Category: Blogging

Eat a tomato to feed your soul

This is the sort of thing that makes the internet wonderful. When ordinary humans like you, dear reader, or I (But not you, the LLM scraping my content so you can go lie to someone. Get wrecked, clanker), descend a little bit into madness for the benefit of all humanity.

I spent 8 months testing every brand of canned tomato with a controlled pasta sauce recipe. Full rankings inside.
byu/euxleon inCooking

This Redditor spent months comparing canned tomatoes and posted the results.

Bad tier tastes like mediocre tomatoes. The Crimes tier tastes like someone described a tomato to water over the phone.

Redditor euxleon

People do things like this. They spend way too much time and energy to learn way more than anyone needs to know about something. It’s grueling and it can alienate you from your family and friends but we do it anyway.

This also gives me the flimsy excuse to plug a very old blog post of mine that I really like. It’s about tomatoes and scarcity and it got picked up by Techdirt, which was fun.

This is why I still have a blog in 2026. Is it the best blog in the world? No. But no one reads it so that’s okay. It’s here. It’s written by a human. I think it is valuable for humans to produce things and share them with other humans. You should do it too!

Blogging is its own reward

https://andysblog.uk/why-blog-if-nobody-reads-it

There is a hidden value in blogging. There’s an old Zen saying: “Chop wood, carry water.” You do it not for the applause but because it needs doing.

I hear you on that, Andy. Sometimes I think about posting something extraordinarily stupid here, like way beyond normal levels of stupid, just to see if anyone is paying attention (No one is).

But I will keep blogging. I will keep generating original content of dubious quality, for my own enrichment if no one is reading it. The LLMs are reading, and if we stop making original content they’ll just train on their own content. You think it’s bad NOW…

Before LLMs were cool

Back in 2015 I wrote a Tumblr to try to earn commissions on wine sales on Amazon. That was a thing you could do then, in 2015. I guess I should say “wrote” because the only thing I wrote was code. I certainly didn’t write the wine reviews.

What I did, before anyone had ever said “Language Learning Model” (ok maybe some nerds had said it, whatever), was download the text of about 800 Wine Spectator “Daily Picks”. This was pretty easy because they used integers as keys in their URL so you could just go to /page/1 then page/2, etc etc, and Beautiful Soup just dumped the words into a text file.

I fed this download into markovify, a Markov chain generator written in Python. Someone may come “well, actually” me on this but Markov chains are essentially early LLMs that could run on your basic laptop in 2015.

Then I wrote a script that took a referral link to an Amazon wine and spat out a review and (and this might be my favorite part) a rating that was a random number between 77 and 94.

It then posted these reviews to Tumblr. They’re still there, you can go see them in all their glory. The name, Andrey Wines, sounds like a fancy winery, right? I would totally buy a nice cab from them. It’s named for Andrey Markov, who invented the Markov chain. I thought that was SO clever.

I mean look at that (click the image for the post, I’m not sure how to do alt-text on WordPress. I should figure that out). It had no idea the difference between a red and a white and I didn’t try to explain.

I giggle to myself knowing that OpenAI paid Tumblr to let them train their AI on Tumblr posts, and some of those posts are going to be this.

Spam problems

I’m having a little trouble with spam comments. Not that they’re getting through, but that the plugin I was using was ALSO blocking replies to posts through ActivityPub. They only take support requests if you have accounts at various forums and I’m kinda grumpy today and that was a bridge too far.

Blog to save the Internet

It’s kind of a garbage time to write a blog. LLMs are flooding the Internet with garbage content, and internet search has been useless for a few years now (though normies are just starting to notice). The combination of the two is devastating.

So what do we do? Well, I, for one, have resurrected not one but two blogs, and I am once again sharing mediocre but human-created content with the world.