Notes

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.

Washington Post:

Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans.

He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.

[…]

Experiences like Sellers’s are becoming more common as AI tools gain momentum in white-collar workplaces, offering time-saving shortcuts but also new workplace etiquette conundrums.

[…]

Major workplace tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet offer note-taking features that can record, transcribe and use AI to summarize meetings a person is invited to but doesn’t attend. A profusion of smaller companies, such as otter.ai, offers apps that workers can use to send AI meeting agents to capture calls in a similar way. OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently added a record mode that can function as a meeting note taker. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

Participants can’t send their note takers to present to a meeting on their behalf — yet. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has said the company wants to allow users to create “digital twins,” or AI assistants, that can eventually attend meetings for people and take action in their place.

Washington Post

Where can I get one of these?!? That’s my first reaction as meetings tend to be my least productive time. However, I will also admit that the regular contact with the rest of my team that meetings provide has become much more important while working remotely. In a way, the regular meetings and discussions have become the glue holding the team together.

Of course, there are also the privacy implications of AI note-takers:

Sending an AI bot to experience things in your absence could be the next logical step after social media and smartphones created the expectation that anything that can be recorded, will be.

“We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller, CEO of Open Machine, which helps companies and executives deploy AI, said in a phone interview last week. Always-on recording is changing human behavior, she said, from college parties to corporate boardrooms.

[…]

She advises people to remember that there’s no medium — on or offline — that means you’re safe from being recorded. And if someone skipped a meeting and sent an AI note taker instead, consider that the person may later read or hear anything you say in their absence.

Washington Post

I wonder what EU law has to say about it given that I live in the EU and this article is from American media.

Here’s the original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/02/ai-note-takers-meetings-bots/

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote up some of my thoughts on AI replacing traditional search on the internet. My main fear of it is that it would devastate publishers who rely on traffic to earn money from their content and thereby causing the whole industry to essentially collapse.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one to see the problem and, even more fortunately, someone in a position to do something about it has also realized it and has committed to do something about it. It turns out Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, has introduced a new Cloudflare feature to help publishers:

Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites.

[…]

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said the feature would ensure that the Internet as we know it will survive “the age of AI.”

“Original content is what makes the Internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and it’s essential that creators continue making it,” Prince said. “AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone.”

Some participating publishers expressed optimism in the press release that Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl feature could potentially stop the endless scraping that publishers defending copyrights have alleged represents wide-scale theft.

Ars Technica

I think this is a fantastic idea. Cloudflare is in the unique position to make an initiative like this a success and perhaps even the standard. Publishers do need to get paid in order to continue to produce content.

You might think that AI firms might be against such a thing, but some are even on board with it:

For Cloudflare’s plan to work, AI companies must sign up, too. However, while some AI companies may not see the incentive, Cloudflare has confirmed that it has partnered with AI companies on the initiative, which may benefit from having a simple interface to negotiate with content creators.

Cloudflare suggested its AI partners benefit from “long-term collaboration” with creators whose updated content will help AI products stay relevant. They also can stop wasting money scraping poor quality data sources, a Cloudflare blog said.

“Without ongoing contributions from content creators, AI systems risk becoming outdated, biased, or less reliable—ultimately diminishing user trust and the value of AI products,” the blog said. “Cloudflare is working with AI companies to give them more signals, and ultimately improve the quality and relevance of content they can access. A healthy, sustainable ecosystem of original content is critical for AI innovation and relevance.”

Ars Technica

The emphasis is mine. It seems that at least some AI companies see the benefit of being able to negotiate access to publisher’s content through one channel rather than with each publisher separately. Aside from that, I can also imagine some AI companies are interested in preventing the onslaught of copyright violation lawsuits that have been working their way through the court systems of multiple countries.

Overall, I’m excited to see where this goes, if anywhere. It’s still very early with the process of trying to figure out where this is all going, so concepts like this will come and go and the ones that stick around will evolve.

There is plenty more to read about the topic on Ars Technica which I have quoted above. I can recommend it.

Otherwise, if you are a Cloudflare user and interested in the program, here is the link to the signup form for the beta: https://www.cloudflare.com/paypercrawl-signup/.

How-To Geek writes:

Dolphin is the default file manager on the KDE desktop, helping you navigate and browse your local and cloud files. Even though it’s usually discussed as a Linux application, you can actually install it on Windows as an alternative to Microsoft’s built-in File Explorer.

Many KDE applications are available and fully supported on Windows and Mac, such as the Kdenlive video editor and Krita digital art creator. Dolphin is also in that category of cross-platform KDE apps, though the Windows version is more of an experimental project. You have to download the latest daily version from KDE’s build server. After installation, Dolphin is available in the Start menu.

How-To Geek

The title already says it all: It’s weird.

That said, Dolphin also offers a number of features that File Explorer doesn’t such as split screen views and the ability to start a terminal session from any folder. The latter may not be as relevant for Windows as it is for Linux, but it’s still convenient for power users.