There’s nothing much to update except that I took down all the Google Ads that I ran. There was a sweet spot around 2010-ish when Google really loved this blog. Whatever I posted would show up on the first page, and very often at or close to the top.
Now, posting on the Web makes you prey to all sorts of “Dark Forest” attacks. As we know from Cixin Liu’s novels, the only way to be safe once you’re targeted for a “Dark Forest” attack is to either quit the space, or look as harmless as possible. I’m going for the later. No ads, so don’t you worry about having to run negative SEO against this blog.
Kidding aside, the real reason is that ads were simply not worth the hassle: increased load times, distraction from your attention, and an audience determined by algorithm just felt cringe to me. Ads are cringe.
I’ve been dabbling in Elixir lately. How it leverages modern, multi-core CPUs makes it a money saver on cloud bills. However, it requires rethinking your code in a functional and an asynch way. This has been super useful for me in dealing with parsing Arabic language data from Wiktionary. More later…