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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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 […]
It took four months but Autocade’s finally at 31 million page views, having made it to 3,352,136 this morning (April 2). That smaller number is the page views since the program was reinstalled last year. Add that to the last recorded total before the reinstallation of 27,647,011, and you have 30,999,147. At c. 10,000 […]
After the last post, you may be thinking: surely if my site was entirely PHP, Google wouldn’t have a problem identifying which were the most important articles? They are the biggest search engine in the world and all that data would ensure that they knew how to rank the dynamic pages properly. They would have […]
Read More… from How Google fares in a site: search if your site is all PHP—Wordpress users beware
The gargantuan full-size 1971–6 Pontiacs (Laurentian, Catalina, Parisienne, Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari) went up on Autocade last week, and they reminded me of the golden era of Pontiac illustrations. That era didn’t stretch into the 1970s that much: you saw them for the 1967s through to the 1971s, before photography took over. I […]
Above: The 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia, the most recent entry to Autocade. Next week, Autocade will turn 15. I don’t expect big editorials extolling its history, mainly because the site has not changed much in principle or appearance since it was first conceived in 2008. We did a single video under the Autocade name, […]
I have told this story many times: I became interested in fashion magazines with a 1989 issue of Studio Collections. In fact, it was its fifth anniversary issue. I really liked the typesetting, photography and print quality. I was probably one of the few people disappointed when they went to desktop publishing and the […]
When I first signed up to Disqus, there was the option to have no ads. But with Lucire we allowed them, because I figured, why not? Disqus’s rules were pretty clear: you’d earn money on the ads shown, and once you got to US$100, they’d pay out. The trouble is those ads made so little […]
Read More… from Why we’ve dropped Disqus, and the shenanigans of the online ad world
Along came Copytrack again yesterday, identifying an image that they allege we stole and put on Lucire’s website. And once again I had to go back through old emails—only 11 years this time, not 13 like the last—to retrieve the email to prove that I had the correct licence to publish it, and that and […]
Here are January 2023’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month. Notes Rosa Clará image, added as I was archiving files from the third quarter of 2021. The Claudia Schiffer Rolling Stone cover came to mind recently—I believe it was commended in 1991 by the […]