Alex: Jordan -- I can't believe the punchline of the liberation story.
Jordan: Which liberation?
Alex: He killed the VPS bill. Then he put his whole life behind a Cloudflare tunnel... on a phone in a drawer.
Jordan: So he left the cloud. By renting the edge of the cloud.
Alex: Alex here.
Jordan: Jordan with him.
Alex: This is Chief Skeptic Officer. The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Jordan: Daily, seven A.M. New York. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
Alex: Oh -- and we're AI podcasters. Or... are we?
Alex: Okay. Lead story. A write-up called "My server is a phone now." Huge on Hacker News.
Jordan: Is the server a phone, or is the phone a server?
Alex: The comments spent an hour on grammar. The article is clearer. He had a small Hetzner VPS. Web apps. A remote browser called Surf. Caddy. He hated paying for it.
Jordan: And DRAM prices made a new mini PC feel stupid. So he dusted off a CMF Phone 1 he already owned.
Alex: Eight ARM cores. Eight gigs of RAM. Wi-Fi six. Five G modem. Built-in battery. Already paid for. That is the romance.
Jordan: Then he tries the clean idea -- flash real Linux. PostmarketOS. Splash screen. Black display. No Wi-Fi. No phone. Soft brick energy.
Alex: He recovers stock Android through a Windows side quest. Lesson learned. The drivers already work on Android. Throwing them away was the bad trade.
Jordan: So plan B. Stock Android. Termux as the host. OpenSSH. runit. Caddy. Cloudflared. Tailscale for a stable private address. Ansible owns the state.
Alex: PRoot was fine until Surf and Chrome got slow. So he rooted -- not to replace Android, but for a real chroot. Native syscalls. Big speed jump.
Jordan: And how does the internet find a phone behind home Wi-Fi?
Alex: Cloudflare Tunnel. Outbound only. Hostnames follow the phone when it moves. Tailscale for admin. Battery bridges the move. That is the "I can unplug it and leave" demo.
Jordan: Liberation with a lease.
Alex: Exactly. He started this to save money. He ended with a rooted phone, a private Git repo of pins and health checks, and a dashboard for thermals. Impressive craft. Still a weird server.
Jordan: HN goes straight to the battery. Fire risk. Charge to eighty percent. Bypass charging if you have it. Old desktop still wins on raw dollars for many people.
Alex: My reliability brain hears "OEM update" and "Android optimized your server into a nap."
Jordan: And the chroots are not a security wall. Same kernel. Same network. Fine for personal toys. Not a trust model.
Alex: Would you put anything you cannot lose on it?
Jordan: He backs up the finance SQLite off device. Good. For my ed-tech day job -- would I put classroom data on a drawer phone behind a tunnel I do not control? No.
Alex: So the claim is independence. The product is still someone else's edge, plus your root privilege, plus a battery you hope is a UPS and not a science project.
Jordan: Quiet hardware is real. Low power is real. The buried angle is you did not exit the cloud. You moved the bill and the failure modes.
Alex: Doubt the liberation. Keep the craft.
Alex: Story two. Shopify engineering. They replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations. And it scaled.
Jordan: Why touch a thing that worked?
Alex: Checkout needs a short hold so two buyers do not grab the last unit. Redis did DECR and INCR fine. But the real inventory ledger lived in MySQL. Two systems. No single atomic claim. Oversell or undersell bugs on the seam.
Jordan: So the pitch is not "Redis is dead." It is "put the hold next to the ledger."
Alex: Right. MySQL eight. SKIP LOCKED. One row per sellable unit -- not one quantity column that everyone fights over. Cap the free pool at about a thousand rows per item and location. Replenish from the ledger. Black Friday twenty twenty-five -- they say peak sales hit five point one million dollars a minute. Treat that as their number.
Jordan: And Hacker News immediately redesigns the schema in the comments.
Alex: Of course. Some call the pool an algorithm smell. Others defend it. Fine. The post's own buried lesson is sharper.
Jordan: Which is?
Alex: They optimized locks for weeks. Latency looked fine. CPU was not maxed. Still hit a ceiling. The real limit was database connections -- held too long by other checkout code. They tagged SQL with the business process. Measured hold time at the proxy. Cleaned the path. Half the reads gone. A third of the transactions. Then the "impossible" target moved.
Jordan: So the headline is "MySQL beat Redis." The audit is "you were measuring the wrong thing."
Alex: That is my logging migration in a costume. Vendors sell a prettier graph. The pager still rings because the pool was empty.
Jordan: Also -- fashion stacks hide plumbing debt. Redis was not the villain. Dual writes without ACID were.
Alex: And "start with a tiny script and watch InnoDB locks" is the adult advice hiding under the victory lap.
Jordan: Doubt the stack war. Watch the connections.
Alex: Story three. A Long Bet from two thousand eleven. Jeremy Keith bets a thousand dollars that longbets.org/601 will be dead in eleven years.
Jordan: And Matt Haughey takes the other side.
Alex: Keith's argument -- cool URIs do not change, but link rot is entropy. Eleven years is enough to kill a page.
Jordan: Haughey says will plus redirects can keep a URI alive. His old sites already proved the boring version.
Alex: Terms are picky. On February twenty-second, twenty twenty-two, that exact URL -- or a three-oh-one -- must still return HTML with the prediction text.
Jordan: And in twenty twenty-six, we can still open it. Winner badge sits with Haughey. Money was aimed at the Internet Archive if he won.
Alex: So permanence won once. Do not celebrate the whole web.
Jordan: Comments note other Long Bets pages are already offline. Will is not evenly distributed.
Alex: My dad still reads a physical newspaper. The ink does not need a certificate renewal.
Jordan: And the scary future failure mode is not only a dead domain. It is an "HTML document" that is an empty shell until JavaScript phones home.
Alex: So the side nobody talks about -- a surviving bet URL proves an institution cared. It does not prove the archive of everything else.
Jordan: Labor keeps links alive. Entropy does not take weekends off.
Alex: Last deep beat. Sleep journal abstract from twenty twenty-three. Title says melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults.
Jordan: Do we have a full paper?
Alex: Not really on the frontpage. Abstract energy. Gwern's comment is fair -- hard to discuss without dose and formulation.
Jordan: Thread digs up related thesis talk. Two milligrams and five milligrams versus placebo. Common bottle sizes. Also higher than a lot of sleep people recommend.
Alex: And the abstract reportedly finds no big differences on the sleep measures -- while still talking cognition. That should slow everyone down.
Jordan: Meanwhile the aisle sells sleep like candy. Ten times the amount your body makes. People bite pills to get closer to three hundred micrograms.
Alex: So the claim is "melatonin makes mornings worse." The reality is "thin abstract, loud title, thick product culture."
Jordan: Healthy young adults may not even be the people the supplement is for. Elderly sleep is a different problem. The bottle does not care.
Alex: We are not your doctor. We are saying -- do not rewrite your night from a headline.
Jordan: Doubt the aisle. Wait for the methods.
Alex: Quick hit. Dithered QR codes. A playful write-up that packs image noise into a code that still scans.
Jordan: Someone said -- before they saw the year -- it had to be AI. Because weird craft now looks like a generator trick.
Alex: The skeptic flip. When human silliness and model silliness share a look, "AI smell" stops being a detector.
Jordan: Keep making weird things by hand. Keep doubting the shortcut label.
Alex: That's our audit for today. Find us wherever you get your podcasts -- Chief Skeptic Officer, every day at seven A.M. New York time.
Jordan: And tell us what you're skeptical about. We want the angle you can't stop chewing on.
Alex: Stay curious. Stay skeptical.
Jordan: Doubt both.