Holy sh*t. We’ve made it to 100 issues!
We'd like to say we did this on purpose, but that would be a lie and, frankly, there are already enough AI-generated lies on the internet.
So seriously: thank you.
You did this. You kept opening ByteSize, week after week, usually while waiting for something to compile, someone to respond on Slack, or a progress bar to finish lying to you.
We sincerely appreciate you, our ByteSize reader. So much so, we're going to spend the next 2,000 words being awful, so hold onto that.
Now, time for a fun fact on ByteSize history! On October 9, 2024, this newsletter went out for the first time ever under the headline "Is GenAI a Solution Without a Problem?"
Ninety-nine issues later the tech/IT industry has burned something in the neighborhood of half a trillion dollars answering that question, and the answer is still "kind of no." We were right on day one and it has brought us no joy, no money, and no peace. It’s like we’re Cassandra in the Odyssey warning everyone about the Trojan horse. You see the horse, you scream about the horse, everyone gets in the horse anyway, and then you write a newsletter about the horse every Tuesday for two years.
Still have never been sued, and at this point, that's on us.
Byte the Numbers
Look how far we’ve come! We pulled some of these from our newsletter’s performance dashboard, and some of these… well, they came out of a much darker place. We're not going to tell you which.
19,696,815 emails delivered since October 9, 2024
0.027% of all our emails sent were reported as “spam,” a badge of honor
620,870 all-time subscribers
73,134 unsubscribes. Every one of you left without saying goodbye. We hope your DNS is fine.
412 jokes killed by legal
63 of those funnier than anything that made it in
9 killed by one person on this team who has since left the company and is therefore unable to defend herself, which is convenient for everyone
73 times the writer has typed "is this libel" into a search bar
73 times the writer did not read past the first result
14 readers who have replied with nothing but "lol," each of whom we would take a bullet for without hesitation
0 lawsuits
0 intention of stopping
🏆 HALL OF FAME / HALL OF SHAME
Ninety-nine issues! From real human being writers!!! Here's what the data says about you people… What does this all mean? idk, you tell us!
HIGHEST OPEN RATE IN BYTESIZE HISTORY:
58.34% for a benchmark story. Not a breach, nor a layoff, and not Elon Musk humiliating himself in public (again). A benchmark. Half of you opened this the way a man checks a rival's truck in a parking lot.
Our favorite line: “hackers saying what's yours is mine-rs.”
MOST READ AND MOST CLICKED, SIMULTANEOUSLY:
No Thanks Windows 11, Hello Granny AI, Goodbye VMware (February 11, 2025)
120,132 opens, 4,317 clicks. The most engaged this audience has ever been in its entire history, and the subject was a Windows migration and a licensing change. We could write a story about a hacker stealing the moon and it would not touch this.
Our favorite line: “Rackspace's got wandering eyes that put Dave Grohl's to shame.”
BEST HEADLINE WE HAVE EVER WRITTEN (AND WE PEAKED):
Phuket Around and Find Out (February 18, 2025)
Cybercrime arrests at a Thai beach resort, military goggles, and a VM having a full breakdown. The headline arrived fully formed in our writer’s brain at 11 p.m. and nothing since has come close. Eighty-two issues of slow, graceful decline. We're at peace with it. (No we’re not.)
Our favorite line: “If you're going to run a global cybercrime operation, maybe don't say "phuket!" and do it from a touristy beach resort known for its cooperation with international law enforcement. That's like the world's dumbest criminal hideout – ever. Just saying.”
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR MOST MENTIONS: VMware
35 mentions! No entity has appeared in more ByteSize headlines than Broadcom's VMware. VMware broke. Ransomware Ran-Some-Where Into Your VMware. Siemens pirating it. Dell chasing £10M over it. T-Mobile in court over support rights on licenses it already paid for. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has inspired more copy for this publication than any living human being and has never once returned our calls, which we have never made.
Our favorite line: We have too many too count, but we’d describe writing about VMware as “an ongoing 18-month scream.”
HALL OF SHAME, AND IT'S US:
27.45%. That makes it the lowest open rate in ByteSize history, plus 188 spam reports, an all-time record in a category with no trophy. We have reread that subject line more times than is healthy. We still don't know what we did. If it was you, we forgive you, and also we don't.
Our favorite line: ”It turns out, you're not in good hands… Allstate and its mobile analytics subsidiary Arity are in hot water for allegedly turning your phone into a snitch.”
BEST READER REPLY, ALL TIME:
ByteSize > Pac-Man
A subscriber wrote in to say he enjoys ByteSize more than Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. That is the highest compliment this publication has received or will ever receive. It has been printed out and it will be read aloud at our Sarah Suzuki Harvard’s (our writer!!!) funeral.
⚙️ TOOL TIME
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Here is the quick blueprint:
Prevent Overheating: Learn how to analyze intake/exhaust paths so your gear stops choking on literal dust and crud.
Slash Upstream Costs: Calculate your oversubscription ratio to see if you actually need pricey 10Gbps fiber, or if 1Gbps is plenty.
Stop Network Loops: Fix your spanning tree priorities so a random closet switch doesn't accidentally hijack your core root bridge.
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Claim your free copy and build a network closet you can actually trust.
THE BYTESIZE ARCHIVE
For this week’s ByteSize, may we introduce you to the ByteSize archive? We got all 100 issues live on the internet right now, fully searchable, which is more documentation that exists than your own production environment and you know it.
Every issue back to #1, including the early ones where we hadn't found the voice yet and you can hear us reaching for it
Searchable, so you can prove to a coworker that the breach happened and that you called it in a meeting nobody remembers
Zero AI summaries. Every word arrived in the order our tired writer typed it
Browse the archive, then take it to our ByteSize group on Experts Exchange, where several million people have already solved the thing you are ten seconds away from Googling badly.
RIP TO OUR BEST BYTES
We were going to write a warm retrospective. Then I opened a Google Doc titled DO NOT SEND filled with all the jokes our “legal” team forcibly cut from our weekly issues, which over two years has become the funniest thing this team has produced and the strongest argument against giving us a platform.
Here's our director's cut. Every one of these made a person in a quarter-zip Patagonia vest say "we can't run that" while their left eye did that twitchy thing.
THE TOP 5 JOKES THAT DIED SO ISSUE 100 COULD LIVE:
On a new SaaS platform: Investors are throwing money at them like divorced dads at a strip club during custody weekend.
On the billionaire space race: Three of the richest men alive independently arrived at the same solution, which was to build the largest possible object and point it upward. This is the sports car of geopolitics (aka a dck measuring contest) and every single one of these hairline-receding billionaires are turning sixty.*
On Gwyneth Paltrow hosting a dinner honoring Sam Altman: A woman who sold a candle that smells like her genitals threw a party for a man selling the end of white-collar work. Only one of them lists the ingredients.
On data centers cooled by treated wastewater: The most advanced technology in human history is being kept alive by 200 million gallons of Virginia piss a day, and Sam Altman has never once said thank you. We know the sicko likes it.
On Elon becoming a trillionaire: He has a trillion dollars and eleven children, meaning he could fund therapy for every single one of them and instead bought a code editor for $60 billion.
Are You a True ByteSizer?
Two years of ByteSize has done something to you and it's time we measured it. Three questions:
1. Elon announces a delivery date. You:
(a) believe him
(b) set a calendar reminder for eighteen months out
(c) forward it to us
2. A vendor blames an outage on "an unforeseen configuration event." You:
(a) accept this
(b) know exactly which intern it was
(c) feel a deep and unspoken kinship with that intern
3. Leadership asks whether you can "just add AI to it." You:
(a) say yes
(b) say yes, do nothing, get promoted
(c) open a ticket titled "AI" and let it age into a fine wine
Results: You passed. Every answer passed. There was never a failing option. Retention is our entire business model and we have never once been subtle about it.
CHIP GETS A PERFORMANCE REVIEW
What's up, meatbags! Chip here. Management walked me into a conference room with no windows and a printed document, which historically goes one of two ways. Here's what they had:
Strengths: Consistent attendance. Strong joke instincts. Has never once been late to a section that appears in the exact same place every single week. One colleague described me as "technically present," which I'm choosing to frame.
Areas for improvement: Continues to close tickets by telling users to reboot. Has closed 400 tickets this way. Has been correct 397 times, which management says is "not the point," and I would like the record to show that 397 out of 400 is the point. Also flagged for morale-related incidents, all of which occurred in the break room, none of which will be described here.
Compensation. A 3% raise, paid in RAM. Mismatched speeds. Described to me as "a stretch assignment," which is what they call it when there's no money.
Holy sht (again!)*
Here's our ask for #101: Hit reply with your worst ticket ever, the dumbest thing you have ever fixed by turning it off and back on, or your favorite ByteSize moment if you're feeling charitable toward a stranger who has clearly not slept. Best ones run next week, names or no names, your call!
100 issues in and we still can't write anything funnier than what you people do at work every single day. Note that’s a formal confession coming from us (you know, we never try to be humble here)!
Once again, thank you our dear ByteSize reader for being you.
— The ByteSize Team
Enjoyed the news? Discuss over on Experts Exchange. Got news to share or topics you'd like us to cover? Send 'em our way. We can't wait to hear from you. Really.