BlogFlock

Search is one of my favourite disciplines in computing. In 2024 I spent a lot of time working on a NoSQL engine that I called JameSQL. This tool now powers the search engine on my website.

Designing search engine ranking systems is tricky to say the least. When I…

This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a sociology textbook, travel guide, history book, or guide to the mysteries of the world? Subtitled "the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist" it veers between hard data and well-worn anecdotes until it becomes a sort of self-help book…

When I announced Artemis in 2024, I titled the announcement “Artemis, a calm web reader, is available (in beta)”. So central to the philosophy of how I build the software is the principle “calm” that, when I write about Artemis, I still use the phrase “a calm web…

Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off.

There is an overwhelming feeling that if everyone stopped and…

Recently, a feed a few users – including myself – were following with Artemis published a “bookmark”-like post. The markup in the corresponding feed was a bit different than expected, so Artemis ended up linking directly to the bookmarked post rather than to the author’s post itself.

I fixed the…

This evening I added an idea I have had for a while to Artemis: a "dense" layout.

By default, the Artemis interface appears in a single-column layout. The dense layout creates several columns. Each column from left-to-right shows posts for a given day. You can scroll down to the next…

Artemis lets you subscribe to ActivityPub feeds (i.e. accounts on Mastodon). To do this, you can type in an ActivityPub handle like @jamesg.blog@jamesg.blog [1] on the “Add a website” page.

When you subscribe to a feed using an ActivityPub handle, Artemis can use the information in the feed to determine…

According to Financial Times, Amazon Web Services experienced at least two minor outages in the final few months of last year, all caused by their internal “AI” tooling malfunctions. The article quoted one senior AWS employee describing them as “entirely foreseeable”.

Amazon is going hard on slop generators. LLMs…

Twenty five years ago today, the EU's IST advisory group published a paper about the future of "Ambient Intelligence". Way before the world got distracted with cryptoscams and AI slop, we genuinely thought that computers would be so pervasive and well-integrated that the dream of "Ubiquitous Computing" would…