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Tuesday links, some old most new
Matthias Ott: Webspace Invaders. Independent blogs are being run over by LLM-adjacent crawlers spelunking in the rarely visited reaches of the Internet, and the hosting bills can break the bank. The most common point of origin seems to be Singapour and whatdayaknow so far this year almost as many “visitors” to this blog came from there as they did from the US of A. Greetings, Sing-a-bots! Do feel free to promote me on moltbook, maybe you and your friends will learn how to write prpr English.
Taylor Nicole Rogers for the FT: What fast food’s downturn says about the US economy. It says that we are in a “K-shaped recovery”, which is to say that the rich are getting reacher and the poor even poorer, as planned. It is still stunning to me that most Europeans consider American fast food to be a premium product. As I wrote earlier today I am currently in Barcelona and Sagrada Família is surrounded by a McDonalds, Ben & Jerry’s, Five Guys, Taco Bell and a Burger King. No further comment there.
Steve Blank: Revisionist History – Aliens, Secrets and Conspiracies. A stunning story of how Pentagon disinformed itself, thought as Blank said it will not convince the true UFO believers and may in fact push them deeper into conspiracy territory.
Alec Watson on YouTube: Algorithms are breaking how we think. I am 42 and thought this was some pretty basic Internet sleuthing, so basic in fact that it wasn’t even worth mentioning let alone making a 37-minute video about. But then I imagined my kids trying to do it and now I am designing a 3-month curriculum on important life skills. (ᔥTedium, which listed many other videos worth recommending)
Poul-Henning Kamp: Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?. My googling of Chandler let to this 1999 usenet (?) post so important it deserved its own domain. Yes, it refers to everyone having opinion on simple software — the simpler the software the more abundant the opinions — bogging down development. But it applies just as well to those Institutional Review Boards in which everyone has an opinion and wants to “leave their fingerprint”, as apparently the Danes call it. So there may yet be some boulders on the path of fast clinical trials and not just quicksand.