Here's one more post relating to what has somehow become a bit of a recent theme on this blog: artificial intelligence.
Something has been weighing on me, of late. I've noticed a significant uptick in my site being mined by bots and spiders: once upon a time it would be for search engines trying to find its content, but increasingly it's the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Grok, coming in and stealing/learning from this blog.
There was a time when I'd have shrugged and said "c'est la vie", but given the increasing competency of these models to write code themselves, effectively destroying the livelihood of a whole category of knowledge worker, I can no longer just sit by. It's time to acknowledge a problem that has been created - at least in part - by developer bloggers and open source contributors. We were just trying to help the community, I promise you.
I would like to apologise deeply for the role - however small - I and this blog have played in the eradication of the software engineering profession. We had a good run - it was so much fun - but now it's clearly over. A few of us are likely to carry on coding manually - a bit like Japanese soldiers fighting on after the end of WWII on a remote Pacific island - and I feel I need to do what I can to support this new resistance.
So, after nearly 20 years of being on-line, this blog is going analog. Existing content will stay up - there seems little point in taking it down, considering the nature of the internet and the fact the it's been crawled so many times, over the years - but new content will only be available through analog means.
You will have a choice of the following mechanisms to subscribe to content from this blog:
- Telefax
- Listings in the upcoming "Through the Interface" magazine
- Hand-written postcards
- Caveat: my hand-writing is awful, YMMV
- A manually typed newsletter
- Although I only have 2 remaining ribbons for my 1938 Underwood Champion
- IBM 5081 punched cards
- Audio-encoded onto TDK C90 cassette tapes
- Added bonus: as I have a limited supply of these, there's a decent chance most of each tape will contain a random 80s era Radio 1 Top 40 countdown or an early 90s Indie music mix-tape
- Carrier pigeon
- Dictation over the phone (landlines only)
- This will cost more as it's very time-consuming, especially when lots of curly braces are needed
I briefly considered hosting a Bulletin Board System, or much more modern media such as sending email or WhatsApp messages, but I've realised that these will simply get gamed by ever-smarter bots desperate to slurp up delicious new content. In theory the more analog distribution mechanisms could also all be gamed, in time, but the barrier of entry is so much higher, at least for now. I will continue to monitor to situation and adjust the available offerings.
How else would you like to receive this blog's content? Ham radio? Morse code? Perhaps we should push to bring back Visicode?
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