Excellent links by way of the fediverse today. First up, Cory Doctorow about saving the news from Big Tech, with sentiments that aren’t far off my own, many of which have been recorded on this blog. His post is from June 2023. Highlights include this on contextual advertising: In studies, these contextual ads perform slightly […]
Tag: media
Miscellaneous images from the US
A bit of a clear-out of a downloads’ folder on my computer. This has been sitting there since 2016 and I’ve no idea of its origins, but let’s say that Americans do understand irony and whomever claimed otherwise was wrong. This was from The New York Times in the early 2000s. Dave Barboza […]
The captivating case of Brian MacKinnon
On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]
Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do
When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]
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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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ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has one of the clearest stories explaining ‘AI’, the misnomer used to describe the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT (which, I understand, is French: Chat, j’ai pété translates to ‘Cat, I farted’). Vaughan-Nichols explains that LLMs (large language models) simply rely on statistics, which is why they get things factually wrong. […]
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Go for it, Harry
Say what you will about Prince Harry making millions from his book and TV appearances. What if it’s to help fund the destruction of one Keith Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., and save the very fabric of democracy itself in the UK? It’s not going to be cheap, but the dude is out for blood. […]
Google’s top 10 continue to bring up old pages; and it looks like Bing’s about to kick us off
After years of using the web, I think I know a little about how web spidering works. The web spider hits your home page (provided it knows about it), then proceeds to follow the links on it. Precedence is given to the pages within your site that are linked most, or are top-level: in Lucire’s […]
Is Microsoft trying to stem its losses from Bing?
If Appledystopia is right in its 2020 article, Microsoft loses US$1·5 milliard per annum on Bing. So maybe that explains why it’s worsened so much. Microsoft might well be finding ways to cut its losses, and servers cost money. Pity that none of the Bing clones are saying anything, not even Duck Duck Go’s usually […]
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Nice try, Marissa Mayer, but no conversion
I had a chuckle at Marissa Mayer saying that Google results are worse because the web is worse. As I’ve shown with a site:lucire.com search, which is a good one since our site pre-dates Google (just), Google is less capable of providing the relevant pages for a typical search. I know how web spiders work […]