hermitcrab

Castles come up for sale fairly regularly in the UK. They are (generally) relatively inexpensive to buy, but ruinously expensive to renovate and maintain.

They have also completely omitted the entire chain of 'Palmerston's folly' Forts built around Portsmouth harbour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmerston_Forts

Castles became star forts, with stone/brick augmented with massive amount of earth. These were relatively effective against artillery into the 20th century.

I suspect the Mongols destroyed a lot of Asian castles and city fortifications. They never made it to Japan.

Which is why advertisers used to pay much more to advertising in paid magazines, than free ones.

The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.

Would be interested to hear how much you were paying per click, if you feel like sharing.

Click prices are only ever likely to rise.

In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?

I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?

Both require a lot of refining, before they are any use. ;0)

Interesting summary. I'm surprised you didn't mention any desktop ETL tools (such as Alteryx, Knime, Easy Data Transform).

"Ah, but that's different!" I was told when I asked some Spanish people about the apparent hypocrisy of Spanish enclaves.

I get this on both FF and Chrome.

A vague article.

With one sentence per line.

Most annoying.

Fun. Maybe you could add some random features for a bit more variety. Shallows, islands, fog banks etc.

Well done to the journalist that uncovered this. Makes a change from copying and pasting press releases that many 'journalists' seem to do these days (partly because journalist organizations have been so hollowed out by Facebook et al).

Are not ~all flags made to express unity?

Usually the unity of some humans against other humns.

Someone made a flag to express unity and we've just all come here to argue about it. How very human.

I remember seeing something similar to https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/capitals/. But the areas were weighted by the populations of the capitals. You ended up with something quite close to real political maps IIRC.

Some people look great bald. Some don't. I am in the latter group, so I'm hoping not to go bald! If I do, I will probably buy a beret.

Will the complex apps be discoverable though

That is the real issue. How to get noticed in a sea of slop.

The appeal to me of raising chickens for eggs is not having to slaughter them,

Doing that in your backyard with a few chickens sounds great.

but reality is much uglier than that, of course.

Much uglier at any sort of commercial scale.

And we've all seen what happened at Boeing when the MBAs and spreadsheet jockeys took over from the engineers.

I feel we are engaged in the same race to the bottom in the UK, although it is not as extreme as it is in the US. One of the few constraining factors in the UK is that our car parking spaces are generally quite small and no-one wants to buy something they can't park anywhere.

Why a chicken farm? The medium to large scale ones I have seen videos of look like terrible places, for both the chickens and the human workers. I expect they smell even worse.

I've been programming for ~50 years and I still like it. When I retire I will probably do some recreational programming.

I was planning to write a book about how to start and run a small software business (which I have been doing for 20 years), but things are changing so fast recently that I am starting to feel a bit of a dinosaur and I'm not sure anyone would be interested.

I'm less worried about being 'outcompeted' by clankers than the possibility that AI slop products become so numerous that it is almost impossible to get noticed.

Same here. I am maintaining and enhancing several 100k of C++ I have written over 20 years. I use MS Copilot to write little snippets now and then. But I always modify them to fit my own style. It is challenging enough to navigate and understand all that code without letting an AI loose on it.

How would you train a system like this? Presumably you are going to need quite a few subjects of each ethnicity. Where are you going to find these people? You can't use asylum seekers, as you can't be sure about their real age.

Hadn't seen that before. Bloody marvellous.