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.

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.

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.

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”.

I derive much pleasure from writing. It hardly costs a thing.

“On a more practical note,” a friend told me, “there really is a minimal income necessary for comfort and health.”

Simple life reduces worry and reduced worry contributes to happiness. High-paying jobs are typically not compatible with simplicity in life. But there is an alternative way to look at it – and one who wrote about Om Malik perishing captured that when saying:

I had a tougher week than usual. Someone I deeply care about had a bad fall, followed by the passing of Om. It made me think again about the impermanence of life: the mundaneness of every day can seem like this can go on forever, but suddenly in just a moment everything may change.

I can’t help but keep thinking about Om and how he was writing so much till the end. Sometimes I feel like I take my writing for granted. It seems to be always there. But what if one day it wasn’t?

There is always some self-consciousness involved when publishing a public blog. Will I be flooding people’s rss readers if I post too much? Why would anyone read this obscure topic? Do people really want to know *my* opinion?? Omg people are going to get so tired of my posts on covid cautiousness.

But mortality has this ultimate clarifying effect. Pride, embarrassment, self-consciousness, etc – what are they in the face of mortality?

[...]

(of course, this website may not survive beyond my death, but that is another problem.)

It links to this older post about “website graveyards”, stating 6 years ago: “I am hence thankful to my partner – I have never understood how essential it is to have a witness until these recent years, or at least at this point in my life when everything seems so shaky and transient, how much it means to me that my ongoing existence is being witnessed. That all of this is real, someone is seeing my pain, my struggles. I think this is the outcome of feeling not being taken seriously my entire life. ”

It says: “Websites shouldn’t have to go offline once their creators are dead, yet they mostly will unless they are hosted on a free service that will likely sustain long-term into the future (i.e. wordpress.com or github)”

This did not age well because github is not doing well and wordpress.com shares a bed with sloppers.

The real solution might be friends who can help run a site for you, like Aaron Swartz did.

The above blogger (anonymous except in domain name) should know sites can outlast people by decades, as many have.

When we say “the Tux” we mean Tux Machines

e’re only about two days away from July. The exquisite weather today (cool and sunny) is a fresh breath of air after a week(ish) of heatwave and even bursts of heavy rain last night. I’ve purchased Rianne many boxes of mochi, I’ve begun grinding down the coffee beans, and we’re now in a position to make it a fruitful summer with many editorial pieces, not just curated story picks.

2025 was a busy year for us due to lawfare (we received sound advice), but in 2026 we are catching up and we’ve already made several technical improvements to the site. Our development team enhanced some bits without adding bloat and we’re probably more robust to DDoS attacks this summer (after some attacks crippled us).

We are also grateful for the fact that we forged some new alliances with friendly groups that share similar goals. We help promote them like they help promote us.

Despite what may be claimed online (evil tongues), we have earned a lot of respect in the past few years and made a big leap since the site was 15 (my wife and I became chief curators when the site was 9).

Rianne is still the soul and motor of the site, even if she does not add many original editorials. Behind the scenes there are technical people who keep the site fast and perpetually available, fully patched, properly backed up etc.

The Web is so chaotic on so many levels.

CDNs are not the solution. Access gatekeeping with JS is not the solution either, it’s another new problem.