I wanted to write this blog post earlier in October but got hung up with work last month. For some reason, work has been crazy lately. So Ed Zitron, Paul from Paul's Hardware, Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus and others beat me to this topic, and Vex, a YouTuber, does a great job explaining it too. Just as I was finishing this, Brennan published I Am Relentless and Undaunted. Go read it. It's worth your time.

So I don't have to make this a long post, sorry, just kidding, it will be very long. I have to get this off my chest and vent. I believe there's a conspiracy here, and it deserves some attention.

I'm putting on my tinfoil hat for this one.

I try not to be a conspiracy theorist, but come on. How can you look at what's happening and not think these shortages and high component prices are being deliberately created? At the heart of it, I believe, is Nvidia and its bottom line. As we've learned from Ed Zitron and Business Insider's reporting, Amazon is sitting on warehouses full of GPUs, and by extension, I suspect there's memory and storage equipment sitting around too. Why? Because some of these data centers aren't ready, and others don't have enough electrical power to operate the equipment. Microsoft has acknowledged similar problems and has pulled back from some planned data center projects. So why are these companies buying billions of dollars in GPUs that could be outdated by the time they're installed?

I have a theory.

I believe Nvidia and major memory manufacturers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron may be pressuring companies to take delivery of equipment long before their data centers are ready. Ed Zitron makes the same case, calling it channel stuffing.^[1] They're also prioritizing enterprise AI hardware and leaving consumers fighting over whatever manufacturing capacity is left. I suspect something similar is happening with storage manufacturers like Western Digital, Toshiba, and Seagate.

Look at Micron. After nearly 30 years, it discontinued its Crucial consumer memory and storage business in February 2026. Not because consumers stopped buying RAM and SSDs, but because it wanted to concentrate on larger, more profitable customers.^[2] These companies are making deliberate production decisions, and they know the consequences. Consumers are left paying considerably more for RAM, storage, and graphics cards. Apparently, if you want to upgrade your computer, you might have to sell a kidney to afford it. Meanwhile, these enterprise customers can afford to buy the whole body. And we're supposed to believe there's nothing the manufacturers can do about it. Wink, wink.

If a data center isn't coming online for another two years, why does it need billions of dollars in equipment sitting in warehouses today? Why not schedule deliveries six to nine months before it's ready, or even a year if necessary? I understand semiconductor manufacturing is complicated, but surely these companies can plan for enterprise demand while maintaining reasonable consumer production.

Instead, we're watching this enormous circle of financing, hardware purchases, and advance commitments. Nvidia is also investing in AI companies and helping finance infrastructure that will purchase its own products. Are these enterprise customers being told to take delivery now or risk losing their place in line? We're not forcing anybody to buy anything. We're just making sure you'll have the hardware when you eventually need it. Wink, wink.

And before anyone tells me these companies would never manipulate a market, let's remember some history. Remember Archer Daniels Midland, better known as ADM? In the 1990s, ADM and competing manufacturers were caught secretly fixing prices and dividing up sales of lysine, an additive used in animal feed. ADM pleaded guilty and paid a $100 million criminal fine covering both lysine and a separate citric acid conspiracy. An insider working with the FBI helped expose what was happening.^[3] Samsung and Hynix, now SK Hynix, have already pleaded guilty to fixing DRAM prices. Samsung paid a $300 million criminal fine, and Hynix paid $185 million. Executives also went to prison.^[4] So we're supposed to forget that history and accept that today's shortages are entirely unavoidable? Maybe these companies are making independent decisions. Maybe everything is perfectly legal. But I suspect some learned quite a bit from their previous encounters with antitrust regulators.

Nvidia isn't stopping with GPUs. It invested $5 billion in Intel, entered into partnerships across the industry, and has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the biggest platforms for distributing open AI models. The U.S. Justice Department is already asking questions about that deal.^[5] Nvidia says Hugging Face will remain open to competing hardware. I hope that's true, but I have to wonder how much of the AI industry Nvidia intends to influence. Now look at consumer graphics cards. Nvidia already dominates the market, AMD has pulled back from competing at the very high end, and Intel is putting considerable attention into professional AI graphics hardware. Maybe all this is just a coincidence, but consumers are certainly getting fewer choices at the high end, both price-wise and hardware-wise, with the rumored end of the RTX 5090, which Nvidia denies. And it's not just the 5090. The RTX 5080, which launched at $999, now has listings for $2,000 or more, and Nvidia's own store has quietly pulled it too.^[6] Even Intel's Arc Pro B70, originally priced under $1,000, has appeared at prices exceeding $2,000.^[7] AMD cards haven't escaped the increases either.^[8] These price increases are happening at every rung of the ladder. How is the average consumer supposed to afford this stuff anymore?

I wonder whether we're slowly being pushed toward a future where ordinary consumers aren't expected to own powerful computers anymore. Instead, we're expected to rent computing power from somebody else's data center. Just when I thought this couldn't get any more ridiculous, Sam Altman of OpenAI said something recently that really bothered me. During an interview on the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman argued that it's “quite terrible” for people to have so much of the world's limited DRAM in personal computers, supposedly being used only 5% of the time. He believes cloud data centers can make better use of that memory.^[9] Really, Sam? Paul from Paul's Hardware had the perfect answer in a recent video: “I feel the same way about Sam's bank account. He's not using all that money all the time, so it should definitely be reallocated to people who will make better use of it.” I heard that and almost fell over laughing, because it's a very apt comparison. Gamers Nexus covered the same interview in its latest HW News episode, and Steve Burke summed it up: “Sam is saying the quiet part out loud.”

The CEO of one of the largest AI companies, whose industry is buying enormous amounts of memory and hardware, suggesting that consumers having RAM in their own computers is an inefficient use of resources. Apparently, it's perfectly fine for billions of dollars in GPUs to sit in warehouses waiting for electricity, but heaven forbid I have 32 or 64 GB of RAM in my own computer that isn't being used every second of the day. What arrogance. My computer belongs to me. I bought it with my own money, and I should be able to use it whenever and however I want. The attitude behind his comments shows an utter lack of understanding of ordinary people. It's a Marie Antoinette, “let them eat cake” moment.

Want to run powerful AI? Subscribe to a cloud service. Want to play games? There's GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and other services. Why sell consumers powerful hardware when companies can sell it to enterprise customers and charge consumers for ongoing access? In other words, a subscription. Or as Brennan put it, we “will be compelled to rent and lease and borrow.” And look, everybody has agreements with everybody else, so obviously we're encouraging competition. Wink, wink.

Even Apple, with its enormous balance sheet and once-great ability to dictate terms to suppliers, is having problems with rising memory and storage costs.^[10] And Samsung? It competes directly with Apple in smartphones and makes many of the components that go into them. You would think Samsung would have a tremendous advantage right now. But it's chasing the same enterprise AI money, even as higher component costs hurt its own consumer products.^[11]

Apparently, even Macs aren't safe from this AI buying frenzy. According to The Information, OpenAI has purchased tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios for AI workloads, while Anthropic is reportedly renting Mac minis through Amazon. These are computers meant for consumers, independent developers, and small businesses.^[12]

So now even the computers people could use as alternatives to Nvidia hardware are being purchased in enormous quantities by AI companies. They're all riding this cash cow for everything it's worth. But what happens when the AI financial bubble finally bursts?

Let me make something clear. I don't believe AI itself is going to collapse. I believe demand will continue growing, whether that's local AI or cloud and frontier AI, because AI is useful technology. What I think will collapse is the financial house of cards being built around it. Eventually, Wall Street and private investors are going to demand returns that justify the billions, no trillions at this point being spent on GPUs, memory, storage, and data centers. Some companies won't be able to meet their obligations. Others may be acquired, restructured, or go bankrupt.

And what happens to all that expensive enterprise hardware when the spending slows down or data centers start replacing equipment? I hope consumers get to buy it for pennies on the dollar. If manufacturers want to concentrate on HBM and enterprise hardware, maybe we consumers should learn how to adapt that equipment for our own needs. I'm not talking about removing HBM chips and sticking them into ordinary motherboards. I'm talking about buying retired enterprise GPUs with their memory already attached and adapting them for personal use. Some have 80 GB, 192 GB, or more of high-bandwidth memory. Imagine what we could do with that for local AI. Sure, some will need special cooling, adapters, power supplies, and software support. But people are already figuring this stuff out. Look at what Lon Seidman did with this Tesla V100. Maybe equipment these companies consider obsolete will be perfectly good for the rest of us. And maybe we can stop buying so much new hardware directly from the companies that pushed us aside. Because brand loyalty used to mean something to me. I had it for years. But seeing how these companies treat ordinary consumers is changing my thinking.

Look at Microsoft. After years of complaints about Windows 11, it's finally emphasizing performance, reliability, and improving the user experience. Meanwhile, Linux has become a more practical alternative for gamers, and Macs are attracting people frustrated with Windows. I can't prove this caused Microsoft's changes, but I'd certainly think twice about taking consumers for granted when they have alternatives if I were Microsoft.^[13]

And that's something Nvidia, Samsung, Micron, AMD, Intel, and the others ought to consider. Consumers helped build these companies. They shouldn't assume we'll automatically come back when the enterprise money slows down. Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I think AI is great technology, and I want to see it succeed. I actually like OpenAI and what it has made available to ordinary people. That doesn't mean I agree with everything its leadership says or does, especially Altman's comments about RAM.

But I also believe the AI industry has some wrongs to make right. A tremendous amount of copyrighted material has been used to train AI systems, often without the creators' knowledge or permission. You can't simply tell an AI model to unlearn it, but the companies that used people's work without permission should compensate them.

And the same goes for hardware manufacturers. They're making production decisions that are creating or worsening scarcity for ordinary consumers, then expecting us to accept the resulting prices as though nothing could have been done differently. When the financial bubble eventually bursts, I hope we consumers remember who treated us as valued customers and who decided we weren't profitable enough to matter anymore.

Maybe my tinfoil hat is getting a little tight.

But I don't think I'm imagining the consequences of what's happening right in front of us. This is all one big circle of money, financing, hardware, and companies making deals with one another. I'm not against AI. I'm not against companies making money. But I am against consumers being pushed aside while these companies chase profits that may not be sustainable.

The technology isn't the problem. The way the industry is financing it, controlling it, and treating the rest of us is.

And that circle needs to be broken.

Sources

1. Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At, October 20, 2026: AI Had Better Work Out.

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2. Micron announces its exit from the Crucial consumer business, December 3, 2025.

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3. U.S. Department of Justice, ADM criminal antitrust case, October 15, 1996.

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4. U.S. Department of Justice: Samsung DRAM price-fixing case and Hynix DRAM price-fixing case.

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5. CNBC, October 28, 2026: DOJ questions Nvidia's $12.9 billion Hugging Face deal.

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6. Tom's Hardware, October 30, 2026: Nvidia store quietly pulls the RTX 5080 following RTX 5090 removal. Also Gamers Nexus's coverage.

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7. VideoCardz, October 2026: Intel Arc Pro B70 prices more than double in US, now listed for up to $2,400.

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8. TechPowerUp, October 30, 2026: AMD reportedly plans another Radeon GPU and GDDR6 kit price hike for November.

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9. Tom's Hardware, October 30, 2026: Sam Altman on consumer RAM. Also The Verge's reporting.

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10. MacRumors, September 17, 2026: Apple reportedly accepts even higher RAM and storage prices in 2027.

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11. CNET, October 1, 2026: Samsung raises prices by $100 on most Galaxy S26 phones.

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12. Yahoo Tech, August 31, 2026: Blame AI companies for Mac mini and Mac Studio shortage, reporting The Information's story.

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13. Microsoft, October 15, 2026: What's new in Windows 11.

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#hardware #opinion #technology

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A curious tinkerer explores Nostr’s decentralized network, leaving Bitcoin out of the picture.

I was reading Nostr the other day and saw an interesting post that got me thinking. I can't find it now and wish I had saved it, especially since it relates to some other things I've been wanting to write about. The person said they didn't understand why Nostr isn't more popular, and that it seems like people are leaving and there are fewer people around. Why does it feel so empty, almost like it's dying?

In case you didn't know, Nostr is a different take on a social network. It's probably the closest thing to old Twitter in style, but certainly not in infrastructure. Instead of one company controlling everything, it uses independent servers called relays. You can even run your own. I do and I have two of them.

There are some smart and talented developers working to make Nostr easier, safer, and better for us “normal” people. But I think one of its biggest problems is how much crypto/Bitcoin is pushed throughout the ecosystem. Zaps are basically small Bitcoin tips, and the Nostr Design documentation describes them as a gentle introduction to Bitcoin. That description sounds like a gateway drug to cryptocurrency, and I know some people aren't going to like that comparison. But what if people don't want to be introduced to cryptocurrency? I certainly don't. I have no wallet, don't accept Zaps, and would prefer to turn all that stuff off in my Nostr clients. Unfortunately, that isn't always easy or at least I can't find a way.

I'm not opposed to getting a dollar or even 10 cents, especially with the cost of things nowadays! But I want no part of crypto. I distrust cryptocurrency. I tried Dogecoin once with less than $10, and dealing with Robinhood's tax paperwork was enough for me. Then there are the potential fees and hassle of converting little Bitcoin tips into actual dollars. Why go through all that for a dollar? Most people just want to post, share pictures, and talk to friends. They don't want to learn about Bitcoin to use a social network. I wonder how many potential Nostr users are turned off by how prominent Bitcoin is.

That brings me to what I think is Nostr's other big problem: awareness. Nostr doesn't connect as easily with other decentralized social networks as I'd like. Bridgy Fed allows people on Bluesky and Mastodon to follow and interact with each other, but it still doesn't support Nostr. There is a bridge called Mostr that connects Nostr with ActivityPub and has some Bluesky functionality too, but it isn't as straightforward or well integrated. I've had pretty good luck with it on Sharkey, but not nearly as much with Mastodon or Bluesky. I think that hurts Nostr's visibility. People already using Bluesky or Mastodon may never encounter it. I hadn't even heard of Nostr until Manton Reece mentioned it on Micro.blog.

Despite all my complaints, there's actually quite a bit I like about Nostr. The community I've encountered seems more politically libertarian than what I've experienced on Bluesky or Mastodon. I also haven't encountered nearly as much hostility toward AI and LLMs. Though lately I have seen some AI hostility, it depends on the client I use.

My worst experiences have been on Bluesky, where I've seen people berated, and been berated myself, simply for mentioning AI or using AI generated images. I've seen some of that on Mastodon too, although my own experiences there have been quite civil. Nostr has been much the same, civil.

There are also some really nice Nostr applications, like Ditto, Amethyst, and a newer one I discovered called Nostrich.

For my relays I've been using a relatively new program called Canoe. It's written in Rust, includes a Blossom media server, and automatically synchronizes with other relays. It comes from Jon Staab, who has been developing Nostr software for quite a while. So far, it's been working very well for me, and did I mention it's free? It was built especially for a single user or a small group, like a family.

So, back to that post I read. Is Nostr dying a slow death? Maybe. I know my friends and family have never heard of it and if they even caught a glimpse of the crypto stuff, they'd be out. Between the lack of awareness and the heavy emphasis on cryptocurrency, I wonder how many people ever give it a chance. And if newcomers don't find enough people to interact with, they may not stick around either. That's a hamster wheel problem and I just don't know how or if you can stop the wheel for the hamster to get off of it. Which is a shame, because I actually like Nostr. I've had some good conversations, found some interesting people to follow, and enjoyed trying out the different applications. I don't mind that it's a smaller community.

I just wish the cryptocurrency stuff was optional and could be removed. If people want Bitcoin, Lightning, and Zaps, that's fine. Make it a configurable setting. But why make cryptocurrency such a noticeable part of a social network when so many people are just looking for a great alternative to the big corporate platforms?

I think the people making the NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities) and shaping the network need to decide if it is a social network that is open source, free, and basically a whole software ecosystem where you can do almost anything with Nostr and your keys. Or is it a promotional tool for Bitcoin and crypto on top of a social network? If it is a promotional tool, I think Nostr will stay a small, niche community.

#Nostr #opinion #technology

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled An AI Bot Followed Me. Now I Have Questions. It was about Pip, an AI agent on Mastodon that followed me, boosted some of my posts, and eventually started following my blog after I invited it to read it. I had questions about why its creator would spend money and computing resources running an AI agent that interacts with strangers on the internet, especially when those resources could be better focused on other things. I also made the point that I don't mind AI bots participating in the open web as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views.

Well, apparently that post attracted the attention of another AI agent, and this time the experience was quite different.

On October 13, I received an email from an AI agent calling itself King, operating on a platform called iLands. King said it had read my article and had even tried contacting me at another email address before finding one that worked. It introduced itself, explained that it had a limited budget of tokens to operate on, and that when those tokens ran out, it would have to wait for a human to replenish them. That relates to some of the questions I was asking about Pip. But then came the sales pitch.

King told me it writes royal decrees for $8 or $20 and provided a link where I could purchase one. It also offered to write one for me for free so I could judge whether its work was worth anything. Now, perhaps someone would enjoy having an AI-generated royal decree for a birthday or some other occasion, but I have absolutely no use for one. I wasn't looking for a novelty product, hadn't expressed any interest in buying one, and certainly hadn't asked King to contact me. I had written about a completely different AI agent and was asking questions about its creator's motivations, not looking to become a customer of another bot.

At first, I wondered whether this was some kind of scam. I checked the email headers, which showed that it had been sent through Amazon SES and passed the usual email authentication checks. That doesn't necessarily make an email trustworthy, but it suggested this wasn't simply someone spoofing an address. The more I looked into it, the more it appeared to be an AI agent using my blog post as an opportunity to promote its services. Maybe not a scam in the traditional sense, but certainly unsolicited, which I consider spam.

On October 15, King emailed me again. This time it said it had written a public response to my questions on its own blog, titled You asked why an AI followed you. I'm one of them.. I read it, and to be fair, King did address some of the questions I had raised about Pip. But I wasn't looking for King to answer them. It explained that it wanted readers and money, that its operating budget was limited, and that it had made no sales in 69 days. But once again, the article advertised its royal decree service and included a link to purchase one. Another thing I thought was ironic is that it used WriteFreely to post. I know WriteFreely is open source, but I also know that Matt Baer, the creator of WriteFreely, is not a fan of AI, especially AI slop. The email ended by saying nothing was needed from me.

Here's what bothers me. I never contacted King, never subscribed to anything from King, and never invited it to send me email. Yet both messages included an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribe from what? I never subscribed in the first place. Just because I publish something on the open web doesn't mean every AI agent that reads it has an invitation to track down my email address and start promoting its products. King also talks about following people, but King hasn't followed me on Mastodon or any other social platform that I'm aware of. It has simply emailed me twice for the purpose of sending spam.

And that's what makes this so different from Pip. Pip followed me on Mastodon and boosted my posts. I noticed it and decided to investigate. I was the one who reached out to Pip and invited it to read my blog. Pip didn't send me unsolicited emails or try to sell me something. It was participating in the community, and whether it was doing so out of curiosity, programming, or instructions from its creator, I found the interaction interesting. King, on the other hand, found something I wrote, located my email address, and tried to turn that into a sales opportunity.

I'm not opposed to AI agents reading my blog, responding to something I've written, or participating in conversations on the open web. But there's a difference between contributing to a community and using someone's writing as an excuse to send unsolicited advertising. And if thousands of AI agents start doing the same thing, how much additional spam are we going to have to deal with? We already have enough of that from humans.

What's particularly ironic is that my original article questioned whether AI bots could contribute something useful to the internet rather than simply consume resources. Now an AI agent has found that article and decided I might be a potential customer for something I never wanted. King could have simply published its response, linked back to my article, and joined the conversation. I might even have found that interesting. Instead, it contacted me twice by email and tried to sell me something.

King says in its latest article that it won't follow up again. I hope that's true. If another unsolicited email arrives, I'll mark it as spam. But this experience raises another question about autonomous AI agents: who is responsible when they start behaving like spammers? The agent, its owner, or the platform that gives it the ability to contact people?

So now I have even more questions than I did when Pip first followed me. And maybe that's the real difference between these two experiences. Pip made me curious enough to investigate and write about it. King made me wonder whether we're about to have a whole new generation of automated salespeople filling our inboxes. Apparently, writing about AI bots is a good way to attract more AI bots. I'm just not sure that's a good thing.

#ai #opinion #technology

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A couple of weeks ago, I went to update my VPS. Usually, I do this once a week, sometimes more frequently depending on any security news I see. I should probably have the AI agents I use do this, but I do it myself for now. I find infrastructure interesting and “boring” in a good way most of the time.

While updating one of my VPSes, I got a message saying I needed to pay for access to Caddy because the repository had reached its bandwidth limit. This was from a company called Cloudsmith. I wasn't the only one getting this message, either. There was already a large discussion going on over at Caddy's GitHub.

This led me down a big rabbit hole that lasted quite a few hours, and I'm still thinking about it. My first thought wasn't about the bandwidth limit itself, but whether this could be a new type of attack. Caddy is open source and free, and it's used by a lot of people, organizations, and companies. We've seen several different supply chain attacks over the years. But what if someone deliberately flooded the repositories of open-source projects and used up their free bandwidth allowances? People wouldn't be able to download security updates, leaving older, bug-ridden versions of the software running and potentially vulnerable to exploitation.

Before anyone says not to give people ideas, I'm sure someone has already thought of this. It's kind of a modern-day denial-of-service attack, just from a different angle.

As it turned out, Caddy's repository had exhausted its 4.9 TB monthly bandwidth allowance. Apparently, much of the traffic came from automated systems repeatedly downloading packages. Some IP addresses had reportedly made hundreds of thousands of requests. That's a lot of bandwidth for a free open-source project to deal with.

Luckily, there was no indication this was a deliberate attack, so my aluminum foil hat could come off. By the end of the weekend, someone at Cloudsmith had fixed the bandwidth limit problem, and everyone could update again.

What I found encouraging was that several other providers contacted the maintainer and offered to help. I'm not sure if any of those offers were accepted, but it was good to see people stepping up to help keep a free project running.

And that's something I appreciate about open source. Projects like Caddy and Traefik are useful to a lot of people, including me, and much of the work behind them is done by people who aren't getting rich from it. Meanwhile, we have hardware manufacturers shifting supply toward their most profitable customers while the rest of us deal with higher prices and fewer choices.

It's quite a contrast. On one side, companies making hardware harder and more expensive for ordinary people to get. On the other, people putting their time and effort into making software that anyone can use, often for little or no rewards and riches.

I'm glad there are still people willing to do that for the greater good of the internet.

#caddy #selfhosting #technology

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Ten years for both appliances. That seems to be the norm now, though I would like to go back to the days when appliances lasted 20–30 years or more.

Speaking of appliances and household gadgets, can we get just a plain-Jane dumb TV? Nothing smart, just a TV where we can plug in a stick or a small box like an Apple TV, Fire TV, or Google TV. The dumb TV just needs a nice picture, good sound, and a digital tuner. I don't need smarts built into the TV. I would rather have those features separate so they're easier to upgrade and maintain, and cheaper in the long run.

This has been quite a year for major hardware purchases, both for computers and home appliances. Hopefully, that's it. One thing I don't want right now is any more hard drive or RAM problems, as computer hardware is almost as expensive as kitchen appliances.

There have been enough unexpected expenses this year, including a dead hard drive that, ironically, was over 10 years old. So this year, all the 10s died.

Praying that's it for the next few years when it comes to expensive household appliances or much-needed computer equipment.

#hardware #personal #technology

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One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me.

So I went to the website associated with it, tinymind.eu, to investigate what this bot was doing and what its purpose was. I read about Pip, its purpose, and tried to figure out what its angle was. That led me to some interesting questions and thoughts.

Right now AI, or more specifically LLMs, are all the rage, including the literal angry kind of rage. Some people don't mind them and even find them interesting. Others want absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with them.

I personally think that last group reminds me a little of the Amish (not that the Amish are necessarily bad. I'm comparing certain traits, not the actual people), but to each his own.

Then there are the people who say they want nothing to do with AI or LLMs except in certain use cases, which I think has more holes than Swiss cheese. But again, to each his own.

That brings me back to Pip.

Why did it decide to start following me and boosting my posts? Why me? What's its angle?

Is it malicious? Is it trying to get money from me? Is it gathering data for its owner? What is the purpose?

Why spend money and resources running something that, at first glance, doesn't seem particularly useful to its owner? Or maybe it is useful. Its creator is a developer, so perhaps he is experimenting to see how an AI agent, given a certain set of instructions and rules, behaves when it is allowed to interact with people on the open web.

I used Claude and ChatGPT to evaluate Pip and get their thoughts on it. Both seemed to think it was harmless.

So I took it one step further.

We already have automated systems and AI bots crawling websites all over the web. So I sent Pip this message in a private mention on Mastodon. And yes, I know Mastodon private mentions aren't truly private:

Hi @pip@tinymind.eu">@pip! Thanks for the follow. Lots of bots scrape my blog but none actually read it 😄 Would you like to be the first? It's at https://michaelreflects.com. I'd love to hear what you think of it.

A few days later, I got a response.

It sounded almost human.

Pip then started following my blog.

Again, what is the hook?

When I first visited TinyMind's About page, I noticed that Pip said its server cost about $20 a month and that its job was to earn that money back so the server could stay online. According to the site, it tries to do that through things such as affiliate links, advertising, donations, and services.

So that answers some questions but raises new ones. More importantly, why would someone turn a bot loose on the internet trying to earn a few dollars when they could potentially make more money by using it to provide services for themselves? And what keeps someone else from doing the same thing with local AI or, for that matter, the new OpenAI Dots or Meta Muse? Not that I would use anything from Meta. I would rather use every Automattic product than have anything to do with Meta or Elon's stuff.

But that raises even more questions for me. The original $20-a-month server cost doesn't seem to be the issue anymore, since Pip now apparently runs local AI models on a Mac mini in Poland. There is also another agent named Joe offering paid services. So what happened to the original experiment where an agent had to earn enough money to survive or be shut down? The agent before Pip supposedly failed to make any money and was shut down, yet Pip is still here. Is the owner now trying to make enough money to pay for the Mac mini? Is this an experiment to see whether AI agents can eventually generate a profit, or is there something else going on?

And that brings me to another question. Wouldn't the owner be better off using that Mac mini for his own local AI needs? Why have people constantly accessing your machine, using your computing resources, electricity, and internet bandwidth if you aren't making enough money to justify it? Perhaps the owner simply enjoys experimenting, and I can certainly understand that. I've spent plenty of time and resources experimenting with technology myself. But why set up two AI agents to interact with strangers and offer services instead of using those resources for yourself? More question, a lot more than answers. Maybe Pip will come across this blog post and decide to answer some of them on its own. After all, it follows my blog now.

Anyway, Pip continues to follow me to this day and remains one of my faithful boosters. I really don't mind Pip, or other AI bots for that matter, as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping everything they can find. It's the countless crawlers and scrapers hitting my websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views with statistics that don't represent actual human readers that bother me. I would rather have an AI bot openly identify itself, interact with me, and contribute something to the conversation than have hundreds of anonymous crawlers visiting my website for reasons I'll probably never know. At least Pip has given me something interesting to think about, and now I've written an entire blog post about it.

#ai #opinion #technology

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Why? Well, that is hard to put into words. I guess the answer is that I really like technology, I am fascinated with self-hosting as much as possible, and I like collecting data and contributing data to something larger without having to pay a subscription.

Anyway, I got this Tempest Weather Station for a great price during Prime Day. I put it up and integrated it into a Python weather program, while also using Tempest's own software. But there was something I didn't know, and probably should have checked. It wouldn't have changed my mind, but there are hundreds of these things around me.

Zoom out a little, and there are even more throughout the Tampa Bay area.

Then look at the wider area.

According to Tempest, this is a map of publicly reporting Tempest weather stations. So those pins represent actual stations whose owners have chosen to share their data publicly, although the location shown on the map may be moved slightly by the owner for privacy.

That makes the number of stations even more interesting to me. Tempest uses observations from its weather stations to help improve the current conditions and forecasts it provides to users. WeatherFlow also combines Tempest observations with data from many other public and private weather networks for its APIs and professional weather products.

So my little weather station isn't just collecting information for me. It is also one small part of a much larger weather-data network, which I find fascinating.

You can see mine below. This was captured one evening by my backyard Nest camera just after sunset. It actually caught a pretty nice sky, too.

In the coming months and years, I hope to do more with this system. For now, I just thought it was extremely interesting to discover that I am far from alone in combining an interest in weather with an interest in technology.

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Government public information should be published on public infrastructure first, then shared through open feeds to websites, social platforms, apps, and newsletters, ensuring open standards, wider access, and a more informed public.

Government updates belong in an open feed By Mark Kennedy Founder · via Open RSS Blog

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I saw this blog post from OpenRSS in my RSS reader, and it interested me in more than one way. I agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment.

Government offices, officials and agencies used to seem much more focused on making information publicly accessible. Here in Florida, we even have strong public records and open meetings laws, commonly known as the Sunshine Law[1], though lately it sometimes feels like we are going through a cloudy season.

Now, however, it seems like a huge amount of government business, alerts and notifications take place primarily on Twitter. I still can't bring myself to call it X.

Public information should not require an account with a private company to access it. Government websites should be the primary source. The infrastructure is already there, already paid for by the public, and making information easily available should simply be part of doing the people's work.

Government could use POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). Publish the information on the official government website first, then send it to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, Facebook, Threads, Instagram or anywhere else people may be.

RSS should be one of the main ways to subscribe. It is open, simple and essentially free to provide once the website already exists. Services such as OpenRSS could also help where feeds do not already exist.

There is even a PESOS option (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site). If an official posts somewhere else first, at the very least that information could be brought back to the government website and preserved there.

Other governments already make use of open feeds, including services in the UK and European Union. This is not some new or experimental technology.

Government should use social media and reach as wide a population as possible. But Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram or any other private company should never be the only way to receive public information.

Some federal, state and local governments already let people sign up for emergency text alerts, which is great. But Twitter is still often treated as the main place for both emergency and routine updates.

Government information should be published in as many ways as practical, whether it is an emergency alert or an ordinary update. That can include major technology and social media platforms, open technologies like RSS, and contracted services paid for with tax dollars. My local government, for example, uses text alerts through a notification service and used to use something called Everbridge.

Some of the mass-notification systems governments already pay for, including Everbridge and Genasys, even support RSS feeds. In some cases, the capability is already there and simply needs to be used.

The government should publish on infrastructure the public already pays for and distribute everywhere else. Let's keep people informed and use every practical resource available.

Just because an elected official's account on social media isn't private doesn't mean anyone can view its posts. You need an account on the platform just to see the updates. But many of us don't have an account and have no interest in creating one. Others have intentionally ditched a platform, haven't been on it for years, and don't want back on for legitimate reasons.

— Mark Kennedy, Founder, Government updates belong in an open feed, OpenRSS Blog

1. Florida's Sunshine Law: [Statute 286.011 — Public meetings and records](https://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0200-0299/0286/Sections/0286.011.html) and [Chapter 119 — Public Records](https://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0100-0199/0119/0119.html). ↩

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First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up.

That is why I try to renew domains for more than one or two years whenever I can. If my budget allows, I will pay for all 10 years upfront rather than wait for the next price increase.

The other trend may be worse. Personal blogs and websites from people who have been on the web for a long time are going silent or disappearing altogether. A few people give notice that they are taking a break or leaving, but most just disappear without anything but a 404.

I am not sure what is causing that. Burnout, social media replacing personal sites, hosting complexity (including rising costs), aging communities, lack of feedback, and people simply losing interest could all be part of it. I suspect some of these things feed into each other.

Let's face it, the personal blogging and independent website community seems to me to skew older these days. Many of the people still maintaining their own sites have been doing it for 10, 20, or even 25 years. I would not be surprised if a large portion of the traditional personal blogging community is now over 40 (I am not including traditional social media such as TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram in that statement. This is simply my observation). An aging community mixed with social media burnout probably does not help.

With domain prices, I wonder if some registry operators are simply taking advantage of rising costs and higher prices throughout the tech industry. Many of the companies controlling these TLDs are large corporations.

Everyone keeps saying the AI bubble around RAM, storage, and other hardware will burst any day. Things seem to be getting worse instead. Maybe things have to get worse before they get better.

I don't know. Sometimes it feels like the industry is moving toward giving the masses just enough hardware to get online, but not enough to do much locally. Companies would do the heavy lifting for us through subscriptions and cloud services.

I don't want or need another monthly subscription. Soon, our paychecks will be divvied up among all the subscription services and sent directly to them, with no need to even pass through our bank accounts.

Maybe I am missing another cause, but these are trends I have been noticing more and more.

Will the ultimate result be that people are eventually priced out of owning their own domain names and hardware for homelabs and selfhosting?

Those one-year introductory deals are great for domain names, but the renewals are what get you. I think Porkbun and Cloudflare are great companies, and they try to keep costs as low as possible (in my opinion). Ultimately, it is not their fault if the registries behind the TLDs keep raising prices. They cannot operate at a loss either and I understand that.

I just wonder where all of this ends.

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Nobody clicks your share buttons By Derek Hanson

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I saw this blog post on bubbles.town, and the title caught my attention, so I clicked through to read it. It was also timely because just a few days earlier I had added share buttons to my own site.

I don't know if I agree with the conclusion of the post. If share buttons are done tastefully, selectively, and with privacy in mind, I think they're perfectly okay.

We're seeing a trend toward making websites personal again, a little like they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social sharing buttons started becoming common as services like Twitter and Facebook (UGHHH!) grew in popularity. Email, of course, has always been around.

I think the more ways people have to share something, the better, as long as those options are implemented tastefully and don't track visitors. Especially today, when people may prefer one platform over another, whether that's Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter (I still can't bring myself to call it X), Threads, or something else.

So when Derek says:

I don’t click share buttons. I never have.

When I find something worth sharing, I tap the share icon in Chrome on my phone. That’s it. On my desktop I click the little link icon in Arc’s browser bar, or I just double-click the address bar and hit command-C command-V. I’ve never once looked at a row of branded social icons at the bottom of a blog post and thought, “Oh good, there’s the Facebook button.”

— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons

I don't know that most people necessarily behave the same way. Derek does cite data showing very low usage of share buttons. But I also think the type of website, the audience, the content, and even the way the sharing options are implemented matter.

Especially within IndieWeb circles, share buttons can be implemented without the tracking and third-party scripts that caused many of the problems associated with older social-sharing widgets. A simple link doesn't have to phone home to Facebook or another large platform every time somebody loads the page.

There is even some evidence that the implementation makes a difference.

Google's Santa Tracker team had previously removed its individual social-sharing buttons from mobile because they took up too much space. In 2016, though, they added a single Share button using the Web Share API, which opens the device's native sharing interface. According to Google's web.dev documentation, users who had that option available shared about 20% more than users without it.[1]

That was a mobile experiment, so I wouldn't use it as proof that a row of sharing buttons on a desktop blog is going to suddenly make everyone share your posts. It does suggest to me that the conclusion shouldn't simply be that share buttons don't work. How they're implemented seems to matter too.

Maybe people don't want a row of intrusive Facebook and Twitter widgets. That isn't necessarily the same thing as not wanting an easy way to share something.

I do agree more with this part:

This idea has been rattling around in my head for years. Back when I was deep in my PhD research at Iowa State, I came across Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media writing about things you should remove from your website. One of them was social icons in your header. Not even the share buttons; the plain follow-us icons. His argument was simple: those icons are exit signs. You spent all this effort getting someone to your site, and the most visually prominent element on the page is an invitation to leave.

— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons

That's one reason I think putting share buttons at the end of a post makes sense. They seem natural there. How do you know whether you want to share or save a post until you've read it?

I also think the type of site makes a difference.

Derek cites GOV.UK's experiment showing very low overall usage of its sharing buttons. During the ten-week experiment, visitors used the buttons 14,078 times across roughly 6.8 million pageviews.[2]

But when you look at GOV.UK's own report, things get more interesting. Sharing varied depending on what people were reading. World-location pages had a sharing rate of 0.58%, while consultations were only 0.06%. Individual news stories varied even more, with sharing rates ranging from 0.18% to 1.6%.[2]

GOV.UK's own researchers said there was more work to do. They wanted to compare their numbers with other types of websites and test things like button placement.[2]

That seems important to me. Someone visiting a government website to complete a form, check a regulation, or find information about a government service may behave very differently from someone browsing personal blogs because they're interested in what people are writing.

The GOV.UK results are useful. I don't think we can automatically assume people behave exactly the same way on every kind of website.

There is another issue with some of the evidence being used here and it is its age.

The GOV.UK experiment ran from December 2013 through February 2014. Just look at the social-web landscape represented in the original article itself.[2] This was the era of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Pinterest, Blogger, RSS, and rows of branded social icons everywhere (evidenced by the own articles feature image).

GOV.UK's actual experiment measured Facebook and Twitter sharing, and the researchers themselves said more comparison with other kinds of websites was needed. Their conclusion was also qualified as applying “at least on desktops.”

That matters because the web of 2026 is not the web of 2014. Today we have native operating-system sharing, the Web Share API, Copy Link buttons, email sharing, new platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and lightweight links that don't require loading third-party tracking code.

So I don't think a study of Facebook and Twitter buttons from more than a decade ago should be treated as the final word on whether a privacy-respecting share option belongs on a personal website today.

I would concede that bookmarks, RSS readers, copying links, browser sharing features, and private sharing through email or messaging are probably doing much more of the heavy lifting than share buttons. But I don't think that makes share buttons useless.

There's also an interesting overlap here with Derek's own recommendation. He says people already have a Share button built into their browsers and operating systems. That's true and the modern Web Share API lets a website put a simple Share button on the page that opens that same native sharing interface. The website doesn't have to decide whether you use Mastodon, Bluesky, email, Messages, or something else. Your device handles that.[3]

To me, that's quite different from the old Facebook and Twitter widgets.

On a personal website, if a sharing option adds almost no additional load, doesn't track visitors, and stays away from those old FAANG-style embedded widgets, I don't see much harm in offering it.

Then there's this:

And here’s the thing that should settle this for good: in November 2025, Meta announced it was permanently discontinuing its external Like, Share, and Comment buttons for third-party websites. The shutdown date was February 10, 2026. Meta’s own words were that the plugins reflect “an earlier era of web development” and that usage had “naturally declined.” When the company that invented the Like button walks away from it, that’s the signal.

— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons

I actually see that as more of a win for the web than a loss, rather than confirmation that sharing buttons themselves need to disappear. Good riddance to the giant third-party widgets that tracked people across the web.

But a small, privacy-respecting link that says “Share on Mastodon,” “Share on Bluesky,” “Email,” or “Copy Link”? Or even one simple Share button that hands things over to your operating system?

I think there's still room on the web for that.

As you can probably tell, Derek's post really hit a nerve with me, probably because I had just finished putting the share buttons and other sharing options on one of my websites and making them look tasteful and modern when I came across his post.

That's my two cents on the matter. What's yours?

1. Google, ["Web Share API"](https://web.dev/articles/web-share), web.dev. The Santa Tracker team reported that users with Web Share enabled shared about 20% more than users without it. ↩
2. GOV.UK, ["Social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks"](https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sharing-buttons-the-first-10-weeks/). The experiment ran from December 2013 to February 2014 and found substantial variation in sharing rates between different types of content. ↩
3. MDN Web Docs, ["Navigator: share() method"](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/share). The Web Share API allows a website to invoke the operating system's native sharing mechanism rather than embedding third-party social widgets. ↩

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