In which Kami extols the virtue of static sites while telling cloudflare to fuck off.

I posted the above on Threads, and some folks questioned whether this could actually be true. So let me run you through the math. Granted, some of these numbers are best estimates. Undercounting is probably happening on both sides of the argument. But when you see how outlandishly far apart the outcome is, you’ll realize that the statement is absolutely true. Estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the United States is roughly 14 million, by Pew, in 2023. Or 16 million by CIS in 2025.…

It is already not easy to be a human. Now add AI. Fernando Borretti: Humans are social animals who can only flourish in the society of other humans. We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left? Nathan Gardels, Noema: The challenge is not just about “disarming” the capacity of AI agents to act on their own, as the Pope has called for, but also about “arming” the integral conception of the human within the…

I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital…

During my extended Summer break I was able to spend more time with friends in the village in Spain. We spent a lot of time together, laughing, eating and drinking, and going on a few trips. One evening, at the village bar, we were sitting outside talking nonsense as usual, and generally having a good time. We decided we should take a trip to the beach. Living inland in Spain, this meant a 120 minute trip to the coast in the South East of the Country. We settled on the beach location in a quiet…

It’s been… a while since the last time I made a spaceship. The last one was all the way back in 2024. Modeling spaceships is one of those things I always want to do, but never seem to be able to actually follow through with, so I’m very happy to finally have been able to finish a new one.For whatever reason I find it an incredibly difficult to do, which probably means I should make an effort to create spaceships more often. And so I am going to do just that. So, unless I happen some have some…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1178/license-update-ai-derivation-prohibited-on-all-my-art-lore-stories-and-comics

I have been wondering why the past couple of years have been so much harder on me even than Trump’s first presidency, and this is exactly why. There is just so much happening, all at once. (Beware: image and link heavy post below the fold; both the images and discussion of government violence rape may be disturbing–if you are in a vulnerable place, please skip this one) ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ ICE constantly detains U.S. citizens for the crime of not looking white enough. 1 ICE has deported over 500 U.S.…

So this is a little unprecedented. I wrote this post and sent it on to Ben as a heads-up. I’ve included a summary of his excellent, well-reasoned reply and have to agree with all his points. And for the eagle-eyed, you may have noticed that he’s already made a change, with the Random view moved to the top of the page, whereas before it was buried down in the footer. Ben is passionate about this project, and I can only applaud him for his response and immediate action! Now, read on for my…

Since IMDb forced users to login to see user reviews, I think it is time for another platform to gain consensus on the quality of media.Potential Alternatives: Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, The Movie Db (TMDB), NeoDB.Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.comThis might be the most well-known alternative to IMDb, frequently cited together with the former for general audiences. It is also corporate owned, in this case by Fandango. Evidently, it has been criticized for black and white reviews,…

Bringing receipts for xkcd.com/2347. adactio.com/links/22794

i love the idea behind this website. there’s a whole section dedicated to dumbphone reviews, along with ideas for what to do offline and a guide to starting your own club: https://slowerliving.club/

If global large-scale human communication continues to be concentrated within large social media platforms and content providers like YouTube, human languages may become sort of irrelevant in that space. Sometimes I Google for something and see a Reddit result in Finnish. I live in Finland, so it makes sense when the search engine prioritizes such results, but most of the time the actual Reddit thread is not in Finnish at all. Reddit can translate any thread with a simple URL param e.g. ?tl=...

Regular readers might recall that a year and a half ago, Halifax sent a letter about my credit card addressed to other people at my address (instead of to me). This was the letter I received 18 months ago, sharing (a) the fact that I have a Halifax credit card, (b) its credit limit, and (c) the last four digits of its number with Ruth and JTA, neither of whom are associated with my credit card. After I wrote to them, they (eventually) phoned me to tell me that the problem had been fixed. It was…

goatsandgangsters:an interesting linguistics find! so I’m reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing “hp” in the context of “not being at full hp” “applying your full hp to a task” etcand I’m like……. okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don’t mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean and it’s not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant…

The time has come to address the elephant in the comments.Whenever my blog hits a place with a comments section the most predictable comment I see — besides some variation of “this idiot is utterly delusional!”† — is this one:lol I read the domain as “D-Bus Hell”Random commenterI’d prefer if they focused on my actual blog content but I can’t get annoyed at people for seeing the wrong words. There’s a reason experts-exchange.com has a hyphen, and who can forget Susan’s party? I’d probably read…

Although I’m a semi-professional musician, most days, I listen to far less music than my friends. I generally work in silence, cook in silence, run in silence. When I do listen to music, usually in the evening, I give it my full attention. Everybody is different, and different kinds of music work well in different contexts, but I can’t help feeling that anyone who doesn’t sometimes listen to music the way I do is missing out. The way I do it is like this: lying on my back, wearing headphones,…

Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a better way. As I've written before, you should sit down and actually test your readme. Spin up a fresh Virtual Machine, go through what you've written, and see if it makes sense. But…

This morning, I killed my Gumroad stores. I hadn’t been watching Gumroad. I kept them around to support VAT, and a handful of you used them. This morning I learned that gum road has gone fully AI. I can’t trust them with my intellectual property. Their support is also managed by AI, so I can’t trust them with money. This is disappointing, but mostly it’s a reminder that I need to keep a better eye on my retailers. European folks, I’m considering other retailers that will support VAT.…

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is to get a surprise remaster and re-release. The space combat game was originally released in 1994 and remains one of the most popular and lauded games in the venerable franchise.The remaster was apparently made possible during a project to digitise all of Electronic Arts' copious assets still on tape. During this process, it was discovered that most or even all of the FMV sequences shot for the Wing Commander franchise had survived intact, allowing it to…

Greg Iacurci, CNBC Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Saturday called for advanced artificial intelligence systems to be built with containment, independent controls and an “emergency brake” that lets authorized people pause or shut a model down mid-task. “We need to surround non-deterministic models with strong, deterministic system design, human controls, and reliable operating procedures, and establish industry standards where existing ones are insufficient,” Nadella wrote in a post…

Meta: Drive people directly to your website, shop or latest offer by adding a clickable link to your Instagram posts and reels. People can visit the website from your post or reel. If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based on your plan: […] It seems utterly bananas to me that Meta is pitching links as a feature people need to pay for, but here we are. Instagram has never supported links of any kind in individual posts, so that is…

Most exploratory questions against a large table only need a rough answer, but without an index on status, even "roughly how many shipped orders" costs a full scan. On the two-million-row orders table, Postgres has to read every single 8 kB page, all 18,085 of them (141 MB), just to count matching rows. EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) SELECT count(*) FROM orders WHERE status = 'shipped'; Aggregate Buffers: shared hit=18085 -> Seq Scan on orders (actual rows=500000.00 loops=1) Filter: (status =…

I was fairly certain that I am done with Apple, Xcode and their developer experience. Yet here we are, having a CI job that needs to sign a binary. One thing I noticed using mostly web apps for my personal assistant is that I actually miss native apps. They just look and feel nicer. So, given that I cannot delete my dev account, why not use it and get a little app for my coding assistant going? I did most of my work for macOS and iOS in Objective-C, but I was there when Swift was released and…

Technically Good is back! With a slightly shorter edition. There's a note at the end of this newsletter if you're interested! ✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: Slow it down!! It's too dangerous!!1!; malware; and "going rogue." 🌞 Good News!: "No AI" seals as a sign of quality 🦭; people are flocking back to human writers. 🐘 Toots and Memes and Such: Age verification, empowerment, and "going rogue" (reprise.) 📯 The Post-Script: The "Inevitability" of AI. Glitched, cropped, and edited…

last updated 1 minute ago hey hun, it's weeknotes number 67, the new funny number! the more funny number to the olds (myself included) is still to come, don't you fret. working on a few bits near enough simultaneously, and worrying a lot about actually finishing anything this side of the new year, but i'm unsure the worry helps anything. if you have trouble finshing what you start definitely get in contact. sorry to anyone who emailed me recently i was in a funk (derogatory) but now i have my…

If you spend a lot of time on places like Bearblog, Ooh Directory, and Bubbles Town, you run into a few common themes in blogging. One of them that particularly interested me this year is the "feed annoyance" post. I am not calling anyone out specifically: this isn't about something that only happened recently or that a recent blogger did (although many have). This is more about the fact that it happens so often from so many people, and it made me want to think and read about it. I am not…

I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping, guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D printing, tattoos, digital minimalism, table tennis, and many more. Some of my hobbies have stuck, but I've never gotten so enthralled into a hobby that I become obsessed. Instead, there's generally 4 steps in the process: I decide I want to take up a hobby. I read, watch videos, and obsessively learn…

Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its incubation program. Hacker News is one of the most popular forums for discussing technology online today – perhaps the biggest.HN also has a pronounced political bias, which is…