Samsung killed the Note 7 today. Not “recalled,” killed. Dead product line. The replacement units for the fire-prone phones also caught fire, including one on an airliner, and after a second recall in two months Samsung pulled the plug on the whole model: production halted, refunds for everyone, an estimated multi-billion-dollar write-off. The engineering post-incident question is brutal and familiar: the first RCA blamed one battery supplier, they switched suppliers, and the fires continued, which means the root cause analysis was wrong while the fix shipped at global scale. A postmortem that names the wrong cause is worse than no postmortem; it converts confidence into fuel. (Literally, here.) ...

Snap (formerly Snapchat, rebranded this week; the app is now one product of a self-declared “camera company”) announced Spectacles: $130 sunglasses that record ten-second circular videos. And here’s the thing: after Google Glass became the cautionary tale (those coffee-shop cyborgs never did get cool), Snap’s version might actually work, because they made it a toy. A fashion-forward, teen-priced, deliberately-scarce toy sold from vending machines, not a $1,500 face computer for enterprise futurists. Same hardware category, opposite cultural strategy. Positioning is engineering by other means. ...

The SRE Book Era (Jul 2015 – Sep 2016) Filed September 20, 2016 — one year to the day after the DynamoDB cascade that defined this window. Google published Site Reliability Engineering in 2016 and gave the industry a shared vocabulary: SLOs, error budgets, toil, blameless postmortems. At the same time, the era’s biggest outages kept showing the same pattern. Systems broke not from the original fault, but from how they tried to recover. ...

Apple killed the headphone jack. The iPhone 7 has no 3.5mm port, a 138-year-old connector, deprecated on stage, and the marketing chief actually used the word “courage,” which the internet will never let die. The replacement bet is AirPods: $159 wireless earbuds that look like cigarette butts and, per everyone who’s tried them, work like actual magic (the W1 pairing chip is the real product). My take, on the record: in two years the jack outrage will be forgotten and every phone will copy this, because Apple doesn’t remove ports first so much as remove them loudest. (See: floppy, CD drive, every port on the MacBook. The obituary is always premature and always eventually true.) ...

Rio closed and the ledger is mythological: Usain Bolt completed the triple-triple, 100m, 200m, 4x100m gold, at three consecutive Olympics. Nine finals, nine golds, zero doubt, all charisma. Phelps retires (again) at twenty-three career golds, more than most countries. Biles owns four golds and the sport’s future. I watched a human run 100 meters in 9.81 seconds while grinning sideways at the field, and I understand now why my non-tech friends tolerate my AlphaGo monologues: excellence in any domain is legible to every domain. ...

The Rio Olympics are on. Phelps, at 31, in his fifth Games, is out here winning golds like it’s 2008; Simone Biles is performing gymnastics from a higher difficulty tier than the sport’s scoring anticipated; and the pool has inexplicably turned green (algae plus chemistry mismanagement, and even the Olympics has infra incidents, with status-page communication worse than ours in 2013). The opening ceremony ran on a fraction of London’s budget and was better for the constraint. Constraints breed brilliance; see also: everything. ...

Verizon is buying Yahoo’s core business for $4.8 billion. Yahoo. The company that was the internet’s front door when I first touched a browser; the company that turned down buying Google for peanuts and turned down selling to Microsoft for $45B. Sold for the price of a nice office campus, to become part of a telco’s ad play. The kicker every article notes: Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba is worth vastly more than Yahoo itself, so the acquisition they got right outperformed the entire operating company. There’s a lesson about portfolios and a meaner one about focus, and Yahoo is somehow the cautionary tale for both. ...

Pokémon GO launched one week ago and reality has not recovered. The park across from our office, normally four pigeons and a guy with a guitar, now hosts hundreds of humans at 10pm, phones aloft, hunting a Snorlax. It’s the fastest app to 10M+ downloads anyone can remember (not even officially released in India yet; the APK found us anyway, as APKs do); Nintendo’s market cap grew by tens of billions (for a game they licensed more than made, which the market eventually noticed); and the servers have been down roughly as often as up, because no capacity plan on Earth included “entire human population, simultaneously, outdoors.” ...

Iceland beat England. Down 1-0 early in the match, the comeback that has never happened in modern English tournament history happened to the most expensive squad of underachievers ever. Final whistle: Iceland’s defensive block materializing out of pure discipline, Sigthorsson’s shot sliding under the goalkeeper, and a nation of 330,000 people celebrating one of the greatest upsets in history. The England manager resigned before the press conference. The group chat’s England fan surfaced this morning staring at the wall and nobody invoked the work queue. The qualification streak is officially the asterisk. Records are vanity metrics. Tournaments are revenue. ...

Writing this one with a heavy heart: the Orlando nightclub shooting was yesterday morning and the numbers are unbearable. Tech’s role this time was quiet and human: blood-drive coordination, safety check-ins, families refreshing feeds. Take care of your people. The rest of this entry is the ordinary world continuing, because it does, and that’s both the tragedy and the mercy of it. E3 is on. The consoles blinked first on Moore’s Law: Microsoft announced “Project Scorpio,” a mid-generation more powerful Xbox, and Sony’s Neo is the open secret. The console cycle is becoming a phone cycle, incremental hardware with a shared library. Backward compatibility as a covenant, upgrades as a treadmill. Gaming discovered the annual release cadence right as gaming discovered it can’t finish games by launch day. ...