Earlier this month on the Tailscale blog, Avery Pennarun started out the year by looking at how far we’ve come in computing over the last twenty years. Compute is 200,000x faster. Web servers are at least 100x. We can put 12TB of RAM into a server. Hard drives are 100x bigger and last longer. And, the c10k problem is now the c10000k problem.

It’s a thought-provoking piece showing how we can do more than ever, with less than ever. Are we keeping up with our tools?

Reading Avery’s post injected some optimism into my day. I needed that.

In the early 2000s, Cameron Moll was working on a presentation about problem solving and wanted to visualize Abraham Wald‘s work in World War II studying the bullet holes in aircraft returning from action. So, he took a diagram of an airplane and drew red dots on it to represent the damage that was visible on surviving aircraft. That became the de-facto illustration for survivorship bias.

I think the most fascinating part of this story is that Wald’s original report from 1943 was un-illustrated. I had always assumed that the diagram was from the original work, and not something that came 60 years later.

I had a conversation last week with a friend about people in positions of power, and at some point I quoted the “power corrupts” adage. You know the one. It’s from a critique of the moral accountability of those in power by Lord Acton, written in 1887:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

After half a laugh and then a brief silence, my friend looked at me seriously and said, “If you listen to the ancient Greeks, they had a bit of a different take: Power reveals the person.”

After that conversation, I went on a bit of a research spree. While there isn’t a direct quote to be found, the saying is often attributed to Plato’s writings, especially in the story of the Ring of Gyges in Republic. Aristotle also explored ideas about how circumstances, including power, test and reveal a person’s moral character. Power doesn’t create flaws or virtues. It magnifies what is already there, testing a person’s resilience, integrity, and moral compass.

This reflection feels especially relevant amid January 2025’s political transitions in Washington DC and how people are reacting to the shifting landscape, especially our titans of industry. But, the idea isn’t just a lens for observing the powerful. It can be a useful mirror for our own lives.

We reveal ourselves in how we use the power we hold, however large or small. Actions reflect character. We should make sure it’s the character that we want it to be, and that we are using our power in the best way possible.

Even then, we should constantly ask ourselves: for whom do we use our power?

Bluesky experienced tremendous growth in 2024, going from just under 3 million users to almost 26 million. That’s an order of magnitude growth, and puts them at only an order of magnitude of size behind X. That growth, of course, brings challenges and Bluesky’s 2024 moderation report illustrates some of them.

In 2024, Bluesky moderators took down 66,308 accounts, and automated tooling took down 35,842 accounts for reasons such as spam and bot networks. Mods took down 6,334 records (posts, lists, feed etc.) while automated systems removed 282.

Also interesting: The majority of legal requests came from Germany, U.S., Brazilian, and Japanese law enforcement agencies.

Two decades ago, Jeff Bezos attended quite a few O’Reilly events and even then one of his favorite topics to talk about was rockets and space. I remember one night at Foo Camp speaking with him about distributed cloud databases for a while, and then the topic turned to his dream of getting to orbit with reusable rockets and what was necessary to accomplish it.

Many talk about it now in terms of a billionaire’s space race between titans of industry. However, I think the deeper story is that today’s launch of New Glenn reaching orbit is the result of long and patient perseverance and the focusing of the dreams of thousands of people by somebody that could continue to carry the torch when the path wasn’t clear.

Even though the booster didn’t make it back to ground in one piece (this time, let’s see how many times it takes for them to stick the landing), it’s awesome to see Blue Origin make their mission goal of putting a satellite into orbit on their first go. Congrats Jeff and Blue Origin.