Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool continues to wreak damage a year after Semrush users chose to write disinformation about me based on what the program said were trending keywords. Semrush later admitted, when I confronted them publicly on Reddit, that its system makes predictions as well, so we now know that what it claims to be […]
Read More… from Semrush users’ damage still felt one year on, thanks to Google ‘AI overviews’
Our third random paperback is out: 論語 (The Analects), as recorded by the followers of Confucius. After this, we’re likely sticking with our usual Lucire and Autocade brands in our publishing business for the remainder of 2025. The decision to do The Analects came from inspiration from one of my closest friends in London, […]
Read More… from A new edition of Confucius’ 論語, The Analects
I thought Emerald Sky Group had removed its disinformation post, falsely claiming to be working with me and having my endorsement. It’s a blatant attempt to trade off my reputation, even though I’ve spotted articles where their lads are bragging about how good they are. Well, you can’t be that good if you need to […]
How very interesting to see that the disinformation posts about me have stopped going up since I called out Semrush on their own subreddit. For four days I’ve not found any new ones on Google. The timing tells me that Semrush can, contrary to its response, adjust keywords, especially after learning the sheer hell their […]
Read More… from Forgetting humanity: the desperation of tech
For anyone who has followed my battles with bot-written and bot-based junk this year, this should come as no surprise: The UK riots were fuelled by the same kind of website, with the same raison d’être. This one was in Pakistan, where, sadly, some of the disinformation sites about me have come from. […]
Something far, far more important than Google or Amazon—neither of which I particularly enjoy writing about, but do so only as a public service. Ditto with anything I’ve written about social media. My friend and typeface design colleague Hasan Abu Afash and his family have been displaced by the war in Gaza, and they are […]
Read More… from Please help my friend Hasan and his family in Gaza
Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and it’s another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y and total confirmed cases on the x. It’s very useful to see how countries are performing over time as […]
Read More… from One more COVID-19 post: graphing and animating the data
At the end of the last century, the National Government announced its Bright Future programme. Their research had identified that one thing holding back our national competitiveness was our devotion to the team rather than the individual, when in fact there have been many times New Zealand individuals have made immeasurable contributions and had not […]
A photo taken in Wellington with a test car I had for Lucire. White cars aren’t the over-represented colour in New Zealand: guess from this photo what is. A friend of mine put me on to this Fairfax Press Stuff article, entitled ‘Silly Car Question #16: Why are there so many white cars?’. It’s a […]
Has John Cleese become embittered? He suggests that the Bond films after Die Another Day (his second and final) were humourless because the producers wanted to pursue Asian audiences. Humour, he says, was out. ‘Also the big money was coming from Asia, from the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, where the audiences go to watch […]