Maybe I should add a ‘odd hardware’ category.
- “Open source is everything!“
- Epistemological Slop.
- Pomera DM250 Tinkering.
- MNT April 2025 Update. The handheld prototype is interesting.
- The DNS system isn’t a database and shouldn’t be used as one. “Lies in order to create truth” is one way to describe DNS.
- Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries and Poisoning Well and anticrawl. I am seeing multiple AI text poisoning tools being published, which gives an idea of the size of the problem. (first two via)
- A local perspective: roughly 15% of my traffic logs for the Digest in the past week contain the line “bot”, which is probably an undercount of actual activity. If I was running more heavyweight services this would definitely concern me.
- Poisonify, same but for music. (via)
- The Qwerkywriter.
- DOOM plus DOOM 2. I had no idea how many rewrites there were.
- Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s Code page 437? (via)
- Digital hygiene. (via)
- Don’t use AI for technical answers.
- If it hadn’t been C, what language would have been most common? Brian Kernighan’s answer.
- “What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9” by Geoff Collyer. Read the Closing Thoughts section at the end. (PDF, via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Keep Pushing from clipping. (via)
People and communities I respect have amply documented their battle with out-of-control LLM crawlers. Luckily static websites like mine that hardly anyone knows about are a lot easier to protect. Block a few IP ranges and you can sleep easy. Hopefully that remains true. Doubly so as shared hosting providers probably take steps to protect their servers too.
The question about alternatives to C that didn’t win is fascinating!