And I'd encourage other people who can afford to, to do the same.

I'm not sure how scalable my approach is within the status quo, though - I've never seen a subscribers-only article go viral on social media, and almost all of my subscriptions began with me enjoying a generous free tier. And I've tried a number of micropayment systems but none of them seem poised to take off for various reasons.

[1] I don't pay for facebook, because fuck 'em

Modern social media is delivered through 'apps' which are like web browsers, except without ad blockers or privacy settings, and with push notifications to make them more addictive, and they only show one website, and they're each 5x the size of a web browser for some reason.

CEO: "I'm not sure I like the idea of us inviting people to hack us - or paying a 'bounty' to hackers holding a knife to our throat. Will they at least agree to a binding NDA and terms of engagement, in advance?"

CISO: "No, they won't."

CEO: "Well, at least if the hackers are in poor countries, a $500 payout for a critical bug will be plenty, right?"

CISO: "No, critical issues will be 10-100x that"

CEO: "Well will the average quality of these reports better than those we get from our hired pentesters?"

CISO: "On average these will be the lowest quality reports you've ever seen. But 0.1% might be gold. Oh, and I need to hire 3 more guys to sift through these terrible reports. Also our sifters might miss the gold."

CEO: "Oh. Well at least we won't be breaking the law though, right?"

CISO: "Uh, about that..."

And if you've got taxes like that on earned income - shouldn't people with unearned income pay just as much? If your tax on investment gains is too small, you end up with an economy where the salaried worker renting a house pays more tax than their landlord, who owns ten houses.

It's also complying with tax and employment laws in the country the hacker is in, to the satisfaction of your legal and finance teams.

Sure, in western-style legal systems you can call them a contractor and they can pay their own tax. Just don't employ them full time for long enough to trigger 'sham contract' rules that would make them employees.

But your corporate legal team doesn't have anyone trained and licensed to give advice on Tajikistan tax and employment law, so they can't approve this proposed contract without hiring an outside legal expert. And of course all suppliers, regardless of country, must agree to our anti-slave-labour policy which permits audits of...

One might say "skip that nonsense, just send the money" - but the larger the company, the more their in-house infosec becomes a load of uptight squares who love compliance and audit. And the kind of companies that can pay out five-figure bounties tend to be pretty large.

I'm sure it depends on the size of your readership, but in my experience these kind of offers are a drop in the bucket compared to the salary of an expert programmer - let alone someone who's had their company acquired.

I also felt that, just like you recognise that the blog boosted the reputation of your startup, that if a blog with my name on it started pushing snake-oil product or making sketchy SEO posts, that would have the reverse effect.

I'd leave it exactly as it is. If you want to pick it up again in a few years time, you can.

City fire departments, car seatbelts, motorbike and bicycle helmets, video doorbells/home CCTV, car steering wheel locks etc etc.

The dangers are uncommon enough that the vast majority of people will live their entire life without ever having their house burn down or crashing their car. But they're common enough that in a city of several million people, the fire department might attend 100 incidents a day.

Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything.

The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.

IDK, haven't Google been putting Gemini front and centre in pretty much all of their products?

I'm seeing Gemini on my slide decks, Gemini on my e-mails, Gemini on my searches, Gemini on my videoconferences, Gemini on my database query console. My impression was they were doing a Google Plus style attempt to marshal all the company's efforts behind one product.

They could just set the minimum ad spend at a level that makes moderation possible.

Let's say it costs $15 to have a human spend 15 minutes checking an ad. If the minimum spend per ad is $100 it'd easily cover the costs of the check. And I imagine most ad campaigns are spending a lot more than $100.

I'm not sure what they do these days - it's about 20 years since I used an IBM Thinkpad to connect to an IBM pSeries.

Of course there have also been crashes where pilots wrongly dismissed sensor data.

In the Kegworth air disaster [1] the pilots had sensor data telling them the left-hand engine was at fault - but a previous model of the plane had a reputation for unreliability in that sensor, and the pilots shut down the right-hand engine on the basis of other evidence.

So we don't want pilots blindly trusting broken sensors - but we also don't want them to dismiss working sensors as broken.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...

But did you know for 'General Aviation' (small planes flown for recreation and suchlike) there are around 300 deaths per year in the US?

An optimist would say:

America doesn't like Iran because it's a theocratic dictatorship that funds terrorist groups throughout the region, supplies drones to Russia, fires missiles at the only democracy in the region (Israel) and is pursuing nuclear weapons.

As energy markets are global, middle east politics impacts America's vital national interests, and prices consumers pay at the pump, even if America is a net exporter of oil.

Iran had a series of nationwide protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_prot... indicating there was widespread popular support for a new, less theocratic government.

Trump thought they could go in with a surgical strike, knock out the theocratic leaders and the nuclear facilities, enabling the protesters to overthrow the remains of the government, while the army steps back like we saw in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Then they'd turn into a peace-loving democracy, and Trump would go down in history as having defeated one of America's long-term antagonists, making him a winner and a tough guy, and really showing Obama how it's done.

A cynic would say:

Trump wanted a distraction from the Epstein files (which this war has 100% delivered) and/or a country that wanted this war to happen has the Epstein evidence to blackmail him with.

Having deliberately installed loyal incompetents in leadership positions, even though military planners were 100% aware the Strait of Hormuz would get closed, and that their drones are an order of magnitude cheaper than our drone interceptors, that knowledge was dismissed by the executive.

Being able to make oil prices rise and fall by tweeting is an easy way to make money if you're exempt from the justice system.

Having the war drag on might not be good for Republican performance in the midterm elections - but Trump can't run for a third term, so he doesn't much care if the party is left in a shambles.

It's awfully tempting for a war photojournalist to pose the group of tearful women in front of the bombed-out building across town. Or for the celeb gossip reporter to collage together two photos without making it clear it's a collage. Or for the person colour-correcting a photo of a divisive figure to lighten or darken their skin.

And the resulting rules are complex and at times judgement-based, because posing subjects is allowed in some circumstances, collages are sometimes allowed, some colour adjustment is allowed, and so on.

Still, serious journalists aren't going to be illustrating their articles about US-Iran negotiations with chatgpt any time soon.

Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.

The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.

To an extent, I guess?

But in the past if one wanted a diagram and didn't care about copyright they'd grab an image like https://i0.wp.com/www.engineeringchoice.org/wp-content/uploa... and reuse it unmodified.

In the age of AI, one can hand it to an LLM and get https://mechaniclove.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/engine-p... in a different style. And with messed up labels and the wrong number of holes in the gaskets.

A lot of traditional news outlets have a style rule that every article must have an image. Look at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.economist.com etc - every article has an image. Even a report on something highly abstract - "BP reports record profits" - will be illustrated with a photograph of some BP-branded fuel pumps. Stories on things like cybersecurity and inflation get generic images like snippets of blurry computer code, banknotes etc.

Some bloggers feel their blog is improved by adopting the style of professional journalism, and (among other things) put an image on every article. Even if for a programming blog good lead images are hard to come by.

Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use. They have rules on everything from illustrating one rocket launch with a photo of another to posing the subjects to colour-correcting images to creating multi-image collages. So I don't imagine we'll see many AI-generated images in traditional news outlets any time soon.

Take a look at the Google Image Search results for 'Engine Diagram' https://www.google.com/search?q=Engine+Diagram&tbm=isch

In the first row I get two correct-looking diagrams, then a load of AI-generated ones. Three cylinder heads for four cylinders? Two crankshafts? Oil pan labelled Crankshaft? Oil pan labelled Connect in rod? A four-cylinder engine with seven valve springs? Parts labelled up to 39 but a 9-item key? Spark plug wires that loop back on themselves? A crank shaft where the pistons aren't offset in phase? Four-cylinder engines whose exhaust manifolds have three or five openings? Then in the second row, I get "Parts of a V6 engine" showing a four-cylinder engine - with an 'Exhaust malvol', an 'extaust manivol', an 'exsoust manivol' an 'oilolaivt manivol'

Savvy technical audiences have noticed this - and so when a diagram has a whiff of AI about it, they become extremely skeptical and distracted.

Personally I only use AI-generated diagrams very sparingly, and very carefully.