Post-migration, I knew some jobs were left untouched. Not because of the amount of work involved — again, I don’t think the workload has meaningfully increased. For the first project afterward, I wanted to focus on a part of the website I hadn’t touched in a while: analytics.
Tagged AI
To Self-Host or Not To Self-Host, Migrating with AI Pt. 4
No doubt the idea of complete control of a blog at $10 a year would be appealing for many. And no doubt many would share the same concerns as I do. During the planning phase, some of the definitive downgrades I was able to come to terms with, some of the regained controls I was able to make use of, and the saved cost I was ready to file under an existing list of subscriptions. I believe there are three major concerns most bloggers may have: uptime, support, and technical debt to AI.
The Part Where I Pay, Migrating with AI Pt. 3
The plan finished baking. Reviewed, revised, the whole nine yards. I wasn’t going to execute the plan myself; I wanted to automate it as well. The only decision left was how.
Between Cost of Hosting and Effort of Self-Hosting, Migrating with AI Pt. 2
Starting a blog doesn’t cost money. At least that’s how I started back in the 2000s, and free platforms are still around. Intermediary platforms came along in the 2010s, giving some control back to bloggers or sharing the ad revenue. The way out of it all, ever since the term weblog was coined, was to run it yourself — either on a machine from a paid hosting service or on your own home server. The question was price and effort.
The Day Hosting Failed Me, Migrating with AI Pt. 1
Mad Tea Party was down for 24+ hrs. A datacenter problem. I’m not arguing a professional hosting service should have zero downtime. Failure itself is expected. Reliability is what happens after it. A full day of downtime is one full business day lost, and a good hosting service should be judged not only on physical performance, but on clear communication during a sudden failure and reasonable effort to reduce it.
AI “Hacked” Unsecured Gym Booking System
A classic mystery submission from Australia: a man asked an OpenClaw agent to book him into a gym class. It booked classes weeks further ahead than the gym policy allowed, then canceled a stranger’s reservation to move him up the waitlist. Every outlet ran it as an AI going rogue. Almost none noted this has always been doable with wetware. All it ever needed was intent.
“Ethical Concern” is AI Dunce Cap
Storage is at an all-time premium nowadays, with even the price of SSDs and HDDs being affected by AI craze. As much as I would love to say ‘rip the discs raw’, there is bound to be a real world limit on how much storage I can secure for a self-hosted media server. My search for encoding these raws led me to looking for configurations used by others, and for what it’s worth, their activity could easily translate into online piracy. Claude shut down the conversation immediately, citing my query as equivalent to looking for a black-market arms dealer.
App to Stop YouTube AI-Translation via User script
I had covered this issue before using a dedicated add-on on browsers. While it worked, there were two problems, at least in my opinion: a. it’s a separate app just for one website, b. it’s not available on iOS. Granted, I was not able to find a universal user script that works on both platforms, but tweaking it takes little to no effort as most of the script can be edited by the user.
How AI Hallucination Affects You
The hallucination in AI, or LLM hallucination, is real. I have read some op-eds and online discussions whether or not hallucinations affect real world use cases — average users making mundane queries. I was on the side of “garbage in, garbage out” camp; hallucination is an expected side effect of the algorithm, and it is up to the user to double check the answers. Now I am wondering if it merits double checking at all.
Coding with Gemini was Fun Short-Lived
During my migration from Pi to NAS via all things Docker, one of the problems I immediately faced was how I was going to handle my aging databases. All these eBooks, magazines, articles, and etc. I have accumulated since high school had to go somewhere. I know there would be some people shouting I should simply throw them out like the 90s memorabilia in the attic. But I took this on as my personal DIY project.
Shopping with Gemini Fixes Broken E-commerce
I’ve been using a counter top oven for all manners of baked goods. The one installed in the wall is a convection microwave which only mimics the function of a standard oven; it’s a story for another time why I stopped using it for baking. Regardless, the counter top oven is significantly smaller than ordinary ovens used in home kitchens or otherwise. It doesn’t even fit a full sized baking sheet, let alone stack them to bake multiple items.
Ads on ChatGPT
As a home baker, one of the most frequent accusations thrown at content creators I see — gadget reviewers, recipe authors, or just plainly writing about baking experiences — is their transparency: ties to the manufacturer, ties to the brands, ties to the producers, and so on. It boils down to a simple question — whether or not the content was sponsored behind the scenes. Those were the problems we had with human content creators with legal liability, not AI giants with an army of lawyers.
AI Spams and Comment Moderation
Many websites have some common unwritten rules on comment moderation — most common of which is locking or closing comments after certain duration. I believe Reddit has it at 6 months, under some of the news articles they have it at 14 days, and some chatting-like discussions, they keep it tight at 48 hours. The Mad Tea Party is now closing comments (Trackbacks and others still work) after 30 days.
Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini, and AI Models
Bloomberg reported Apple is in talk with Google to use custom version of Gemini in the Apple’s servers, named “Private Cloud Compute”. If the deal goes through, Apple would have a default AI model for Apple Intelligence as a service. In all likelihood, it also means Apple would keep many of the AI related features on iOS and macOS to be replaceable by other models or services, much akin to how App Store is reshaping now.
AI Translation Poisoning Search Results
If you have been plagued by the recent YouTube’s AI dubbing, video title and description, that’s the kind of problems that is happening across all Google platform. I am talking about the Google Search results. And believe me when I say it, when I google something in Korean, I expect it to pick up Korean articles, posts, and threads so that it may be useful in the particular context.