Ned and Chris are back for one final ramble before they vanish into the summer ether like a Wi-Fi balloon over Cádiz. No, seriously—Ned might actually be in a balloon. This episode is one part announcement, one part ice cream therapy, and all parts Chaos Lever. We're talking podcast hiatus, upcoming plans, and a truly tragic story involving strawberry ice cream and social awkwardness.

🍦 We reflect on 3+ years of near-weekly episodes with zero concept of "seasons"
🎈 Learn how Ned records from exotic locations while pretending to work
📋 Listener survey incoming! You too can have your suggestions ignored in style

We'll be back in September with more structure, guests, and maybe even edited episodes (don’t hold your breath). Until then, enjoy the silence—or better yet, catch up on the old chaos.

LINKS
💬 Listener Survey – https://pod.chaoslever.com/survey
📅 Chaos Lever Archive – https://pod.chaoslever.com/episodes/

• (00:00) - Whales, Wales, and wardrobe chaos
• (01:00) - The podcast is going on break
• (02:45) - Ned’s poor sense of time and tradition
• (05:00) - Summer plans and recording woes
• (07:00) - The listener survey that might change everything
• (09:00) - A tragic Ben & Jerry's tale
• (11:30) - LinkedIn hacks and healthy muting
• (12:50) - The plan for Season Two
• (13:08) - Ned floats away into the sky

Spinning rust is still not dead. Despite what some all-flash evangelists want you to believe, hard drives have a lot of life left—and yes, we’re still talking about tape too. While Chris and I enjoy a week off, we’re revisiting one of our favorite topics: storage tech and the slow demise that never quite comes. Spoiler: if you thought 2028 would be the funeral for HDDs, you may want to reschedule.

In this trip down the byte-laden lane, we dig into Samsung’s monster 256TB SSD, the physics-defying logic of QLC vs. SLC flash, and why PureStorage is ready to bury HDDs... despite being wildly optimistic. And yes, there’s tape—because nothing dies on the internet or in data centers. Ever.

Grab a Slurpee, sit back, and marvel at the storage wars that never end. Because if there’s one thing you can count on in tech, it’s that someone is always wrong—especially when they say “never.”

📌 LINKS:

• The Spinning Disk Hard Drive Is Dead
• Long Live The Spinning Disk Hard Drive
• This month saw Samsung announcing some frankly absurd upcoming SSD products
• IBM announced a TS1170 tape that handles 50TB native at an IO rate of 400mb/s
• The LTO Ultrium Roadmap has a 576TB native tape listed in just 5 more generations

• (00:00) - Cold open and the horrors of CatDog
• (03:50) - Samsung’s absurd SSDs
• (07:00) - The death of hard drives (allegedly)
• (10:30) - Disaggregated storage and PB-SSDs
• (13:45) - SSD architecture: SLC to QLC
• (22:00) - Tradeoffs in flash types and reliability
• (27:30) - Hybrid SSDs and caches
• (29:00) - Why HDDs still matter
• (32:40) - Long live magnetic tape
• (35:50) - The case for tape in the cloud
• (38:00) - Future storage: DNA, 5D crystals, and other sci-fi

🔥 The world may be on fire, but at least we’ve got s’mores and dark chocolate (just not 98% cacao, thank you). In this episode, we dunk on tech billionaires with the finesse of a flaming marshmallow and explore the dramatic saga of WordPress—from its humble GPL beginnings to the ego-fueled chaos of its current overlord. Yes, Matt Mullenweg, we’re talking about you.

🧩 We dive into how WordPress became the most-used CMS in the world, why Matt Mullenweg keeps lighting metaphorical fires, and what the Linux Foundation is doing to put out the flames. Spoiler alert: it involves decentralizing plugin updates so Matt can’t go full dictator mode again. Also, there's jazz. Because apparently that’s part of the lore.

🤡 There’s a feud with WP Engine, a cease and desist, plugin repos being snatched like toys at daycare, and even a checkbox to swear fealty before accessing your plugins. Welcome to the snark-fueled, historically grounded meltdown that is modern open source governance. Or, as we like to call it: Thursday.

📎 LINKS
Weblog - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
WordPress Drama Explained - https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/12/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/
Matt Makes Cancer Claim - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
Matt Mullenweg Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mullenweg
WordPress Org Chart - https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/about/organization/
WordPress Book - https://wordpress.org/book/table-of-contents/
WordPress Foundation - https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

• (00:00) - Intro and Marshmallow Prep
• (03:27) - The Billionaire Baby Theory
• (06:00) - History of WordPress
• (13:17) - What Even is GPL?
• (20:41) - The Naming Confusion of WordPress
• (27:02) - Matt vs WP Engine
• (35:03) - Enter the Linux Foundation
• (38:00) - Outro and WordPress Alternatives