If you've heard of Duck Duck Go, you know that it has hung its hat on your privacy, whereas Google has prioritized company profits. I've been moving my search more and more over to Duck Duck Go, and one big relief from my end is that DDG does believe that this blog exists:
I even got ahead of the AI Context Parallelism blog. From August 12, 2026.
That makes me feel pretty good to know that both Bing and DDG know I exist. Alas, Google still thinks I'm a figment of people's imagination:
As of August 12, 2026.
Their AI doesn't even have the correct blog, much less a direct entry to it. Thanks to Atheren for referencing me at least that one time, which is how Google knows there might be something there.
And for completeness, here's Bing's results:
As of August 12, 2026.
Funny how the graphic they have there is a pretty old one about Mass Effect, but hey, at least I'm at the top of the search results.
I've kind of given up trying to understand why the supposed "best search engine evah" can't find a blog that's been around since 2009 and has over 1800 published posts. I guess they want money from me to suddenly "improve" my search results --I know that Bing does-- which would effectively turn Google into the 2020's version of Yahoo. You know, that's not exactly a comparison I'd be proud of if I were Google.
I will say this about AI: it's driven me to learning a new programming language for the first time in 30 years.
In O'Reilly We Trust, which I guess makes me an old fart (tm).
I know Python has been around since the early 90s, but when I was learning Perl and C++ in the mid-90s for my then software QA job, it seemed to have no really big use for me. In the late 90s Java was the new hotness --despite how crappy the memory leaks were-- and Python only really took off in the 2000s when my job utilized Perl and shell scripting, so... Python wasn't needed.
And now, with Claude Code from Anthropic being the new thing, I have to learn Python so I can perform proper code reviews when necessary. Apologies to all of those YouTube sponsorships from Boot.Dev, but I'm going to learn it how I taught myself Perl: reading a book published by O'Reilly* and figuring it out myself. I might not have code to review, but I'm sure that'll be how I'll end up learning it: by looking at code to see what it does and whether it does what we want it to do.
So... thanks, AI?
But could you at least have given me an extra year of puttering around with amateur radio before you exploded like you have in 2026?
*Mine was Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz, 1993. Yes, the First Edition:
Here it is in all it's glory. It's still holding up fairly well for a well-loved 30 year old book.
Yesterday was pretty wild here for non-gaming reasons.
From the livestormchasers.com Instagram feed for August 11, 2026.
There were a about 3 or 4 of what I'll charitably call F0 or F1 tornadoes in that line of storms that hit us last afternoon --including one just across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky-- but my neighborhood was missed. One tornado was a couple of miles south of us, another a couple of miles north of us.
And really, you don't need a tornado to do some massive damage. This is what happened to a gas station in Brown County, Ohio, a couple of counties to the east of Hamilton County (where I live):
We lost some vinyl siding on our house, but luckily for us it landed across the street completely intact. That's relatively so, because it slammed into their front door before flopping to the ground. (I'm still not sure how it stayed intact.) I ought to be able to put it back into place when the roof over the garage dries out and I can safely get up there to put it back. We got extremely lucky overall, with only that damage, whereas our neighbors had chimney caps torn off, trees toppled, and debris crashing into the side of their houses, damaging the siding. There has also been downed trees, power lines, and even in the Columbus area (the central part of the state) a car driving on the I-71 interstate was flipped over by the winds that hit them in the late morning.
As for us, a tree toppled across I-71 here in Cincinnati and crashed into a truck that had the bad luck to be driving by.
Before you ask, yes the two of us are both fine, and my son who lives on the east side of Cincinnati was fine as well. My wife was at work, and they closed up the store and ushered everybody --employees and customers-- into the fire safety corridor, which was the safest part of the building. They were there for 45 minutes, but outside of hearing the noise from the storms they had no idea what was going on.
As for me, I had a doctor's appointment earlier in the afternoon and got home in time before the storms hit. When the sirens went off I turned on the news, and when WLWT's Meteorologist Kevin Robinson said for my immediate area to head for shelter something slammed into our back door, picked up by the wind, and I scampered to the basement and stayed there until the worst of it passed.
So yeah, gaming hasn't exactly been on my mind this evening.
This intersection is 2 miles from my home as the crow flies. And no, that's not mountains; That's clouds and rain. From Steve Bowling via WCPO.
Even though I didn't play much on the Anniversary servers the past week, when I did play I had a good time grouping with people to run some instances. If you're used to pseudo-random groups* being completely silent during instance runs, then the runs I was involved with last week were anything but that.
Yes, yes, I know, I can be chatty when I'm in a group and someone breaks the ice, but this time around I was far from the most active in any of the groups. When I was on Joan, that didn't come as a surprise because inevitably someone would comment on the name "Joanofdark", but when I ran as Neve on the Horde side there was another chatty person far more interested in social connections than I was in her dungeon runs.
What struck me the most last week, however, were the number of people who mentioned to me at the end of the run that they'd added me to their Friends List. In all of the cases, they mentioned that in addition to a smooth run they had a good time just hanging out with me. As I told one of my friends group later, "It's amazing how not being an asshole works out."
Hey, why is everybody looking at me? From Memedroid and Dogeloaf using the OG 'Scooby Doo, Where Are You?' cartoon.
There are times when it feels like being nice to people in an MMO is an exercise in futility, but last week proved to me that there are still people who prize a good connection in an MMO over other things. I have no idea what the rest of this week will be like, but you never know.
*The LFD automated queue finder doesn't exist on the WoW Classic Anniversary servers. Instead, it's a semi-random process where your name gets thrown up along with everybody else who is looking for people for a group, and it's up to you or another person to actually assemble the group based on what person you want. Some classes (Mage, Protection Paladin) have an easier time of finding groups than others.
I have been wrestling with a household issue that is both annoying, frustrating, and vexing: fire alarms.
About 2 years ago, our long running fire alarm in the hallway at the top of the stairs started going off for no good reason. I cleaned it off, reset it, and a couple of days later it would go off again. I sighed, went down to Lowe's, and discovered that they didn't carry any of the battery operated fire alarms anymore. They had wired fire alarms and fire alarms with a sealed battery in them that were supposedly good for 10 years, and that was it. So I picked up one of the 10-year alarms and installed it.
A few months later THAT alarm started going off at random times, so I grumbled and got a replacement. Finally, we had some peace and that alarm behaved as it should: only going off when I actually tested it with smoke.
So, that was how things stayed until about 3 months ago, when that alarm started going on the fritz. I reset it, cleaned and dusted around it, and it stopped the random behavior.
Until a couple of days ago.
This time around, I decided that I was done with these First Alert fire alarms misbehaving so I went to Home Depot to see if they had other brands.
Sure enough, they had the Kidde brand instead of First Alert*, and whaddya know, there were AA battery operated fire alarms available in addition to the 10 year sealed models. And they were a LOT cheaper, so I picked one up and just installed it about 1/2 hour ago.
I don't know if enshittification has hit something so basic --yet so critical-- as fire alarms, but if they start asking for subscriptions for these things I think I know the answer.
*Back when we first moved into our house Home Depot had First Alert, then they switched to Firex, and in 2009 Kidde bought Firex out and the brand name changed to Kidde. Go figure. Lowes wasn't in our area at the time, so I have no idea what they carried back then.
I was watching this video from Gameranx about the potential Sony PS6 launch being in a perfect storm of problems, and it got me to thinking.
This video was focusing on the console itself, but the shortages affecting all parts of the computer industry will not only affect the next generation of consoles (and PCs), but the peripherals and monitors/televisions as well. When you get down to it, all electronic devices utilize memory and storage and processors to a greater or lesser degree, and the shortages across the industry will also impact the price of those devices too.
Looking to upgrade your television to a 4K or 8K version to take advantage of the new capabilities of the PS6? It'll cost more.* Need a decent sound bar? That'll cost more too. How about a new headset or controller? Yep, those will be hit by price increases as well.
Sure, RAM prices get all of the attention, and justifiably so, but it's not like they're alone in price increases. The data center boom is sucking up all available manufacturing capability to the point where components earmarked for the consumer market (or even the traditional business market) are put on the back burner. Don't be surprised if the lack of priority extends to manufacturing such as automobiles, commercial jets, and even items such as those damn Flock cameras.**
I do wonder whether the conspicuous consumption of electronics in general will grind to a halt given all the headwinds we're facing. Job losses, hardware shortages, software price hikes, economic uncertainty, and tariffs all combine to create a potential perfect storm to nuke consumer spending. Of course, a lot of these companies aren't interested in consumers, but the B2B market space that LLMs live in. The thing is, if people can't afford things, that will create a ripple effect backward through the economy, and the push to adopt LLMs will suddenly dry up when companies' bottom line becomes affected.
Gloomy thoughts for a Saturday, I suppose, but still I look at the short-sightedness of all of this behavior and think that there's going to be a lot of upset people in a couple of years.
**Just remember, when you buy a smart doorbell such as one made by Ring or Google (the Nest) and use a subscription to save "your data", it's really going to be deposited in one of these data centers. It may not be one utilized exclusively for AI usage, but it will be put in a data center. It's more a matter of "pick your poison". I'd personally consider a doorbell camera if it meant I could keep the data locally on a hard drive, but those that do (such as TP-Link) don't exactly give me warm fuzzies in terms of security.
***Well, a Friday as I was writing the bulk of this while sitting in yet another presentation about using LLMs to improve my output.
