On the verge of a change for the better

I can’t find the original toot on Mastodon but I was led to this piece in the MIT Technology Review by Chris Stokel-Walker, ‘Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks’. As I’ve cut back on my Twitter usage, I haven’t witnessed any issues, but it does highlight the efforts […]

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I’ve left the data farms but occasionally revisit the Matrix

Warner Bros.   Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I won’t shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I don’t wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I […]

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Engaging your team: an excellent video tutorial from Insight Creative

This is particularly good stuff, especially in these times when companies want to hang on to their employees and foster a better internal culture. Insight Creative’s Staff Engagement Masterclass video tutorial has some excellent advice, in line with a lot of what I’ve preached over the years. Their model is excellent and really breaks down […]

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Twitter pushes the near future to look more bipolar than multipolar

Dave Troy’s analysis of the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter makes for interesting reading, since Troy has actually spoken to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and has a bit more of the inside track than most. For starters, Troy reminds us that Dorsey trusts Musk, in order to keep Twitter away from Wall Street investors. Dorsey […]

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Lucire at 25: how things have changed

The below was originally posted in Lucire. We have made it to 25 years of age there, and rather than reinvent the wheel, this little piece—as well as the one I uploaded yesterday hours after we turned exactly 25—reflect how I feel upon reaching this milestone.   Olivia Macklin, photographed by Josh Fogel, make-up by […]

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We should challenge monopolists, not do business with them at the exclusion of ethical parties

Search engine Mojeek is doing no wrong in my book. Here’s its CEO Colin Hayhurst being interviewed by The New Era’s Jeffrey Peel, making complete sense, which is not something I can say about anyone speaking for Big Tech. We should be shunning monopolists if we truly value progress and innovation, or even a proper, […]

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Forget the 2010s and 2020s, Bing’s results are firmly in the 2000s now

Immediately after blogging about Bing being able to pick up an article from 2022, Microsoft’s collapsing search engine has reverted back to being the Wayback Machine. There was just over a week of it living in the 2020s, but it seems it’s too much for them. It’s back to, well, Bing Vista, for want of […]

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Bing actually indexes a page from 2022—Microsoft must be in shock

This is a miracle. Bing actually indexed and showed something from Lucire from 2022. Of course, since it’s incapable of remembering what it had shown in its results earlier, the story was repeated twice on subsequent pages. Since I began my tests earlier this year (and finding out yet another area that tech companies brag […]

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China in 2022: speak Cantonese, get banned from social media

If you think some of us were being uppity about New Zealand Chinese Language Week, how’s this for a real-life report? Speak Cantonese, get banned from a social media platform. That’s what’s happening in China right now. And I had already mentioned schoolchildren being told off for using their reo. The Google Translate translation is […]

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Startpage isn’t what I thought it was—but then Google does the opposite to what you think

Startpage says it licenses Google’s results but gives us privacy. So, if you want Google-level, Google-biased results, but don’t want their tracking, you use Startpage. Um, no. Let’s just take a random search for a screenwriter I once mentioned on this blog:     It’s quite a bit slower than Google, too. The results are […]

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