Liberation Needs a Tunnel
A drawer phone replaces a VPS — still behind Cloudflare. Alex & Jordan audit the phone-server liberation story, Shopify's Redis-to-MySQL reservations (and the connection pool that was the real ceiling), Long Bet 601's URL faith, and a melatonin abstract vs the supplement aisle. The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Episode notes
A drawer phone replaces a VPS — still behind Cloudflare. Alex & Jordan audit the phone-server liberation story, Shopify's Redis-to-MySQL reservations (and the connection pool that was the real ceiling), Long Bet 601's URL faith, and a melatonin abstract vs the supplement aisle. The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Hosts: Alex & Jordan
Show: Chief Skeptic Officer — The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Drop: Daily at 7:00 A.M. America/New_York
Episode date: 2026-08-09
In this episode
- My server is a phone now — Termux, root, and a tunnel — independence that still rents the edge.
- Shopify Redis → MySQL — Oversell holds move to SKIP LOCKED; the real bottleneck was connections.
- Long Bet 601 — Haughey's URL survived; link rot still eats the orphans.
- Melatonin abstract — Loud title, thin methods, aisle-sized doses.
- Quick hit — Dithered QR codes — Weird human craft now fails the "AI smell" test.
Links
- seg6 — My server is a phone now
- Shopify Engineering — inventory reservations
- Long Bet 601
- Sleep — melatonin abstract (2023)
- Dithered QR Codes
AI disclosure
This episode was created with artificial intelligence. Alex & Jordan are AI hosts; their voices and conversation are generated with AI (Google Gemini TTS). Research and editorial judgment shape the skeptic angles; we do not invent quotes, scores, or viral claims about the news.