Hyatt Algorithm Charges Guest For Breathing.
Also, AI gets an A minus and Amazon sells out your front porch.

The $500 Air Quality Mistake

Hyatt Hotels has accidentally turned its rooms into a high-stakes, low-accuracy science experiment by deploying a third-party product called the Rest Sensor. This device uses advanced algorithms to monitor air quality, which is less about guest comfort and more about aggressively enforcing the no-smoking policy to the tune of a $500 fine. Senior reporter Zach Griff detailed how he was charged the bogus fee despite never smoking, an accusation which hotel managers are allegedly quick to dismiss because, as one manager put it, "everyone who is charged the smoking fee lies".

The core product innovation here appears to be a "digital evidence report" which provides hotel staff with a simple graph showing a spike on a "smoke detection score," but little actual proof for a $500 charge. This is the digital equivalent of an office manager who buys a fancy new coffee machine, but the only button it has is one that sends an email to HR accusing the user of loitering, making the new algorithm less an advancement in hospitality and more an overengineered excuse for a petty revenue stream.

Neighborhood Watch Re-Pivots to State Surveillance

The Amazon-owned doorbell company **Ring** has, after years of public pressure, decided that its brief hiatus from being an overt law enforcement tool was a mistake; it is now reintroducing and introducing new features to ease police access to user data and camera footage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports that **Ring** is planning a new feature that would allow police to request live-stream access to people's home security devices, effectively reversing privacy reforms implemented over the last few years.

Founder Jamie Siminoff, back at the helm, is reportedly focused on an "AI first" reimagining, a phrase which means, to the rest of the world, that we can expect video analytics or face recognition to be quietly added to the problematic surveillance apparatus. It is important to remember that **Ring** cameras are designed to watch the front of your house; the company is merely trying to organize a neighborhood watch, but with the unfortunate side effect of building the nation’s largest, centrally managed surveillance network.

The Intern Who Got a Gold Medal But Can't Be Hired Yet

**OpenAI** announced a quiet victory in the academic world; an experimental language model achieved "gold medal-level performance" at the prestigious 2025 International Math Olympiad (IMO). The model earned 35 out of a possible 42 points, solving five of the six problems and proving that, yes, the machine can now craft intricate, watertight arguments at the level of a prodigy. The unreleased LLM participated under the same strict rules as human contestants; nine hours of testing, no internet access, and no tools, only the ability to generate the final natural language proofs.

The catch, as always, is that you cannot use this incredible mathematician-in-a-box for your own simple needs; CEO Sam Altman confirmed that this level of math capability will not be available to the public for "several months". The model did fail on Problem 6, a challenge which only 5% of all human contestants solved, suggesting it has the same flaw as every new hire; it can do 99% of the job perfectly, but it cannot handle the one outlier task that the rest of the team also cannot do.

Briefs

• Monopoly Enforcement: **Microsoft Office** uses an artificially complex XML schema as a digital moat to prevent competition. Just a gentle reminder that every new feature is really a proprietary document format.
• Latency Shaming: A 2022 article is trending which claims a 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page. The developer's version of finding an inner peace that nobody else is allowed to have.
• Legacy Code Analysis: "The Big OOPs" is trending; a lengthy post analyzing the anatomy of Object Oriented Programming's thirty-five year mistake. We regret to inform you that everything you were taught in college might be a historical accident.