“Thank you for using RSS.” “I love RSS.” A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging.
I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don’t announce it. You don’t
put a sticker in your footer that says “I love packet switching”.
RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don’t love it.
…
I feel targetted (if you subscribe by RSS you’ll know that I share my enjoyment of the format in my <description>s!).
Actually, I do love RSS!
I love it despite its faults; and it’s got plenty of faults. Its brittleness, sure, as unstory observes. But also its insistence upon RFC
822 dates, which are almost the worst imaginable standardised Internet date format. Also the fact that things you wouldn’t want to use it without borrowing features from a different, one might say competing, standard. Also the excessive HTTP-centricity,
which makes it theoretically a standards violation to, e.g. make a podcast that’s distributed by Gemini, for example.
But I love what it does. I love how it ties the Web together. And I love how it does it: just a resource, at a URL, that the subscriber can hit as frequently, or not, as they like.
Oh and:
The person with the heart in their footer would not survive writing one item by hand.
I totally would. I absolutely do. I rarely do, because I’m far more-inclined to write software to do it for me, but I still write “raw” RSS a couple of times in a typical
year.
I also love HTTP. Maybe I should sing about that more often, too. And yes, I actually love HTTP in the way that unstory gatekeeps “love of a technology”, like I do RSS: I can “survive
writing it by hand”.
Aside from their predictable subject lines and verbiage, there’s also one other thing that these [recent, AI generated] spam emails have in common: 99.9% come from GMail accounts.
Once in a blue moon one will come from yahoo or aol or some other general mail service, but they are a rarity. Almost all of them are GMail. One one hand, congrats to Google, I
suppose, for cornering the stand-alone email market so completely that even scammers are impressed with its ease of use. Surely that is some sort of sign of success.
On the other hand, if you are a person who relies on GMail as your primary email, this means that if you are trying to send me mail, you now run a much higher chance of being
deposited into my spam folder. So much of the email I get from GMail accounts at this point is spam that an actual Gmail email, from an actual person, is statistically
relatively rare. To be fair, if you write that email to me yourself with your own little fingers, your chances of hitting my actual inbox are pretty decent. But if you used GMail’s
onboard “AI” to “help” you write that email, you are likely going directly to the spam folder. The GMail spam filter is now trained to recognize “AI” slop sentences, even those
written by GMail itself. Yes, there is probably irony there.
…
GMail’s been going gradually downhill for many years. It’s been a slow decline, compared to many enshittified services, but it’s still very-clearly happening. Aside from the
long-established privacy/big data concerns – especially if you use any other Google services, or fail to block their Web trackers – they’ve just devolved into a service that doesn’t
“wow” like it did when it was launched. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and it increasingly shovels AI down your throat, whether you want it or not.
If you own a domain name, you should already be using that as the domain of your email address, of course. This detaches your email address from any specific provider, which makes
it much easier to change your email provider whenever you like: it puts the power in your hands. You can do this whether you’re using GMail or any other
provider.
(If you don’t own a domain name, then perhaps you should.)
But beyond that: if you’re using GMail as your primary personal email service, you should shop around. Don’t let the weight of the inertia of your inbox stop you: there are plenty of
ways to back that up, move it around, or just retain it as an archive in-place if you have no other choice.
I switched to Proton about ten or eleven years ago and I haven’t looked back. Are they perfect? No. Are they better than GMail? Absolutely; for me at
least. But there are plenty of other options available for those for whom Proton is, perhaps, too-security-conscious. And switching to almost any of them reduces the risk
that your messages start going to your recipients’ spam folders, as more and more spammers move to GMail for its AI features, which produce junk mail faster than ever before.
If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone
who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just
needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn’t you want as much cash as possible?
…
An excellent counterpoint for anybody who claims that AI will become profitable eventually, and agrees with the hype assertion that the things that it’s capable
of automating always represent better value than human workers doing the same tasks.
Why sell picks and shovels if you’ve already struck gold?
But of course you already know the answer. The big AI companies are currently funded by moving-money-around. They do not have a clear path to profitability, and it’s not certain whether or not they ever will. So selling their service, rather than competing with their customers,
allows them to hedge their bets for as long as possible.
Maybe in that time they’ll find a way to bring their costs down. Maybe they won’t. But they’re clearly not confident enough that they will that they’ll bet on their own long-term
future.
When you reach the “Let’s sign in” screen (or any network/account screen during setup), press Shift + F10. This opens a Command Prompt window. Type the following
and press Enter:
start ms-cxh:localonly
…
I hope to never need to install Windows again – I hope that part of my life has passed – but should I need to install Windows then, as usual, I’ll want to do so without a
Microsoft account. And as that’s apparently become more-difficult now, I’ll be consulting this guide.
The Walkman is the Sony WM-EX521 from 2002, which is a pretty late model. It’s not one of the classics from the 80s, but I really
like the design, the case is made out of metal so it looks and feels really solid and with it being relatively young, I don’t expect too many problems. In fact, I had a suspicion
that the only thing that was wrong with it might be the belt. Tape drives have rubber belts in them which link the motor with the tape mechanism, and these wear out over time. They
can become loose or lose their elasticity, some break and some also try to turn themselves back into crude oil, which leaves a giant mess behind.
So when the Walkman arrived, I opened the back to see how it looked on the inside, which required putting it on a heat plate for a few minutes to soften the adhesive, and then I
could carefully insert a plastic tool between the frame and the back cover and start prying… nah, I’m kidding. This was made before all of that nonsense. You take out five screws
and you’re in. Which is how it should be.
Anyway, I took the back off, stuck a battery in, pressed play and I could see that the motor was spinning, but the belt was loose and wasn’t moving. Suspicion confirmed, the belt
was bad. Thankfully it was just worn out and hadn’t disintegrated yet, so that’s an easy fix.
I ordered a new belt here, which arrived a few days later from Portugal, and replaced the old one. I also sprayed some contact cleaner into
the volume potentiometer while I was at it, because it sounded very noisy and scratchy. Here are some pictures, and you can see the old, worn out belt next to the new one. It’s
literally twice as long! No wonder it wasn’t working anymore.
…
This entire post is amazing. Every step Andreas takes, from selecting and buying an (old) Walkman, to repairing its belt, to using the (known) frequency of the first note of a song to
“tune” it by recalibrating the speed control potentiometer while playing into a guitar tuner app… feels like you’re being taken along on the journey with him.
I really enjoy Andreas’ writing style and posts, so I’ll be adding him to the blogroll. A delightful and serendipitous find (courtesy of Bubbles).
On March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time. In March, they did the spring forward one hour with their clocks to
UTC-7, but they won’t fall back to UTC-8 in November. Going forward, the UTC offset for America/Vancouver timezone is permanently UTC-7.
Let’s use this as an opportunity to talk about date and time zone storage. In the most basic examples, the default is to store the UTC value, then calculate local time relative to
UTC. However, people using calendar systems think in terms of local time (i.e. wall clock time), and never consider UTC. After modifying time zone data, these time calculations from
UTC for a region will differ from the user’s input value.
If you stored timestamps in a UTC-based column for British Columbia-based appointment in 2026 and beyond, your November through March appointments may be off by an
hour!
…
A fascinating read into a problem that I knew existed… and fear!
This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night every time I expand on Three Rings‘ timezone support. Right
now, Three Rings stores the times of “shifts” (when volunteers do things) as UTC timestamps but treats them as “local time” to the voluntary organisation
using them. If they say a shift starts at 8pm, that’s probably what they mean: they mean 8pm local time, no matter where they happen to be in the world and whether or not their region
uses daylight saving time.
But this approach, while simple, has limitations:
Three Rings doesn’t correctly respect shift duration variance as a result of daylight saving time clock changes. Suppose a Samaritans branch has a four-hour
shift starting at midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Twice a year, that shift will intersect with the clocks going forwards or backwards. Is it still a “four hour” shift? Well
that depends: does the volunteer stay for four hours regardless of the clock change, or do they always go home at 4am? Three Rings assumes the former
because it’s mathematically simpler, but in reality the latter is probably true (and the volunteer actually worked three or five hours).
Three Rings isn’t suited to organisations that span multiple timezones. When an Australian charity started using Three Rings they were
interested in getting an overview of how many of their helplines – which are spread across three to four timezones (depending on whether daylight saving is in effect: half of
central Australia observes daylight savings and half doesn’t!) – are open at any given time. Three Rings currently isn’t designed in a way to make it easy to answer that
question.
Three Rings makes some suboptimal choices if you’re a long way from the Prime Meridian. This one’s easier to fix, and we probably will,
but if you’re far from the UK and especially if you’re West of the UK then our scheduled tasks to e.g. “lock” shifts that appear to have “started” and prevent their easy modification…
triggers at the wrong time.
Items 1 and 2 on that list are hard problems to solve, especially starting from where we are with our vast corpus of 24 years worth of “assumed local” time data. We’re
improving on this kind of thing by increments, but it takes a while…
…and then, just sometimes, some country decides to fiddle with its timezone or its observance of daylight saving time and makes programmers’ lives hell.
Still; I’ll be referring to this blog post by Christopher Winslett the next time I’m working on a big set of timezone-related enhancements for Three Rings, for sure!
I had another submission accepted to Curious Cones last month; it remains one of my favourite silly niche
blogs. This time around, it was this traffic cone seemingly about to take a dive from the low board at an outdoor pool (at which the younger kid and I were taking a respite from the
heat!).
Not-accepted, but shared here for your enjoyment, was a photo I took while at West End Live in London the other week. I spotted a
traffic cone on a shelf in the left luggage room at our hotel! I took the pic quickly and the room was dark and the photo came out blurry, so it’s fair that it didn’t make it onto the
blog, but it’ll remind me to keep an eye out for cones in the most-curious of places!
You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript.
…
Machines get the clean version.
I enjoy this take. If there’s a “clean version”: something simpler, easier to read, lower-bandwidth… why aren’t we giving that to the humans in the first place!
Though I’ll tell you what: if this pattern becomes widespread, I’ll absolutely use (or implement!) a browser plugin that spoofs being an LLM, so that I can
get the clean content, and then Markdown-to-HTML converts it back so my browser can display the “readable” version of the page.
And what a world that would be. Humans, pretending to be robots, that pretend to be humans! We live in interesting times.
I’ve stopped thinking that’s the right question. The better one: do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?
Clock 1: can costs fall fast enough, soon enough?
Clock 2: will the money last long enough?
Clock 3: does real demand arrive fast enough to replace the circular kind?
Bull and bear mostly agree the technology is real. They disagree on the clocks.
…
A relatively balanced discussion on the economic prospects of GenAI. Of course, the author attracts responses on… 😬 Twitter… so I’m not replying there. But I enjoyed the relative
neutrality of Emile’s piece.
I’m not sure, of course, whether asking about the economic stability of GenAI is the right question in the first place. It sort of presupposes that it’s a net good (note that I
didn’t say “has value”: there are definitely things it’s useful for), right, to ask whether it’s something that we can afford to pay to keep around?
Around 1995 or so, a high schooler named Matt Wright decided to launch a website that shared some basic website tools that he
programmed. Many of these were dead-simple, things like contact forms, guestbooks, and web counters.
…
OMG I remember Matt’s Script Archive. I taught myself Perl with (among other things) his scripts.
I took his Counter/ImageCounter script and adapted it into my own FireCounter, which stitched together (non-animated) GIFs of digits (which I made using a filter in Corel Photo-Paint, I
think) into the kinds of edgy hit counter I was into, back in the day.
This is a recreation. It probably looks better than the original!
Later, I even added parameter handling to allow the webmaster to specify a different set of digit images, and referrer detection so that it could track different sites:
each got its own text file with its count in it! For a while, a dozen or so of my friends had my counter visible on their Geocities and Angelfire pages!
I’m sure that my script had many, if not more, of the kinds of security vulnerabilities discussed in the linked article. But man, it felt like magic at the time!
The field-sizing property is coming to Firefox 152, making it available across all major engines. It allows
you to control the sizing behavior of elements with a default preferred size, such as form elements.
…
Sometimes a new CSS feature comes along and I immediately “get it”. Like: that’s a cool new feature, I can already see how it’ll save me time, or make things simpler, or improve
accessibility, or allow me to do something new.
Other times, like this one, I initially shrug. What’s the point?, I think…
…and then later in the very same day find occasion to wish it was already mainstream. Hah!
Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully
self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.
OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few
self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.)Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than
that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.
Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Muskpromisedthat each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.
a few unqualified successes (Tesla leading the charge on the EV rollout; Starlink providing widespread Internet), and
a lot more unfulfilled promises and vapourware (Twitter’s post-takeover nosedive, the failure to deliver anything-of-use by Neuralink, The Boring Company/Hyperloop, the
worse-than-pointless Grokipedia, all the things SpaceX hasn’t yet done…).
The vast majority of his wealth comes from investment, not from returns: people buy his stock if they buy his hype. I’m not saying he’s
producing nothing of value… but yeah: the “world’s first trillionaire” is… unfortunate.
But then again, I’d be quite happy for him to be the world’s last trillionaire, too.
For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link
was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.
That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article, necessarily. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a
widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t send users to websites. They deliver “synthesized updates” with maybe a link or two buried at the bottom.
The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the
content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed. Google is creating its own context.
Google thinks it no longer needs the Web to deliver answers. And it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is you. Your emails, your files, your calendar,
your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the
kind of personal context those auction models need to work. The prediction module in the prominence allocation framework doesn’t run on keywords. It runs on knowing you.
…
An excellent piece by Matthias Ott, discussing revelations from this year’s Google I/O. In particular, the imminent pivot of Google Search from its lifelong “query in, list of links
out” model to a wholesale “query in, LLM output out” one.
This isn’t just about putting AI output at the top of the search results, as I gather they do today, but about getting rid of search “results” entirely, and
running everything through the model.
To which Matthias wisely asks: well, how will ads work then? Google’s business model is based on mining your personal data and shoving ads in your face. Where do they go in a search
interface that it’s really a search but a “helpful” AI.
It turns out there’s a few approaches that Google seem to be considering, but what they’ve all got in common is the idea that marketers will be able to “influence” the LLM’s token
generation, perhaps by using an LLM of their own to decide whether you (based on everything Google knows about you) are worth marketing to, and how much they’ll pay to do so, and then
this input being “weighted” against competing advertisers and actual ingested data in order to feature advertiser-influenced content woven directly into the output of the LLM.
Superficially, this sounds a little like product placement, like you sometimes see in American-made TV shows and movies. You know, where one character says, of “I’m going to go get a
drink refill. You know you can get unlimited refills on any drink you want… and it’s free?”, and the next says “It’s a wonderful restaurant.”, while they’re sitting in Burger King.
Except this isn’t about saying “hey, people who watch this show are probably high and want a snack, let’s push our fast food their way”. It’s individualised.
It’s more like if the characters, knowing that your GMail account had a recent email about some test results, and your Google Calendar had an appointment tomorrow at the doctor, started
talking about a particular brand of medication to, y’know, put the idea into your head.
The future presented in Futurama was supposed to be a joke, right?
We’re not at the point of completely-customised TV shows – nor the injection of commercials into dreams – yet. But Google’s plans, which blur the already-grey boundaries between organic
and advertising content, are pretty insidious.
Assuming you’re in their ecosystem already, and possibly even if you’re not… Google may already be looking at your search terms, your calendar, your emails, your location and schedule,
who you communicate with and how often, which web pages you visit, which apps you use, where you spend money, etc. (Seriously: if you somehow haven’t begun de-googling already, what are
you waiting for?)… there’s a huge potential for misuse there.
But the arms race between people blocking or learning-to-ignore ads and advertisers trying to foist them upon us continues, and Google thinks this is an acceptable next step in
escalating that. Using an insane amount of energy to recycle other people’s work without crediting them, in order to mash up the result with information they know about you in order to
deliver you an unverifiable soup of words which might answer your question but with no clue how much or little commercial interest went into producing it, or by whom.
That’s some proper Darkest Timeline shit, right there.
You don’t need to take my nor Matthias’s word on it (although you should read his full post because it’s excellent): just look at the concept videos in Google’s blog post on the subject. You’ll also notice that almost-nowhere
in their demos do Google even hint at the possibility of linking-out to anybody else’s website: there’s like one “visit site” button that appears at the very end of
one of the flows, after the agent has done its things. Google is building a walled garden where they hope you’ll live, served by their AI butler on behalf of the companies
who pay Google to tell you about their products.
🚫 Regrettably you have been locked out of diamond geezer
pending age verification protocols.
You may be UNDER 16 YEARS OF AGE and therefore you must not read anything here UNTIL YOU CAN PROVE THAT YOU’RE
NOT.
The government is taking urgent action to ensure that children are no longer able to access harmful social media apps. At the personal behest of the Prime Minister a raft of
carefully thought-through definitely-not-rushed non-kneejerk policies designed to restrict inappropriate content is to be introduced forthwith.
There is some absolutely terrible stuff online, much of which has already tarnished the minds of innocent youth. It is therefore imperative that all potentially terrible stuff must
now be wrapped in a secure plain cover and placed on the digital top shelf. It’s for everyone’s own good.
…
Despite being parody, diamond geezer’s new age-gating – which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn’t actually block access to the site – somehow perfectly
straddles the line between “invasive” and “ineffective”… in exactly the same way that I expect the UK’s legal implementation will manage in a year or two.
