Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and presumably Whatsapp) is taking user content for its ‘generative AI’. I don’t remember signing up for this, but then I stopped using these sites regularly. Allegedly you can opt out of this. I opted out of ad preference collection there and it made no difference, but in case it […]
Month: August 2023
A keyword might help in a Bing site: search
After I suggested that Mike Masnick of Techdirt try out Mojeek for his site:techdirt.com search, since Bing was coming up blank, he decided he would try the search with Techdirt as his keyword (which is what Mojeek requires by design: it doesn’t site searches without search terms; here he would have had to do site:techdirt.com […]
‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine
Some say, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ as a positive thing. In fact, a very dear friend used to say it, and it did him a lot of good. But then, he’s an honest sort of chap and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver. His take on faking it was to present a […]
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First impressions of the Royal Kludge RK100 with blue switches
After only a few days’ wait, my (oddly named) Royal Kludge RK100 keyboard with blue switches arrived. It’s going to be my daily driver (I hope) to replace my Cooler Master Quickfire TK with Cherry MX Brown switches, which is going to another office. First impressions: I love the return of the click sound. If […]
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Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)
Since Autocade was reinstalled last year, an errant line appeared on the home page: ‘Category: Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag’. The sole page that was listed under this Mediawiki category: the home page. It was very useless information, especially for site visitors. I finally discovered how to hide this, and I’m recording it as the […]
A farewell to my friend, Denis Wood (and to a stranger, Sir Michael Parkinson)
I was deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the passing of my friend Denis Wood, treasurer of Scots Collegians’ Association, Inc. I’ve been on the Collegians’ executive for over a decade and Denis was always present as our financial guru. He was committed to our Association and our purposes. I’m still processing this news, […]
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Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’
Rod Hilton, on how terrible Google is getting. This isn’t down to the web being worse, as Marissa Mayer laughably claims. This is down to Google focusing on its surveillance capitalism-based ad business, which earns most of its revenues, over search. It hasn’t been a search-centred company for decades. And I thought its […]
Autocade reaches 32 million page views
It’s been a slow haul to get to 32 million page views on Autocade, but we are there, in four months rather than the dire five I predicted earlier. The last installation reached 27,647,011 the day before it was unplugged, and the new one has reached 4,362,443, which totals 32,009,454. I don’t think we can […]
Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again
Props to Mojeek again. I gave them feedback about how lucir was coming up for a search about Lucire. There is a search engine convention that identifies root words and delivers variants, but I argued that as I was querying a capitalized word, maybe Lucire should appear further up top. To their credit, this now […]
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Going to HTTPS need not be this hard
Autocade finally got a secure certificate. The reason it took so long: people who make these things write convoluted instructions to lock out laypeople, or they are simply wrong. The Autocade one is through Let’s Encrypt, which has a confusing website. It linked to instructions for our web host, Hetzner, which were plain wrong. The […]