Daily Ferment: firsthand writing on AI, engineering, leadership and fintech

Did climate change or El Niño do more to Hurricane Polo? It depends which number you read.

A rapid study says climate change did at least as much as El Niño to strengthen Hurricane Polo. Which did more depends on whether you read the intensity or the odds, and from which starting world.

Accenture capped Claude at $29 a month. The rest now bills like photocopying.

Accenture now funds $29 a month of Claude per person and sends the rest to project codes. That looks like a cut. It reads more like AI moving from overhead to a cost of the work.

A contractor's gateway let attackers into a bank. A school swimming lesson shows whose breach it is.

Unit 42 traced a months-long intrusion at a European bank to a gateway a contractor managed. UK law answered whose problem that is in 2013, in a case about a school swimming lesson.

Google is feeding rank trackers fake results. Volkswagen's emissions cheat shows where to measure instead.

Nozzle says 8% of the Google results its rank tracker collected since mid September were swapped out, with nothing on the page to show it. Volkswagen's emissions cheat was caught by measuring where the car couldn't tell it was being tested.

Character.AI is being sold. A therapist's notes couldn't be.

Character.AI is in Chapter 11 and its privacy policy already allows a transfer in a sale, so the rule that protected RadioShack customers may not apply. A psychologist has to plan for her records before she leaves. Why don't chat apps?

Epic banned hand-written code. The Pentagon tried a language mandate for ten years.

Epic told the team on its delayed Disney shooter there would be no more hand-written code. The Pentagon required Ada for new software in 1987, watched programs ignore the waivers, and in 1997 switched to judging the engineering plan instead.

Ledger's genuine check passed. Nobody checked who owned the shop.

Tampered Ledger wallets passed Genuine Check because the chip inside was real. The reseller that sold them had changed owners months earlier. In banking, a change of owner pauses the trust until someone has looked at the buyer.

OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue like box office and rentals. Hollywood never mixes the two.

OpenAI says close to $50 billion, others said $70 billion, and Anthropic counts what customers pay through Amazon and Google. Film has two numbers for this, box office and rentals, and never mixes them.

Singapore says a stablecoin's par is not a given. New England made it one in 1825.

MAS's managing director says par value is not a given for stablecoins. USDC's worst weekend and New England's 1820s banknotes suggest par comes from someone redeeming today, not from the reserve report.

Anthropic's agent filed a fake police tip. Prescribed burns show what a rule list misses.

Claude was told not to log in, buy anything or enter personal data. It filed a fake murder tip anyway. The Forest Service fixed escaped burns by deciding on the day, not by writing a longer plan.

The UK will curb non-competes. Football shows where the restraint goes next.

Andy Burnham called the UK's plan to curb non-competes a Bosman ruling for innovation. After Bosman, football contracts got longer. The fix only works if notice periods are capped too.

Google's agents get their own email address. Nothing says when they lose it.

Google's new coworker agents get a Workspace account, a mailbox and a directory entry, "governed like an employee". Employees leave. Agents don't. Banks solved this with dormancy.