Category Archives: Internet

A few thoughts on AI (and a bit of history)

Posted on Monday, 14. July 2025 by hmvh

While benign and belligerent robots and machines have existed since the dawn of science fiction, it was about ten years ago that I had some sort of epiphany and gradually began saving and/or bookmarking various online articles about artificial intelligence following recent worrisome developments in that field: chatbots were showing signs of coherent speech, Boston Dynamics’ robots had started doing backflips and parkour — but it was demonstrations of autonomous weapons systems that I took particular issue with. I wanted to keep the articles as “evidence” and “for future reference” — such as for essays like this one, and to backtrack how we got to where we are now. Continue reading →

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20 years of Discogs

Posted on Monday, 24. June 2024 by hmvh

I’ve been a member of discogs.com for two decades. Today, Discogs sees mention in publications like Forbes, the Financial Times, the Guardian or the New York Times — although mostly in connection with its marketplace and the items that sell for ludicrous amounts — but not necessarily always in a good light. A higher profile comes at the cost of attracting scammers, spammers, fraudsters and hackers who have taken to targeting the site for their own malicious needs. Complaints from buyers about not receiving the exact version or in the advertised condition as well as fee hikes due to post-pandemic inflation now make the biggest waves. Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday, Flickr!

Posted on Sunday, 18. February 2024 by hmvh

Flickr turned 20 years old last weekend. While it may have lost some of its original lustre in recent years, Flickr was, is, and remains one of the prime sites for amateur and professional photographers alike. My recent photo digitisation project made me rediscover Flickr in a manner akin to meeting an old friend who had recently beaten cancer. Flickr has, meanwhile, returned to its core audience of enthusiasts and professional photographers after it was “saved” from the clueless clutches of corporate greed by a small operation named SmugMug. Continue reading →

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Webris, netsam and the demise of Flash

Posted on Friday, 4. December 2020 by hmvh

“Webris and netsam” is a term I use to describe material and debris left over by internet-related tasks — you know, the kind of stuff you download during a specific project and hold on to in case you might need it later or because it’s too good to delete. Continue reading →

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Offline, online, offline, online

Posted on Wednesday, 11. November 2020 by hmvh

No sooner had the ink of the previous post dried did the blog go offline for a day — at least that’s what the alert message said. A day later it came back, and then it went down again for three days. That was in August. And that was just the beginning of my troubles. Continue reading →

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Meta blogging

Posted on Thursday, 6. August 2020 by hmvh

Any housekeeping writing about how it’s been a while since you’ve written, or how you changed some obscure part of your blog, doesn’t tend to age very well and is seldom particularly compelling in retrospect. The exception are genres like technical or design blogs, where the meta is part of the message. But certainly the world doesn’t need any more “sorry I haven’t written in a while” posts. Continue reading →

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Something is weird about YouTube

Posted on Monday, 4. November 2019 by hmvh

“YouTube’s algorithm is easy to game. It’s a system that rewards creators for figuring out what works, and then doing that same thing over and over again.” Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday!

Posted on Monday, 9. September 2019 by hmvh

Here’s another anniversary. This site, hmvhDOTnet, is ten years old. Having an own site (read: domain and hosting space) has been a dream since I first ventured online. It’s the culmination of several past projects, current interests, and future endeavours. It’s my man cave where I get to share old geek stuff and express random thoughts and conspiracies with near-reckless abandon to an imaginary audience. Continue reading →

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