yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

@slightlyoff I’ve wanted to get back to you for a while because you were a big reason for our e-commerce website being the way it was, technically speaking.

We took your earlier publications to heart, and we applied every kind of optimization we could think of, just to try and stay a little bit ahead of the competition. I think we did all right in that respect.

When the company was shut down at the end of 2018, I finally put together a document outlining our techniques. It’s not a tutorial and lots of things aren’t perfect, but I think a lot of this can still be used.

I was weirdly proud of the server-side cached pre-renders for several cohorts (at FRONTEND > web server > httpd in the link below), which we were continuously building for the 5 most viewed pages. These on disk static pages didn’t have a long TTL but this allowed us to reevaluate the need for a pricy CDN.

These Apache2 rules allow for high throughput of the pages that are cached in this way. Because of this, we have been able to withstand traffic generated through TV mentions and other publicity without the help of a CDN or any autoscaling.

Of course we eventually placed nginx in front of httpd and these rules became somewhat redundant, but not if you include brotli and other CPU-heavy compression.

Anyway I’m geeking out on a dead website. Here’s the doc:

https://github.com/GuillaumeRossolini/il

The whole AI thing has me endlessly confused. Half the market is crashing because investors didn't see any signs of payoff in the quarterly earnings report, but I'm so lost as to what exactly they were expecting to see. Did they just not pay any attention at all to what these companies were actually doing with AI?

Were they expecting exponential Instagram usage growth as a result of Meta making it so you can have a conversation with the search bar? Or maybe everyone was going to buy 10 new Windows licenses in celebration of Microsoft announcing they want to install AI powered spyware on everyone's computer? Or was Google going to sell more ads by replacing all the search results with reddit shitposts. Either I'm missing something or everyone's 2 remaining brain cells are just really busy fighting to death for 3rd place.

Mac people: if you miss the older style menus bars, when they still looked cool, give Lickable Menu Bar a try. mtm set up with the shiny Tiger menu bar again, and really like it.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/lickable-menu-bar/id6444217677?mt=12

@mcc I worked at Tripod (owned by Lycos) when Lycos also acquired Angelfire. It turned out that the entire site (login, html editor, uploader, everything) was run on a single CGI that was written in C.

The CGI binary was named a.out, which I was told stood for “angelfire.out”.

This is unrelated to your 404 page, but I don’t get many chances to tell this story.

Just saw a Google AI commercial in the Olympics where a kid asks AI to write a heart-felt letter to her Olympic hero.

Are marketers insane? The whole point of heart-felt letters is that they come from a place of authenticity.

As the general vibe heats up, why not distract yourself with a way to keep cool that we abandoned for some reason?

youtu.be/uhbDfi7Ee7k

Beloved Apple blog TUAW was shut down in 2015, sold to private equity, then sold to a company in Hong Kong. It recently relaunched as an AI content farm using the stolen identities and bylines of its former human staff. A nightmare:

https://www.404media.co/a-beloved-tech-blog-tuaw-is-now-publishing-ai-articles-under-the-names-of-its-old-human-staff/

Justice #Sotomayor dissent:

“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be #immune from #criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal #law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such #immunity.
…if the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our #democracy, I dissent."

This week at Config I gave a talk about pixel fonts that I think turned out really well.

It’s called “In defense of an old pixel,” and I don’t think I ever worked harder on a talk before. Check it out here! (25 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w

Mastodon expects you to accurately set the language of your post before posting.

There are real-world accessibility problems if you set it incorrectly, including:

(a) Mastodon's translation feature may not work correctly

(b) when people follow you they can opt-in to only receive posts you send in a particular language. If you mis-label the language of your posts you may be inadvertently spamming your followers.

Earlier this week I had a passenger who tried to bully me.

I was driving the 29 Sunset, and as is normal for me, I was making big enthusiastic stop and transfer announcements. I’m a little atypical for transit operators: I love to make announcements. I draw out the syllables. I sound a little like a WWE announcer crossed with an old time carnival barker. Mostly, people love it. I get lots of compliments and the occasional commendation. I find that making these announcements helps me keep focused on the flow of the route and connects me to my passengers as a person. People recognize my voice, and will sometimes remember me from a different route a year later. But most of all it’s fun, and feels good. I’ll even do it on an empty bus.

So a few months ago we learned that the individual running polyfill.io silently sold the service to an obscure chinese company.

This popular (and well done / very useful) service was created by the Financial Times, who stopped maintaining it and "donated it to the community", meaning that it relied on a few volunteers to continue running it (and on Fastly who provided the hosting for free). 1/7

computers used to scream when you connected them to the internet. this was correct

See also being pulled into a random slack channel with no context…

Funny story: This was my work, patented by my supervisors at my first summer research position. They waited until I was out of the country for a gap year, and never told me they had patented and possibly even sold it.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5479513A/en

The one good thing AI chat bots are good for.

"Hey, chatGPT what is a recipe for banana bread?"
"Here it is with cooking instructions."

"Hey, any search engine what is a recipe for banana bread?"

"Here are 14 links every one of them will be a long story about someone's grandmother, a bunch of pictures, more stories about someone's grandmother, but keep paging down but then page back up because you just skipped past the ingredient list. Okay now that you've found it page down three more times past more copy about the writer's grandmother for the cooking instructions."
____________
#chatGPT

The state of search in 2024:

Google: "We threw away decades of search knowledge and Internet indexing and just made an answer up "

Bing: "Here's 100 tangentially related pages from 2010 that I only included because your query appears in a tag cloud in the website's footer"

DuckDuckGo: "Here are the Bing results, only with ✨privacy✨"

Reddit: (this user has deleted their entire post history using PowerDeleteMyShit. Fuck /u/Spez)

Yahoo: "Oh thank god, someone's actually using our search engine! No, we're not just Bing!" *frantically trying to cover up the giant Bing sticker* "NO DON'T GO TO GOOGLE!!!!"

Yandex: "Here are all of the Russian-owned resources on this topic. Only Russian sources are trustworthy. Everything else is fake ne—I MEAN, misinformation"

Kagi: "We'll give you what Google used to give you for free, for the low low price of $10/month!"

Ask.com: [hoarse screaming and clawing noises can be heard from the ground beneath a headstone that says "Here lies Jeeves: 1996-2006"]

“Politics isn’t about solving problems any more, it’s about exploiting them.”

good line-- grim-- but good line.

from Alastair Campbell about the UK, but applies beyond there.

https://www.ft.com/content/bc19bbf4-2939-489e-a113-e21d5baf356d

(comic) As the years go by https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-as-the-years-go-by