Author: Veselin

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Lakes Muratovo and Ribno

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

We did a very pretty hike this weekend – from Vihren Hut to Muratovo and Ribno lakes.

There’s a path that connects both lakes, and I think it’s easier to find if you visit Muratovo lake first. The connection between the two lakes is not marked but the path is obvious. There’s really no other path you can take in the general direction of Ribno starting from Muratovo.

Vrom Vihren hut to Muratovo is about 1-1.5h and +260 meters. I found 45 min as an estimation online but that would require the hikers to be in a very good shape.

Lake Muratovo is small but exceptionally scenic.

The Ribno lake (Fish Lake) is much larger. Despite the name, tiny fish, likely trout, can be found in most lakes in the area, not only the Fish Lake.

The whole loop Vihren Hut – Muratovo Lake – Ribno Lake – Vihren Hut took us about 4h and only about 13K steps.

Pay to Crawl

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Cloudflare introduces a private beta to a service where engines are required to pay to access the information on a site. It made me think.

AI breaks the open web model in at least three different ways.

  • First is that the open web gets filled with AI-generated garbage
  • Second is that any word posted anywhere, from websites to DMs, may be used to train models, and then later retold and sold as AI
  • Third is that the lack of transparency of how the models work is a fertile ground spreading precisely controlled lies (in the shape Generative Engine Optimization – GEO)

While the first and third don’t bother me much yet, the second bothers me a lot. I feel like Google broke the pact it made with the Internet to provide neutral web search in exchange for profiting from paid search. Now website owners need to pay so their content is crawled, so the different AI tools can present it as universal knowledge. Useful or not, many AI tools feed from the web and give content creators nothing in return. Here’s Cloudflare’s product idea – to charge crawlers, make it less unfair.

However, even though this is a step in the right direction, it still doesn’t feel right, even if there was a way to enforce it.

When BMW designs a car, they charge per car sold, not per car design stolen.

Frieda Klein

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I’m reading the series about Frieda Klein by Nicci French.

It’s a series of 8 books, 7 named after days of week, and one final. Frieda is a psychologist with a medical degree who always has a murder case to solve. She has the persistence of Harry Bosch and uses intuition and advanced questioning to untangle the ball of lies in each book.

The only downside of the series is that it has main antagonists who remain untouched over the series, like some kind of comic book supervillains.

I already finished the first 6 books of the series, having 2 left, and a few more with other protagonists. I gave 5*/5 to 5 of the 6 books and 4*/5 to one, which is pretty high for a series like that.