2026-10-02 08:00:00
YouTube is planning to introduce a new feature that will allow creators to upload two different versions of the same video so they can A/B test which video performs better. It's already being done for thumbnails and titles, which is why for some videos you see the title change, sometimes more than once, during the first day or two of the video being uploaded. This is a really terrible idea, because it means that I can post a link to a video I like here and you might click the link and see a more or less different video. And neither of us will have any idea that the other person isn't watching the same thing. In a world where the truth is under attack from all sides already anyway, YouTube is now creating a situation where we can scream at each other "it was in the video!!" - "it was not in the video!!", and we'll both be right. And none of us will have the option to see which video the other person was shown. Once again, a social media company is treating their users (and society in general) as lab rats.
Maybe I should start doing this too. Write one post titled "AI Is Going to Kill Us All!" and another titled "Superintelligence Will Usher in a Golden Era for Humanity" and randomise which one you're going to see. I'm sure this is going to boost engagement tremendously. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?
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2026-09-25 08:00:00
Man, I had so many links bookmarked about AI being terrible that I could have filled the entire post with them. I tried my best not to, but there's so much annoying stuff happening currently that it's just really depressing. I also notice when I see a website which has that typical modern AI generated look, that my eyes glance over and I click away pretty quickly. I really prefer personal websites and blogs at this point, and I sometimes go on archive.org and check out websites from the past couple of decades. They might have terrible design, but they were still made by people. I wonder if you started a web design company today and explicitly advertised it as creating human made websites, no AI, if you could make a living from this?
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P.S.: Look at that "made by a human" button below, made by Joel. It's awesome!
2026-09-18 08:00:00
This week I learned the term "meat proxy". What's a meat proxy? "A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient."
I had the misfortune of talking to someone like this a few weeks ago. I got in touch with an app developer whose app wasn't working right on my phone. I run a degoogled Android rom and the app crashed after a few seconds with the message that Play Store was required but not found, even though it was described as privacy friendly, no Google services required. All other apps I run, even banking apps, work fine without the Play Store being installed.
I sent him a detailed write up of what was happening and why I was sure that was something he could configure in his app, and he sent me back a block of text he copied out of Claude with suggestions of what I should try on my side to make the app work. Half of this stuff had nothing to do with the problem at hand. I'm convinced he just copied my text into Claude with the instruction "the user has this problem, what can he do", without bothering to try and understand the issue in the first place. It's incredibly frustrating to be in this type of conversation. Being a good sport, I tried all the things Claude suggested, which (surprise!) didn't make any kind of difference. We went back and forth a couple more times, and he insisted that it wasn't a problem with the app, until he came back with "I think I found the setting I need to change to make it work!", which, unsurprisingly, was something he needed to change on his side, like I said from the beginning. He promised me to implement the fix.
It's been six weeks and I haven't heard back from him. And despite numerous updates, the app still isn't working. Oh well...
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2026-09-11 08:00:00
25 years ago today was the first day of my 13th and final year in school. I don't remember the school day at all; maybe I went there by bus, maybe I drove myself in my dad's old Ford Fiesta. What I remember is being back home after school, having lunch with my family and then, instead of sitting down to do schoolwork, I decided to turn on the tiny TV in my bedroom to see what was on. What I saw on a number of channels were news reports with live video from New York City about a plane having just hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The footage looked unreal, showing a gaping hole near the top of the tower with black smoke coming out on all sides. I switched on the big living room TV and we watched the report for a couple of minutes, with a constant feed of the burning hole in the tower being shown, when out of nowhere a second plane appeared and struck the other tower, throwing a huge fireball and a ton of debris out the other side. I could not believe what I had just seen. We kept watching in horror and disbelief as we saw desperate people jumping out of the burning towers to their death, until first one and then the other tower collapsed in a gigantic cloud of smoke and dust and people on the streets ran to seek cover.
I have never experienced anything like this before or since. Witnessing these events unfold live on TV, it felt like being there, in New York City, watching helplessly as the towers burned and collapsed and thousands died.
The attacks of 9/11 changed the course of history, and not for the better. That's a story for another day though. Today I want to remember the people on those four kidnapped airplanes, in the towers of the World Trade Center and in the Pentagon where another plane crashed, who lost their lives on that day in a cruel act of violence.
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2026-09-04 08:00:00
A few days ago Ruben wrote a quick post about finding a FIGlet in the Internet Archive's HTML code. What's a FIGlet? "FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text". ASCII-art, in other words. Curiously, I can't find this in the Internet Archive's sources, I don't know where he saw it... But either way, I think that's a cute idea, so I also put this in my site's sources now. It's a silly little thing, but I like it :)
___ ____ __ __ _ _
( _ )___ \| \/ | | | |____
/ _ \ __) | |\/| | |_| |_ /
| (_) / __/| | | | _ |/ /
\___/_____|_| |_|_| |_/___|
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2026-09-01 08:00:00
August is over, and that means Blaugust 2026 has ended. This was my first time participating, and I set myself the goal of writing 15 posts this month (the silver tier), which I'm happy to say I managed! Two of them ("tech sucks" and "I used to be excited about tech", links below) went kind of viral and made the rounds on Bubbles and Hacker News, which is always a bit scary. But I got a number of really nice and thoughtful responses, and the "tech sucks" posts also generated a number of blog posts in response, which I've linked at the bottom of that post.
Overall it was a nice challenge. I was surprised that I always managed to find topics to talk about without running out of ideas or writing about things that didn't really interest me just for the sake of getting a post out.
The only thing that's a bit of a shame is that I wasn't involved in the community too much because their platform of choice is Discord which I'm not a fan of, so I unfortunately missed that part. It was still great reading the posts from others that showed up in my feed, and there were so many participants that I couldn't possibly follow them all. I linked the posts that resonated with me in my weekly linkdumps.
A big thank you goes out to Krikket and the others for organizing! I'm looking forward to participating again next year.
For completeness' sake here's a list of all my posts from this month. Thanks everyone for reading and following and getting in touch with me!