate" to fake-out liquidation sales for companies that do not exist, and the US Better Business Bureau has even issued warnings about the type of fraud the platform is hosting.

It is easy to blame an algorithmic black box for the influx of financial mischief but this is simply the natural result of treating your curated, premium news service like a digital bus shelter. Apple promotes the app with buzzwords like "trusted sources" and a "rewriting the reading experience," which is technically correct since the experience is being rewritten by con artists and their terrible JavaScript. Frankly, the most charitable read is that the Apple News team tried to optimize ad revenue past the point of sanity and accidentally let a bot manage the vendor vetting process, a mishap we will call benevolent incompetence.

HR Department: Europe Sends a Cease and Desist on the Dopamine Dispenser

The European Commission, operating as the world's most aggressive HR department, has issued a preliminary finding that TikTok's design violates the Digital Services Act. The investigation focuses on the platform's core mechanics, specifically the endless scroll, the autoplay feature, and the highly personalized recommendation system. The EU states that these features essentially shift the brains of users, especially minors and vulnerable adults, into an "autopilot mode," which sounds less like a regulatory violation and more like a successful feature implementation.

The Commission wants TikTok to change its fundamental design by potentially disabling "infinite scroll" and implementing effective screen time breaks, which is a bit like asking the coffee machine to stop dispensing caffeine. TikTok, in a predictable corporate response, stated the findings are "completely incorrect," presumably while the company’s internal metrics team high-fived itself for a job well done.

Waymo Gets an Extravagant Training Simulator, Installs an Elephant

Waymo, the autonomous driving subsidiary of Alphabet, introduced its new Waymo World Model, a high-fidelity generative AI built on Google DeepMind's Genie 3. The model's purpose is to run through "impossible" and "exceedingly rare" scenarios like tornadoes, heavy flooding, or a casual encounter with a full-sized elephant in the middle of a city street. The engineering challenge here is not building a car that drives well, but building an entire fake universe that can generate a multi-sensor lidar and camera output for a scenario Waymo Driver will almost certainly never see.

The team at Waymo is using an AI-generated digital world to train for the weirdest possible edge cases, which is the perfect corporate solution to a physical world problem. Instead of getting its engineers outside, Waymo is just having them run "what if" scenarios in a custom-built, hyper-realistic video game where the main objective is not running over the giant tumbleweed. It is a $944 million investment in a sophisticated hallucination engine, which is the most efficient way to achieve safety compliance in the age of generative AI.

Briefs

• Continuous Integration: A blog post suggests that GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams. It is a slow, painless death by thousands of YAML configuration files, which is frankly a beautiful metaphor for modern corporate IT.
• PaaS Nostalgia: Heroku, the platform that let a generation of engineers start a side-hustle with a single git push, issued an update that assures everyone they are still around and mostly doing fine. This is the equivalent of a co-worker emailing you five years after they quit just to say they are doing well.
• Legacy Systems: The community has released OpenCiv3, an open-source, cross-platform re-implementation of the classic Civilization III game. It is comforting to know that some developers still believe in rewriting a core, stable enterprise system from scratch just for the fun of it.