I've picked up a new hobby: fact-checking Instagram stories that careless friends send my way. The AI slop, the missing citations, the made-up sources and the willful misunderstandings, it's all there day after day. Sometimes it's a lie by omission, like removing the date from a seven-years-old article to make readers believe something terrible is happening. Sometimes it's a straight-up lie, prompting ChatGPT for controversial headlines supporting one culture war or another. As far as hobbies go, this one won't run out of steam anytime soon.

We may therefore agree that any talk about statistics on the media is tainted from the get-go, a point I must raise for you to believe what is to come, namely: that there are two statistics so unbelievable (as in, I didn't believe them at first) that, once I had no choice but to begrudgingly accept them, changed the way in which I see the world and the human cost of doing what we're doing.

The one about why we are screwed

The first one is straightforward: it's the number of deaths in Germany since 2020 for every single day, with 2026 plotted in red:

If you're a normal, cognitively-healthy adult who knows how to read a graph then you may have noticed the spike. If you live in Europe you may have also recognized that the spike corresponds to the latest heatwave. But let me throw a couple more numbers at you: the median number of deaths in Germany since 2001 is 2417 people, the median number of deaths for June 29 is 2305, and the number of deaths for June 29 2026 is 4832 -- that is, more than two thousand extra deaths on this single day and outpacing any day during the pandemic. Once we add all of June into the mix we reach an excess of five thousand heat-related deaths, a development called "virtually impossible" without human-induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

I want to believe I'm not an idiot (evidence notwithstanding) and I won't pretend that I didn't know about global warming. But getting the confirmation that we no longer need to measure it exclusively in degrees Celsius or CO2 particles, but now also in bodies (if you want Freedom Units, the proper conversion is 1.7 September 11s) has been a sobering realization.

The one about why the new generation is also screwed

The second graph is harder to track down - I don't know when I saw its first version and, since its results have been replicated, it's hard for me to know which one is the original.

This may have been the first one I saw. It depicts the number of hospitalizations for self-harm across teenage girls in the US since 2001 for self-harm:

But nowadays I prefer this one from The Economist showing percentage changes in suicide rates in 17 nations:

Unlike the previous case, this time the discussion is muddier because no one knows exactly what is driving teenage girls and young women to suicide and, out of the likeliest culprits, the ones on top are major multinationals with an iron grip on our societal discourse. The evidence may point to social media and phones being a deadly combination (a point I agree with) but, just like cigarettes before, the companies behind them will have to be dragged kicked and screaming before they even pretend to accept their role, much less their fault.

I understand that the discourse around social media bans for teenagers is tricky, and both sides have good points made in good faith. But my take is simple: we are standing on the bodies of young women, we haven't done anything, and we are running out of ideas. As far as I'm concerned, staying silent is no longer an option.

Honorable mention

While not as life-changing as the previous two, this graph of the global average temperature predictions made by Exxon in 1982 lives rent-free in my head as an example of "anyone who believes oil companies saying there is no human-made global warming is not a normal, cognitively-healthy adult who knows how to read a graph".

The German job market in 2026 is, roughly speaking, hell. So in addition to the usual venues I've been sending my profile to HackerNews' "Who wants to be hired" thread.

The rules of the thread are fairly simple:

Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here.

Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.

As expected, all but one (arguably two) of the replies I got are spam:

• AI Cover letter writing service: let me be clear: cover letters are, with very few exceptions, bullshit. But it takes a certain type of personality to think that the solution to "every 'AI cover letter' tool churning slop" is... to make a new AI cover letter tool to churn slop.
• AI Resume Tech: I don't understand what this letter wants to say or what they do. Apparently my CV is a "portfolio-only read", which is surprising because I don't have a portfolio in there.
• Be a face for a foreign developer (received twice): I knew this was going on, but I was nonetheless surprised that it was offered to me. If you're not up to date, the trick is that you act as the face of a foreign spy developer -- you show up in meetings, they do the technical work, and you both split the salary 40/60. What happens to the company whose infrastructure is open to some unkown foreign developer is left as an exercise to the reader. Here's a hint.
• Weird spam with no link
• Buy a home spam
• Join our API Hackathon and win $35k: apparently it is no longer enough to pass an interview - if you want to be hired you need to join a hackathon, build someone else's API, and only then you may be considered for a role.
• Job recommendation service: few things say "here's your zero noise list" as an unrequested list of jobs that don't fit my profile.
• Crypto-native talent network: the biggest surprise for me was to find out that, apparently, we are still doing blockchain in 2026.
• Someone who isn't even trying
• Someone who is trying really hard: from one guy who can't be bothered to learn about encodings to another one who wants to build an entire market. Perhaps I should put the previous guy in touch with this one.
• Actual, non-spam job offer: they didn't reply to my follow-up e-mail but at least they were on topic.
• Job recommendation service with recruiter referral code: I thought that job agencies weren't allowed to contact me at all but a deeper read of the rules reveals that this is technically not true -- they cannot post in the thread but there's nothing about them mailing me directly. And since the link is to a job (not one that this person is hiring for but a job nonetheless) it technically qualifies as "work opportunity". A previous version of this article had this e-mail classified as spam, but I've since bumped it to "not what I wanted but ok".

I know this sounds really dumb but part of me was hoping that the HN crowd would be different to that of literally every other forum on the internet. At least just because I hoped it would be better doesn't mean that I'd be naive enough to post my personal e-mail address. Despite all the noise I still find it mildly amusing to receive e-mails from bots that think my name is "Probably".

More than a decade ago on my first trip to the US I bought a Kindle DX, an almost-A4-sized e-book reader that followed me through multiple countries, homes, and commutes. We were off to a rocky start when I slipped on the ice and fell breaking the screen in the process, but I got a free replacement that I've been using ever since¹.

I never used most of its functionalities - all I wanted was an e-book reader that I could load via USB with a big enough e-paper screen on which to read papers and comics in PDF format, and on that front my Kindle DX delivered like no other. I cannot speak to its audiobook-playing capacities nor 3G capabilities because, frankly, I never cared.

I kept the device in surprisingly good condition for a long time, with the only obvious problem being its micro USB port becoming progressively weaker as the years went by. So imagine my surprise when, about a month ago, my Kindle stopped working altogether regardless of a full battery and a still-working port. I tried all reset procedures I knew and I even exchanged its battery, but it is time for me to accept that the device is dead or, at least, beyond my skills to revive it. Whether its demise is related to me reading Careless people at the time remains an unanswered question.

I am currently deciding what to do with the remaining pieces. There seems to be exactly one project focused on controlling these screens and it's not precisely a friendly one, but I'm not in a rush to get it done. I will be needing a replacement, though, but whether it will be a second-hand Kindle DX or something else I cannot say. The smaller form factor of modern devices is mildly intriguing, but then I would also have to get a tablet for reading comics and that feels like a waste of money.

Goodbye, Martin's 2nd Kindle (as it was called). I wish you would have told me that you were close to the end so I could have saved, if not the books themselves, at least the bookmarks. And I would have had time to get replacement reading before my holidays, not to mention the 30€ I spent on a new battery. I guess now I'll never know whether it was MOBI or ePUB that I was supposed to use as ebook format, or at least not without consulting Wikipedia. I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere.

Footnotes

1. While the Ship of Theseus school of thought would argue that this is not the same device, the Japanese school would argue the opposite - if you haven't seen it, this anecdote from Douglas Adams' "Last Chance to See" gives a good summary.

After spending the holidays with my family I am once again reminded of the need for a computer with dedicated hardware for seniors. Whenever we talk about parents and tech we picture an old woman wearing a shawl trying to operate a computer that's turned off, and that's unfair: the problem is not that my mom doesn't understand how a mouse works (she does) but rather that her OS keeps moving things around, breaking the muscle memory on which she relies after losing her eyesight. And while a younger person would rely on accessibility software like the Orca screen reader, all my mom wants is to keep doing what she already knows.

My mom's computer needs are modest: listening to audiobooks, podcasts, voice notes, and getting reliable, repeatable answers to simple questions. Under her current setup only the first two are painless (relatively speaking) while the last two are impossible. Case in point: listening to an audiobook (that I download for her in a shared folder) requires turning on her computer, wait for the screen reader, press the Windows key, type "books", press Enter, Esc, Alt-Tab, scroll down to the right book, Enter, Ctrl+G, enter a page number, Enter, Esc, and finally Insert+Arrow Down, at which point the screen reader will finally read the book from the given page number.

One may think that a voice interface would be the solution, but our experiences have been mixed: while good for listening and replying to messages, asking Siri a question on her really-not-cheap iPhone ends up with Siri replying "I found this, take a look" (not the best phrasing, but whatever) and then performing an equally-complex series of swipes and clicks after which, more often than not, my mom gives up and asks whoever is around. Alexa isn't any better, alternating between misunderstanding our questions and trying to sell us premium apps.

The problem here is that my mom is expected to adapt to the technology instead of the other way around. What she needs is a simple device with roughly five customizable physical buttons (touchscreens are out for obvious reasons), two knobs, mic and speakers, and nothing else. One knob would select a function (list books, list audiobooks, list notes, etc), the other would control the volume, the buttons would depend on the current function (play and pause for podcasts, next page for audiobooks, and so on), and that's it. Connect the box to the WiFi (config provided via a file in the SD card) and we're good to go.

I know I can write the software for such a device, but the hardware is trickier. The input buttons are straightforward, the knobs less so, I have ideas for handling the mic, and the enclosure would be 3D printed. The OS would be Linux with remote access for troubleshooting, and all that's left is the two hundred unexpected tiny issues that always pop up. And then there's the question of whether a joystick wouldn't be a better choice...

I'm not saying I'll find the time to do it, but I'm definitely thinking about it.

I wrote my last post in November 2024, which is a lot. Unlike other dry spells (seven months in 2017 and six months in 2019), this one was not because I forgot about the blog but because I have a severe writing block due to, you guessed it, AI.

I receive lots of bot traffic every day — way more, I suspect, than actual human readers. That's usually not a problem because I think of this blog as a message in a bottle, drifting lazily through the oceans until one day someone finds it by chance, reads it and thinks "yeah, VGA cables are indeed cool". But AI changes the equation — if for every human I reach there are one hundred bots, then all I'm effectively doing is creating AI training data for free.

I used to think that the terms under which I release this content (Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0) would help: the "ShareAlike" terms give you permission to share and adapt my ideas, but only as long as you give proper attribution and distribute the result under the same license. This is all well and good until you learn that AI companies have decided that they can use all content ever created under a "fair use" policy, licenses be damned and sell you the results without even attributting the original author (let's not even think about compensation).

Much more talented people than me have given their reasons for why they think this whole situation is a travesty — Dorothy Gambrell, the creator Cat and Girl has made an eloquent case for why AI feels so much like theft and Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade has made comics like this one, this other one and this third one. None of those texts include the word "fucking assholes", though, but that's understandable. My version does, though.

Social problems cannot be solved with technology, but given the limited amount of power I have I will have to make do with the technology I have. I have decided to implement a three-step process:

1. Add all known AI crawlers to my robots.txt file and restrict them to the PR part of this website (who I am, what I do, publications). Everything else is off-limits.
2. Add some AI protection — I like the spirit behind Anubis but I may end up sticking to a combination of Apache's mod_evasive and Fail2Ban.
3. If all that fails, a Tarpit for particularly misbehaved bots. How to generate an infinite maze of URLs for cheap is an interesting problem to think about, and one that I've started working on.

One of my personal goals has always been to make this website as quick to load as possible, which rules out captchas of any kind. A Proof-of-Work solution like the above-mentioned Anubis can work, but that remains to be seen. Other measures are less drastic, with the simplest one being that I'll try and get at least one curse per post. The reasons for this are complex enough that they deserve their own post, so stay tuned.