It’s hard not to get sentimental over these. These were the stickers on my cot, which I slept in in Hong Kong. For whatever reason, my parents decided to ship it over to New Zealand even though I had outgrown it. That reason would have likely been that in 1977, the potential of my […]
As NixCraft wrote when sharing this: the irony is that it’s from Perplexity. The rest of you can do this, we won’t. We might be one of those little corners of the web still making human-written content. Life skill in 2025: to spot what is real and what is slop. A bit like […]
Read More… from Ninety per cent of the web could be “AI” slop next year
Beware Substack. I received a newsletter today that I had never heard of, so I unsubscribed—to find that I had allegedly signed up to everything that the user publishes. Not bloody likely. This wasn’t a case of being on someone else’s Substack and accidentally clicking ‘Yes’ to other suggested newsletters. Normally there’d only […]
Read More… from Beware Substack—and TV3 makes terrible design and marketing decisions
Back in 1990, this was a missed opportunity to have a humorous tie-in between Abbey National and Jonathan Lynn’s film Nuns on the Run. Almost as good as the idea I had for Elizabeth Arden. You may also like Is your favourite 1980s’ celeb here? Carry on designing MG taps into BMC’s small-car […]
I watched a video by William Gourley (a friend of friends) recently, and here are the suggested videos to its right on YouTube. There is only one that is actually related to what I saw. The rest are completely irrelevant. In the olden days, YouTube would at least attempt to show you related […]
Read More… from Does clickbait work now? YouTube must think so
As my Typepad blog went into oblivion without any warning from Six Apart, I had better repost the following from my Tumblr, in case it has the same fate. This was an old favourite post of mine. The rise and rise of Joe Patroni George Kennedy’s most famous role. OK, so the last one […]
My dad made quite a few predictions, not because he was psychic (in fact, while he was never vocally against it, like Confucius he wasn’t a fan of it), but because he was a keen observer of people, natural phenomena, and the rise and fall of institutions. Off the top of my head: when Rob […]
Not what usually comes to mind when you say Eric and Ernie. Not many of you have wanted our edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Fair enough: the only thing new is a foreword where we acknowledge the influence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s (Eric Blair’s) wife. However, our A Farewell to Arms has drifted out […]
This was interesting: how the “AI” theftbots (yes, I’m coining that word) affected Autocade’s traffic. We had blocked a bunch of them already—notably the western ones and ByteDance—but there were many others that still got through. This is from Cloudflare, but even their default settings miss a bunch, especially Chinese ones, and they don’t […]
Creative Commons/CC0/Pxhere Anyone else do this? You’re searching for something online and you go to a page where there’s an introduction, then a ‘Contents’ box dividing up the answer into sections. You immediately leave that page because it’s likely to be “AI”-written or the answer you want is buried within, and it’s quicker to […]