It occurred to me that, despite its absolute laundry list of flaws and impossible claims, the major perceptual problem with “AI” is that it’s being hoisted upon us by a handful of tech bros, instead of regular people being part of the process.
When you have a handful of narcissistic, clearly biased and self-interested, possibly delusional people force their product upon the masses with little regard for the negative environmental, societal, and economic impact, the only outcome can be masses of negative sentiment.
If (and I say this using every grain of salt imaginable) AI lives up to even 5% of the hype, then it will be vastly disruptive across the board, and we, the little people, will be the ones who have to deal with and suffer through those changes. The creators of this failed product (OpenAI resorting to advertising in ChatGPT was a tacit admission of this failure) will not be the ones bearing the brunt of it.
“Today, we’re beginning to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads. Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers.”
Let me rephrase that for you, Sam and co: “We’re bleeding money. We lose money across the board. Nobody is really using our product. We’re introducing ads in a desperate attempt to generate some revenue to offset a tiny portion of our massive debt and losses”.
Nobody uses AI. I paint that brush broadly, because it’s broadly true.
You might claim you “use” AI, but rewriting an email or suggesting a variation on your aunt Fannies roast beef recipe (ripped from the millions of recipes posted online) isn’t really using it. It’s fucking around with an expensive system to get an output that two seconds of effort or one second of googling could have achieved – just at a far higher energy cost.
If you’re one of the “Uber Geeks” who “use” AI to write poor, unmaintainable code, or automatically drop the current price of bitcoin into your Google doc every 15 seconds, then I still maintain that you don’t really use it, because it’s not really useful. I also maintain that the number of Uber Geeks who use AI in this fashion is so small that you’re little more than a statistical anomaly.
I have always been one of those geeks. From learning to code as a child, to trying and adopting every new technology and fad (that’s important) of the past handful of decades.
There’s simply not enough of us for OpenAI to be profitable. Even worse for Sam, is that a lot of us Uber Geeks think that the shit they are peddling as “AI” today is just that – pointless, useless, expensive shit.
Even our tiny group of nerds is split about its future, so where will the money come from?
Worse, it’s being used for all the wrong things. If you want to know what a company thinks the true value of their product is, then look at how they advertise its use to potential customers.
It’s not as if OpenAI doesn’t know me. Or that the advertising algorithms don’t know me. I’ve used ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others for hundreds of hours. Testing workflows, refining documents, comparing code, all to see if there is a real benefit, and the best I could come up with is a few minor edge case time-savers that aren’t worth the financial or environmental expense.
Sure, it can (poorly and I have to double-check) summarise thousands of pages of documents at once, but how often in my lifetime will I ever have to do that? And given that we know the answers can’t be trusted… My point is – I’ve used it a lot, and they should know roughly what I use it for, and how to advertise to me, but…
I don’t get ads about coding, or helping with my writing, doing taxes, learning new languages, training to cure cancer, or perfecting a PHD thesis – no, I get repeated ads about generating pictures of penguins. Why fucking penguins? I don’t even like them. Have you ever seen inside their mouths? Nightmare fuel!
-16 LUFS for podcast (stereo) audio has been the standard for longer than I can remember. By exporting your audio at this level, you help ensure that your listener isn’t suddenly forced to either raise their volume to hear your podcast properly or panic grab for the volume button before their eardrums start to bleed.
I sometimes feel like podcasters, even established ones who should know better, think that their show exists in a vacuum. The listeners shown in your stats dashboard listen to your show and your show alone, so fuck them, and fuck the larger podcast community. I’ll put my podcast out the way I want to.
Well, reality check, ducky. I’ve had enough and am now actively unsubscribing from podcasts that don’t respect podcast audio standards. It’s been around way too long to be lightly brushed aside.
Your podcast isn’t the only one I listen to, and I can say with relative certainty that 95% of podcast listeners don’t just have one podcast on their playlist.
As listeners, we tend to be doing other things while we listen – chores, running, etc. Being forced to stop what we are doing, especially when you’re elbows deep in the podcast creator’s wife dishes, to adjust the volume because it has suddenly jumped to levels that would make a KISS concert feel like gentle elevator music is just not acceptable.
It’s a bad listener experience. Your podcast does not exist separately from the larger podcast ecosystem, and the success or perception of the podcast community is tied to what we do as a group.
It’s not a difficult fix. In production, it literally takes less than 30 seconds to adjust and export appropriately.
I understand that some podcasters don’t even listen to their own shows (what kind of monster are you?); they record, and their editor or production team take care of the rest, but that is no excuse for disrespecting your listeners who are choosing to spend their time listening to your podcast.
It’s also no excuse for disrespecting the rest of the podcast creator community that is trying to make podcasting better for all involved.
Google Search accounts for more than 90% of all general search queries in the UK – with millions of people relying on it as a key gateway to the internet. More than 200,000 firms in the UK collectively spent more than £10 billion on Google’s search advertising last year. These services matter to the UK’s economy and society – so it is vital that competition works well.
Google issued a response but I felt like they didn’t really say what they actual meant, so I revealed some of their original thinking 🤣
Forced Shifts in user behavior are rapidly changing how people search for information, and features like AI Overviews are forcing helping people to search more because the results are useless discover new content and ask more questions. Today, the interfering aholes UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a consultation on potential new requirements for Google Search, including on the controls we provide to websites to manage their content in Search AI features. This is a complex topic because we really NEED people to use AI search to justify the ridiculous amount of money we’ve invested into this crap product. It’s just too much, we can’t admit failure or look bad in front of investors or other companies. Fuck the user experience, think of the poor, poor shareholders! it can affect how people find information and how websites get found in Search.
For years, we have provided web publishers with a range of controls, based on open standards like robots.txt, to manage how their content appears in Search. As we’ve forced this change and could still easily respect robots.txt but won’t technology has evolved, so have our tools. We added controls for things like Featured Snippets and image previews (which also apply to AI Overviews). And more recently, we introduced Google-Extended, a new control that lets websites manage how their content is used to train our Gemini models.
Building on this framework, and working with the web ecosystem, we’re now exploring updates to our controls to force let sites to specifically opt out of Search generative AI features so that we have carte blanche to steal their content because they forgot to opt-out, didn’t know they could, or accidentally misconfigured their site. Opt in?? Ha Ha Ha That’s so cute. Our goal is to protect Ad revenue and shareholder profits the helpfulness of Search for people who want information quickly, while also giving websites the right tools to manage their content. We despise having to look forward to engaging in the CMA’s process and will preformatively, do you really think your opinion matters? continue discussions with website owners no and other stakeholders on this topic.
Any new controls need to avoid doing what we did and breaking Search in a way that leads to a fragmented or confusing experience for people. As we force AI increasingly to becomes a core part of how people find information, any new controls also need to be incumbent on website owners so that we can steal data with impunity because they forgot to opt out to be simple and scalable for website owners.
We’re optimistic we can force users, website owners and publishers down this road, steal their content, and into using an error prone, unwanted, hallucinating product to save face and shareholder profits find a path forward that provides even more choice to website owners and publishers, while ensuring people continue to get the most helpful and innovative Search experience possible.
Fuck you.
Gemini, rewrite this post to make it friendly and appear like we actually care.
I’ve done a bit of an overhaul on the site today and settled on a bit of branding. I wasn’t happy with the previous colour scheme or logo, so I spent the morning brainstorming colours / fonts / iconography based on what I want this site to represent.
Gone are the dark, moody colours, and the “rubber ducky” inspired scheme has arrived.
For those of you who are curious (and why wouldn’t you be?), here are the colours and fonts that I have used in this design so far:
Colours:
Black #161616
White #FAF9F7
Grey #8A8A8A
Yellow (quack) #F2C400
Red #C83A2A
Slate Blue #4A5D73
Fonts:
Inter – Body Text
Merriweather – Headings
IBM Plex Sans – UI / Navigation elements
I’m guessing some of you talented designers are pulling your hair out at my choices, and that’s fair. Leave suggestions for improvement in the comments.
I really can’t stress this enough, but I feel the need to say this: nobody should control your domain name except you.
I’ve spent the past two days attempting to track down and restore the ownership of a domain for a client whose online store has been offline for the past 4 days. All because the people who developed their site registered the domain, never transferred it to the client, and let it lapse.
Yes, the client should have known better, but in all fairness, they were taken for a ride by scammers (that’s another post for another day).
Consider this your warning.
There is ZERO reason why any entity other than you should control the domain name for you or your business.
If someone is building a website for you, register the domain yourself. It’s not complicated, especially not in 2026.
If someone registered the domain for you, create your own account with a domain host (it’s free), and get them to transfer it to you. Once you create your account, it’s as simple as them sending you an email.
Also, ensure that you have full administrative access to that account until it is transferred, and verify that the domain ownership details match yours, not theirs. This is important in case you have to dispute ownership later.
Similarly, you can apply this advice to anything that may be handled by a third party or agency, such as your social media or advertising account. I don’t think I need to stress why.
Babies utter their first words to smiling faces, and the parental “oohs”, “aahs” and “omg honey, did you hear that?” of family.
Programmers typically type their first words of a new language (or even their very first programming language) by having the computer announce “Hello World” to the ether.
It’s an achievement rarely seen or recognised by anybody other than themselves, and is always accompanied by a satisfied little grin because “That worked!”.
This post is my “hello world”. It’s the first post on a new blog, and I know nobody will see it.
I’ve been “online” for more than three decades. I’ve watched computer brands, software platforms, social platforms and more rise and fall. I’ve been on them all. I’ve been on some that I’m pretty sure most of you never knew existed. I’ve even developed a few.
I’ve also been around the marketing block long enough to be more than a tad, not disillusioned, but, well, I’ve seen it all. So yes, disillusioned, I guess. I know when new ideas are simply old ideas with a new lick of paint, and are destined to fail, no matter how good looking the sugar-coated frosting is.
People don’t really change (as a group), so marketing never really changes. Sure, we can reach you faster today, but that doesn’t change the fundamentals.
My point is, I’m not naive enough to believe that anybody is going to read this post. Not unless some rabid fan or stalker decides to troll my archives in a decade (I can wish – it would mean I’m still kicking around).
The only people who have their “hello world” posts seen by significant numbers of readers are those who already have an audience. And then it’s not really “hello world” is it? It’s more: “I’m over there too! Look at me!”.
“If nobody is going to see it, then why are you writing it?”, I don’t hear you ask.
You’ve got to start somewhere, and writing this allows me to layout for you, dear reader, and for myself, what we can expect from this blog.
I’m old by the standards of internet influencers, and by the current generations who reply to me with “OK Boomer” when they’re too dumb or inexperienced to understand the wisdom I graciously bestowed upon them.
But I’m not really that “old”. I’m Gen X, and I have been around.
I’ve got literal decades of developing, designing, marketing and business experience to share with the universe, and I intend to do just that.
On this blog, I plan to opine daily whenever I feel like it. Sometimes it will be at length, sometimes merely a link or a quote. But this is where I will dump my thoughts about society, technology, culture, marketing, fandoms and the world at large.
It will be a judgment-free zone. There will be no fat shaming of my ideas or sermons.
I will also be writing longer, more structured (researched) pieces, that I will publish on substack as a newsletter. Those pieces will be reposted here a week or so later.
I may also release the longer pieces as a podcast, but that will come down the line. I need to build up a publishing cadence first before I go overextending my old self.
Be warned that I am not for everybody. I’m too old to care about your sensibilities, and I strongly believe that you do not have the right to be offended. If you disagree with me, bring receipts or you will be treated mercilessly.
Feelings aren’t facts, except when they support my arguments, and Shakespeare was correct. All the world is, in fact, a stage. It’s just that the play is shit, and the actors are inept.
I’m pretty sure we are all on the same page now, and you have at least an inkling of what to expect from this site and my writing. And more importantly, I do too!
If you are still reading this, perhaps in an attempt to prove me wrong, or are the rabid stalker from the future… I love you. Wisdom comes from pain, and I wish I hurt a lot less.
Learn from my mistakes. There have been, and will be plenty.
