The God of Boundaries: The word “terminus” has a hell of an origin story

So, that point I made about the terminus being a surprisingly boring part of the federal highway system? Turns out that the term itself came from a not-so-boring place.

See, terminus is the Latin term for “boundary marker,” and that term eventually inspired a Roman god who would protect boundaries from all wrongdoing. What did that look like? Let’s refer to an Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry from 1911:

Terminus, in Roman mythology, the god of boundaries, the protector of the limits both of private property and of the public territory of Rome. He was represented by a stone or post, set up in the ground with the following religious ceremonies. A trench was dug, in which a fire was lighted; a victim was sacrificed, and its blood poured into the trench; the body, upon which incense and fruits, honey and wine were thrown, was then cast into the fire. When it was entirely consumed, the boundary stone, which had been previously anointed and crowned with garlands, was placed upon the hot ashes and fixed in the ground. Anyone who removed a boundary stone was accursed and might be slain with impunity; a fine was afterwards substituted for the death penalty.

Put another way: They took their boundary markers pretty seriously, largely thanks to Numa Pompilius, the Roman king (active from 715 to 672 B.C.) who is responsible for, among many other things, the Roman calendar. Also on his list of things he offered—the idea that there was a God named Terminus worth celebrating.

There was probably a deeper motive behind making boundaries something that needed a God, admittedly. According to Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives, Numa’s goal was to encourage peace:

He was also the first, they say, to build temples to Faith and Terminus; and he taught the Romans their most solemn oath by Faith, which they still continue to use. Terminus signifies boundary, and to this god they make public and private sacrifices where their fields are set off by boundaries; of living victims nowadays, but anciently the sacrifice was a bloodless one, since Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries was a guardian of peace and a witness of just dealing, and should therefore be clear from slaughter.

(Call it Roman-era soft power or something.)

The result is that these boundary stones had more weight to them than the road signs that end our long highways. In fact, they even had a festival on, of all days, the 23rd of February. As the Roman poet Ovid wrote of the celebration:

When night has passed, let the god whose marker separates fields be celebrated with the customary honors. Terminus—be you a stone, or a stump buried in a field—you too have divine authority from ancient times. You are crowned by two owners on opposite sides; two garlands and two libations are offered to you. An altar is built for you: here a rustic farm-woman brings fire that she has taken herself from the warm hearth on a broken pot. An old man cuts logs and skilfully piles up the chopped wood, and struggles to fix branches in the hard ground; then she kindles the first flames with dry bark, and a boy stands by holding a broad basket in his hands. Next, when he has three times thrown corn into the middle of the fire, a young girl offers up cut honeycombs.

Others hold jars of wine, and each one in turn is poured on the flames; the crowd, dressed in white, watches and respects this with silent tongues. Communal Terminus is sprinkled with the blood of a slaughtered lamb, and doesn’t complain when a sucking pig is offered to him. The simple folk of the neighborhood come together and celebrate with a banquet, and sing your praises, sacred Terminus. You mark the ends of nations, cities and great kingdoms: without you, the whole countryside would be full of disputes. You don’t go round trying to influence people, you are not corrupted by money, but with law-abiding good faith you guard the land entrusted to you.

I’m a guy who has never constantly thought about the Roman Empire, but I guess that’s about to change now that I know how these dudes party with boundary markers.

The massive road with no major cities and four termini: The story of U.S. Route 2

There’s not a U.S. Route 0, but that’s because we named it U.S. Route 2. Based on the rough grid system we use for interstates and federal highways, you can’t get much further north than this road, which hugs the Canadian border pretty much the entire way across.

Occasionally, it gets a chance to run into some famous friends—and in one case, it shares a terminus with one.

Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 2 end at around the same spot, at the border between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. I-95 is perhaps one of the most famous highways in North America, flowing through Miami, Jacksonville, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, among many other major cities.

The story of U.S. 2, however, is the definition of a long drive for someone with nothing to think about. The largest city it hits on its entire run is in Spokane, Washington (population: around 200,000), which is only five hours from its western terminus in Everett, Washington (population: around 100,000), where it hits another extremely notable major interstate: I-5. That road touches Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego. U.S. 2, which ends about an hour outside downtown Seattle, is the northern connection between two of the most important interstates in the country, and it touches each near both coasts.

But there’s just one problem with that: Oddly, after an excursion through mostly unpopulated parts of Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota (where it hits Grand Forks and Minot, two modest-sized cities), it runs into Duluth, Minnesota. Duluth is a fairly small city by most standards, but it’s the third-largest city on the entire highway. From there, it briefly clips Wisconsin before hugging the southern part of the Upper Peninsula, where it ends at another major freeway, Interstate 75. That road hits Tampa, Atlanta, Knoxville, Lexington, Cincinnati, and Detroit. I-75 represents what I guess we can call its Midwestern terminus.

And as is the case with many termini, it ends with little fanfare. R.I.P. long, boring road. (To be fair, the Mackinac Bridge, located directly nearby, is a pretty beautiful destination. Wouldn’t want to upstage it.)

Except, and here’s the interesting part, it comes back at the tippy top of Upstate New York, nearing but not quite touching the Canadian border. That’s the job of U.S. Route 11, a road that (minus a short excursion between Bristol, Virginia, and Knoxville, Tennessee where it splits into two separate highways, 11W and 11E) goes all the way to New Orleans.

But we’re talking about U.S. 2, and U.S. 2 is in New York for less than a mile before it hits the Korean Veterans Memorial Bridge and then transitions into Vermont. The highway only hits one reasonably large city on this entire section of the route, Burlington, though its Upstate New York terminus was only about an hour away from Montreal, a city of 1.7 million people. With apologies to Seattle and Vancouver, it’s the largest city within even shouting distance of U.S. 2.

From there, it glides through a handful of lightly populated parts of New Hampshire and Maine before it hits its final terminus, the quiet connection it has with I-95, perhaps the most important north-south highway in the country. (Apologies to I-69, which I hear is gradually building out and making a name for itself.)

Of course, I-95 didn’t used to be there, and previously, it had a Customs & Border Patrol location of its own, according to U.S. Ends.

So, why does this highway, in a largely rural area of the country with few population centers, appeal to me so much? I think it’s because I remember crossing the Mackinac Bridge as a child, reading atlases, and finding the idea that a highway just randomly stopped and then started back up again 700 miles away to be fascinating. If you wanted to connect the two halves of U.S. 2, you could always flow up I-75, make your way to the Trans-Canada Highway, and take that most of the way there. It’s a 12-hour drive, though. You might be better off flying.

Where did this road come from? Well, it has its roots in one of the first transcontinental highway systems in the country, the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway. First built in 1919, the goal was to have the road connect Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. While the modern U.S. 2 hits neither city, stopping in Washington State and instead hitting Bangor, Maine, it did create the blueprint for the modern highway, which is the northernmost cross-country U.S. highway in the United States. (Even if it does presume that you’re going to go into Canada for a solid third of the drive.)

While no longer named for him, Roosevelt’s memory and legacy loom large over this road. When it was completed in 1931, a large obelisk was built for him in Montana, at the Marias Pass. In a way, it’s the road’s spiritual terminus, if not its literal one.

If we think of termini as vertical, I guess it’s the highway’s tallest point, technically.

If you were to walk into a GameStop today, you might find the platform choices deeply lacking. Certainly you could find games for the latest consoles from Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, but what about Windows? Mac? Linux? The previous generation of systems from the console companies too? How about the Nintendo 3DS, the Wii or even the Sega Genesis?

Over on GameStop’s website, you can buy games for nearly every console released in the US since the mid-’80s. But good luck picking up a copy of Wii U Fit or Link’s Awakening in an actual store.

Keeping physical products in stock is hard, and harder still when you have to support so many platforms. Yet, the majority of the consoles sold since the mid-’90s are disc-based, supporting CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs. Even Nintendo’s flirtation with discs have some grounding in standards: The GameCube uses mini-DVDs while the Wii and Wii U use a format based on DVD and Blu-ray respectively.

Given that these formats are standards-based, why couldn’t GameStop just create discs on demand, with the help of a digital kiosk? Not only could GameStop support the various PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo disc formats, such an approach could support older games, too. Imagine: The store could just burn a 3DO, Jaguar CD, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, or Dreamcast game, whenever you wanted? (And the publishers get paid?!?) Take this a step further and license these kiosks to independent retailers too, and you’d have a hell of a system that would surely be attractive to many game publishers. Figuring out who owns the rights to many of the older games would surely be the harder part.

When I was growing up in the early 1990s in the UK, we had a similar problem. Consoles hadn’t really taken off yet, and home computers were the norm for gaming. The Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64 were all still commercially viable. MS-DOS was starting to see some releases, and even the MSX was a going concern too. As an Amstrad CPC owner in this era, it was often hard enough to find games on cassette. But if you wanted games on Amstrad’s not-quite-proprietary 3-inch disc format, you were out of luck. At the same, the image files for these games are relatively small, as anyone with access to an emulator can attest. The solution? Supply the image files on CD-ROMs to the stores, and duplicate games at the point of sale. Want a copy of Treasure Island Dizzy for your Amstrad CPC on 3-inch disc? No problem.

Enter Software on Demand Ltd, a company out of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire who created the EDOS system. The Electronic Distribution of Software platform leaned on a giant, hulking IBM PC clone with a case that included multiple floppy disk drives, a pair of caddy-loading CD-ROM drives and, in the middle, a high speed cassette recorder. It was capable of copying software from all of these platforms and others, including MacOS.

From their own sales catalog: “Electronic Distribution of Software is a new way to buy games software. EDOS stores are provided with this special equipment, which permits them to duplicate games for you on the spot.”

More than 20 companies distributed games through the EDOS system, based on a catalog from 1991. The brands were pretty well-known to UK gamers of the era, including Alternative Software, Codemasters, Titus, and Ocean Software, along with some up-and-coming software houses.

(The scheme might remind some gaming fans of Nintendo’s own attempts to build a kiosk-based platform in Japan with the Famicom Disk System, but one major difference was that the EDOS system was cross-platform. Nintendo Japan later brought the basic idea to the Super Famicom and Game Boy with its Nintendo Power cartridge-copying service. By the way, did you know that there’s a Game Boy cartridge with a Super NES game on it?)

At the center of the scheme, and driving its interest, was the British retailer John Menzies.

Formed in 1833 as a bookseller in Edinburgh, John Menzies had a significant retail presence throughout the UK and especially in Scotland. (Case in point: If you’ve seen the movie Trainspotting, the opening shot has the lead characters running from a Menzies store on Princes Street, having just robbed it.)

While the retail outlets would eventually merge with rival WHSmith in the late ’90s, the company was known for supplying independent newsagents with magazines and newspapers. Given all that, it’s not hard to see why they thought they could have some success with this endeavor too.

One clear benefit of the EDOS approach? It was designed to make things as easy for the stores as possible. It seems a lot of care was put into the duplication process by the company to reduce the number of returns too, with each duplication verified by the machine and self tests running on each of the duplication drives daily.

In the end, the story of EDOS is a pretty compelling what-if story of a company with a clever idea that perhaps was a few years too early. With the advent of games on CD-ROM just around the corner the system itself would need greater storage to store the images, but as gaming evolved, that seems increasingly possible. With dual-layer Blu-ray discs capable of storing around 50 gigabytes each, it’s possible this could have kept up with the increasing size of games as well.

Maybe Valve’s next piece of hardware can be a 3-inch disc drive for the Steam Machine?

One look at Paul Fusco’s IMDB page makes clear that he has not worked on anything but ALF since the early 1990s. He has essentially played one character for most of the past 40 years.

It’s a good character, and given my elder millennial status, one that I remember fondly. I was one of the millions of people who loved ALF back in the late ’80s. But at what point do you realize, holy crap, you’ve backed yourself into a snarky alien corner?

A recent video from the channel Treehouse Detective put an interesting spin on this TV classic, that it reflects the work of a creative person who was only willing to serve up his skills in one specific way. ALF must not be treated like a puppet, and it cannot be clear that Fusco is hiding under the weird creature he created.

This high standard led to years of tension on the ALF set, as everyone needed to make way for Mr. Gordon Shumway, but it also made the production significantly more difficult, thanks to a set full of trap doors and an insanely long production process for a TV sitcom. The importance of keeping up the illusion meant that ALF was stuck in this house, and couldn’t appear in other settings. That ultimately stifled the show, killed its ratings, and led to its cancellation—a cancellation that, mind you, likely wouldn’t have happened if Fusco was willing to be more of a team player.

It also limited career opportunities for Fusco’s alien. Andrew Price, the mind behind the channel, described how Fusco’s exacting standards meant that he unwittingly turned down career opportunities for his creature. This Saturday Night Live anecdote, shared by Price, lays things out perfectly:

Fusco said he’d only do it if the studio audience couldn’t see the puppeteers, and they built a trench on the SNL stage to maintain the illusion throughout the taping. Can you imagine that? The SNL crew would need to build a bunch of tunnels underneath the sound stage. And then ALF would have to be off the magic trick to make it seem like he was a real guy, all for one single episode.

It’s pretty obvious if you look at it from a distance: Fusco didn’t turn them down; instead, he was so unwilling to lower his standards that he forced open doors to slam shut.

For those not familiar with the history of ALF, the TV show ended up being a huge hit, but its ratings dropped off sharply during its fourth season, which led the show to get canceled on a cliffhanger. And not just any cliffhanger, either—one in which ALF was taken away by the government just before he’s about to leave Earth, traumatizing a generation of school-age ALF fans.

By the time Fusco got the chance to close the loop with Project ALF, a TV special that aired on ABC six freaking years after NBC dumped the show, the dream of ALF was already dead.

In the years since, Fusco has only been able to bring it back as a nostalgia ploy, most recently in 2023 when Ryan Reynolds acquired rights to the show as a sponsorship play. Not exactly dead, but not quite the cultural force it seemed like Mr. Shumway was on his way to becoming in 1987.

This is not like an unknown story in the history of television, and ALF’s arc is not unique, especially to the ’80s, where gimmicky characters like Pee-Wee Herman, Ed Grimley, Ernest P. Worrell, and Mr. T dominated the zeitgeist. But Fusco’s tendency to encase his character in amber and pretend that he wasn’t a puppeteer holding a puppet at the end of the day? That stands out.

Framing can be a really useful tool to think about your own approach to creativity, and I found myself thinking bigger-picture after watching Price’s video. As a creative person, I have often taken the philosophy of saying no more than I say yes, and that has led me to a lot of interesting times that I’ve said no.

I’ve never done a podcast or really played seriously in video, for example, and I’ve avoided paywalling my content for the most part. When lots of creators found success with social media or big platforms, I’ve largely stayed die-hard indie. Other creative folks, I’m sure, have their own version of this, the lines they won’t cross out of fear they might stifle or destroy their vision.

But there’s being passionate about a vision, and there’s letting that vision get in the way of what you’re actually trying to do.

It’s worth noting that Fusco himself has said that, no, all the horror stories about ALF’s production weren’t as bad as everyone says they were. As he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012, amid hints of a revival that never came to pass:

It was just the nature of the beast. There was no way we could have made it go any further or any faster. So no, I think it was frustrating that it would take so long, but people got paid for what they did. Despite what people thought, that there was a lot of tension on set, there really wasn’t.

(The late Max Wright, who played the put-upon Willie Tanner and who once reportedly got into a fist-fight with the character, might have disagreed with that sentiment.)

I think there’s a universe where one might be too close to their creation and cannot look at it objectively, and that causes the creation to ultimately turn on its creator. Or maybe it makes it so our successful work doesn’t have a sustainable economic upside.

In a world where successful people are always looking for paths to success that are never guaranteed, we should not have so much pride in our work that we make that work difficult for others to latch onto.

That makes it way too easy to dismiss.

Why the Web eventually moved in the direction of forums

If you think about it, the web forum was a terrible fit for the way the Web worked. We already technically had a tool that allowed people to communicate with one another in a forum setting in the early ’90s—Usenet.

Or, at least, that’s what it seemed like. So I wondered, well, what did people think about the growth of web forums on Usenet? And that led me in the direction of a fascinating post from modern-day futurist Eric Hunting.

Posting on alt.hypertext in the thread “Forums in the Web,” in April 1994, Hunting more or less predicted what web forums would become in just a couple of years:

One of the things lacking in the environment of the Web is a means of using Web pages as a medium for conducting open discussions or forums as you have in USENET. The reason for this is probably that there is no means of packaging pages, along with all their associated graphics and multimedia data, like forum posts nor would it be practical to distribute such potentially huge amounts of data among forum servers as with USENET.

His post, which is a bit wordy, describes the concept of threads, URLs as organizing structures, and what might or might not work. Essentially, the addition of images and multimedia, a second-class citizen on a text-based forum like Usenet, would significantly reshape how people interacted on forums. One area where he was wrong, unfortunately, is a common one. He assumed that the lack of anonymity would lead people to behave a bit better online:

It’s one thing to toss out a hundred lines of spontaneous vindictiveness to the faceless USENET server, another thing to have to maintain that mass of nastiness for a specific period of time on one’s own computer. A Web Forum post wouldn’t be a message on a paper airplane tossed to the aether. It would be a billboard in your own home.

Welp, not so much. But Hunting wouldn’t have to wait long to see an implementation of a web forum in the wild. In June 1994, CERN’s Ari Luotonen developed what is believed to be the first Web-based forum software, WWW Interactive Talk (WIT).

“[Bear] in mind that this was put together in a big hurry in a few days
so forgive me if it doesn’t do yet all the things that it could do,” Luotonen wrote.

The software did not live for long, and no longer appears on the W3C website—a surprise because much of its early work has more or less stayed online. Not this, though—though a little Internet Archive Wayback-foo eventually helped me find where the archive file was hiding.

In hopes of kicking back off a trend in W3C-generated forums, I uploaded the software to GitHub. And for kicks, I got it to run in a Docker container.

(Want to try it yourself? I put it on the Web here. Watch out for falling spam.)

While the W3C was first, there are lots of examples of similar tools out there. For example, the Collaborative Cork Board (CoCoBoard) was developed at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the same place that launched Mosaic into the world. That tool essentially turned email replies into forum threads.

It wasn’t long before this pie in the sky concept, once the experimental territory of early Web developers working in CGI and Perl, found interest with big businesses. These were promoted as one of many examples of groupware. Odds are, you probably did not get your first experience posting on a Web forum using an open-source tool, but a commercial one.

One of the first companies to successfully launch a web forum startup was Lundeen & Associates, which created the WebCrossing forum tool, which was announced in the fall of 1995. Within a year, a number of major publications, including the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The New York Times, and Salon, had put the software to work—in the Times’ case, it was part of its 1996 election coverage. While later tools became better known, WebCrossing may be one of the few internet-native software tools to remain in active development for more than 30 years.

(A testament to its legacy: Salon used the software as the anchor of its digital community for more than 15 years, only shutting it down in 2011 out of concerns it wasn’t where the Web was going. With another 15 years of retrospect, can we argue that this was probably a bad move? Perhaps.)

But WebCrossing was far from alone. The website Perlwatch has a list of literally hundreds of different forum systems, some of which vary in levels of obscurity. The list, as far as I can tell, has not been updated in years, despite the site claiming otherwise. But it is an excellent historic document of what it was like looking for a bulletin board system in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

But even with all this competition, the most dominant player in ’90s forum software benefited from being the free option. Matt’s Script Archive, a collection of Perl-based website tools (including guestbooks and page counters), hit on something important with WWWboard.

That tool, a primitive forum technology that barely worked, nonetheless made threaded discussions accessible by normal people, even if it meant forums that extended well past the point of loadability and security issues that never get patched. (We wrote a whole thing about it last week in case you want to dive in more.)

We quickly surpassed the limited capabilities of WWWBoard. But the forum itself would eventually get left in the dust, too.

Before there was Markdown, there was BBCode

One challenge that a lot of early forums had to navigate was the necessity of sanitizing the text that people posted in forums. People could post literally anything in a form, and it could break the site, encourage exploits, the whole bit.

(When you don’t sanitize, you run into issues like making it possible to put CSS on MySpace pages.)

But on the other hand, you still wanted your websites to have at least some style to them, in a controlled way, without a lot of extra junk. These days, a lot of platforms use Markdown to solve this problem, in part because of its ubiquity. But before that, people posting on forums needed alternative options that made room for fun if not for putting malware on your forum.

That led to the creation of BBCode in 1998, first starting with UBB, then spreading to other forum platforms like phpBB and vBulletin. (There is a BBCode dot org dedicated to this scripting language, but I refuse to link to it because it’s now a Web3 SEO play.) While it doesn’t get the modern level of attention Markdown does, it is both older and more capable than Markdown is, for better or worse.

A subset of HTML, it effectively replaced the < or > with [ and ], and removed the ability to add a bunch of extra stuff that the HTML spec was capable of doing. Forum owners naturally appreciated this because it gave them a bit of control over what users could do on their platform. JavaScript might be off the table, but 300 point text? Suddenly possible. A library of common images? Absolutely, they were called image macros. And features that make the forum more usable? You bet.

This lingo would sometimes shape the community as a whole. Fans of Something Awful, for example, likely remember the forums had a number of image macros, most notably :10bux:, which displayed an image of a $10 bill, reflecting the forum’s infamous one-time entry fee. And on some forums, BBCode would end up getting used in experimental ways, helping to generate some early meme culture. In its own way, BBCode was what made forums more than just Usenet in HTML format.

The downside is that the security reasons were more pronounced in theory than in practice. A 2005 blog post by developer Chris Shiflett argued that the security reason for BBCode was a lot weaker than it seemed:

As regular readers of Security Corner know, input must always be filtered. When you’re allowing users to enter very complex data, creating a whitelist of acceptable characters can be very difficult. Because of this, many developers employ very weak filtering rules for such input and rely on the escaping performed by htmlentities() for protection.

While htmlentities() can save you from poorly filtered data, relying on escaping alone is not ideal. Because an attacker can send any type of data, it’s equally unwise to rely on BBCode for protection—you can’t assume that the attackers will abide by your rules unless you enforce those rules in your programming logic.

But even if the security reasons didn’t matter so much, Shiflett conceded that it was good for users and may in some cases even be easier to remember than actual HTML. (Though on the other hand, one presumes BBCode did discourage some people from trying out forums entirely. Those were the people who eventually went to Facebook.)

A similar concept in content management systems associated with WordPress, the shortcode, became a popular technique for helping visually modify or organize content on a page. (Tedium uses shortcodes with Markdown.)

More video games should be programmed with a little BBCode.

But what may be the most interesting legacy for BBCode in the modern day might not even be forums. The game development tool Godot has adopted the scripting language for writing formatted text within its node-driven interface. Which, given Godot’s surge in popularity over the past few years, likely means that a lot of modern games you enjoy might be secretly taking advantage of a tool developed for forum software built in Perl roughly 30 years ago.

Guess we can indirectly blame Unity for helping give BBCode a second wind. What a story arc.

If I was Micron and everyone was hating on my company for making life just a little more unaffordable, I might try looking for a scapegoat, too.

But given how little the RAM folks have stuck their necks out in the year of the RAM crisis, this quote from a recent Wall Street Journal story was nonetheless revealing:

In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.

“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”

On the surface, the logic checks out. RAM takes a long time to build, and when the cycle of supply and demand prevents further reinvestment, the result is that demand becomes completely impossible to anticipate on the surface.

So yeah, hand one to the memory companies. I’m sure when you have a product everyone wants that is extremely difficult to produce and lacks the elegance of anything Apple does, it can be difficult to eyeball your long-term memory demand. (On the other hand, when your profits are surging … it makes it hard to be charitable.)

This, of course, led to the last really huge memory crunch, dating to the late 1980s, when it caused problems for Nintendo cartridges in particular. Back when I wrote about it, I gave it an ending that aged like sour milk:

Megabyte for megabyte, that means it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a 1988-style shortage ever again. We can’t make better oil, but we can make better RAM.

Yes, it turns out, we can make better RAM. Problem is, sometimes the demand is so much that we can’t account for it with traditional measurement tools. We can't always see the run on tulips before it happens.

If you look at Apple's business model, it is essentially a 50-year bet that it can maximize profit by owning as much of its production process as possible. RAM and storage are, at this point, two of the biggest, most expensive components that Apple does not make in its phones and computers, having created its own ARM-based SoCs. Apple hands those chips to a manufacturer, TSMC, to build for hire, but they are in control of the supply chain.

Part of what drove the rise of Apple Silicon was the very same pressure to rely on a partner with different priorities from Apple. A surface read suggests that this is a fairly similar situation, but it falls apart when you look closer. Unlike oil, RAM does get better over time, as does solid-state storage. But it’s a difficult market to do well. Here’s a video of Micron’s own process of turning sand into silicon:

Doesn’t seem particularly easy, does it? And a good case against vertical integration might be Apple’s primary mobile competitor, Samsung, which also doubles as a major supplier. Samsung makes memory chips, but the market is so screwed up that Samsung isn’t even willing to sell some of those chips to itself. Even with the understanding that the company likely has a better understanding of its own supply needs than anyone else, Samsung is favoring the demand from corporate buyers over its own product lines.

(It’s so bad that Apple is trying to talk up the Trump administration to get some RAM from a Chinese supplier that is otherwise banned from the U.S. market.)

In theory, Apple would vertically integrate everything to the best of its ability. But RAM is not an area where they can really do something different from the rest of the crowd, unified memory excepted. It would cost them a lot of money and time to do it properly, and it might not even turn into anything useful in the end. It’s worth noting that Apple recently had one of those, and it did not work out for them. Apple has the budget to do it, but it’s easy to look at their battered frenemy Intel and see that being a component supplier is not all wafers and clean rooms.

To put it another way, vertical integration is in so many ways Apple’s moat, but the tech that Micron and other big memory suppliers offer can’t be vertically integrated—and they know it. It’s going to make for tough negotiations in the future, because Apple is no longer the biggest company buying all the RAM.

And we, as consumers, suffer.

Currently, I’m in the midst of writing a big post about the roots of web forums, but I hit on an aside weird enough that I decided to stop writing that and work on a separate post. Because I think it actually explains a lot about the way people use the internet.

Essentially, here’s the deal. Around 1995 or so, a high schooler named Matt Wright decided to launch a website that shared some basic website tools that he programmed. Many of these were dead-simple, things like contact forms, guestbooks, and web counters. One in particular, WWWBoard, became a massive hit, becoming one of the first widely used web forum apps on the internet.

The site Wright built, Matt’s Script Archive, unwittingly helped to highlight the divergence between how normal people think about software, and the developer’s perspective.

Wright, and others like him, hit upon an obvious need. Regular people found these scripts, ran them, and suddenly had forums, counters, and contact forms. They got the job done. But programmers who weren’t in high school and weren’t so wet behind the ears looked aghast at what Wright had done: He had spread poorly designed, but widely used software across the internet. This software was packed with security issues, but worst of all, it wasn’t really getting updated all that much.

How serious are the security issues? Well, a look at OpenCVE points out some very serious problems that range from bugs that emerged from massive exposure to some questionable design decisions. (Keeping an encrypted password file in the root? Making it possible to grab env variables via a URL? Not smart!)

One exploit in particular, affecting Wright’s textcounter tool, stands out among the list: CVE-1999-1479, with a score of 10.0 critical, effectively allows exploiters to execute code on the server as root.

This state of affairs got serious enough that a competing website, called nms, essentially was launched to replace Matt’s buggy scripts with drop-in versions aren’t full of security exploits from bad coding. Their POV:

The problem is that the scripts in Matt’s Script Archive aren’t very good. The scripts are well known amongst the Perl community to be badly written, buggy, and insecure. Anyone asking for support on Matt’s scripts in any forum will be told in no uncertain terms that they shouldn’t use his scripts.

Unfortunately for some time there were no replacements for Matt’s scripts that you would want people to use. In 2001, the London Perl Mongers decided to address this problem and write a series of drop-in replacements for Matt’s scripts. This project is the result.

That said, you shouldn’t use nms either, because it hasn’t been updated in about 20 years. What gives? After I wrote this, Dave Cross, who helped develop the nms tool, reached out and noted that while he still programs in Perl, the mechanisms we use to program and host websites have sharply diverged over the past 30 years. “The best practices in Perl web development moved on from CGI a long time ago,” he wrote in an email.

On top of all that, security practices have continued to evolve.

“The internet is a very different and far less trusting place these days,” Cross added. “One of the problems with FormMail, for example, is that it could be used to send spam. That hole was fixed but, today, things like SPF and DKIM would make it very hard to deliver email to its intended recipient.”

(Even if Cross actually wanted to update the nms scripts, he would be unable to—as he doesn’t have his SourceForge login anymore, nor does he really remember how Subversion works. But we’re not exactly lacking for alternatives, either.)

Matt’s scripts, the easy option, and the problem with overexposure

When so many people use something that it becomes part of the internet’s lingua franca, it’s inevitable exploits are going to emerge. There’s a reason WordPress and Windows each have reputations as bug-ridden, and it’s largely because of the number of eyes on the given tools.

With that in mind, I don’t think it’s fair to blame Wright for having bad code—after all, it wasn’t like he knew it was going to become a huge platform.

(For what it’s worth, Wright himself later recommended the nms scripts instead of his own, reminding folks he wrote his original scripts as a kid. “The code you find at Matt’s Script Archive is not representative of how even I would code these days,” he wrote on his site. “My interests and activities have moved on, however, and I just have not found the time to update all of my scripts.”)

I think there is a lesson for security teams, however, who are going to be stuck trying to work around people who grab the lowest hanging fruit.

The average person does not want to spend hours looking over every option under the sun to find something good. They just want it to work, and they may not necessarily think much about how to make it better.

That, of course, is why vibe coding is such a big thing nowadays. It hits on the very same tension that an easy-to-access script archive did. And just as with these scripts, you can look at vibe-coded apps as insecure dreck created by someone who didn’t know better, or you can look at them as a democratizing tool.

Problem is, they’re technically both. Can you appreciate one while appreciating the other? I have the answer, and it’s yes.

Matt’s scripts, remembered

Recently, I spotted an incredible project at the domain that once hosted Matt’s Script Archive. As of a year ago, worldwidemart.com was hosting spam gambling content of the kind that might give your computer a virus.

But that owner let the domain expire late last year. This turned out to be the best thing. Someone who really cared about the legacy of Matt’s Script Archive decided to buy the domain to build a new site explaining the legacy of what once existed there, and why those scripts, as broken as they are, matter.

The new site has the definite smell of vibe coding, but you know what? It’s also doing something incredibly important for the history of the internet. As you know, I’m the kind of guy that complains loudly when someone takes over a historically important website for less-than-stellar reasons. But I have looked through this page and I do not see any reason to complain—no under-the-radar sketchy “yeah, we did this to sell you something” drama. The page where I thought I would see that, a link located at /hosting/, is instead an explanation of how web hosting has changed in the past 30+ years.

Put another way, this website rules. If we’re going to revive domains into zombie websites, I’d rather it was a vibe-coded thing that explains why this was once historically relevant than something that a spammer doesn’t even want.

What was Matt thinking? He just wanted to be helpful. And that he was.

Updated 05/23/2026

Added more details about the nms scripts from Dave Cross, who helped build them a quarter-century ago. (Thanks for reaching out!)

It’s hot. It’s kind of heavy. And on my computing weapon of choice, it’s hard to set up.

But honestly, I love that it exists.

Recently I’ve been taking a look at an eGPU, the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5060 Ti AI Box, which is essentially a desktop GPU in a relatively small case. I’ve always been really curious about eGPUs, in part because they presumably offer the best of all worlds in many situations. Your laptop stays home with you, but when you want something beastly, you plug an eGPU into your setup, and boom—good graphics.

What makes the AI Box interesting is that it is technically small enough to fit in your laptop bag, while still giving your presumably older laptop a leg up. (As it supports Thunderbolt 5, it also will eventually run faster whenever you get to upgrading the thing.)

The GPU is actually a desktop GPU, though one that got gamer raspberries when it first came out. The Nvidia RTX 5060 was seen as underpowered and lacking in the RAM department when it first came out. The 5060 Ti still got the side-eye from gamers, but the bump up to 16GB of RAM made it more attractive to creatives or … yes, folks messing around with AI on their local machines.

Part of the reason for this comes down to its design. Unlike most GPUs, it is designed for an eight-lane PCIe gen 5 setup, rather than the more common 16-lane approach. (PCIe has gotten really fast, which is why that’s even possible.) And once you remove the myriad number of fans the thing has, the board is actually quite small.

Oddly enough, I think the context is what really matters here. In a desktop for your average Black Myth: Wukong player, it feels a little on the weaker end. But for laptop jockeys who only occasionally load up Steam, it suddenly seems utterly awesome. It is a beacon of miniaturization that someone got a card this powerful to actually in something the size of a traditional Thunderbolt dock.

You could carry this thing into a Panera and people would look at you like you have a giant power brick. (A small miss in this context is the decision to not include a sturdier case; after looking around, I landed on the Koolertron Waterproof DSLR Camera Bag. It fits nicely in a Chrome bag.)

And given the speeds of the laptops where this might end up getting used—my HP Envy has dedicated Intel Arc graphics, but they pale in comparison to this thing—and the value prop shows itself.

Another way the value prop shows itself: At $699, it’s not that much more expensive than a standalone 5060 Ti, and it is more or less self-contained, which you definitely can’t say for a low-end eGPU. (It is more expensive than what the base price of the card was supposed to be, but, y’know, AI.) Most are just cheap adapters that presume that 1) you have a power supply and 2) you’re cool with letting your GPU hang out in the open air. It’s a rare example where you actually get more value from it by setting the upgradeability aside.

(Though maybe not! As noted by a user on the eGPU.io forums, the device itself is just a GPU on a very small PCIe card, plugged into an adapter. So if another card like this ever exists, you might even be able to upgrade it.)

I set this thing up in Linux because I hate myself

I’m not going to sugar-coat it: If you’re buying an eGPU to run on Linux, you’re intentionally asking for a world of pain. Fortunately, as a former Hackintosher, I’m a glutton for punishment, and I was willing to experiment to get the upside.

And the problems this box had—freezes whenever the driver was enabled—reminded me of the most stressful parts of troubleshooting kexts in Clover.

The AI Box’s driver situation hasn’t fully been settled on Linux. But that hasn’t stopped some from trying, particularly developer Andrew Obersnel, who has built a project called nvidia-driver-injector that essentially patches Nvidia’s driver, then runs it in a Docker container.

Even with that starting point, it still wasn’t a cakewalk. Obersnel’s tool was written for the more powerful 5090 AI Box—same family, different requirements. On top of that, I was trying to run it in Bazzite DX, an immutable distro, which meant a more complicated state of affairs for me. (I’m used to it.)

Getting this working is absolute gruntwork, the kind of thing where using an LLM can be a huge help, helping to make sense of admittedly complex debugging schemes. It took a few hours, but eventually I hit paydirt.

Unfortunately for me, the next update to Bazzite hit right after and forced me to rebuild everything. Annoying, but a little more LLM gruntwork got me on track. But let it be known: Linux is not for the faint of heart at this time. Hopefully that changes.

Other operating systems offered differing tales: I ran it in Windows 11, installed the Nvidia drivers, and was immediately off to the races. More intriguingly, this GPU can theoretically run on Apple Silicon thanks to some newly sanctioned drivers from TinyGrad. I actually tested this method on my M1 Air and immediately ran into a brick wall, but if the card was a little older, it would have worked. Oh well, I’ll give it another shot in six months.

Running speed trials all over the place

My planned use case for this thing involves experimenting with local LLMs and giving creative software, particularly Affinity, a little extra horsepower.

I did run a land speed test in LM Studio by having them run the same prompt. Using Qwen 3 VL 4B, a model small enough to fully fit in the laptop’s Intel Arc chip, the difference was fairly stark. The laptop’s dedicated GPU spat out text at about 14 tokens a second; the eGPU did so at 118 tokens/second. It was not even close, and there’s still headroom on this thing to spare.

Newer models impressed as well, including the new Gemma4 12B model (around 35 tokens per second) and a distilled version of Qwen 3.5 trained on DeepSeek 4 (around 60 tokens per second). At least from a speed perspective, these models are quite capable—and after a little optimization I was able to increase those numbers a little further.

Local LLMs do have limits, however, and they’re easy to hit. I proved this with a very Tedium-coded challenge involving one of my favorite indie-rock dynasties: “Share with me a story about how Conor Oberst beat Tim Kasher in a trivia game about the history of Omaha.”

All the tests shared a story, but the details were where everything fell flat. Most, not all, of the LLMs were aware that Oberst was the singer of Bright Eyes, but none got close to figuring out which band Kasher led—one said The Decemberists, another said The National. (The answer, of course, is Cursive, or if you’re a real fan, The Good Life.) You don’t trust models with anything factual, of course, but local LLMs are likely more fact-deprived than their server-rack cousins.

And from a coding perspective, you will have to be careful about how you utilize a tool like this, testing some models to find the right balance. For example, I found that Gemma4 struggled to complete coding-related tasks in Opencode, while the Qwen/DeepSeek combo I tested did fine, even if it wasn’t quite as smart as DeepSeek proper.

(This is way beyond where it was a year ago, though.)

One area where I was pleased with the results of this test was Affinity. I did a fresh install of the tool using the graphical installer, and after a little troubleshooting, I had a very polished app that excelled in Vulkan mode using this GPU plugged in.

And for the nerds, yes, I did try a game or two. The 2016 edition of Doom, probably the closest thing in my library I have to a heavy game, scored 70fps at 4K medium and neared 100fps at 1440p ultra. Not a bad showing.

But it was a fraught one, in part because of Linuxy issues. I had some issues with resizable BAR (Base Address Register) that I needed to work out, and even after I did that, I ran into frequent freezes when attempting to run a DisplayPort cable through the eGPU itself. I don’t think that’s the device. I think it’s a mixture of driver immaturity and user error. It does mean that until I get it fixed, I’m leaving performance on the table until I bite the bullet and go back to Windows 11.

This is not a plug-and-play device on Linux. In fact, it had a tendency to siphon resources from other plugged-in devices to feed its never-ending desire for bandwidth. (At times, it could disable other devices plugged into a Thunderbolt dock, like my keyboard, mouse, and webcam.) But for those willing to put in the work, it is a very capable one.

The eGPU for the rest of us? Not yet, but …

I’m certainly not going to say that the eGPU market is one that I have a deep understanding of, but its potential has always been a bit difficult to grasp for normal consumers because of what it represents. It’s a tool to bring a stationary task to a portable system, a niche that has never truly had its moment, like mini PCs have.

I think a device like this one gets us closer to such a moment. These things do have real downsides from a technical standpoint: Thunderbolt is just not as fast as a PCIe connection, and to get the best graphical performance out of the thing, you need to plug it into an external monitor. Having it run back through your laptop just tanks performance, though it’s still probably faster than anything else in your machine.

The 5060 Ti AI Box is certainly not the first “breakaway box” that attempts to bring a more portable form of this model to computers. But it is a relatively rare beast—a desktop GPU in a box that is smaller than a standard desktop GPU card. Plus, most prior attempts have been AMD graphics. AMD is fine, but the company is behind from a machine-learning standpoint, even with its recent improvements to its ROCm computation stack. (Side note: I think Intel should consider offering an eGPU, or at least push its vendors to offer one, as its Arc cards are fairly price-competitive at this time and would likely play nicer with Linux.)

There’s a possibility that eGPUs could eventually become a bridge device as laptops become more GPU-forward. That phenomenon already happened in the Mac ecosystem and could happen with PCs, based on Nvidia’s recent moves into ARM laptops. Those chips are powerful, with 5070-class GPUs and lots of RAM. But they’re not going to reach normal people for quite a while, thanks in part to their workstation-class positioning.

Unless Nvidia taps into its war chest like Apple has, these are likely going to be mid-four-figure computers. Even enthusiasts might find themselves passing, at least at first.

In that light, an eGPU that can be plugged into a Thunderbolt port and can offer something approaching that experience to a class of people with normie laptops feels like an excellent compromise. That’s especially true if LLMs become more fundamental to how we do work.

When I got this thing, I didn’t think the portability would be such an important part of why I like it so much, but it’s honestly the main feature. I hope we see a dozen models like it.

And I hope we see some real work on making them first-class Linux citizens.

Two companies that have enabled literal decades of creativity have both landed on the same question around the same time: Who owns a vibe?

One makes $5,000 guitars. The other makes software that they’d charge $5,000 a year for if they could. And creatives, as ever, are caught in the middle.

First up, we have Fender, the originators of one of the most important guitar designs of the past century, the Stratocaster. It’s been around so long that it’s basically generic at this point, often the starting point of many a luthier. But Fender disagrees on this point, with a single default judgment in a German court giving them just enough cover to call out their competitors, many of whom have been making Strat-like guitars for decades.

Surprisingly close to the center of this controversy, somehow, is John Mayer. See, a bit over a decade ago, Mayer wanted to make improvements to his Strat under his signature guitar deal with Fender. But Fender’s corporate culture was in the middle of a big shift, and the people in charge weren’t receptive to his ideas. So he jumped ship to PRS Guitars, whose founder, Paul Reed Smith, is still at the helm. Mayer found a close collaborator, and the two saw an opportunity to improve on a de facto industry standard, tweaking a solid guitar to make it even better for hardcore players.

They were small things—wider frets, a deeper slope to make it easier to hit those high notes—but they added up to be a better guitar that superseded its signature-guitar status.

John Mayer, showing off his Strat-like signature guitar, which is more popular than your average signature guitar.

The PRS Silver Sky, as it came to be called, got a lot of online mockery for looking kind of like a Strat. But the guitar quickly outpaced its surface details and became more popular than the Strat among serious guitarists.

Enter Fender, which recently sent PRS a legal complaint. They weren’t the only ones, but Fender was clearly looking for some way to protect its design, which has been around for about as long as Paul Reed Smith, a 71-year-old man, has been alive. Backlash has been swift—with many musicians siding with smaller manufacturers, reflecting a widespread belief that the Strat design is generic.

Meanwhile, a completely different push for ownership emerged this week on Capitol Hill. The company? Adobe, a clear favorite around these parts.

But this is worth paying attention to. Essentially, Adobe is attempting to put its might behind something called the CREATOR Act, which aims to give artists ownership over their distinct visual style, something at risk in the age of AI.

“If passed, this common-sense, bipartisan measure would address a gap in our intellectual property laws by protecting creators against style impersonation, and Adobe is proud to support it,” wrote Louise Pentland, the company’s chief legal officer and executive vice president of legal and government relations.

Broken down, Adobe is essentially pushing for something very similar to what Fender is—the right to protect a style, but in a very different medium. One is resolutely analog; the other is as digital as you can get. While the bill seems narrowly tailored based on a cursory read, the protecting-artists mess feels like it’s testing fate.

What do I mean by that? Well, going back to music, modern artists have found themselves navigating complex legal battles over songs that borrow a portion of a melody or even a general vibe. The infamous “Blurred Lines” case, in which the estate of Marvin Gaye sued over Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell copying the general style (rather than the specific melody) of “Got to Give it Up.” That case has created all sorts of ugly precedent in the years since, and much of it is being driven not by the artists, but their estates.

This bill is literally asking to bring that mess to visual art, a situation in which interpretation is often even more abstract than with music. Admittedly, the bill has distinct limits—it has to be made clear whether, by AI or by a human creator, that the intent was to specifically rip off another person’s art. It carves out stuff that would already be protected under fair use, like using a work in a news story.

And as anyone might have noticed when OpenAI kicked off a Studio Ghibli meme last year, there would be clear cases where this might happen. At least from an AI standpoint, it’s timely.

But most art lives in an uncanny valley of indirect inspiration—where perhaps you saw something, and it inspired you to make something of your own. The gap between whether something is directly inspired or indirectly inspired is wide, and all matter of deeply messy legal battles could fill it.

One presumes the reason Adobe is the one pushing for this is because they see a potential business in licensing specific styles to AI platforms and Creative Cloud users, though the company does not explicitly state this. (Its Firefly product does something similar with stock photos.)

If this law passes, it wouldn’t be surprising if some big company started skulking around, looking for the next target to hit. (Given that this law would apply for up to five decades after the artist’s death, it might even apply to their estate.) You think this is hyperbole, but this is already what’s happening with music, where modern musicians preemptively make other artists songwriters on the off chance it sounds too similar.

Inspiration springs eternal, but one wonders if this attempt to protect creativity is just going to lead to a company resting on its laurels to try to smother the next generation of creatives.

Yes, we’re in a climate of constant slop, but a climate of constant lawsuits would probably be worse.

One basic-ass site against Google’s overwhelming prowess

To start off, I want to make a bit of a separation here. Google does a lot of good things. It also does a lot of bad things, especially in the realm of advertising.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare the badness of different companies on a scale—bad is bad, after all—but Google’s brand of evil is largely built from neglect for the genuinely good things it’s built.

You could see some of this at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference, last week. Google Beam, its attempt to make video conference calls more lifelike, continues to evolve in exciting ways, for example. And the Googlebook, the company’s evolution of ChromeOS and Android, feels like it’s coming along at a good time, given that everyone suddenly hates Windows.

But the thing is, how much of this did customers actually ask for? Google I/O seemed to be stuffed with things intended to sell a specific vision of how Google sees itself fitting into your life, rather than creating things that seem to demand it.

It’s not enough that Google is on your phone, on your wrist, or in your web browser. It must continually deepen that relationship in new ways or threaten its long-term relevance for good.

Which brings us the AI overviews discussion. It’s so weird. Two years ago, a Google I/O event added a feature that I could not ignore, so I spent 20 minutes looking for a way to ignore it. Then I found an obscure URL code and created a website that told everyone about it. Within hours, &udm=14 became a meme.

That website took off in a big way because, let’s face it, we’ve decided that we need to have a say in how intrusive Google’s features get.

Even in the world of AI, Google does interesting things (the Gemma 4 open-weight models are quite good), but the problem is that the company is approaching the technology from a defensive stance. Love ’em or hate ’em, people choose to use ChatGPT and Claude. Google’s structural advantage is that it’s already deeply embedded in your life, so its play has to be that it can integrate the thing that might give them value in a way that forces you to take notice.

On top of the AI overviews, there have been other visible signs of this kind of annoyance kibble throughout their product lines. At one point, Google put its Gemini icon in the Gmail app in the very place its account switcher button used to be, ensuring users would hit the button constantly.

More recently, Google put a giant button on the bottom of Google Docs by default, though it thankfully made it easy to turn that off.

That is Google’s modus operandi, and it has been for years, dating back to the days of Google+. (Remember, there was a time that Google just shoved everyone’s emails and search data into a social network. In fact, it was the second time in 18 months. This is not a new game for them.)

But just imagine if the company had decided it would just let the tech earn its place, not unlike the way Gmail or Google Photos did. The conversation would be way different. It would feel like we’re in conversation with it, rather than getting pulled down the road, kicking and screaming, ready to fight back if it gets too intrusive.

In so many ways, large companies like Google and Meta treat their mandates as if they can change the script constantly and we’ll just stick around. Users deserve more say in that discussion—and by working around forced features, that’s how they get it.

I spent two hours of my life building a thing. Google has probably spent thousands, if not millions, of collective employee hours building all their AI innovations. And for a surprisingly large number of people, the two-hour workaround I built wins out. There’s a lesson in that.

The single-serving site doesn’t get the due it deserves

I will admit that I did have one other inspiration point for my &udm=14 idea. And it’s extremely far away from the everything site that is Google.

Around 2011 or so, I had a successful long-haul Tumblr that got a bit of traffic. But one day, a coworker of mine briefly outpaced it with his own viral single-serving Tumblr. Months later, it happened again, when my pal Stacy Lambe, a fellow Tumblr user who I hung out with often, helped put together Texts From Hillary, one of the most viral websites I’ve ever seen.

My thing, ShortFormBlog, was built around depth and designed to get people coming back on the daily. But it couldn’t compete with humorous pics of safari animals. Different lane, but still a useful lesson.

Later, I became familiar with another category of single-serving site: The site that does one thing extremely well. My favorite example of this is Kay Savetz’s FaxToy, a website that does nothing but print faxes sent to a specific number. I talked to Savetz about it back in 2017 for a piece on unusual phone numbers, and I think in many ways, it stuck in my head. It was a genuinely clever idea that, beyond being absurd and funny, actually does something. If you want to ensure your fax machine is working, send a weird image to FaxToy.

Yes, it’s single serving, but it’s sticky, fitting into the category of “small tool.” That’s a bit of a rare beast online, and I often find myself relying on sites like these on the regular. I don’t send many faxes, but I do have plenty of single-serving sites I do rely on regularly. For one, Compressor.io, which does nothing but compress big images to smaller ones. I’ve compressed hundreds of GIFs using this method.

It’s no Texts From Hillary, but &udm=14 is an excellent small tool. It does two very specific things: First, it tells you about the &udm=14 hack, and second, it makes it easy to use it yourself, even if you’re a luddite.

There’s no reason other people can’t make their own, and in fact, I would encourage it. If vibe coding is a thing people just do now, why not vibe-code a simple solution to a common problem?

A tool that just does one thing and is in a specific place still has power. And it could be something you made. So if you’re holding onto something good, try making it. You might be surprised.

If we stand a chance against big tech, we need to think smaller

I don’t think I’ve necessarily hidden the fact that I’m “in the middle” about this whole AI thing. I’m not Ed Zitron, nor am I the YouTube-centric AI company whisperer Theo Browne.

I’m just a nerd who got into writing via emulation, who writes a lot about processor architectures like PowerPC and the Transmeta Crusoe. I once bought a 386 off of eBay because it was the exact model I used when I was 12. And when I was nine, I spent hours shoving random Game Genie codes into Super Mario 3 to see if I could find any codes that weren‘t in the book.

Basically, I’m the perfect target audience for interesting AI stuff. And even then, I’m just like, “Don’t hand it to me unless I ask for it.”

I’ve described a “bionic arm” philosophy for navigating the use of it ethically. I recently pitched the idea of moving away from the bigger providers and using DeepSeek (which remains an insanely cheap option).

If I’m looking for that kind of tool in my utility belt, I’m not by default opposed to accessing it, as long as I understand what I’m giving up by using it, and it doesn’t cross my personal lines. I know many people have far stricter standards than I do, as is their right, however.

When a modern technology, including but not limited to AI, becomes a decorative bird, it loses its novelty. No matter how good it is.

But what I am opposed to is what I might call “decorative bird AI,” of which Google’s AI overviews are the classic example. Part of the reason Google’s AI overviews are so rough is pretty obvious when you break it down. Google put a complex technology on top of the most widely used form on the entire internet. They can’t put an expensive model on that. Even though they own the entire infrastructure soup to nuts, it would cost too much! So instead, they put a more basic model on top of it, and the company gets embarrassed constantly.

It’s not just about Google, though. Lots of companies do this, and it more often than not just makes things worse for them, as they add features on top of features on top of features. They don’t do this because anyone is specifically asking for these features, but because this is what they’ve been told is an exploitable market.

One example I often think back to is Dropbox. In the midst of the Apple Silicon move, which came with significant architectural changes that Dropbox users could have benefited from, the company was constantly launching new productivity features, rather than updating their app for the new architecture. Five years later, the company’s CEO is leaving, after years of sagging values.

Too much tech is just put out there because an investor told a CEO that it was essential to include to keep up. Doesn’t matter that the audience didn’t ask for it, that there wasn’t market research suggesting that it was necessary. We need to have an answer to the other guy’s use of AI, so it’s there.

All the motivations are set against us. And while some companies have actively avoided going down the road of overzealous AI infusion, like the Vivaldi browser, the truth is that there’s a structural motivation behind all this.

If we no longer want to be at the mercy of companies that poorly dominate every part of our life, we must embrace the idea of companies that do one thing well.

Way back in the Tedium archive sits a tale about why umbrellas are so hard to redesign. They’re single-use devices that do one thing well, and every attempt we’ve made to improve them has never quite lived up to the ambition. I hate single-use devices, particularly clunky ones, until the moment I need them. And well, once that moment arrives, an umbrella proves its worth.

Contrast that with the approach modern tech takes: Once we’ve decided on something being important, every big company must have their dedicated version of it.

Our world needs more, smaller tools that speak the same language, where everyone makes a little money, but nobody dominates the industry. In the 1980s, the software industry was kind of like this. Oh, sure, Microsoft and Apple were still out front, sucking up all the oxygen. But there were lots of little companies, selling software on disks. The bigger ones put them in boxes in stores. The smaller ones realized that they could just ship software through the mail and let the software spread naturally among user communities.

Shareware didn’t really survive the internet era—but, at least for a while, its spirit did. More recently, that spirit has taken a backseat to the larger companies that realize, if they’re big enough, they can shape how we interact with our world.

In 1991, if you wanted to start a software company, you had to hope that your product was good enough that word of mouth and a P.O. Box could push it around. That’s exactly what happened when Tim Sweeney released ZZT. It became the starting point for Epic Games, the kind of company that today is big enough that, thanks to its Unreal Engine and the success of Fortnite, it can dictate terms to much of the gaming industry.

If you ask me, I want a world where more software is like ZZT than it is like Fortnite, because more people have a chance to succeed in the former environment.

As much as I hate umbrellas, I think I’m coming around. Let’s build more small stuff. I’d rather have something small that covers my part of the sky than something big that covers the whole thing.

We’d all be happier with more umbrellas.

For nearly two decades, Plex has served as self-hosting’s great gateway drug.

It’s the one self-hosting tool that normies know about, and it looks slick and modern. (It’s even a streamer itself these days!) Despite the fact that it’s often associated with piracy, it has transcended its roots in the Xbox homebrew scene—it started as a Mac-oriented fork of XBMC, which became the modern-day Kodi—to become a legit business.

The rub, of course, is that it’s not open-source like most of the other tools people self-host. But Plex more than made up for this failing by offering an add-on service that added additional features to the free app. For more than a decade, you’ve been able to pay the fine folks at Plex a one-time fee, and boom, you have the full-fat service forever.

And for years, that fee was under $100—sometimes well under it. (I got it in 2024 on a discount, and I paid $91 for the honor.) At a time when Adobe seemed to charge an arm and a leg for its software with glee, Plex’s model felt like the right balance for consumers.

But clearly the deal wasn’t quite so good for the company, because this week the company felt compelled to raise the already elevated price of this lifetime subscription by an eye-watering $500, from $249.99 to $749.99. Their reasoning is pretty plain when all laid out:

We’ve considered eliminating the Lifetime Plex Pass in the past, given that recurring subscriptions help us sustain long-term development, but we know it’s still a valuable option for many in our community. So instead of retiring it, we’re keeping it available at a price that reflects the real, ongoing value of the software we’re committed to building and maintaining for years to come.

Just like everyone else, Plex needs money to pay for its service. But the problem is, people specifically use Plex and products like it to get away from the SaaS business model. Hence the impasse. By charging so much for it that the average person is not going to be willing to get past the sticker shock, Plex weeds out the people who aren’t good for their bottom line long-term.

Those people, rather than paying more than the price of the mini PC they use to host their Plex libraries, are most assuredly going with an alternative like Jellyfin.

But this tension is not new—far from it. A few years back, FUTO had then-spokesperson Louis Rossmann pushing for a form of open-source that encouraged payment by users. FUTO’s big self-hosted tool is the excellent Immich, so they have a horse in this race just like Plex. The problem is, FUTO’s pitch isn’t really open source. While Immich uses the more common AGPL v3 license, other FUTO projects like Grayjay use the Source First license, which encourages payment for commercial use.

(By the way: I see FUTO now states directly on its website that it’s not a nonprofit. I’d like to think my piece from 2024, which specifically called out that lack of clarity, led to that statement.)

Self-hosting is an extremely exciting scene these days, as I wrote about a couple of months ago. (I have plans to write a guide to apps you should be trying very soon.)

But if the model is ultimately unsustainable, that’s not good for the self-hosted community, either. And I think Plex, by announcing this insane price increase, they’re making it clear that they ultimately do not see this model as sustainable for real companies. (The counter-argument that carries water with me: Most users did not ask Plex to get into the streaming or content-licensing businesses.)

There’s a consistent tension that the Plex news hints at: End users want ownership of the tools they use, but those tools require different business models than the buy-once software of yore. You could reasonably argue that since we’re no longer buying software in boxes, we have a different expectation of maintenance than we once did. But on the other hand, there are plenty of cases where we weren’t necessarily asked whether we wanted new features added to the software we use. (I think if Adobe still shipped standalone Creative Suite versions every year and charged $1,000 for them, people wouldn’t be begging for feature updates every year.)

The truth is, if you run a business, a consistent stream of revenue is better than a flood of revenue that turns into a sputter. (A stream of revenue that becomes a flood is even better, if you have the infrastructure to manage it.) But when every drop of our paychecks is already accounted for before we’ve even saved anything up, SaaS feels exhausting. Plex’s move only leans into that exhaustion.

I think Plex’s problem is that it’s straddling two worlds, only one of which can realistically support a big company. Self-hosting is great for users and hardware companies, but there’s no way in heck it is as profitable as a money spigot.

The company had to make a choice. It might just push the next generation of self-hosted users to alternatives like Jellyfin and Emby. But that’s okay. Plex still has its normies.