Above: Amanda and me with Merrill in 2016. I was saddened to learn of the passing of my friend Merrill J. Fernando, founder of Dilmah Tea and the MJF Foundation. I’ve written an obit over at Lucire, since he was very much a friend of the magazine, too, and his values of social responsibility […]
Read More… from Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando
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 […]
Read More… from Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?
Farewell, my dear friend Sergei. Taken far too soon. Sergei trying to corral us for a photograph in London in 2015. I’m pretty upset by this so rather than write a fresh tribute (which I will have to do in time in an official capacity), I’m going to quote from what I wrote […]
Wow, we’re nearly there: the long journey to migrate our sites off AWS and on to a new box. We began hosting there in 2012 but the server—which appears to have had a single major update in 2016—was getting very old. In 2018 we began searching for someone who knew about migrations. A second […]
Read More… from Hopefully this week: farewell, Amazon Web Services
Refreshingly, I’ve noticed that my more recent blog posts haven’t been about Big Tech as often. I haven’t changed my views: the ones I’ve stated earlier still stand, and Google and Facebook in particular continue to be a blight on democracy and even individual mental health. A lot of the posts were inspired by […]
Read More… from My first tech post in a while: how I use my social-computing time
I haven’t been able to find anything on this bug online, but it’s very common. As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple […]
Read More… from Fixing Wordpress’s problem of fake bolds and italics
Last night, I uploaded a revised website for JY&A Consulting (jya.co), which I wrote and coded. Amanda came up with a lot of the good ideas for it—it was important to get her feedback precisely because she isn’t in the industry, and I could then include people who might be looking to start a new […]
Read More… from Branding ourselves in the 2020s: a revamp for JY&A Consulting’s website, jya.co
Danjaq LLC/United Artists Time for another podcast, this time with a Scottish theme. I touch upon how fortunate we are here in Aotearoa to be able to go to the ballet or expos, and, of course, on the US elections (thanks to those who checked out my last podcast entry, which had a record 31 […]
My partner Amanda and I are part of Medinge’s presence at Dutch Design Week this year. Since Medinge couldn’t celebrate our 20th anniversary due to COVID-19, some of our Dutch members, helped by many others, took the opportunity to get us into the event, which is virtual this year. We had done a […]
Read More… from Medinge Group at Dutch Design Week: the contribution from Aotearoa New Zealand
I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works. If I read this correctly, #Google lets more than one person use a single email address (in this case, over 200!)? How daft! Why would they do that? pic.twitter.com/KtTO6PnDEI — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 27, 2020 PS.: This was the image linked […]