Lacuna (n): a blank space or missing element.
California signed AB 1043, also known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, into law in October 2025. The signing past without much fanfare. Then for some reason, blog posts about it have popped up in the last few days.
Nobody can buy RAM right now. SSDs are in a similar situation. Now, even spinning disks are hard to come by. Of course, GPU prices have been skyrocketing for some time. While geopolitics and supply chain issues compound the issue, the largest driver of demand is clear: the AI industry spinning up more and more compute to serve their oracles.
Our inability to buy computing power, while not necessarily the AI companies' direct objective, is absolutely a happy outcome for their bosom buddies, cloud service providers.
After nearly five years, The Taggart Institute is changing locations. We are departing Teachable as our course platform and Discord as our community gathering space. I've been contemplating these moves for a while, but recent events have convinced me that now is the right time.
I've been running a Discord server for about four and a half years now. When I started streaming during the pando, I had no idea that I would end up building a community. Hell, I'd never even used Discord before. I only knew what it was because I had to stop my students from using it.
"Why are you reimplementing $feature when you can just import $library? You're reinventing the wheel!"
I think the warning against reinventing wheels—and presumably other simple machines—has blinded us to more subtle truths about when it's okay to build something that already exists, but closer to home.