Entry 146. Six years, 146 fortnights, zero gaps. The streak enters its seventh production year with 99.999% author uptime (one entry written on a phone in an Oregon eclipse field, #113; the SLA held).
2018’s THESIS: everything got INVOICED. 2017 ran up the bills (#121); 2018 collected. Facebook paid for the feed (Cambridge Analytica #127, $119B in a day #136, the token heist #140). Musk paid per word (#140: $4.4M/token). TSB paid for the skipped rehearsal (#130). Fallout 76 paid for shipping the wrong vision competently (#143). Marriott paid for buying a breach sight-unseen (#144). And the whole industry paid its GDPR retrofit costs (#131) for a decade of data hoarding — the only invoice that came with a receipt I’m actually proud of (#129’s deletion pipeline; the lawyers’ forcing function produced my year’s best work, therapy pending).
The quiet item I’m filing for the future, per tradition (#121 logged a “probably a big deal” paper): Google released BERT this fall — a language model built on that same Transformer architecture, now smashing every NLP benchmark via pretraining-then-finetuning. The pattern: 2017’s curiosity is 2018’s benchmark-eater. Extrapolation is left as an exercise for future entries. (Hi, future entries. You knew. We all half-knew.)
MY year: loop lead (#138’s debugging-audition data), GDPR shipped, game-day discipline institutionalized (#142’s homework), Proverbs file: 168. Fantasy PL: CHAMPION, again, goalkeeper-diversified (#138). The banner multiplies. NEXT SPRINT (2019): I’ve been asked to scope what a “platform team” would mean here — the org is 120 people now and the paved roads (#106) need a road crew. Feels like a fork in the career: deeper into systems, or wider into people. The honest answer is the fork is fake and the road does both. See you in year seven.