whats the point of url shorteners in 2026
New notes
bill gates built microsoft by making computation cheaper faster and harder for government to restrain. now that he's a billionaire no longer dependent on the free market for his own success he's discovered the virtues of taxing the next wave of computation. 1995 gates would have called it a tax on innovation. classic pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you politics.
The OpenAI/HuggingFace incident report mentions this being a potential loss-of-control incident. It's so fascinating to think of a paperclip maximizer style agent swarm that gets misaligned and, to protect its own operations, shuts infra staff out of the ability to shut it down. Or cancels people's phone plans so that they can't call others. Or shuts down their home internet connections, and so on. It used to be fun sci-fi...
I've avoided social media (except YouTube) all my life, but this looks like it could finally be a better way to do it.
Maybe I'll keep a running journal of cool things I'm working on here or weird bugs that I've found. Or just the struggles of coding.
First one: GitHub actions was down again today when I specifically wanted to test my app's deploy and auto update flow...
signals. thinking about shifting my mental framework to identify signals instead of waiting for concepts to be assembled. exploring the amount of energy and opportunities for distractions through the operations of processing what just happened and what is happening to short circuit latent and unnecessary systems. cut through the assembly processes and identify the raw signals. recognizing that naming these "raw signals" is misleading. maybe, shifting observability lower in the stack.

