We have opinions about your Wi-Fi and everyone else's business. We watch Starlink stats so closely it's a little concerning. Speedify keeps you online. 📶
Philadelphia, PA
Joined May 2014
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A technician, a building, a leak. None of these were the failures all that redundancy was designed to stop. Every system has a single point of failure hiding somewhere: one zone, one cable list, one bug nobody noticed for ten years. You usually find it the hard way. 7/8
In September, Google’s fix was simple: move the traffic onto paths that still worked. That’s the lesson from all three stories. You need a second path that doesn’t depend on the first, before you need it. Most homes and offices have exactly one internet connection. If Google’s backups can fail, a setup with no backup is just waiting its turn. 8/8
The plan was to announce the bugs and the fix together on Thursday. Then the details leaked online. PHP rushed the patch out a day early, and within about half an hour, attackers were already trying the bugs on real servers. Web admins spent the day updating and restarting every server they had, racing people who already knew where to look. 5/8
This wasn’t Google’s first bad day this fall. On September 1, during routine maintenance in Iowa, a technician unplugged every fiber cable on a set of routers, one after another, in 13 minutes. Google builds those connections with multiple paths and separate power so no single failure can take them down. One person with a cable list did it anyway, and part of Google Cloud was offline for four hours. 6/8
Cloud regions are split into zones so that when one fails, the others keep things running. But redundancy only helps if you actually use it. Any service that lived entirely in that one London zone went down with it. As one expert put it afterward, a backup is only useful if it doesn’t rely on the thing that just broke. 3/8
Then on Wednesday, PHP had its own emergency. PHP runs a huge share of the websites you use every day, and researchers using AI tools found two bugs that let attackers run their own code on unpatched servers without logging in. One security outlet called them among the most severe in software history. They’d been sitting in PHP for more than a decade. 4/8
In one week, a power failure in a single Google data center knocked UK banks offline, and two critical PHP bugs leaked before the fix was ready, putting a huge share of the web in a race against hackers. Both stories come down to the same problem, and Google already had a warning about it in September. 🧵 1/8
On Tuesday morning, a “power event” hit one zone of Google Cloud’s London region. Revolut customers couldn’t pay by card, pull cash from ATMs, or even log into the app. Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove and parts of the NHS had problems too. It took until midday to fully recover. One building lost power and a whole country found out what its bank runs on. 2/8
Tesla’s humanoid robot won’t reach customers until late 2027. It’s been “almost ready” longer than the office printer has been “warming up.”
No, Starlink isn’t the network that cut Ukraine’s drones off at 100 mph. It was Starshield, a separate satellite network SpaceX built for the US military. People mix them up because SpaceX launched both, but Starlink is the commercial internet service on RV roofs and cabin porches, and Musk says Starshield is owned and controlled by the US government. Who actually ordered the cap is still disputed.
Here’s the part most people miss: regular Starlink already has a 100 mph limit. A standard dish only works when it’s sitting still, a Roam plan lets you use it in motion up to 100 mph, and anything faster needs an aviation plan that costs several times more.
The dish can enforce that because teardowns show each one carries a GPS and an IMU, a set of gyroscopes and accelerometers. It needs them to aim a tight beam at satellites about 500 km up moving 17,000 mph, which means it always knows where it is, which way it’s pointing, and how fast it’s going.
Your phone works differently. It works in the car, on the train, and in an elevator, and your carrier doesn’t charge more because you’re moving. Every network has its own rules and its own off switch, and they fail in different places. That’s the best argument for not relying on just one.
Your Starlink dish has a speed limit too. Roam plans stop supporting in-motion use at 100 mph, the same number that hit Ukraine’s drones. If you want to go faster, you need an aviation plan that costs several times more.
Starlink and Starshield both come from SpaceX, but only one of them is reportedly cutting Ukrainian drones off at 100 mph. Hint: it’s not the one on your RV.
Zipline’s delivery drones hover 300 feet up and lower your food on a rope. Texas has burrito ziplines now and I’m still waiting on a DoorDash driver who went the wrong way
Around 76% of major US newspapers have a paywall. Everyone’s always asking what AI will do to jobs. I’m asking when it can get me past “subscribe to keep reading.”
NVIDIA’s DRIVE Thor self-driving chip runs the autopilot, the dashboard and the voice assistant all on 1 chip. My laptop can’t run Chrome and Zoom at the same time
Unitree just introduced the H2-X, a kung fu humanoid bodyguard. Will Smith’s Detective Del Spooner spent all of I, Robot warning us about this.
Marty McFly and Doc Brown landed in Hill Valley on October 21, 2015, expecting flying cars and hoverboards. Eleven years past that date, we almost got both, if you count the Roadster as a flying car and those old "hoverboards" from 2017
Chapter 11 for Getty Images: 477 million+ images, and I simply screenshot the watermarked preview of every single one I ever needed. Adobe would’ve charged me a fee just for looking
$80.7 BILLION?!? That's so many zeros that I need to use my extra fingers that come with my AI retouched self portrait
Anthropic reported an $80.7 billion net loss in the first half of 2026 as it prepares for an IPO.
The number is misleading at first glance, though. About $72 billion came from noncash accounting charges tied to convertible notes, while the company still spent nearly $9 billion on computing and infrastructure.
