fascinating once again, the universe reminds us that all abstractions eventually resolve to DNS Monday’s Massive AWS Outage Explained: Looks Like It’s Finally Over - CNET Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS • The Register
The shift away from the public cloud by companies like 37signals marks a moment of reckoning for an industry that spent the last decade preaching infinite scalability and “as-a-service” convenience. What once seemed like the inevitable future of computing, outsourcing infrastructure entirely to hyperscalers, is now being reassessed through the lens of cost, performance, and control. The so-called “great unclouding” is not a rejection of cloud technology itself, but of the assumptions that it is always cheaper, simpler, or strategically wiser. For mature companies with predictable workloads, owning the hardware again is beginning to look less like nostalgia and more like discipline. ...
In an intriguing article, Jeferson Borba discusses the Dead Internet Theory, which suggests that the internet has been overrun by bots, AI-generated content, and algorithmic manipulation since around 2016. He reflects on how platforms like LinkedIn are filled with AI-generated posts that mimic genuine human interaction, making us question whether the internet is truly alive. This theory, which originated in niche online forums, has gained traction as users observe a shift in the nature of engagement on social media and the prevalence of automated accounts that shape public opinion without real human discourse. ...
I came across a video by Dr. John Padfield, a former engineer and state representative, talking about something that stuck with me. He recalls being told, “never get in a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” It was a warning for politicians — don’t mess with newspapers. Then he updates it for our time: “Never get in a fight with people who buy network servers by the acre.” ...
Time Between Disengagements is a concept I came across in a recent article from Gitpod, and it offered an interesting new way to think about AI’s role in software development. It compares the evolution of AI in engineering to the progression of self-driving cars—where the key metric is how long an autonomous system can operate before a human needs to step in. That simple but powerful analogy really clicked with me. It reframes how we should think about the future of AI-assisted development—not just in terms of raw capability, but in how independently and safely these systems can work. ...
In 2025, digital advertising is looking more like a pyramid scheme than a sustainable marketing model. As John Kilhefner explains in his HackerNoon article, the obsession with pageviews and impressions has led to a bloated, user-hostile web—filled with pop-ups, autoplay videos, and trackers that drive readers away. Publishers chase clicks at the expense of quality, while brands spend millions on ads that users increasingly ignore or block. The result? A fragile ecosystem where trust erodes and ROI quietly collapses under the weight of empty metrics. ...
AI bots are reshaping the Internet at its core. What was once primarily a human-driven space is now increasingly navigated by intelligent, autonomous bots that explore, interact and even make decisions… Bots Evolution: From Search Indexing to AI During the Internet’s early period, web crawlers functioned mainly within the framework of search engines such as Google and Bing. These bots had a straightforward yet impactful purpose: traversed websites, catalogued content, and structured data to enhance user accessibility. Their function was clearly established—these automated tools classified and prioritized web pages according to relevance, search terms, and visitor interaction. This period depended on programmed algorithms that determined how information was found and displayed. ...
Scaling internet infrastructure was a significant challenge before concepts like cloud computing, DevOps, and SDN emerged. In the late 1990s, Alteon Networks revolutionized the industry with some of the first gigabit Ethernet switches and hardware-based load balancers. These devices, equipped with failover capabilities, filtering, and various layer 3/4 functionalities, became the backbone of many major web platforms of the time. The Alteon load balancer stood out as a unique solution in the pre-standard gigabit Ethernet era. While the name is now closely associated with load balancing, Alteon was a pioneer in NIC and switch innovation throughout the 1990s. As John Hayes described it, networking at the time was as groundbreaking as AI is today. ...