#state-of-the-web — Public Fediverse posts

Praising by Faint Damn

A chat about an eugenicist in California made me think about rhetorical tricks. My gentle readers are familiar with objective allies, where the centrist journalist cries “that candidate is horrible and awful and I am going to put his words on the front page and in the prime-time news every day” and watches the ad revenue roll in, while the candidate launches a line of propaganda on the theme “look how much those elitists hate me and how powerful I am” and hires a new accountant to track his donations. Ever since smartphones came out, vlogs and podcasts are funded by people declaring another influencer the enemy, launching a five-part series to attack them, and sending their viewers to the ‘enemy’ channel until the ‘enemy’ returns the favour by launching a counter-video or anti-episode. This pays much better than useful factual videos on knitting or woodworking. There is a related concept whose name I am trying to find.

The eugenicist explained that after he discovered the online far right, he decided to share their ideas by posting about them a lot and rebutting some of their peripherial points but not the ones he agreed with. He hoped that people would follow his links, read the original posts, and decide they agreed with some of them. He is not the only person to use this gambit.

In his 1764 treatise against execution and judicial torture, Cesare Beccaria included a brief chapter on the crime of heresy:

rational men will see that the place where I live, the present age, and the matter at hand do not permit me to examine the nature of such a crime. It would take me too long and too far from my subject to prove how a perfect uniformity of thought is necessary in a state, the example of many nations to the contrary not withstanding; how opinions that differ only in a few subtle and obscure points altogether beyond human comprehension can nonetheless disturb public order if one of them is not authorized to the exclusion of the others… It would take me too long to prove that, however odious the triumph of force over human minds may seem, since the only fruits of its conquest are dissembling and, consequently, degradation; however contrary it may seem to the spirit of gentleness and brotherly love enjoined by reason and the authority we most revere; it is still necessary and indispensable

This was enough to pass the Neapolitan censor, but in 260 years I do not know anyone who has read that chapter and believed that Beccaria thought heresy should be a crime. He just refused to say that heresy should be legal.

Under Communism, writers learned to summarize the best arguments for a position, then denounce it with a cookie-cutter party-line teaching.

This is similar to but not the same as irony, sarcasm, or litotes. A summary of a book or thinker and a weak criticism can be superficially sincere, even if the author has a hidden agenda.

This is related to crit-hype, where a critic accepts the premise that a new technology will be almost godlike rather than asking whether that is true and whether the real dangers are in the present. Since 2019, American chatbot companies have been telling reporters that their next product might be too dangerous to release. Then they release it anyways and look for a new reporter who they can tell the next version is even more powerful.

Edit: This is connected to all publicity is good publicity, but is deliberate. The average person responding on corporate social media and thereby promoting the thing they hate in the algorithm does not know what he does, but this tactic is a deliberate attempt to spread an idea or a thinker without endorsing it.

Lastly, this is related to the attention economy, another concept which I do not understand (I would expect an attention economy to reward dense, high-quality information, but many people just want to hang out online with someone articulate and energetic). We would all think it odd if Kat Connor accepted a challenge to a MMA bout from a spotty fifteen-year-old, and there is something just as odd if a professor of computer science at UWaterloo agrees to debate an anonymous account which says obviously P = NP but has never even released a preprint.

I come from Internet culture. The way social media works makes my skin crawl. In our culture, if an idea is bad you make an exhaustive book or website explaining all the ways it is bad, but in social media culture, it is a red flag that your career is funded by posting angry attacks on other social media figures that send your viewers to their content. One reason why I am at a loss this decade is that I have not found a way to respond to this new environment and still be me or someone I would like to be.

You damn someone with faint praise by saying mildly positive things about them. What should we call the reverse, where you share an idea or thinker then make a half-hearted criticism? I am off to do something outside with other people but maybe the Internet can help.

(scheduled 13 June 2026)

The Great Rebalancing

In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.

When a certain Codomannus became Darius, Great King, King of Kings, he inherited enough gold and silver to run his empire for several years without collecting taxes and tithes.1 It had been squirreled away by the kings before him through all the wars with Egypt and the Ionians. Older historians often said that this showed the Achaemenids were foolish kings who did not understand how to use silver, even though Thucydides boasted that the Athenians had enough coined silver in the Acropolis to run their empire for ten years (Thucydides 2.13.3– look it up!). A few years later, Alexander the king of the Macedonians overthrew Darius and took his treasures. Thirty years later, most of them had been spent on grandiose construction projects and wars between Alexander’s generals, and buried in pots in Thrace or set in motion between Sidon and Carthage. Empire gathered all those sparkling treasures into a few pillared rooms with mud-brick walls in Persepolis and Damascus and Ecbatana. Once the empire was divided, the treasures scattered like water from a burst skin.

When Barack Obama left office, he saw a United States which had been the center of global finance for almost a hundred years. Many Americans resisted their new role, and the global capitalist system that caused the Great Depression, but by about 1950 American institutions stood behind the new order. And slowly in the Great War, then faster and faster, capital started to flow to the United States like silver flowed into Mughal India and Ming China. The United States headed the global institutions which governed the postwar world and enforced a policy of free trade and free navigation. The United Nations headquarters was in New York City not Kuala Lumpur, the International Monetary Fund was based in DC not Vienna, Canada extended copyright when the Mouse told them too, and every Internet standards meeting had representatives from American megacorps who pushed in whatever direction the NSA was pushing. Someone who looked at the world in 2016 might have thought that this was natural. Someone who looked at the world in 1906 might have expected that China would always have an emperor and Britain would dominate global finance for decades until the United States or Germany finally caught up. Things changed more quickly than expected, as they often do. The people who did best when the coal-burning empires collapsed were the people who understood that things could change and took precautions, and the people who saw that they had changed and moved much faster than their friends thought was wise.

One of the basic principles of investing is rebalancing. If one part of your portfolio grows much faster or shrinks much slower than everything else, that might seem like a good thing. Exponential growth compounds. But this means that if anything goes wrong with that successful investment, more and more of your total assets are at risk. So prudent investors check every so often, and sell off some of what is doing best to buy a bit of everything else. The classic example is selling some stocks and buying bonds or other fixed-income assets when stock markets are booming. Fixed-income assets rarely make much money after inflation, but they rarely loose much money either. And when stock-markets crash, central banks usually lower interest rates, which causes the value of bonds paying the older higher interest rates to rise. Just as important is selling stocks in a sector that is booming and buying some boring banks and fertilizer companies and carmakers who ignore the nagging economists and pay dividends. One day soon BreX or Nortel or pets.com may be worth nothing. But if you have turned some of your wins into something safer, you keep them once it goes away.

The Internet gave us many good things, and a few people found value on corporate social media. However, corporate tech is driven by greed and the desire to surveil and control. All around the world, millions of us are considering what to do: should I learn how to block Google’s and Gemini’s crawlers to improve my webmaster skills at the cost of a few visitors, or even install Iocaine to poison their training data? Sticking with big tech is easy, and in the past they gave us free email and web search that just worked. Even if you are grateful for those things, it would be wise to take some of the money and time they freed up and invest it in alternatives.

I am not a prophet. But in my view, it is very likely that in twenty years, the power of a few American web service corporations will be much less than it was in 2016. Google’s business was showing you ads next to the search results, then ads on the site you visited. They would not be blowing up that model if they thought it was sure to survive. Facebook can’t launch a profitable new business to save its middle managers’ bonuses, and Microsoft struggles to keep one version of Windows functional. The people who run these companies are not serious or skillful at anything except gathering power and keeping their quarterly bonus. Sometimes the latest outrage is not a brutal expression of power, but King Lear’s cry to Regan and Goneril before they threw him out into the storm:

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth!

If the power of these corporations does collapse, anyone who built their life, their business, or their university around them will be left like farmers on their housetops in a flood.

The great institutions can’t move fast enough. If the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund sells half its US stocks, someone has to buy them. Before the French government finishes moving off Microsoft software, it will have to build the FOSS systems it requires. The Prime Minister of Canada is torn between ordinary Canadians and security personnel who understand that we have to move now, and the useful idiots and middle managers who spent their careers and climbed the ladder integrating Canada with the United States and don’t see any reason to change course. But anyone reading a blog like this can reduce their engagement with big tech.

Maybe the open web will lose and drown in an ocean of slop or be locked away behind ID checks and requirements to use the company’s hardware and the company’s software to read simple HTML. Anyone who claims to know the future is selling something. But if you assume that the US’ information and financial domination will last forever, and could not go into rapid decline, you may find yourself like a moneylender waiting at the palace gates in Ecbatana for payment when the treasury contains only cobwebs and rats’ nests. Moving your email to Fastmail and your web searches to Mojeek is not the easiest choice or a path to wealth and power, but it is a way to prepare for the possibility that the world could change.

For (Mark) Carney (in 2019), the dollar system had structural flaws. It was inherently unsustainable. For (Israeli-American banker Stanley) Fischer, there was no reason to move on from a system that had been working when the problem was not structural but political (and he named a specific politician in DC). … For Carney, the dollar system must necessarily pass. For Fischer, it can only collapse if America is foolish enough to let it. Every disagreement about the future of the (US) dollar comes down to one of those two arguments.

Greeley, The Almighty Dollar (2026), p. 164

Further Reading

Nicholas Taleb gestures at some of these ideas in his Incerto pentalogy. The Opt Out Project has pretty good advice for people who got entangled with Google and want to unwind. Dan Bortolotti has a good introduction to rebalancing as risk management on his blog and in his book Reboot Your Portfolio (2021). Journalism and blogging are full of bold speculations about the future of corporate tech and American hegemony, from mild newspaper columns and firm essays to spicy blog posts by Timothy Snyder or Baldur Bjarnason. They are also full of examples of executives, major investors, and board members at these companies talking like Lothrop Stoddard. I took a moment to write to Spotify about a particularly egregious example since in theory they are Canadian and we don’t accept that poisonous nonsense here.

(scheduled 25 May 2026)

1. I would like to read Frank Lee Holt’s The Treasures of Alexander the Great (Oxford University Press, 2016). The back cover blurb fights back against the Droysen school of the Achaemenids as economic vampires and Greeks and Macedonians as clever capitalists, so it must not be dead yet even among people who read books from OUP. ↩︎

The Great Rebalancing

In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.

When a certain Codomannus became Darius, Great King, King of Kings, he inherited enough gold and silver to run his empire for several years without collecting taxes and tithes.1 It had been squirreled away by the kings before him through all the wars with Egypt and the Ionians. Older historians often said that this showed the Achaemenids were foolish kings who did not understand how to use silver, even though Thucydides boasted that the Athenians had enough coined silver in the Acropolis to run their empire for ten years (Thucydides 2.13.3– look it up!). A few years later, Alexander the king of the Macedonians overthrew Darius and took his treasures. Thirty years later, most of them had been spent on grandiose construction projects and wars between Alexander’s generals, and buried in pots in Thrace or set in motion between Sidon and Carthage. Empire gathered all those sparkling treasures into a few pillared rooms with mud-brick walls in Persepolis and Damascus and Ecbatana. Once the empire was divided, the treasures scattered like water from a burst skin.

When Barack Obama left office, he saw a United States which had been the center of global finance for almost a hundred years. Many Americans resisted their new role, and the global capitalist system that caused the Great Depression, but by about 1950 American institutions stood behind the new order. And slowly in the Great War, then faster and faster, capital started to flow to the United States like silver flowed into Mughal India and Ming China. The United States headed the global institutions which governed the postwar world and enforced a policy of free trade and free navigation. The United Nations headquarters was in New York City not Kuala Lumpur, the International Monetary Fund was based in DC not Vienna, Canada extended copyright when the Mouse told them too, and every Internet standards meeting had representatives from American megacorps who pushed in whatever direction the NSA was pushing. Someone who looked at the world in 2016 might have thought that this was natural. Someone who looked at the world in 1906 might have expected that China would always have an emperor and Britain would dominate global finance for decades until the United States or Germany finally caught up. Things changed more quickly than expected, as they often do. The people who did best when the coal-burning empires collapsed were the people who understood that things could change and took precautions, and the people who saw that they had changed and moved much faster than their friends thought was wise.

One of the basic principles of investing is rebalancing. If one part of your portfolio grows much faster or shrinks much slower than everything else, that might seem like a good thing. Exponential growth compounds. But this means that if anything goes wrong with that successful investment, more and more of your total assets are at risk. So prudent investors check every so often, and sell off some of what is doing best to buy a bit of everything else. The classic example is selling some stocks and buying bonds or other fixed-income assets when stock markets are booming. Fixed-income assets rarely make much money after inflation, but they rarely loose much money either. And when stock-markets crash, central banks usually lower interest rates, which causes the value of bonds paying the older higher interest rates to rise. Just as important is selling stocks in a sector that is booming and buying some boring banks and fertilizer companies and carmakers who ignore the nagging economists and pay dividends. One day soon BreX or Nortel or pets.com may be worth nothing. But if you have turned some of your wins into something safer, you keep them once it goes away.

The Internet gave us many good things, and a few people found value on corporate social media. However, corporate tech is driven by greed and the desire to surveil and control. All around the world, millions of us are considering what to do: should I learn how to block Google’s and Gemini’s crawlers to improve my webmaster skills at the cost of a few visitors, or even install Iocaine to poison their training data? Sticking with big tech is easy, and in the past they gave us free email and web search that just worked. Even if you are grateful for those things, it would be wise to take some of the money and time they freed up and invest it in alternatives.

I am not a prophet. But in my view, it is very likely that in twenty years, the power of a few American web service corporations will be much less than it was in 2016. Google’s business was showing you ads next to the search results, then ads on the site you visited. They would not be blowing up that model if they thought it was sure to survive. Facebook can’t launch a profitable new business to save its middle managers’ bonuses, and Microsoft struggles to keep one version of Windows functional. The people who run these companies are not serious or skillful at anything except gathering power and keeping their quarterly bonus. Sometimes the latest outrage is not a brutal expression of power, but King Lear’s cry to Regan and Goneril before they threw him out into the storm:

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth!

If the power of these corporations does collapse, anyone who built their life, their business, or their university around them will be left like farmers on their housetops in a flood.

The great institutions can’t move fast enough. If the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund sells half its US stocks, someone has to buy them. Before the French government finishes moving off Microsoft software, it will have to build the FOSS systems it requires. The Prime Minister of Canada is torn between ordinary Canadians and security personnel who understand that we have to move now, and the useful idiots and middle managers who spent their careers and climbed the ladder integrating Canada with the United States and don’t see any reason to change course. But anyone reading a blog like this can reduce their engagement with big tech.

Maybe the open web will lose and drown in an ocean of slop or be locked away behind ID checks and requirements to use the company’s hardware and the company’s software to read simple HTML. Anyone who claims to know the future is selling something. But if you assume that the US’ information and financial domination will last forever, and could not go into rapid decline, you may find yourself like a moneylender waiting at the palace gates in Ecbatana for payment when the treasury contains only cobwebs and rats’ nests. Moving your email to Fastmail and your web searches to Mojeek is not the easiest choice or a path to wealth and power, but it is a way to prepare for the possibility that the world could change.

For (Mark) Carney (in 2019), the dollar system had structural flaws. It was inherently unsustainable. For (Israeli-American banker Stanley) Fischer, there was no reason to move on from a system that had been working when the problem was not structural but political (and he named a specific politician in DC). … For Carney, the dollar system must necessarily pass. For Fischer, it can only collapse if America is foolish enough to let it. Every disagreement about the future of the (US) dollar comes down to one of those two arguments.

Greeley, The Almighty Dollar (2026), p. 164

Further Reading

Nicholas Taleb gestures at some of these ideas in his Incerto pentalogy. The Opt Out Project has pretty good advice for people who got entangled with Google and want to unwind. Dan Bortolotti has a good introduction to rebalancing as risk management on his blog and in his book Reboot Your Portfolio (2021). Journalism and blogging are full of bold speculations about the future of corporate tech and American hegemony, from mild newspaper columns and firm essays to spicy blog posts by Timothy Snyder or Baldur Bjarnason. They are also full of examples of executives, major investors, and board members at these companies talking like Lothrop Stoddard. I took a moment to write to Shopify Spotify about a particularly egregious example since in theory they are Canadian and we don’t accept that poisonous nonsense here.

Edit 2026-06-14: Leah Elliott’s Contra Chrome is one of many excellent explanations why someone who cares about privacy should have nothing to do with Google products.

(scheduled 25 May 2026)

1. I would like to read Frank Lee Holt’s The Treasures of Alexander the Great (Oxford University Press, 2016). The back cover blurb fights back against the Droysen school of the Achaemenids as economic vampires and Greeks and Macedonians as clever capitalists, so it must not be dead yet even among people who read books from OUP. ↩︎

Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

🧵 3/3

Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #CranfordTeague

🧵 3/3

“We … find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity.”

https://ai-on-the-internet.github.io/ #AI #StateOfTheWeb

“We … find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity.”

https://ai-on-the-internet.github.io/ #AI #StateOfTheWeb

Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

🧵 3/3

Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #CranfordTeague

🧵 3/3

“Long term, we expect that a separate cache layer for AI traffic will be the best way forward. Imagine a cache architecture that routes human and AI traffic to distinct tiers deployed at different layers of the network.” – Cloudflare blog.cloudflare.com/rethinking-c... #architecture #StateOfTheWeb

Why we're rethinking cache for...

“Long term, we expect that a separate cache layer for AI traffic will be the best way forward. Imagine a cache architecture that routes human and AI traffic to distinct tiers deployed at different layers of the network.” – Cloudflare blog.cloudflare.com/rethinking-c... #architecture #StateOfTheWeb

Why we're rethinking cache for...

“Long term, we expect that a separate cache layer for AI traffic will be the best way forward. Imagine a cache architecture that routes human and AI traffic to distinct tiers deployed at different layers of the network.” – Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/rethinking-cache-ai-humans/ #architecture #StateOfTheWeb #caching #AI #Cloudflare

“Long term, we expect that a separate cache layer for AI traffic will be the best way forward. Imagine a cache architecture that routes human and AI traffic to distinct tiers deployed at different layers of the network.” – Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/rethinking-cache-ai-humans/ #architecture #StateOfTheWeb #caching #AI #Cloudflare

What Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?

The Latin language is always expanding. Sometimes this is easy, as when it picked up gladius “sword” from Celtic and sclopetum “arquebus, smoothbore gun” from Italian. Other times it is hard and you have to invent a new word or phrase. Sometimes you even think for a long time and decide that crisare “to shake one’s hips” is good enough substitute for to twerk. Trying to settle an argument by pulling out a dictionary is an argumentum ad dictionarium.1 What should we call trying to settle an argument by quoting a chatbot?

Slop (“fodder for a pig, output from a chatbot”) is clearly pabulum in Latin (Columnella de re rustica 7.9.7 Internet archive). Its not so clear what a Latinate take on words like bot, generative AI, or large language model would be. The obnoxious thing about these programs is that they emit vast amounts of stuff which sometimes seems plausible but should never be trusted. It does not matter how they work when you have to clean up after them. So after some tooing and froing I decided on fountain of lies or deceitful fountain. One good name would be fons mendacitatis. However, Greyor @[email protected] pointed out that Plautus has the adjective falsidicum “false-speaking.” The ancients did not have a sophisticated language to talk about lies, fiction, bullshit, and shared games, so I will chose the word that delights me and not worry about parsing different kinds of untrustworthy untruths.2

So a LLM chatbot is a fons falsidicus, and the “appeal to chatbot” is an argumentum ad fontem falsidicum. Botanists might have to wait for someone with enough Latin to name a new species, but bookandswordblog readers get this one straight away!

There are some sad things I could say about why some people feel the need to ask chatbots what is true, and about how the playful language games of New England hacker culture turned into the magical thinking and purposeless self-perfection of Bay Area tech culture (already skewered by Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, 14.2-8). But the world does not need more sadness and it is a beautiful spring day in Victoria.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a great place to explore how robot became bot “diminutive name for a robot” then “automated computer program.” I don’t know of a good successor to the Jargon File since Eric S. Raymond was not a good steward.

PS. Some people call attacking the source of the information an argumentum ad fontem. If you use that, and you want to be clear to young people without Latin who might confuse fons “source of information” and fons “fountain of lies”, you could all the appeal to chatbot an argumentum ad automaton. Greek words were popular in working Latin although pagan writers avoided them in literature. But I think it important that every language have spicy words for the bad and malevolent technology which is American-style generative AI.

(scheduled 23 March 2026)

1. Dictionarium comes from our friend John of Garland, nam hic liber in se multos dictiones habet. ↩︎
2. I read an article on true, false, and pseudo-true statements for the Cyrus’ Paradise conference in 2012, but lost access to my notes when a ‘free’ service ran out of money. I will edit this post if I ever find the reference again. Memento mori! And never ever trust a ‘free’ service hosted on someone else’s computer. ↩︎

New post: how generative 'AI' pollutes search results https://www.bookandsword.com/2026/03/14/how-generative-ai-pollutes-search-results/ #llm #stateOfTheWeb

How Generative ‘AI’ Pollutes Search Results

In February 2026 I forgot to use noai.duckduckgo.com and saw a result from their AI assistant at the top of my search results. Like a lot of things produced by ‘generative AI’ it looks fun at first glance but sad as soon as you pay attention. Today I will post about what is wrong with this answer and with the whole premise.

Search Assist is Confidently Wrong

The search assist box cites two sources. The first is a magazine article about how an investor told TV audience that YouTube was very profitable in 2008 and 2009. The very second sentence of the article says that Google itself denied this. Personally, I trust the CEO of a publicly traded company who can be thrown in prison if he lies over an investor, although it is certainly possible that there is some cooking of the books. In addition, a company can be profitable in one year but not in another. Based on this article it would be reasonable to say “an investor claimed that YouTube was profitable in 2009” but that is two major differences from the actual result The second source is a magazine article about Google’s growing revenues. Google does not seem to have discussed costs, and revenue and expenses can increase at the same time. Whereas services like Netflix only host things that large numbers of people want to pay for, YouTube hosts anything people want to share, and that is expensive. So the search-assist box has one false sentence, and one which is true but irrelevant. It pollutes results by making a simple, authoritative statement which is false.

Search results now contain many computer-generated articles like https://www.clrn.org/does-youtube-operate-at-a-loss/. This article cites no evidence but denies that YouTube operates at a loss anyways. It has no value over a reddit threat where people tell themselves that YouTube must be profitable because its big and has ads. Hosting unlimited videos and streaming them everywhere for free is expensive and Internet ads are probably a net negative (most of the money goes to mobile data providers, and they waste readers’ time much more than traditional print ads). If websites had to pay for the data their ads consume, like YouTube has to pay for serving all those videos, they would look much simpler.

The computer-generated results box and the computer-generated article have negative value. They add to the bog of confident speculation that flood social media, and increase the burden of wading through it. Every marketer and propagandist knows that repetition is powerful. So if you don’t want to be fooled, its a really good idea to block unreliable sources of information before you are exposed to them. Brandolini’s Law teaches us that its harder to prove something wrong than claim it, and the fable of John Henry teaches us that its foolish to try to work faster than a machine. A machine that spews plausible lies is a lot like the company’s steam drill.

Using an actual search, I have found statements by Google executives in 2010 and 2016 that YouTube was not yet profitable, and someone familiar with the figures who told a reporter that its income was roughly equal to its expenses in 2014.1 Their competitor vidme had trouble figuring out how Google could make the numbers work without feeding extra cash into YouTube. It also seems to me that if YouTube was profitable while so many streaming services and social media sites go bankrupt or go private, Google would boast about that. So it seems to me that YouTube was probably not profitable up to 2016, and that it probably still struggles.

The computer-generated answer reminds me of misleading headlines and captions on human journalism. People who flip past a headline like “Google sets all-time records as search and YouTube profits soar” might be surprised to read an article which just talks about YouTube revenues. If you sell something for less than it costs, your sales revenue may be high, but your costs will be even higher. Many people will never read the whole article and will just take away the headline (journalists used to be trained to write stories in a reverse pyramid, with the most important information at the start of the article where people will read it, but seem to have given up that practice). Reducing a complex story to a dozen words takes expertise and attention to detail and is easy to do badly.

This Is Bad Automation

This is the sort of thing that could be automated. Because press releases and journalism are posted online in English, it would be possible for a computer to sift through them and determine if any senior Google staffer has claimed that YouTube made a profit. Its possible that one day a computer could sort the same search results and say “Google is secretive about YouTube’s revenue. On three occasions from 2010 to 2016, Google executive said that it was losing money or just breaking even. An investor claimed that it was profitable in 2009 but was immediately contradicted.” But DuckDuckGo’s AiAssist cannot even do that right. Instead, it imitates something darker.

AiAssist imitates Pravda in the USSR and American journalism a few years ago. It tries to figure out the party line, and push that as hard as it can, rather than asking what is true and finding out empirically. To do this you don’t have to know anything about the world, just what authorities say about the world. It was pitiful to watch journalists with no scientific education try to learn the official truth on a topic like airborne infection control where the evidence is rapidly shifting and previous best practice turns out to have been made up. And its shameful watching reporters looking for the official truth when the only way to know if YouTube is profitable is to audit it or have someone share the books. You cannot know whether YouTube is profitable by searching the Internet, you have to investigate, and investigating and persuading sources to talk is their job! The closest I have found is a statement by “a person familiar with the figures” to the Wall Street Journal that YouTube roughly broke even in 2014 (archive).

Its hard and expensive to go out into the world and learn things. Its also difficult and pricey to become an expert who can evaluate large contradictory and diverse bodies of evidence with nuance. It takes time and effort to build trusted relationships with people who have access to secret information and might share it. And these companies can’t be bothered to code tools that answer “has any reliable source claimed this?” So instead they try to create a list of authorities and issue decrees based on them.

A few years ago, Google tried to rely more on authorities by upranking all results on certain domains. The result was a flood of sponsored content and mattress ads on formerly respected news and education sites, while specialist sites languished on the second and third page of results. This is a childish approach to epistemology, because most of us learn that uncle Roy has great advice on fishing or auto repair but should not be listened to on the Hollow Earth or the (((globalists))). People and sources are trustworthy on some topics but not others. It corrupts news organizations, because if they have been producing useful accurate information on some topics, it offers them wealth if they mix it with cheap propaganda. But making a list of good sites is cheap and easy to automate and that is all that the companies that dominate social media and web search care about.

These ‘high-tech’ companies have a way of deciding what is true which was respectable in the twelfth century. That bad thinking would just be their problem but they spew its consequences across the Internet and social media and leave it for the rest of us to clean up. If nobody knows something, the best search result is to say that, not to pretend that there is an unquestioned truth. And sifting through what others have said cannot substitute for going out and finding out what is true. Sometimes you can make people pretend that the emperor is wearing clothes. That won’t stop him from getting pneumonia if he spends all day in the rain wearing nothing but his crown and immense self-confidence.

I don’t publish ads or third-party content, but I do have to pay for the bandwidth that the chatbot companies use up. I am always glad when people share, comment, talk about my writing with friends, or donate.

(scheduled 12 March 2026)

Edit 2026-03-15: explain in what sense web ads are economically negative

1. All links are under The Political Economy of American Tech Companies Since 2008 (the model has changed a bit since the end of the Zero Real Interest Rates policy, but the ‘generative AI’ companies are still burning tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money a year by promising that some day soon they will build God or let the bosses fire everyone). ↩︎

I am No Longer on Academia.edu

academia.edu has introduced new terms of service allowing them to use your Member Content and your personal information, including your name , voice, signature (!), photograph, and likeness, for any purpose forever. That is clearly a proposal to let them generate fake podcasts or videos of you talking about your work, powered by bullshit generators. To delete your account next time you log in, click “privacy policy,” then put your mouse over your username in the upper right, then click “account settings” and look for the option to delete.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu’s Services.

https://www.academia.edu/terms

Academia was popular with scholars in ancient world studies and Assyriology, so I used it by default but never uploaded any papers after my MA.

James Bailie recommends Knowledge Commons at hcommons.org as a place to host your papers which is run by scholars not shareholders and respects your rights.

If you are comfortable with programming gems, Ryan Baumann has a tool to download from the site without logging in and agreeing to the new terms of service. https://github.com/ryanfb/academia-dl

academia.edu is well known for spamming you and for making aggressive claims to anything you upload to it. Sarah Emily Bond already warned about it in 2017. And remember the last pre-war Dutch census!

(scheduled 18 September 2025)

#modern #stateOfTheWeb

What a weird snippet of a Wikipedia page!
Is that from Wikipedia or yet some more unadvised AI malarkey, I wonder?

#wikipedia #ai #stateOfTheWeb #duckduckgo

What a weird snippet of a Wikipedia page!
Is that from Wikipedia or yet some more unadvised AI malarkey, I wonder?

#wikipedia #ai #stateOfTheWeb #duckduckgo

Understand trends and projections in the #type industry.

With insights from 4,777 participants across more than 13 countries, the 2024 Global Font Use & Forecasting Survey by Monotype and Censuswide  investigates what #design industry members are looking for and why they choose certain #fonts. 

https://www.monotype.com/resources/ebook/global-font-use-forecasting-survey-2024?zeldielocks

#fonts #typefaces #surveys #design #monotype #StateoftheWeb #StateofDesign

Understand trends and projections in the #type industry.

With insights from 4,777 participants across more than 13 countries, the 2024 Global Font Use & Forecasting Survey by Monotype and Censuswide  investigates what #design industry members are looking for and why they choose certain #fonts. 

https://www.monotype.com/resources/ebook/global-font-use-forecasting-survey-2024?zeldielocks

#fonts #typefaces #surveys #design #monotype #StateoftheWeb #StateofDesign

“As cool as any technology may be, we need to be sure we’re not rapidly generating inequality at scale.” @davatron5000

https://daverupert.com/2023/10/accessiblity-shamed/ #a11y #StateoftheWeb #DevelopersReflect

“As cool as any technology may be, we need to be sure we’re not rapidly generating inequality at scale.” @davatron5000

https://daverupert.com/2023/10/accessiblity-shamed/ #a11y #StateoftheWeb #DevelopersReflect

I think it says a lot about the state of the web that most of the browser extensions I use don’t add features but remove annoyances like App Banners, ads and trackers, custom video players or cookie banners… #stateoftheweb #browser #extensions

Auto-playing video on websites is the same energy as playing your music on speaker on the subway.
#web #stateoftheweb #firstworldproblems

…put another pot on the stove, it's a long one…

☕️🍵🫖🧉

#Fallout #rewild #rewilding #infrastructure #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet #WalledGarden

…put another pot on the stove, it's a long one…

☕️🍵🫖🧉

#Fallout #rewild #rewilding #infrastructure #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet #WalledGarden

Another, even better, piece about the state of the web:

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

via the powerful Manual Moreale:
https://manuelmoreale.com

#rewild #rewilding #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet

Another, even better, piece about the state of the web:

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

via the powerful Manual Moreale:
https://manuelmoreale.com

#rewild #rewilding #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet

What’s in a job title? @elly explains why good old “web design” is the best way to understand what she does—and maybe what you do, too.

#webdesign #frontend #webstandards #design #stateoftheweb

https://zeldman.com/2024/04/03/the-more-things-change-or-whats-in-a-job-title/

What’s in a job title? @elly explains why good old “web design” is the best way to understand what she does—and maybe what you do, too.

#webdesign #frontend #webstandards #design #stateoftheweb

https://zeldman.com/2024/04/03/the-more-things-change-or-whats-in-a-job-title/

In A List Apart, for people who make websites: @stegrainer reviews the history of the web, analyzes where we are now, and shares how we can shape a better web future.

https://alistapart.com/article/the-wax-and-the-wane-of-the-web/ Illustration: Dougal MacPherson

#StateoftheWeb #WebStrategy #webdesign #webdevelopment #ux

In A List Apart, for people who make websites: @stegrainer reviews the history of the web, analyzes where we are now, and shares how we can shape a better web future.

https://alistapart.com/article/the-wax-and-the-wane-of-the-web/ Illustration: Dougal MacPherson

#StateoftheWeb #WebStrategy #webdesign #webdevelopment #ux

☞ “I built an Ultra-Lean, Web Components enhanced, no-build, no-dependencies boilerplate for PWAs, using only the Modern Web.”

https://medium.com/@neerventure/purepwa-a-radical-u-turn-in-web-development-a386c0dc092e

Hat tip: @Aaron #webstandards #StateoftheWeb #webdesign #development #webdevelopment #PWAs #W3C

☞ “I built an Ultra-Lean, Web Components enhanced, no-build, no-dependencies boilerplate for PWAs, using only the Modern Web.”

https://medium.com/@neerventure/purepwa-a-radical-u-turn-in-web-development-a386c0dc092e

Hat tip: @Aaron #webstandards #StateoftheWeb #webdesign #development #webdevelopment #PWAs #W3C

I feel like a lot of the web nowadays is bloated, suffering from a chronic inability to "get to the point".

Most times, an article will tease you with a small piece of information and then run around in circles for three pages before revealing it.

While I understand why this happens (SEO, Google optimization, Ads), it's frustrating to say the least.

That's why I'm excited about LLMs and their capability to cut the fat out of an article when asked nicely.

#stateoftheweb #bingchat #llm

1/

I feel like a lot of the web nowadays is bloated, suffering from a chronic inability to "get to the point".

Most times, an article will tease you with a small piece of information and then run around in circles for three pages before revealing it.

While I understand why this happens (SEO, Google optimization, Ads), it's frustrating to say the least.

That's why I'm excited about LLMs and their capability to cut the fat out of an article when asked nicely.

#stateoftheweb #bingchat #llm

1/

Not how any of this works…

<button type="button" class="css-x3e7ag"><svg width="40" height="40" viewBox="0 0 18 10" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" alt="chevron" loading="lazy" aria-hidden="true" focusable="false" class="css-1bs8wnl">…</svg></button>

#stateOfTheWeb

Not how any of this works…

<button type="button" class="css-x3e7ag"><svg width="40" height="40" viewBox="0 0 18 10" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" alt="chevron" loading="lazy" aria-hidden="true" focusable="false" class="css-1bs8wnl">…</svg></button>

#stateOfTheWeb