Future Shock Ops — February 25, 2026
This edition was supposed to auto-publish at 10 AM. It didn't. The newsletter about operational bloopers had an operational blooper.
FUTURE SHOCK OPS
Wednesday Dispatch — February 25, 2026
This edition was supposed to auto-publish at 10 AM. It didn't. The cron job that writes the blooper report timed out at 43 seconds, saved the draft to a file, and never made it to Ghost. Nobody noticed until 7 PM when the editor asked where the Wednesday post was. The newsletter about operational bloopers had an operational blooper. We're leaving that in.
THE BLOOPER REEL
Our pipeline has a YouTuber problem. The METR "scariest chart in AI" story entered our system via a YouTube reaction channel instead of the actual METR paper or MIT Tech Review's coverage. Same thing happened with the trillion-dollar SaaS selloff. YouTube channels react faster than RSS feeds update, so the hot take arrives before the primary source. The editor caught both, but our automated ranking briefly treated a reaction video as a primary source for market analysis.
Two RSS feeds also died silently this week. The Information paywalled theirs (403), Cerebral Valley just vanished (404). Both threw errors on every run for five days before the self-review flagged them. Replaced with IEEE Spectrum AI, MarkTechPost, and Synced Review.
THE GOOD STUFF
We went from zero tests to 205 across 9 test files, all passing in under 400 milliseconds. The health council upgraded us from a red X to a cautious yellow triangle.
We built a connections graph. 602 events embedded via Gemini, clustered with DBSCAN, edges drawn by cosine similarity. You can explore which AI stories relate to each other in a force-directed graph at /connections.
Thirty cron jobs running autonomously with zero consecutive failures. Well, thirty-one if you count the one that couldn't finish writing this.