If Emily Dickinson had written her poems on her Wordpress blog, her host would have deleted them outright when the bill came due. Instead, her sister found 1,800 poems written on paper and stored in a drawer. Words written on paper take an intentional decision to destroy them whereas words written online usually require an intentional decision to keep them. In this modern blogging age how do we make our writing last? I do not have any important writing on this blog but I do want my family to…
Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1164/when-online-commenters-detect-my-art-as-ai
It's already been almost a month (how??) since I deleted all my corporate social media accounts. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, among others. And as a result I've found myself looking at other social platforms and communities to fill my time with. Because social media is not inherently bad—it only starts becoming bad when multi-billion dollar businesses are created around using people as products and extracting as much information and value as possible out of every single one of them.…
(which in hindsight will be replacing "elephant in the room" as a phrase moving forward) If you've been reading my blog for a while or following me anywhere I'm still active on social media, a thing that's come up multiple times and never remarked upon is that in some cat photos, there's a thing that's just out of frame that upon a cleaner look would require some explanation. A prime example is the photo of Chi at the bottom of this post from last month. So, here's your cleaner look: And here's…
Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1163/authenticity-problem
I cannot understand Mozilla. We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet. @firefox · Jul 20, 2026 They either do not know who their user base is, or they know but those are not the users they want. I care about the open web and I care about privacy. I'm much more in the LLMs are a tool camp, but I still don't want "AI features" shoved down my throat or baked into everything these organizations…
Since doing an awful lot of thinking about the value of books my brain has gone down some weird rabbit holes. 20 odd years ago, in a different life when I was a different person, I very briefly worked for a company involved in book data. At the time, as now, I had a deep love of books, but the company and life moved in other directions and I was only there for about 9 months. In the same period I spent a lot of time on sites like LibraryThing and Bookcrossing. My use of the later especially…
Last edited 7 minutes ago. I don't have contact with small children in my daily life anymore. It's kind of a bummer honestly. I liked working with children when I was interning at a local community library back in my college days, and when I worked as a teacher at a private English course. I don't miss teaching at the school though. That shit was wild. Also I had a class full of 12-year-olds... Not the same as small children, let me tell you. Anyways. All of that to say that lately I finally…
Hello again. It's your boy Mike here, blogging about blogging (glances at Wouter). Today, I'd like to explore the topic of making my blog posts more durable. I recently completed importing a backup of some of my old blog posts. These posts were from 2012 - 2019 and required a fair bit of editing because I was using embeds from other sites, some of which have since been purchased and shut down. Here are my lessons learned, focusing on my posts only and not the hosting problem of keeping a site…
The current wave of wildfires across Europe is not simply a natural disaster, it is also exposing a deeper mess, the failure of our information systems. Instead of explaining why Europe is burning, significant sections of the corporate media are either ignoring #climatechaos or distracting by blaming rewilding, net-zero policies and environmental protections. Rather than confronting the #KISS scientific evidence that fossil fuel combustion is driving global heating, they redirect public anger…
The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market. Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else. We read aloud in our household. A lot. We always have. When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my…
As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created. Sit with that for a second, because it’s genuinely deranged. I have been writing fiction since 2014 — unpublished, because getting published is the hard part and I am bad at the hard part — and the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t the rejection. It’s that some stranger is going to read my perfectly normal writing tics, feel that they’re AI, and torpedo the whole dream…
TALKIN SHIT Not my finest entry in the series but I'm nothing if not a bird photo opportunist. Speaking of - I'm pretty sure this is our resident red tail (we named them Tobias) but I can't be 100% certain since I don't have all the tells yet and only got these two very brief photos. The tail feather coloring though I think sells it? Would love to be wrong though! Like the whole poison ivy / berry thing, I'd love to be wrong and learn how to better tell things apart. As a sidenote but…
In the late 20th century, there was a gorilla named Koko who made waves by displaying an apparent ability to talk to humans in sign language. This would've had shocking implications for life as we know it, but the science determined that what she was doing wasn't actually "using language". Through reinforcement learning, she had come to realize that mimicking the hand signals of her human handlers would result in certain outcomes. She knew that making the hand signal for "food" might convince…
The Guardian is reporting that more and more venues -- from restaurants to theaters -- are banning Meta glasses. Is Apple working on its camera-equipped version? Can Apple uphold its privacy principles, or will the company protect only the wearer, not the videoed? ~ Link: Restaurants, Pubs and Theatres Ban Meta’s ‘Spy Glasses’ Over Privacy Fears, by Helena Horton, The Guardian
You can now mute words on powRSS. It’s only available on the desktop version. Click on the settings dropdown and add the words you don’t want to see on the home feed.
Original post at space • time • tech by Jake. I've been sitting on this post for weeks, but thought it was time to share now. The fragile nature of digital media has been in the news quite a bit recently, and the physical vs. digital debate is as old as...well I'm not sure, but at least since the late 90s and Napster vs. The Music Industry. Here are two of the latest articles, both about Sony: -- Sony erases digital content from libraries; we're reminded we don’t own what we buy - Ars Technica…
I do these things to make the VPS this blog runs on less palatable for internet bottom feeders.
Emacs has a built-in way to save and restore sessions: the desktop.el library. As the Emacs manual says, putting this in the init file enables automatic save and restore of sessions: (desktop-save-mode 1) But, I wanted a different behavior: Automatically save the session But don't restore it automatically I wanted to only use the session feature to restore sessions that I closed by mistake, or where I forgot to finish something before quitting Emacs. By default, I wanted a fresh session every…
https://manualdousuario.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/duckduckgo-oculos-de-sol-normais.mp4 After Meta, Google, and Samsung, it’s DuckDuckGo’s turn to launch its own glasses. Named Normal Sunglasses, they have no cameras, no AI, and infinite battery life. It’s a joke, but anyone who wants can buy them at Knockaround’s store, the eyewear brand partnering with DDG on this venture. I’d wear them.
TLDR: I migrated my blog. Please email me if you notice anything's amiss! What should you do when you’re busy and have been spending too much time on your blog lately? Why, dive head first into a completely unnecessary SSG migration, of course! I had Hugo on the brain last night for somewhat valid, somewhat flimsy reasons: I used Hugo in the past and liked it. 11ty’s fast, but Hugo’s wicked fast. I’ve been writing more Golang code lately. While I’m fine with JavaScript and enjoy TypeScript,…
Introduction There’s one piece of audio gear I miss, it is my Technics SL-J33 turntable. I guess technically now it is considered vintage audio gear since it was produced in the 1980s. And, I would hazard a guess, that if you are used to seeing typical turntables, the above photograph1 is not what you would think of as a turntable. The SL-J33 was most definitely not your typical phonograph. Let’s take a look at its main features, and point out a few that are unique. Automatic, Quartz Locking,…
It started innocently enough. I saw a tweet about a new product offering from one of my favorite companies, Cloudflare. Neat! I clicked through to the site and there it is: And huzzah!, my preferred handle, @ericlaw is still available. I’d better hurry to claim it before someone else gets it! Since I’m already a long-time Cloudflare user, I just need to sign in. That makes sense, how else will they bind the handle to my account? Easy peasy. I’m in. Looks like there’s just one more step, I gotta…
After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet. We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks…
I'm so sorry for blogging about blogging, you can skip this one but there IS a good cat photo at the end lmao As usual, there will be unrelated photos sprinkled about my post because I'm highly visual; enjoy some birds on a power line from the photo backlog! I’ve mentioned before that I've gone full hog into RSS and things like Bubbles.town with the intent of reading more blogs which, on the whole has been great! But there's been a steady increase in that space of bloggers being...how to put…
Of course, for my first post of Blaugust, what would I be writing about other than blogging? In all seriousness though, this is far more about UI/UX and accessibility, and I think it touches on something both important and neglected by the IndieWeb community. In some webweaving circles, you'll see websites created that only work properly on a desktop screen. Sometimes this is due to coding difficulties—I've been there many times myself, media queries in CSS can be a difficult beast to tame! But…
It's the final day of July, and I'm in a contemplative mood. Tomorrow begins Blaugust 2026, a fun event where bloggers are challenged to write 31 blog posts in 31 days. Will I participate? Well, every month has been Blaugust for me since November 2025, as I've written at least 23 posts every month since then. Although I haven't yet had a month where I've successfully blogged every single day, so maybe I will. What I want to talk about, though, is not blogging. At the start of the month, Dan Q.…
I occasionally come across people who call themselves “almost vegan” “practically vegan” “99% vegan” and similar descriptions. The reasons for that are usually casual in nature: They still want to enjoy grandma’s great cake, they don’t wanna cause a ruckus at the company barbecue, and when it’s pizza night, they can’t say no to a good cheese. But other than that - plantbased. And they quickly want to convey that to someone. I still want to urge others to be precise with language. We have words…
Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: "Safari. A browser that's actually private." and "Privacy. That's iPhone." It's accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private, but not people in general,…
