Notes

In my free time this past weekend, I’ve been working on finalizing a few convenience features and fixing a sandbox bug I’m really glad I caught before releasing ScratchPad 2.0 to the public. Otherwise, I’ve been testing quite a bit and am very happy with how it’s currently running.

However, one thing I discovered is that a quick search on the App Store shows that there are already two applications called “Scratchpad” (see screenshot above). While the casing is different (Scratchpad vs ScratchPad), it’s essentially still the same name. So the question now is whether I should rename my application.

Many years ago, before Apple Notes existed, I started work on a much more expansive version of ScratchPad that would have essentially had the same features as Apple Notes. I abandoned it because, well, it was sherlocked before I was even far enough along to release it.

That project I dubbed “ScratchBook” which seems like it might be a fitting new name for ScratchPad. Searching for “ScratchBook” in the App Store didn’t return any results, so I may end up going with that.

Even if I decided not to rename it, Apple still may reject the submission due to other apps already having the same name. I may try it anyway and see what happens. Or I might rename it so that it’s easier to search for and find.

What do you think about it?

A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon a blog post by Manuel Moreale about whether adblocking should be considered piracy. It’s a topic I’ve thought about before and what Manuel wrote really resonated with me.

For me, the reason why the two are not the same is very simple. When I pirate something (a game, a TV show, a movie, music, you name it), the original, legal, implied agreement was pretty straightforward: someone created something and put it up for sale, and if you want that something, you have to exchange money in order to get access to said something. There are no ambiguities here, and it’s a fairly simple transaction. That’s how most of society works. There’s a more complex discussion we can have to figure out if piracy = stealing, but that’s a separate discussion, and it’s not relevant here.

With adblocking, on the other hand, the implied agreement is more complex. To start, while browsing the web, I don’t know upfront if the link I’m about to click on has ads or not. So the argument that you shouldn’t use adblockers because you have accepted to be served ads while consuming a specific piece of content is shaky at best in my view. I could see that argument being more valid if ads weren’t displayed straight away, and I was given the option to leave the site before ads were displayed to me, but this is not what’s happening on the web.

Then there’s the issue of what being served an ad means. Do I have to watch the ad? Does it have to be displayed on my screen? If ads are displayed on the sidebar of your website, and I keep that portion of the browser outside my screen on purpose, is that adblocking? I’m literally not allowing the ads on my screen after all. If the ads load and I have a script that, after 100ms, replaces them with pictures of cats, is that ok? If I design an adblocker that grabs all the ads on your page and moves them all to the bottom of the page, and I never reach that portion of the site, is that ok?

The moment your data has reached my computer, I should be free to interact with it however I see fit. And if I decide to strip away most of the junk you sent my way, it’s my right to do so, the same way it was my right to stand up and walk away or change channel when TV ads were running.

Manuel Moreale

I recommend reading the whole article here: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/adblocking-piracy.

The latest developments in the tech industry have gotten me thinking about how much the pursuit of short-term profits with AI has blinded major companies when it comes to the long term. It’s truly incredible how much the tech industry loves shooting itself in its own foot in the name of short-term profit.

By now, it’s no secret to anyone following the tech news that the price of RAM, NAND flash and other components is skyrocketing out of control due to the enormous demand caused by the current AI fad. New server farms spawning to support the AI craze are eating up as much RAM as the three global manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, can produce. That means little is left over for the consumer even though demand remains unchanged causing prices to skyrocket.

Both the large AI companies and the RAM manufacturers profit handsomely from this arrangement now. One of them, Micron, has even announced that it is going to exit the consumer RAM market entirely to focus solely on HBM (high bandwidth memory — the RAM used to power servers) which has only exacerbated the problem.

The focus here is clearly on AI and short-term profit. Executives of companies pushing AI have made big promises to secure massive investments and are now under pressure to deliver to investors. They want bigger and more capable LLMs which means they need ever-increasing amounts of computing power to train and host them.

However, in their blindness, they’ve forgotten the consumer: both the individual buyer and other businesses. RAM is used in everything from computers to phones to cars to refrigerators, not to mention the machines used to manufacture these items. A shortage is going to drive the prices up for everything.

I would never expect large corporations to be especially humane and this isn’t about expecting sympathy or consideration for consumers, but rather about how they can forget about their own traditional bottom lines in the long term.

In their blind pursuit of AI-driven profits, the forgotten consumers are going to buy less because they won’t be able to afford the components whose prices have been driven up by it. Most of those companies also sell consumer products. Not only is this business going to be hurt, but as they buy less, there will be fewer devices capable of running their holy AI which ultimately means AI will also be less profitable for them. The latter also applies to companies like OpenAI or Anthropic that don’t otherwise sell consumer products.

It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone and it’s astounding to me that they don’t appear to have even taken it into consideration. Unsurprisingly, it’s similar to how they are constantly bragging about AI taking jobs. The less jobs there are, the less people buy and therefore the less companies can profit by selling them products or services. If you lose your job job, paying for a subscription to use the AI that put you out of a job isn’t going to be particularly high on your priority list.

I’m not trying to say all is doomed with AI. That isn’t what this post is about. AI has its uses and I do frequently use it. It isn’t a bad technology. What I’m ranting about is the companies that are bulldozing everything else in the name of the short-term profits to be had by the AI bubble. Prices are rising everywhere because of their obsession with it which is ultimately going to backfire for everyone — even for them.

Here are a couple of links to articles that discuss the issue with soaring component prices in more detail:

• RAM is $400 and GPUs are $3,700: The PC market has officially crashed
• The “RAM-pocalypse” is spreading to storage: Buy an SSD while you still can

I’ve noticed this trend. Every time I go back to the US, it feels like the trucks have grown again. If you compare, for example, a 1995 Ford F-250 to a 2025 F-250, the new model dwarfs the 30 year old model. I’ve always wondered why and this video explains it pretty well in an entertaining way.

The only issue I take with the video is that they are comparing a modern Chevy 2500 HD pickup to a 80s Toyota Pickup. Those vehicles are in different size classes which makes the comparison biased. It would have been better to compare a modern Chevy 2500 HD to an 80s Chevy C-10 3/4 ton or a modern Tacoma with its 80s ancestor. They would have at least stayed in the same size class then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-HqgdJAcLs

A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon an interesting article on TechDirt about how many websites have started to wall themselves off from the open internet in order to prevent AI bots from scraping their content. I have thoughts about it.

Generally, I’ve been a big fan of this idea simply because I’ve been afraid of what’s going to happen when people who create content online no longer get as many readers or viewers. However, when I say I’ve been a fan of the idea, I don’t mean that I want paywalls or logins, but rather more technical solutions to stave off the hoards of training bots coursing through cyberspace at the moment.

The article from TechDirt raised a very good point though in that, by adding barriers, we are essentially walling off large swaths of the internet just to hurt AI companies. If we take that too far, we are violating the very princple we are trying to protect.

A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I’d reversed my position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught me off guard—until I realized what he was seeing. Across the tech policy world, people who spent decades fighting for an open, accessible internet are now cheering as that same internet gets locked down, walled off, and restricted. Their reasoning? If it hurts AI companies, it must be good.

This is a profound mistake that threatens the very principles these advocates once championed.[…]

The problem isn’t just ideological—it’s practical. We’re watching the construction of a fundamentally different internet, one where access is controlled by gatekeepers and paywalls rather than governed by open protocols and user choice. And we’re doing it in the name of stopping AI companies, even though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of those same large tech companies while making the internet less useful for everyone else.

The shift toward a closed internet shifted into high gear, to some extent, with Cloudflare launching its pay-per-crawl feature. I will admit that when I first saw this announcement, it intrigued me. It would sure be nice for Techdirt if we suddenly started getting random checks from AI companies for crawling the more than 80k articles we’ve written that are then fueling their LLMs.

But, also, I recognize that even having 80k high-quality (if I say so myself) articles is probably worth… not very much. LLMs are based on feeding billions of pieces of content—articles, websites, comments, pdfs, videos, books, etc—into a transformer tool to make the LLMs work. Any individual piece of content (or even 80k pieces of content) is actually not worth that much. So, even if Cloudflare’s system got anyone to pay, the net effect for almost everyone online would be… tiny.

TechDirt

Since my last posts about the subject, I have noticed a fascinating phenomenon about the source of traffic on my blogs. The amount of non-bot visitors coming from ChatGPT, Gemini and others has risen sharply, contradicting the pattern I thought I would actually see. In fact, I would almost argue that I’ve seen an increase in traffic with a lot of it coming from AI chats, but I haven’t crunched any numbers, so I can only say how it feels to me.

Most of the traffic increase I’ve seen has been on my blog The Beskirted Man. That is not only by far my most popular blog with 400-500 visitors a day, but I think it’s because of the unusual subject matter I discuss there that I’ve seen an increase in citations in AI chats and thus an increase in traffic. There is a huge number of tech blogs that discuss similar topics to what I post here, so I’m not surprised that I’m not seeing as many citations from this blog.

In any case, I’m cautiously optimistic now that the impact on bloggers and other creators won’t be as bad as I thought it would be. Of course, I’m not earning any money from my blogs, so that is one concern I don’t have, but maybe those who do won’t feel the pinch as much as I thought.

It seems like when I’m not writing posts on one of my blogs, I’m thinking about whether or not to replace WordPress as my CMS. It’s an endless quest that I have gone on several times without ever actually replacing the software.

I have used WordPress for all of my blogs since 2007 when I started my very first blog. Back then, it was a lean CMS centered around blogging and not the behemoth do-all, be-all CMS it attempts to be today. For most of my purposes, it is extremely overkill since all I really need it for is to manage my blog posts. You might argue that I should just ignore all of the features I don’t need, such as Block Themes (which I absolutely hate), but it’s not quite that easy.

I hardly use any plugins, but WordPress still loads a number of additional CSS and JS files that I don’t have anything to do with. I understand they are there to add default styling and functionality for the post blocks, but that just means I have to override anything, particularly styles, that I want to appear or function differently with my own code. The issue with that is then both the defaults and my overrides still need to be downloaded which, call me fussy, I find to be very inefficient.

My profession is web development with a strong emphasis on the frontend and I’ve become rather picky about what and how my websites load. I don’t just want, I need to have full control of it to feel like I am presenting my best work to the world. I do use custom themes on all of my blogs, but I can only control so much of what WordPress injects into my theme.

Other than bloat, I’ve just always wanted to write my own blog software from the ground up. It sounds like a fun project. I’ve kicked around several different ideas and made various attempts in the past, but so far, nothing has stuck. I can’t seem to decide on a technology stack for the long term nor on whether I want to essentially build another, custom CMS with a web-based backend or whether having my blog posts as Markdown files in the file system is enough. I’ve even gone as far as to write a script to export WordPress posts to Markdown files so that I have all of my posts ready to go in the event that I decide for the latter.

That’s been my real archilles heel: I can’t make a final decision as to how I want my blog to be. I just keep turning in circles. Do I want to use Node? How about PHP? Oh, maybe I’ll give Swift a go. At least some of these various attempts have given me content to write about for the blog though.

Of course, despite containing a lot of features I don’t need, WordPress also offers a lot I would have to rebuild: a search, categories and tags, RSS feeds (for the whole site, as well as category-specific), related posts, etc. Not to mention that writing plugins for it is incredibly simple and I even use a few custom plugins I’ve written for myself (such as for the stories section of Haunting Alex or the World Map page on History Rhymes).

So there I go again, turning in circles: WordPress or not? At the very least, this post came out of it, so that’s something anyway.

It seems like every browser is currently jumping on the band wagon and trying to “enhance” the browsing experience with generative AI and, frankly, it’s getting annoying. As I have stated in previous posts, I am not against AI and use it quite frequently to augment my work as a developer, to check for grammar mistakes in my writing, and to generate images for my blogs.

However, I am starting to experience a sort of “AI fatigue” in that I am really getting tired of the hype and especially of it being shoved down my throat in a new way every time I get on one of my devices. The fact that it is showing up everywhere even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense means that every time I see “ChatGPT” or “Copilot” or “Gemini,” I feel like vomiting. In my opinion, they’re ruining their own branding by over-using it in absolutely everything.

I am aware that the way I am writing about it makes me sound closed-minded towards AI. That isn’t because I am unwilling to give it a shot, it’s because I’ve become burnt out on the hype. I have always approached AI and other new features with an open mind since I enjoy experimenting and playing around with new technologies, but the need to infuse absolutely everything with it is getting to be quite ridiculous. Even Notepad, yes, Notepad now has Copilot.

Browsers have not been excluded from this dilution of the AI experience. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari have all gained AI features that I have experimented with, but find utterly useless. Mostly, they just distract from the browsing experience rather than enhance it.

The only feature I’ve found even remotely useful has been Safari’s integration of Apple’s Writing Tools which is available systemwide on macOS, iOS and iPadOS and is like a souped-up spelling and grammar check. Other features, such as article summarizations, I just don’t trust. They’ve been known to hallucinate and summarize incorrectly which defeats the entire point of their existence. Not only that, but if I’m going to read an article, I’m going to read it and not just a summary. AI-generated summaries feel a little like they only cater to the growing attention span problem induced by social media.

But I digress. There is still hope for those who want to escape the AI mess in their browsers. Yesterday, Vivaldi’s founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner released a blog post on their official blog declaring that the Vivaldi browser will stay AI-free.

Note: I am not sponsored by Vivaldi — or anyone else for that matter.

Here’s part of what he wrote:

Across the industry, artificial assistants are being embedded directly into browsers, and pitched as a quicker path to answers. Google is bringing Gemini into Chrome to summarize pages and, in future, work across tabs and navigate sites on a user’s behalf. Microsoft is promoting Edge as an AI browser, including new modes that scan what is on screen and anticipate actions.

These moves are reshaping the address bar into an assistant prompt, turning the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship.

This shift has major consequences for the web as we know it. Independent research shows users are less likely to click through to original sources when an AI summary is present, which means fewer visits for publishers, creators, and communities that keep the web vibrant. A recent study by PewResearch found users clicked traditional results roughly half as often when AI summaries appeared. Publishers warn of dramatic traffic losses when AI overviews sit above links. 

The stakes are high. New AI-native browsers and agent platforms are arriving, while regulators debate remedies that could reshape how people reach information online. The next phase of the browser wars is not about tab speed, it is about who intermediates knowledge, who benefits from attention, who controls the pathway to information, and who gets to monetize you.[…]

Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.

We will stay true to our identity, giving users control and enabling  people to use the browser in combination with whatever tools they want to use. Our focus is on building a powerful personal and private browser for you to explore the web on your own terms. We will not turn exploration into passive consumption.

Jon von Tetzchner

I’m glad that at least one browser is taking a stand against the AI enshittification taking place elsewhere. Again, I am not against AI, I’m just against the hype and companies trying to ram it down our throats at every single opportunity whether it actually makes sense or not. It just feels like they’re trying to justify their enormous multi-billion dollar investments before the bubble bursts by cramming it in absolutely everything.

This post was originally going to be a simple post saying, “Hey! Look! Vivaldi has taken a stance against adding AI to their browser!” but has since transformed into a rant about all of the hype surrounding AI. I would apologize for it, but I’m not going to because I think it’s important to push back a little bit against it.

The BBC writes:

A manuscript once considered an unofficial copy of Magna Carta is now believed to be a genuine version and ”one of the world’s most valuable documents”, according to UK academics.

Harvard Law School paid $27.50 (then about £7) for it in 1946 and for years it has remained tucked away in its library, its true identity unknown.

But two medieval history professors have concluded it is an extraordinarily rare and lost original Magna Carta from 1300, in the reign of King Edward I, that could be worth millions.[…]

The manuscript’s purchase price of $27.50 would be about $450 (£339) in 2025, based on inflation.

BBC

It seems like Harvard Law School got a pretty good deal on that geninue copy of the Magna Carta. Of course, they didn’t know was geniune at the time of purchase or they wouldn’t have paid a petty $27.50 for it.

The article goes into a lot of detail about how they determined it was geniune and also gives a little bit of history about the document. It’s a very interesting read.

TechCrunch reports:

A group known as the Independent Publisher Alliance has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over Google’s AI Overviews, according to Reuters.

The complaint accuses Google of “misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss.”

It also says that unless they’re willing to disappear from Google search results entirely, publishers “do not have the option to opt out” of their material being used in AI summaries.

TechCrunch

It will be really interesting to see how this develops. Such a lawsuit has the potential to shape the future of online publishing as well as search. Google’s AI Overviews could be useful if they were as accurate and not prone to hallucinations as they have known to have been. However, as I have written about before, I share the plaintiff’s concern about the harm they could potentially cause online publishers.

I recently came across a post on How-To Geek about how the author gave Windows a serious shot as his primary operating system for two years, but kept coming back to his Mac:

I want to like Windows. It’s great for gaming and handles CAD software fantastically. But, for over a decade, I never seriously considered it as my primary OS—until two years ago. Now, after giving it another shot, I’m back on macOS… just like always. […]

A few years ago, I shifted gears professionally and started working in my woodworking and CNC shop full-time. This meant that I had to have a system that supported my CAD (computer aided design) software, which ran exclusively on Windows.

Yes, I could have used a virtual machine on my MacBook, and I could have just switched back and forth between macOS and Windows, but I decided to go all-in on Windows at that time. […]

I was honestly pretty happy with Windows 11, surprisingly even though I didn’t expect to be, I figured the experiment would go on for a few weeks or months, and I’d come crawling back to macOS, but that just didn’t happen.

I ended up living on Windows for just about two full years. I was able to use my CNC software just fine, and when I shifted gears from running my shop to writing full-time again, I was able to do those tasks well too. Video editing worked great, photo editing was great, and playing games was seamless. I had an always-on computer in the office and my laptop for when I was out. It really was a pretty great setup—except for Windows. […]

Truly, the main thing that drove me away from Windows this time was the integration with my iPhone (or lack thereof). If Windows integrated better with the iPhone, offering solutions similar to AirDrop and access to iMessage, I wouldn’t have left Windows. Hands down. I’m very aware that this is down to Apple’s closed-ecosystem approach, and that’s to say I guess it worked as intended on me.

How-To Geek

I’ve included a few snippets here that sum up his experience. While I don’t need CNC or CAD software, I do play certain games that only run on Windows which is why I ended up building my own PC. After having exclusively used Macs since Mac OS 9 was new (with a brief stint of having to use Windows 7 at work), my experience with Windows 11 was, surprisingly, much better than expected.

That said, every time I come back to macOS, it feels like coming home. So many years of Mac usage means I have my Mac-specific workflows and tools that just don’t work on other platforms. Then there’s the matter of stability.

It’s very rare that I have serious issues with my Macs whereas on my PC, I regularly experience the PC just giving up and restarting. I don’t get a blue screen of death or any other message, the PC just suddenly restarts. That is indicative of a hardware rather than a software problem and I believe it’s probably a thermal issue, but I haven’t had the time to really dig in and fix it yet. That isn’t Windows’s fault, but it still detracts from the stability and user experience since the OS is just one component of the overall PC.

In any case though, I find myself using my Mac for just about everything other than gaming. It’s just more comfortable for me and I am much more productive. In the end, a computer is a tool and that tool needs to work with you rather than against you. If I used Windows or even Linux long enough, I could probably get to the same level of comfort, but I’m happy to stick with my Mac for now since it does everything I need.

Good news for Apple users who care about privacy and use Safari!

9to5Mac writes:

Introduced for Private Browsing sessions in Safari 17.0, Advanced Fingerprinting Protection was also optionally available for regular non-private sessions. With iOS 26, it will be enabled by default. Here’s what that means.

Starting with iOS 26 (as well as iPad 26, and macOS 26), Apple is flipping the switch on Advanced Fingerprinting Protection for all browsing sessions, not just Private Browsing.

9to5Mac

As stated above, this feature has been available for a while in Safari and has been on by default for Private Browsing sessions, however, more technically savvy users may already know that you can already enable it for all browsing sessions in current versions of Safari. I’ve had it on for all browsing sessions for a long time on my Macs, my iPhone and my iPad.

If you want to know how Advanced Fingerprinting Protection works in Safari, then head over to 9to5Mac and read through the original article.

As a long-time Mac user, I find the lack of consistency in Windows’ UI utterly baffling, even in system applications from Microsoft. The latest update to Windows 11 just introduced a new search feature in the Settings application which is actually a good thing, but their choice to use an entirely different type of search bar compared to other Microsoft applications confuses me.

It is located in the center of the title bar much like the Microsoft Store, but instead of having almost square edges like every other search bar (and text box for that matter) in Windows 11’s standard design language, it has fully rounded sides like Mac OS X used to have for all of its search bars for years. Why? Just, why?

Just compare them below. Left is the Settings application and right is the Microsoft Store and File Explorer.

It might seem trivial, but details like this matter. They add up and even if most users don’t consciously notice it, they will on a subconscious level. Consistent UI makes for a smoother, easier user experience which is one major reason why macOS has such a fine reputation for user-friendliness.

I just wish Microsoft would stick to its own UI guidelines, but they won’t. Windows has a reputation for inconsistent UI even among first-party applications and it will continue happily moseying down that path. And, as my grandpa used to say, it will keep looking like the south end of a northbound donkey as it does so.