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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 1 minute ago.

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    • I remember back to when I was nine months old, doesn’t everyone?
      • In my last post, I mentioned a memoir that only three people have copies of, in various states of completion. In there, I devote about eight pages to infant memories that I had between nine months (or thereabouts) and five years, as they probably did impact on at least one decision I made in business. [...] Read More... from I remember back to when I was nine months old, doesn’t everyone?

    • Good values are timeless
      • Sometimes you have to go with your creative instincts regardless of logic. Last year I worked on a business memoir—it’s not an autobiography, which means certain significant people aren’t in there as much—which is part of a larger project that I’m fleshing out. Logic would say that the larger project should be prepared first, but [...] Read More... from Good values are timeless

    • Palantir’s dystopia
      • Here are two disturbing opening paragraphs from The New Republic in March (link to X removed): Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men. “This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power [...] Read More... from Palantir’s dystopia

    • The best is yet to come—if we can centre it in good
      • One friend said to me that he was resigned to the fact that his best work had been done. That it was in the past. I reject that premise entirely. I may be in my 50s but I still see some of my best work ahead of me. Times change, technologies change, media change, and [...] Read More... from The best is yet to come—if we can centre it in good

    • What’s our “AI” policy? For us, there’s a very clear line
      • Eerily good: an image of me sent by a friend generated (with my permission) by an “AI”. Not perfect but good enough to fool most people. One of our team, and a good friend, returning to writing for Lucire after a while, asked me what our AI policy was. The only stated policy we had [...] Read More... from What’s our “AI” policy? For us, there’s a very clear line

    • Google doesn’t understand consent (or, more bots to block)
      • Google has two bots which will ignore websites’ robots.txt files. In other words, to heck with consent. Like a rapist with ‘She was asking for it’ (credit to Kilroy for making the analogy), Google’s justification is ‘Because the fetch was requested by a user, these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules.’ As explained by Thomas Baekdal [...] Read More... from Google doesn’t understand consent (or, more bots to block)

    • Google’s opt-out cookies still ignored, 15 years later
      • There’s an excellent report in 404 Media by Matthew Gault with the headline, ‘Google, Microsoft, Meta all tracking you even when you opt out, according to an independent audit’. That audit was done by WebXray, which ran it on over 7,000 popular websites in California. ‘Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of [...] Read More... from Google’s opt-out cookies still ignored, 15 years later

    • Up the national brand
      • It’s always nice to get mentioned. I noticed one Mastodon account said that Lucire is ‘originally based in Aotearoa/NZ’. I welcomed their link to our Mastodon account, but had to add that we’re still HQed in Aotearoa, but that we have licensed editions internationally. There’s nothing in particular that says we’re foreign, but it’s something [...] Read More... from Up the national brand

    • Too lazy to do anything but parrot the voices of the rich
      • Well written words from Adriana Wilhelmina van Altvorst on Linkedin, powerfully summarizing in seven paragraphs one angle of the reports from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19. Those who occupied Parliament in March 2022 claimed that they were a silent majority, but van Altvorst notes that 82 per cent of New Zealanders chose to [...] Read More... from Too lazy to do anything but parrot the voices of the rich

    • Why would anyone work for Elon Musk for free?
      • Robin Berjon has an excellent piece, penned at the end of 2025, on why it makes no sense for non-Nazis to be on whatever Twttr is called these days. Their notion that they need to be there to prevent the bastards from winning (which I heard from one leftie friend) doesn’t work in practice, argues [...] Read More... from Why would anyone work for Elon Musk for free?

    • Apologies to Viettel customers—and why is Harvard loading myriads of our images?
      • While we’ve blocked obvious ASNs where we suspect evil might congregate—Google’s cloud service, for instance, and all of Microsoft excepting Bingbot—last week, we had to issue a block on the main Autocade website for all Viettel customers. With great regret, as I am sure there are many legitimate people in Vietnam who use Autocade, there [...] Read More... from Apologies to Viettel customers—and why is Harvard loading myriads of our images?

    • Family loses all their accounts and data on Google
      • I’m not going to preach here, especially with how much this family is going through, their livelihoods threatened and a dissertation up in smoke, all because they had everything hooked up to Google, and the 14-year-old did something in front of Gemini Live. Google’s parental controls failed here, as they did not cover Gemini Live. [...] Read More... from Family loses all their accounts and data on Google

    • Kagi’s “AI” assistant hits thousands of times
      • If the Kagi Fetcher (kagi-fetcher) ‘is an AI Assistant operated by Kagi that fetches web content to answer user queries through Kagi AI, their suite of AI-powered tools including Assistant, Research, and other knowledge discovery features,’ then how come we see this traffic pattern caused by five Kagi Fetcher IP addresses, which are the five [...] Read More... from Kagi’s “AI” assistant hits thousands of times

    • Happy 18th to Autocade
      • Eighteen may be a lucky number in the Cantonese culture but it’s not an anniversary you typically remember, so Autocade’s passed earlier this month without fanfare. March 8, 2008 was when the first entries went up. The oldest I can trace on the Wayback Machine and on the site itself is the Renault Mégane II’s, [...] Read More... from Happy 18th to Autocade

    • You’ll wait a long time for Meta to remove fake content
      • An ABC News (the Australian one) investigation has shown how good the deepfakes are, usually right-wing-supporting content to fool the public. Matt Martino shared this link on Linkedin, to a story he, Michael Workman, and Lucy Carter worked on. The video that went on Linkedin by way of demonstration was a deepfake that used an [...] Read More... from You’ll wait a long time for Meta to remove fake content

    • Top for the month
      • My online friend Brett Mason tagged me to play Cardle, both the US and UK versions, in January. Quite stoked to see myself top of the US leaderboard for the month (though as a new player, well away from the three-month and all-time top 10). I hope this gives people confidence that the [...] Read More... from Top for the month

    • Bing plummets again
      • I was pretty shocked to see, once again, the number of sites on a site: search for Lucire and Autocade plummet on Bing, into the 50s for each site. I thought: is it because we were blocking so many Microsoft servers (which come up a lot—more than Google ones—for hacking and scraping)? But a quick [...] Read More... from Bing plummets again

    • We are the experts on “AI”
      • With the exception of people like Dr Timnit Gebru, no one is a genuine expert on “AI”. Which means there’s an awful lot of us who probably could say we are experts on “AI” in a colloquial sense, at least how it impacts on our corner of the world. And we have to be: it’s [...] Read More... from We are the experts on “AI”

    • Why we don’t have Google Analytics
      • I’m a bit fuzzy with the dates of this kōrero, so bear with me. Back in the 2000s, I built the original Medinge Group website and somewhere along the line, it was added to Google Analytics. By this stage I wanted nothing to do with Google, so this must have been after the débâcle with [...] Read More... from Why we don’t have Google Analytics

    • Autocade reader challenges expanded
      • We had to put a lot of ISPs today into challenge mode, sadly, at Autocade. That means some users going through them will get a page asking them to tick a box to prove they’re not a bot. Ironically, it is a bot that will ask this of them. In the last 24 hours [...] Read More... from Autocade reader challenges expanded

    • Where WordPerfect continues to hold its own against Word and other upstarts
      • Above: This blog post, prepared on WordPerfect, with Reveal Codes showing the mark-up. I was asked today why I find WordPerfect better than Word. Unlike most people, I never made the shift in the 1990s. There are the usual features that most reviewers note, such as Reveal Codes, which shows just why the text [...] Read More... from Where WordPerfect continues to hold its own against Word and other upstarts

    • On “AI”, brainwashing, and Epstein
      • I have said for a long, long time that a lot of the folks working for these Big Tech companies aren’t smart. I think I began saying that about Facebook soon after they launched Timeline, especially when they presumed all 750 million users (as it then was, apparently) lived in the US Pacific time zone. [...] Read More... from On “AI”, brainwashing, and Epstein

    • Nearly 20 people can use the same Gmail address
      • When I blogged about multiple people being able to use the same Gmail address, I didn’t expect to find first-hand experience of this. Yet this week, I did, as it turned out that we, too, had an early Gmail account, set up in 2004. It was inactive but the recovery address was still current, so [...] Read More... from Nearly 20 people can use the same Gmail address

    • Gems found via Mastodon
      • I said for ages that someone should administer the Voigt-Kampf test on politicians here in Aotearoa and it turns out someone did, with the Hon Judith Collins MP. Probably a Nexus 3. Let’s hope the two Chrises get asked, minimum. I have my suspicions on which ones are replicants. And the number is [...] Read More... from Gems found via Mastodon

    • Nothing new under the sun, not even “AI” libel
      • Yesterday’s story about Scott Shambaugh being the victim of a rogue “AI” attacking him and making a blog post has had some people believing that there was still a malicious human hand in it, and we shouldn’t be so quick as to attribute agency to the machine. Regardless of agency, is this so new? In [...] Read More... from Nothing new under the sun, not even “AI” libel

    • Version 2 of “AI” attacking reputations: this time, it’s autonomous
      • Remember when I said sooner or later, “AI” would be writing smack about all of us? This has just happened to Denver, Col. engineer Scott Shambaugh, who blogs ‘An AI agent published a hit piece on me’. It’s just one, but what’s particularly weird is that the “AI” did this autonomously, whereas the hundreds I [...] Read More... from Version 2 of “AI” attacking reputations: this time, it’s autonomous

    • Our Black Friday sale, and Autocade’s top 10 car makers’ table for 2025
      • I thought of doing this late in 2025 but only remembered I said I would today—so for Friday, February 13, there’s a Black Friday sale on at Libriz, with 10 per cent off store-wide. The coupon code is BF12026, good for two uses at check-out till the clock ticks over to the 14th. With the [...] Read More... from Our Black Friday sale, and Autocade’s top 10 car makers’ table for 2025

    • Of course Google cooperates with ICE; did a Cloudflare security rule go missing?
      • The TechCrunch headline: ‘Google sent personal and financial information of student journalist to ICE’. The journalist is Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a British subject who briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024. Google handed the US régime’s secret police his ‘IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers’. The TechCrunch [...] Read More... from Of course Google cooperates with ICE; did a Cloudflare security rule go missing?

    • An Epstein files round-up
      • I imagine if I had been more au fait with security software, I’d have sounded alarms about Peter Thiel’s Palantir, but thank goodness others more knowledgeable about such matters are doing it, especially in the wake of the new Epstein files’ release. This time, Mandy—Lord Mandelson (not for long, Pete)—has been implicated, and the Byline [...] Read More... from An Epstein files round-up

    • Slop, everywhere you look
      • In the trackbacks yesterday at Lucire: “AI” slop that actually bothered to credit us. We can’t DMCA it, as it’s not an exact copy, and the act wasn’t designed to handle such situations—and right now I don’t believe judges have interpreted it that widely, yet. I’m not thrilled about it because it builds on [...] Read More... from Slop, everywhere you look

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