first created a site in Geocities. It was around 1997. It was my first site. It wasn’t until the early 2000s (some time around 2001) that I began developing something about myself, back then a Software Engineering student. It was modeled after the academic page of a lecturer whom I respected.

The Web is waning for many reasons (not just slop), but people still read, some watch videos (usually short ones), and there’s no sign that people will quit caring about literature altogether.

So we all carry on.

don’t think the quote above has anything to do with Snowden and an actor claiming to be Snowden is just a for-profit Hollywood production.

Unverified quotes are not a new problem. It’s not an LLM slop issue, wherein they call it “hallucination”. Even decades ago one could easily find false “wisdoms” and fake (or misattributed) quotes online. Those were not satires, though sometimes people passed off satires sans the disclosures.

The best solution is to check the credibility of the sources or trace quotes back to their source.

Crossposted from Techrights

HREE years ago we abandoned WordPress. It was a much-belated success story as for reasons specified a decade earlier we had long planned to abandon WordPress. More and more reasons added up, even before WordPress and especially WordPress.com became slop-ware (LLM integration that users mostly loathed; data was also being passed for training plagiarism).

Read on

ver two years ago Rianne and colleagues celebrated her site that she curates turning 20. Back then the site and its community were besieged by American aggressors. The aggression did not end well. Rianne and the site received more publicity, more people offered to help/contribute, and last month we all celebrated in northern England as the site turned 22.

very pleasant anniversary of Tux Machines was celebrated this summer. Tux Machines came under SLAPPs (lawfare) over 2 years ago, just months before it turned 20. That didn’t hurt the site, it only made it more popular.

We’ve meanwhile seen politicians who want to crack down on SLAPPs appointed to the new cabinet and this new report on legal regulation reform from the Legal Services Consumer Panel says abolish the SRA and BSB. They are part of the problem, they don’t regulate.

I will soon do a long series about the SRA.

T is hardly controversial to say that Wikipedia gets misused to sort of decided who’s important and who’s unimportant, who’s good, who’s evil etc.

Wikipedia is an abusive instrument of power and we know who funds it: billionaires.

Nope, not poor donors. They’re a drop in the ocean.

“Did you ever contribute on Wikipedia and is this something you would like to push there?” a friend asked me today. “It would be interesting to see how they react this time and if they make up new excuses to try and sabotage my campaign,” he said, then “report that in Techrights” (mentioned this morning).

Wikipedia has a policy against people writing about themselves, but writing about oneself isn’t a real limitation when people ask friends and PR firms to do this.

Be very sceptical of Wikipedia. It became part of the advertising industry.

2 days ago: In Defence of Physical Tickets

any people actually think or genuinely believe that “going paperless” (i.e. no more paper receipts, bills etc.) makes them look smart. In reality, they typically surrender to brainwash from greedy companies that try to avoid manual labour, shipping costs, and materials. There’s a good reason to have (both get and keep) a paper trail. It’s not surveillance, it is for you to control, even shred if so you wish.

Last week I was almost completely away from the computer for three days and I didn’t miss the computer, the Internet, my inbox etc. Not at all. I didn’t check E-mail for half a week and didn’t miss anything critical. I did not use a phone either. In some sense, I guess that I became anti-computers in many contexts; I’ve noticed that some of the more senior judges seem to be like that as well, as some work 100% on paper (markers, sticky notes, handwritten notes, bookmarks and so on). It is a case of “the right tool for the job” and all that, a friend has explained to me, as “computers make sense in a lot of places but should not be shoehorned into workflows where they do not belong.”

In modern times the idea of “disconnecting” (from computers, not just the Net) became known as “Detox”, recognising the fact that digital things can be “Toxic”.