It’s going to be very interesting to see the legalities of Google using the contents of 15·1 million websites for its C4 dataset, used to train large language models. Ton Zijlstra put me on to a Washington Post article that revealed which sites were used. He had discovered that his own website (zylstra.org) had provided […]
Read More… from Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?
This may be a source of comedy on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, but to me it’s obvious why young people are opting for flip phones and digital cameras. They’re smart enough to think: why should I have a device that’s addictive and wastes my time? Why should I spend time on websites […]
Read More… from Generation Z has the right idea with flip phones and digital cameras
I followed a Ford Ranger today and felt nothing. This isn’t as strange as it sounds. Ford has become a truck company here, too, and there’s nothing about the blue oval that stirs the soul any more. Mustangs are rare, and Ford—which once democratized flash—doesn’t have the brand equity that it used to. Never mind […]
This is about as personal as you’re going to ever read on this blog. It’s written for whomever needs to read it now. I felt I had to put it out there. You know who you are. When you lose your mum to cancer at 22, you feel a lot of emotions. Grief, for one. […]
A message I sent to the former Vodafone New Zealand: Everything is OK except the messages you’re promoting! I know you’ve already heard the feedback that you share your name with a white supremacist organization, and you shrugged it off. OK, maybe we can put this down to a marketing company that didn’t do […]
Read More… from ‘No more black spots’ is music to the white supremacist
I took a peek at Google Webmaster Tools. Apparently there are a lot of noindex pages on the Lucire website that they want me to resolve. Well, folks, if you didn’t put tag index pages so high up for a site: search, I wouldn’t need to have so many. This is to help Google […]
Read More… from Curiosities within Google’s search console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
Dr Sean Munger’s blog post today about an east Asian model’s face being used by scammers is excellent, and his final paragraph is spot on. I won’t spoil it, as it’s worth your time getting there, but I will provide his Mastodon post on it. I responded to Sean with: ‘I must have […]
Read More… from The tech’s been captured by the bad actors and we haven’t caught up
We’ve hit 4,700 models on Autocade, and unfortunately the model that sees in the milestone is, to my eyes, visually challenging. Still, there’s a part of me that’s quite curious about the interior and how it drives. Goes to show that there’s no planning in making the BMW iX our 4,700th. I also want to […]
When I said this was the third template for this site yesterday, I was wrong. There was one more at the very start, thanks to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, making 2023’s new look the fourth. In September 2002, very soon after I acquired the jackyan.com domain around the time of my 30th […]
Read More… from The original (and shortest-lived) look to this website in 2002
So far I’ve had two people feed back about the site redesign and it’s positive. One friend in the US noticed that the site ran slower for him than before, which is very astute of him: he’s absolutely right because it seems the newer the tech, the slower things go. Bit like banking. I’ve had […]