Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’ A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better. If search engines had kept up with the game, […]
Tag: 1990s
One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting
A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]
Read More… from One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting
A tribute to Helen Baxter, 1973–2024
[Originally published in Lucire] Not only did we lose Mandi Kingsbury last month, we lost a good friend of this magazine, and a dear personal friend, Helen Baxter, who tragically took her own life aged 51 on September 23. This is a reminder that physical changes to one’s health can manifest as depression, and to […]
Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?
Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost […]
Read More… from Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?
At the dawn of the ’90s
More from the slimmed-down archives. Here’s a little item from 1991, when I was 19. St Luke’s Church in Wadestown, Wellington was holding a 1960s-themed dance and I designed and hand-lettered the tickets. You can see I was into Swiss modernism even then. The large type was drawn from memory: I didn’t go back […]
Recycle time
Thirty-plus years of my files are being recycled. Only a last few years are left to go. I kept them, thinking they might be of some historical use—maybe future entrepreneurs might want to see the efforts I put in to get the country’s first digital font range known, or building up Lucire from nothing. As […]
Using “AI”: you need to know when answers are disinformation
You need your wits about you more often than not, especially when Bing tells you MIT went online in 1881 Having come up blank in regular web searches on Mojeek, Google and Bing, I resorted to LLM-driven bots to see if they would help. I wanted to know if anyone predated Lucire into turning […]
Read More… from Using “AI”: you need to know when answers are disinformation
For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward
The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]
Read More… from For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward
A history of dealing with ad networks
Written in the feedback form to one ad network as we attempt to find someone to complement our work with H12 Media. Sums up a lot about the murky world of online advertising. It’s to a ‘Google Publishing Partner’, and we know Big Tech lies, but I’m keeping an open mind with this provider. Italics […]
You never know where your interests will take you
A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa? Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]
Read More… from You never know where your interests will take you