The AI Bought a Million Memos
Also Crypto Scams and Antitrust Paperwork

The Digital Hoarder: Anthropic's Memo-Maxxer

Anthropic, the company that sells the Claude AI, has announced that its Sonnet 4 model can now handle one million tokens of context, which is the equivalent of approximately 2,500 pages of text. This is a massive expansion, giving the AI the capacity to read the entire departmental policy manual and a stack of vendor contracts before answering a simple question like, "Where is the coffee filter stockpile".

The general sentiment, however, remains that giving the system an infinitely long desk to spread out its papers is not the same as giving it the ability to actually find the document it needs. The technical community is gently suggesting that the AI suffers from "Lost in the Middle" syndrome. This means that while Claude can theoretically ingest the entire history of the company's PowerPoint presentations, it will only reliably reference the title slide and the final slide's contact information. Anthropic tried very hard, and we commend the toddler for not immediately setting the data center on fire this time.

Petty Cash Drawer Found Tilted, Monero Staff Confused

The famously private cryptocurrency Monero appears to have suffered a successful 51% attack, which is crypto speak for "someone managed to pay the electric bill with monopoly money, and the auditors are going to have a bad week". A 51% attack means a single entity controls enough mining power to rewrite the transactional history; effectively, they control the truth about who bought whom lunch.

This is a classic decentralized finance oopsie. The point of Monero is to be a ghost in the machine, but it turns out the ghost has a physical address where you can deliver an angry letter and a cease and desist. The Monero community is currently in the "everything is fine" phase of a catastrophic failure, assuring everyone that their highly secure, untraceable currency is merely experiencing a temporary, block-chain-based 'disruption of service' while the IT department reboots the main ledger.

Antitrust Paperwork Delivered to Cupertino and Mountain View Inboxes

The Australian court system has found both Apple and Google guilty of being anticompetitive in how they run their respective application stores. The core issue is that the two behemoths were effectively high-fiving in a corner, agreeing that only their friends could play with the ball.

It is a beautiful example of two companies trying very hard to be innovative by preventing anyone else from innovating near their profit centers. Apple is likely filing the ruling under 'Minor International Administrative Costs', right next to their quarterly tax returns. Google probably had an AI draft the apology, which will be warm, empathetic, and therefore, according to recent research, less reliable.

The Startup That Wants to Buy The Office Building

Perplexity, the AI search company currently embroiled in a copyright lawsuit with Japan's largest newspaper, *Yomiuri Shimbun*, decided now was the perfect time to make a longshot $34.5 billion offer for Google's Chrome browser. This is the equivalent of the office intern receiving a notice from HR about too many personal print jobs and immediately trying to buy the entire print shop.

The valuation of $34.5 billion for Chrome is based on the idea that the only thing holding the browser back is a lack of integration with an AI that summarizes other people's work without paying them. Perplexity appears to be working under the classic tech assumption that the best way to handle a lawsuit about theft is to buy the entire supply chain.

Briefs

• Server Outage: GitHub was having issues. Yes, the website where we host our code stopped working. Nobody saw that coming, which is why everyone is scrambling to find their local copies now.
• Spyware Dictionary: The dictionary app StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers. It turns out that when you look up the word 'secure', the definition is automatically forwarded to an anonymous person in the Ukraine.
• Analog Media Continues: Kodak says it might have to cease operations. The company that invented the camera is finding it difficult to compete against a world that simply trades JPEGs; their strategy of selling expensive chemical baths appears to have failed.