Hi Byters! That doesn’t sound right, but I’m going with it.

This week, we hit 1500+ subscribers. Really cool! Thanks to the fantastic community, have a cookie 🍪!

Also, this week, I migrated to a new email service, Beehiiv. I’m excited to start incorporating many more community features soon. I moved so that I could add more GIFs to the newsletter, so watch out—there will be a lot of Office GIFS incoming!

Quick Bytes

Google Loves Cookies…again

Are you sick of all those annoying cookie pop-ups on websites? Well, guess what—they aren’t going anywhere. Google just pulled the plug on its Chrome Browser Cookie project, which would have given us the ability to block all third-party cookies directly from the browser. That would’ve been too easy anyway!

Instead, the project has been scrapped, and Google said, "Please add more pop-ups because they are working so well." By the way, Europeans spend 575 million hours per year clicking away cookie banners.

At least we tried. If you want real cookies, here is my mom’s secret chocolate chip cookie recipe.

MCP, yeah, you know me…Markitdown MCP Server

Microsoft just released a great MCP server called Markitdown. Since LLM’s love to have documents formatted in Markdown language. This clever utility converts Office files into Markdown. Since it is an MCP server you can integrate directly with Claude Desktop to build some powerful agents as well.

At present, MarkItDown supports:

• PDF

• PowerPoint

• Word

• Excel

• Images (EXIF metadata and OCR)

• Audio (EXIF metadata and speech transcription)

• HTML

• Text-based formats (CSV, JSON, XML)

• ZIP files (iterates over contents)

• Youtube URLs

• EPubs

• ... and more!

🤖 When Cursors AI Customer Support Goes Rogue

We all hear the stories of AI taking jobs, but ehhh, maybe we still need a bit more time after hearing about the story from our favorite AI IDE Cursor.

An AI-powered customer support agent from Cursor recently went rogue, spamming users, hallucinating bugs, and demanding product changes. Users reported a weird logout issue, but the AI Bot replied to support emails as “Sam” that the logouts were “expected behavior” under a new login policy. 

However…There was no new login policy…The AI Support agent was hallucinating, which caused a wave of Cursor subscription cancellations.

Best Tweet this week:

That’s it for this week. Remember: if your AI starts demanding product changes, opening JIRA tickets, asking for pay raises, or time off, please don’t give it admin rights!

Stay sharp, stay curious, and, for the love of cookies, click “Reject All” when you can.

Until next time, and Happy Weekend
— Brian 🧠💥