Happily, Curlie is back in action: I was able to log in without issue yesterday, and everything is back to normal. We definitely need human-curated indices on the web, sorting the human from the machine-written. Curlie (and its forerunner, the Open Directory Project) had forbidden content mills early on: sites that churned out only content […]
Read More… from This weekend: Curlie is back; ignorance must be bliss
It was sad to read of the passing of Ian Crawford, the former TV producer, whom I got to know through Lucire in his post-Crawfords career. I never pressed Ian about Crawford Productions and preferred to keep things on topic about his Pacific resort. It was out of respect as I had the sense (rightly […]
I know, if you search, you’re bound to find an opinion that matches yours, and pretty quickly, too. Bhagwad Park (in either Ontario or Florida—I assume one of the addresses on his site hasn’t been updated) happens to agree with me about AWS, except he breaks things down far better, being an expert on web […]
Now that the world is waking up to Big Tech and its shenanigans, there is less need for me to post about them. Finally, what was once very evident to me is becoming mainstream thought, from Big Tech’s kowtowing to the suppression of a free press. I posted because it was frustrating to see everyone […]
Read More… from It’s finally mainstream to report what Big Tech has been about for over a decade
For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server. That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager […]
I was led to believe that SRWare Iron was Chromium with more privacy, but this morning’s experience testing it was a bit disturbing. Let’s take a fairly common search, like Amazon seller. SRWare’s default search engine is Bing, or at least its own search takes you to Bing. And Bing puts in its first result […]
Read More… from Strange behaviour on SRWare Iron, and Bing ranks phishing site first
Extra plug for my friend Randy Scobey, who has written a memoir. Since Randy and I met through blogging in 2006, it seems fitting to mention this on my blog. What I wrote in Lucire about his book is heartfelt. If you want to read a first-hand account on the stigma felt by the […]
Read More… from My friend Randy writes a book; our ‘Written by humans’ graphic; Hart’s is economical
This is from Perplexity, showing how convincingly these bots with their large language models spit out utter drivel: And not everyone will have the actual knowledge to call them out on it: “AI” is only useful when you already know the answer, because it does get it wrong and you need […]
Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone […]
Read More… from Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?
I thought I’d look at selling the Autocade Yearbook through Amazon, since people who visit the site are in the mood for shopping. Against all my instincts, I’d bite the bullet and make bloody Jeff even richer. But the whole sign-up process is a swindle. Here’s what I sent to them. Hello there: I […]
Read More… from Signing up on Seller Central: another Amazon swindle