In particular, you probably don’t want the GPS coordinates of your house publicly available on your blog for everyone to see.

You have to be selective though, some of the EXIF data specifies things like color spaces and orientation that is used by browsers for displaying the image properly.

But my favourite[0] was Write Your Own Adventure Programs, which taught data driven programming and text parsing.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2017/2/usborne_computer_books.html

Months later, just before the end of the internship, they received a reply. Their manager had forwarded their request up the chain of command and the email had the full quoted history. Their request had been bumped up 4 successive layers in the London office, then across to the US headquarters where it continued its upwards trajectory, finally alighting on the desk of a VP who, after thanking them for bring the issue to his attention, rendered an carefully considered opinion.

The whole process had taken weeks, presumably as each person in the hierarchy debated whether they had the authority to tackle such a weighty issue.

The email had then been inexplicably bounced back DOWN the chain one link at a time, back across the Atlantic Ocean, and through the local office, down to the suit-bound interns, again weeks later, who by this stage only had days left at the internship.

The answer was no.

A threshold that might be beyond what the physical properties of our universe allow. It is still unclear.

I have been hearing about one more technical hurdle to solve before quantum algorithms become feasible since before I graduated. That was in 1996.

Almost nobody actually contacts me but it is technically possible.

Let me introduce you to the last resort of the struggling artist - extreme stylization. Really good pixel art is a very difficult discipline but terrible pixel art can be just as appealing if you push a style you can call your own.

Be bold.

I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.

I got criticism on my blog for using a serif font but those people are just … wrong. Serif fonts are just better for reading at all font sizes.

Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects -

The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.

There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.

Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.

Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

Running over a VPN service would have the much the same effect.

It seems a little pointless, surely every server actually accepting SSH passwords has been 0wned year ago.

On mobile that is.

On larger screens with desktops and overlapping windows it looks kind of bad. Not unusable, just annoying. I am hoping this will change as more apps update their design.