When I’m bored, I get price quotes from Lyft and Uber to the airport. I’ll click around and look at the different tiers of service. Then I choose not to actually request a fare, and close the app.

I fly enough to where both apps probably have me as a regular airport customer, but that I’m price sensitive enough where I just won’t use their service sometimes.

I do the same with Doordash and other food apps, where I just put together potential orders to get a sense of how much something would cost if I ordered it, and then just never order it, letting that cart expire. I’m hoping this poisons their data or adds something to the price sensitivity metrics.

I also look at airfares, hotel prices, etc., a lot. It’s not for the purpose of manipulating their algorithms, as I just like to get a sense for how prices move over time. But if there’s a side effect that these variable pricing algorithms take into account people who window shop and walk away, maybe I’m helping push prices down.

If they’re gonna create a panopticon, we should fuck with their data.

AMP was two different things.

1. Google defined a standard that was an approved subset of html/css/js designed to load quickly on mobile screens, with none of the extra cruft that slows down sites as experienced by phone users.
2. Google also agreed to host AMP-compliant pages on their own ultra-fast servers. Many smaller sites, especially local news stations and local newspapers, agreed to offload the extra work by allowing Google to host their content. Those hosted pages had a whole system of referring back to the canonical URL on the actual outlet’s own website (and the desktop version of the page), and had little things referring to the AMP project.

I was 100% on board with #1, but #2 was controversial and created a lot of the conflicts of interest that tore the whole thing apart. Google spun off the AMP project as an open governance model, and then it was taken over by the OpenJS foundation.

In the end, the performance gap between mobile devices and desktops narrowed, and at this point most people’s phones and mobile browsers can load pages just as quickly as a laptop, so the purpose of the project itself is less important to the actual web as it exists today.

Google’s AMP was supposed to stop this, but they never could get around the conflict of interest between “our search engine experience is improved by prioritizing fast loading results” and “our ad business needs websites to carry a ton of ads,” ended up carving in enough exceptions and an anti-AMP backlash that they pretty much walked away from the whole thing.

I’m also waiting to see how Linux support for the A-series chips develops, now that the MacBook Neo has A18 Pros running MacOS. There are people working on tools to allow Asahi’s m1n1 bootloader to work on the Neos. Unclear how much of that effort will ultimately be upstreamed to Asahi itself, but I’m hopeful.

Most CPUs implement a strategy called “race-to-sleep,” where it throws all the resources it has at a computing task, to finish it as fast as possible, so that it can hurry back to a low power sleep mode.

For that reason, optimizing speed often improves battery life.

Technically these are all System in Package (SiP) rather than systems on a chip (SoCs). It’s not cost effective to waste silicon area on things like memory and storage in the latest and greatest TSMC nodes, so they have several different silicon dies that they connect together using advanced packaging techniques, but where each silicon die in that package might come from a different foundry/process.

Not exactly, the bootpicker just won’t show partitions that are not flagged as bootable. This is a departure from previous versions, that would check to see whether partitions were bootable without looking at the flag, and took a little bit of investigating to figure out this undocumented behavior, but it is an easy fix:

https://asahilinux.org/2026/06/progress-report-7-1/

Most of the time it doesn’t escalate into a contentious debate, sure. Lots of discussions where the things I read change my view on things, and I’m sure my own comments change others’ view on things too.

But by the time it starts to take on the style of an actual debate, there’s less room to convince someone who feels strongly enough to engage in the debate. Still, it’s worth doing sometimes because in these public forums, the debate might be read by thousands of lurkers, some of whom didn’t feel strongly enough to have a view, but walk away convinced that one of the two sides is more correct.

I know I’ve been convinced of a side while watching two others debate.

The “ninjas stole my dog/wife/kids, need money for karate lessons” joke itself predates smartphones. I used to see this sign from panhandlers all throughout the 2000’s.

What if Claude was one of us?

There just wasn’t really user-submitted content back then. If you wanted to post something on the internet, you had to create a website.

There were tools that made a website a bit easier to create (most notably Geocities), but it was still a fairly technical task to simply get text that you typed show up on a website accessible to all.

Simply being able to reply to someone else? That wasn’t really on the web, although by 2001 there were a few attempts to bring that kind of forum functionality to the broader web on actual http/www webpages (when it was previously on Usenet and BBSes and mailing lists and the technologies known as the internet before and separate from the world wide web). vBulletin was the popular one, and I think phpBB was fairly popular, too, but those projects started in 2000 and weren’t that popular in the first years. Web hosts actually offering a full blown LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for hosting, and the technical skills to administer that kind of service, even on free software, was a pretty big hurdle to adoption before 2003 or so.

In 2001, almost all of the web was static content, with no method of interacting with the content other than simply viewing it. You’d click on links to retrieve another piece of content. By 2005 the web 2.0 revolution was underway, and websites had become interactive, with dynamic content drawing from relational databases under the hood. But in 2001? No, the web was pretty static.

Your description of the rise of the social algorithms is part of the story since 2010, but even that leaves out the period of time in between.