Mine seems to be doing rather better than 400% just right now this second. Don't worry, it doesn't keep it up.

Even when you *want* to see advertisements because you *want* to buy something "the internet" has become enshittified beyond belief.

It used to be:

(1) Google search for what you wanted to buy
(2) Google points you at manufacturer's or retailer's web site
(3) Buy it

Now that Google search has become so ****ing useless it seems to have to be

(1) Amazon search for what you wanted to buy
(2) Doesn't have the size/colour/whatever you want (their filtering is crap), but at least you get the names of some brands who might sell the sort of thing you're after
(3) Find the web sites for the individual brands / manufacturers
(4) On each one, see whether their full range (which Amazon never sells) includes the size/colour/etc combinations that you want
(5) If you're lucky, one of the several web sites you've now searched will have what you want
(6) Buy it

Why is "the internet" making it *harder* to spend money? Where's the logic? Who benefits?

From the menu card you find on the table when you attend a dinner at Sydney Sussex:

"Sydney Sussex College is one of Cambridge's newest colleges. Founded in 1596 ..."

An excellent "only in #Cambridge " troll.

TACO https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crx23qlnj27qo

I'm still getting spam - not enough Yandex data centres have been hit yet.

The "High Street" again. I wasn't really expecting the little local shop to still exist, despite the vestigial web presence, but I cycled into town anyway (the exercise is good for me) to find that indeed it did not exist any more.

So I will be ordering online from a national organisation.

As usual.

So the USA are going into government-sponsored livestreamed snuff movies.

Do they not have the remotest clue what that looks like to the rest of the world?

A win for Iran. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmwyve191dlko

A Chrome window on the left. The same page in Firefox on the right.

I used to do some things in Chrome, some in Firefox. I guess I can use Firefox for everything instead.

WTF? Chrome updated itself an hour or so ago, and just now everything that used to be white (except for the background of the hamburger menu, which remains white) has gone pale yellow???

And sometimes equally pointless when you *do* know what you've bought.

Such as a book you bought a couple of days ago and cannot possibly be expected to have read yet.

You buy various things from a retailer, then you get an email inviting you to give a review.

Without saying which of your several, completely different, purchases they want reviewed.

Pointless. How on earth anyone managed to "design" such a process ...

UK to join in Trump's war - what could possibly go wrong?? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqlykpe4dk0yo

"called on Congress to provide more cash to update the system"

The US airport system is socialised is it? I'd somehow assumed that in The Land Of The Free it would all be private enterprise.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c6j9xpgl8pzwt

Looks like it was a bog standard multithreading bug and not a Russian attack this time.

https://www.nats.aero/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/NATS-Preliminary-Investigation-Report-into-NAS-Incident-on-08-Sept-2026-Issued-16-Sept-2026.pdf

I have only just learned that Arthur C Clarke invented (as well as communications satellites and his many other inventions) modern LLM text generators.

The story is The Steam-powered Word Processor, 1986, and includes:

A vicar bored with writing sermons, which he realised consisted of subsets of the same text rearranged in slightly different ways each week "... conceived a machine which would automatically reassemble massed of text in any desired order ...".

And to train it?

"Before the machine could be used, [he] was faced with the laborious task of punching not only the Bible but the whole of Cruden's Concordance on to Jaquard cards ..."

RE: https://mastodonapp.uk/@bytebro/117196840681821760

#snake

Should my web site block access by user agent "feroxbuster", on the grounds that it's not a real person wanting to do something real, and then blacklist the IP address to block the follow-up probes for weird files with a different user agent, or isn't it worth the effort because they'll soon fix their user agent string?

What's with probing for <valid URL>/.env anyway?

Oh look, a new prime minister who promised devolution is actually delivering centralisation.

As expected.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8m0gxexl4o

OK, so it's taken me a while to work out the motivation for the American anti-vaxxer movement - the American health "care" industry makes far more money from treating a person with a disease than from just selling them a dose of vaccine.

Which has let me to wonder: are there other areas of preventative medicine which the American health "care" industry fights against, because cure (or, indeed, failed attempt to cure) makes more money than prevention? Is it for example the health "care" industry which is behind the drive to reduce food safety?