Robert Vanwey on whom to boycott

It’s hard to find fault with Robert Vanwey’s ‘Who to Boycott’, subtitled ‘There are some in business who treat workers like property’. Note: for those who don’t like Substack, you might not wish to click through. But I gave my word to Rob I would link it because I was impressed by his thinking and […]

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Twenty years of blogging

First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal.   Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 […]

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Who leads when the house of cards falls?

Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]

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Where do we draw the line on LLM- or “AI”-generated content?

Contrary to my earlier post, I allowed the trackbacks from AI-Summary.com after its owner reached out to me. The fact he reached out does show he read the post, and there was some human agency involved. That very courteous email even offered to remove this blog from further mining. When you know a human’s there, […]

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Should I link back an “AI” or LLM-authored splog? I vote no

This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it.     It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback […]

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Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?

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 […]

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The newer the tech, the slower the site

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 […]

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Revamping my personal site after a decade

After 10 years, it was time for a new template for my personal site—I think it’s only the third in 21 years. Ten years is a long time on the web, and the previous template hadn’t been up to snuff for a long time. But there’s always the issue of finding time—which, thanks to Easter, […]

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Got dynamic pages or a Wordpress blog? Don’t expect Google to rank your pages highly

That was short-lived. Bing’s back to offering 55 results for Lucire, and when you go through them, c. 40 per cent are repeated from page to page. However, a lot of the results are from the 2020s now, of both static and dynamic pages, so that’s something. There’s still a handful of truly ancient pages […]

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Of course Bing AI makes stuff up—Bing itself does

Of course some of us expected Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT to be rubbish—and we knew ChatGPT would make stuff up. Because Bing makes stuff up.     If you have a normal, functioning web crawler (or spider), there’s no way you would ever wind up with pages that have never existed. Nothing about this is […]

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