Meta: 7,000

Although I try to keep navel-gazing to a minimum, I’m happy to report that this publication has crossed 7,000 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of RSS weirdos). I write to challenge myself and I try to stay clear of current events, so I’m delighted that so many of you still find this publication worth your time.But another reason I wanted to write this post is that it increasingly feels like a party at the end of the internet.In the olden days, a nerdy site like this would have three sources of traffic: web search, hobby forums, and the aggregators of tech news. It goes without saying that organic web search traffic has been under siege from SEO spam for decades; it’s now a lost cause because of spammers’ ability to generate LLM content on any topic nearly for free. But the final blow comes from Google itself: the company is now in the business of stopping its users from visiting other websites; with pre-digested answers to all of life’s questions, there’s just no reason to…