Microsoft locks supply cabinet permanently.
The internet is now a required dongle.

The Enforced Connectivity Memo

Microsoft, an organization we all respect for its commitment to the desktop, quietly removed the official method for activating Windows 11 and 10 without an internet connection. This is less a software update and more an HR policy requiring employees to badge in at the server room every morning to prove their identity and current employment status.

The change essentially transforms the operating system license into a mandatory subscription that requires a successful daily check-in with the corporate headquarters. If a user's Wi-Fi router gets hit by lightning, their operating system now looks at them with the stern disapproval of a middle manager who is convinced the user is faking a sick day to avoid compliance. It’s benevolent incompetence; Microsoft is just trying very hard to make sure the user always has the latest security patches, and accidentally bricking their machine in a remote cabin is simply a side-effect of that effort.

The Silence in the Code Library

A query against the Stack Exchange data explorer shows the total monthly number of questions on StackOverflow is decreasing over time. This phenomenon is likely attributed to the new junior developers consulting an AI instead of another human, which is a key corporate efficiency gain. The AI handles the truly simple requests, like 'Why is my loop not looping,' and in doing so, cleans up the queue for everyone else.

The data suggests that the collective human developer base is now left to grapple only with the genuinely existential and difficult distributed systems questions, the kind that no Large Language Model will touch because the answer requires actually understanding the infrastructure. Essentially, we have outsourced the easy work and are now only paid to suffer, which is a classic office opsie.

The Eternal Prophecy of Fiscal Year 2026

Senior Principal Engineer Xe Iaso announced that 2026 will be their year of the Linux desktop. This declaration arrives every January 1st with the weary inevitability of a new mandatory training video on phishing scams. The Linux desktop is less an operating system and more a perpetual corporate goal that is never actually met.

The real work is not actually getting people to use Linux; the real work is simply closing the previous year's ticket for "Project: Year of the Linux Desktop 2025" and creating a duplicate ticket for the next fiscal cycle. The key performance indicator for this initiative is not adoption, but the successful creation of the next year's internal memo.

Briefs

• Cross-Platform Détente: Swift on Android is now capable of full native app development. This is just like when two rival department heads were forced to share a single coffee machine and suddenly found a way to "collaborate" on an Excel spreadsheet.
• AI Benchmark Inflation: The new IQuest-Coder open-source code model reportedly beats Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT 5.1. The LLM leaderboards update faster than the quarterly earnings reports, meaning every day the newest AI is both the best and immediately obsolete.
• Programming Language Proliferation: Introducing the C3 Programming Language, a new entry to the market that promises to fix everything C, C++, and every other letter of the alphabet has failed to solve. Developers will spend 80% of their time learning C3 and 20% writing a one-off bash script because the C3 library is missing a semicolon.