Today I learnedToday I learned

2026

1. No. 2 · 15 Oct

   The first webcam watched a coffee pot

   In 1991 researchers at Cambridge pointed a camera at the coffee pot in the Trojan Room so they could check whether there was coffee before walking down the hall. It went online in 1993 and became the first webcam. The whole internet got its start from lazy people and an empty carafe. The web has repaid the debt: HTTP status 418 is "I'm a teapot", from the 1998 April Fools' RFC 2324 (the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol). A teapot asked to brew coffee is supposed to refuse with 418.

   #history#web

2. No. 1 · 15 Oct

   Agents now have a protocol for talking and one for paying

   A2A is how agents talk to each other. AP2 is how they pay, and it's built on top of A2A. Payment systems assume a human is clicking "buy", so AP2 adds a signed "mandate" that records what the user authorised. https://a2a-protocol.org/latest/ https://ap2-protocol.org/

   #ai#protocols