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Posts by Matt C. A. Smith

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Kagi – a paid search engine that supports the small web | MattCASmith Before algorithmic bias and advertising took over, search felt different. Kagi is trying to take us back — stripping out ads and SEO spam, and actively promoting the small web that most engines quietl...

A more positive post this week! I was happy to run across @kagi.com, which not only offers a paid search engine free of ads and bias, but also runs an initiative to improve visiblity of small and independent websites.

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So used to defanging URLs at work that I instinctively went to add brackets when writing a domain down on paper.

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Microsoft's terms of use for Copilot now state that it is "for entertainment purposes only" and shouldn't be relied upon for important advice.

Meanwhile, it's forced Copilot into its productivity suite and airs adverts where it's used in high-powered business negotiations.

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Ah, this time it looks like Claude is actually down. Still, I've had to retry certain requests a fair bit in recent weeks.

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As well as the lower caps, I'm seeing "taking longer than usual" messages a lot more frequently in Claude conversations these days.

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Monologue: AI Isn't Too Big to Fail

I’ve been saying this for a while: AI is Uber in 2015. Investment will not flow at current rates forever. Barring some huge technical advancement, higher prices and lower limits will come. If AI is core to your products/workflows, that could spell trouble.

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Field Notes 9 // Museums, Facebook, and new Muse | MattCASmith An 18th Century plate that keeps returning to mind, Sarah Wynn-Williams' damning account of life inside Facebook, and new music from Muse that takes me back to summer nights in the 2000s.

I posted the new edition of Field Notes to the blog early this month, which is definitely a special Easter treat and not at all because I was too busy over the bank holiday weekend to finish my next blog post.

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Muse were fantastic last night at Brixton Academy, but the Ticketmaster saga just keeps on giving. I’ll write a blog post soon with the whole story, but it’s been incompetence and obfuscation at every turn.

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It’s likely this week’s blog post will be a PSA about Ticketmaster randomly cancelling tickets for “bot activity”. I support their aims, but ticketing for Friday’s Muse gig is a complete mess – many legit fans have lost their tickets at the last minute after making travel plans.

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F1's new regulations deliver spectacle without soul | MattCASmith F1's new rules have given us surface-level entertainment – but the racing feels artificial, the drivers are managing batteries instead of pushing limits, and its leaders seem reluctant to admit there'...

Three races in and I'm still unconvinced by F1's new regulations. Hoping its leadership uses the break before Miami to take stock – although short-term fixes may not be possible. #JapaneseGP #F1

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Your sign-up form is a weapon | Bytemash How bots used our sign-up and forgot password pages to bomb real people's inboxes, and what we did to stop it. A practical guide to subscription bombing for founders and developers who think CAPTCHA i...

Nice writeup on subscription bombing – a technique used by threat actors to spam users with signup emails so they miss something important in the noise, like a password reset notification.

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F1's new regulations deliver spectacle without soul | MattCASmith F1's new rules have given us surface-level entertainment – but the racing feels artificial, the drivers are managing batteries instead of pushing limits, and its leaders seem reluctant to admit there'...

Three races in and I'm still unconvinced by F1's new regulations. Hoping its leadership uses the break before Miami to take stock – although short-term fixes may not be possible. #JapaneseGP #F1

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This is the kind of update that would have consumed an entire weekend in years gone by.

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Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494
Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494 YouTube video by Lex Fridman

The interview comes with a healthy dose of PR sheen, but provides some interesting insights.

3 weeks ago 0 0 0 0
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More seriously, the challenges he discusses in implementing the compute required for AI are interesting.

Huang says he has 60+ direct reports – experts in power, memory, cooling, networking… All the supporting functions that enable that sort of processing across many computers.

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“The problem no longer fits inside one computer, to be accelerated by one GPU,” says Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a company whose objective is to sell as many GPUs as possible in perpetuity.

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The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was …

RollerCoaster Tycoon was famously written in Assembly, but it’s rare to hear much more detail.

So this is a fascinating look at how technical limitations influenced its gameplay, even touching details as small as whether a guest has bought a map.

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A €1 billion deal, according to the FT. Amazing to see Huel hit those figures – I know the pre-mix hit supermarkets in recent years, but it always felt like a niche thing that happened to gain traction in a SOC I worked in circa 2018.

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Just got an email to say Huel is being acquired by Danone. No immediate changes to subscriptions, but I’ve seen enough acquisitions in my time not to trust that over the long term.

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Enshittified football needs its Steve Jobs moment | MattCASmith Elite football clubs are being run down by the same model of enshittification that ruined tech products. Owners, safe in the knowledge they have a captive audience, prioritise profits over sporting su...

We can only hope the revenue hit from no European football next season will finally make BlueCo realise their model doesn’t work.

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Enzo Maresca has come out of this mess looking really good, huh? Binning him and hiring Rosenior were two gigantic missteps. #EVECHE #CFC

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Nvidia's DLSS 5 swaps artistic vision for AI guesswork | MattCASmith By redrawing every frame of gameplay using AI, Nvidia's new DLSS 5 technology makes assumptions about what your games should look like and overrides the developers' creative vision in favour of hyperr...

Nvidia says DLSS 5 is the best thing since ray tracing – "the GPT moment for graphics" – but graphics alone don't make great games.

When AI redraws frames, it makes assumptions about how games should look and overrides developers' creative decisions.

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An old friend was in town, so made an occasion of it and enjoyed some top-tier steak and wine tonight.

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Genius developers, a million frameworks, and AI coding agents… and my success rate sorting tables in SaaS tools is 50 percent.

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Modern games are so poorly optimised that a good graphics card already isn't enough to hit decent frame rates. But now we're going to waste some of that processing power to have AI guess what things should look like?

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Every so often I look at tech I take for granted and realise how amazing it would have seemed in 2010. Today it’s being able to hand off a podcast I’m listening to between Spotify on my PC and iPhone.

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Thoroughly recommend that you read the full piece here: craigmod.com/essays/softw...

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Loved @craigmod.com’s essay about how he vibe coded accounting software for his unique use case.

That’s where I see AI’s potential – not replacing professional devs making commercial software where everything must be secure and polished. Building little tools for an audience of one.

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