Tag: blog

The Day of the Dead by Nicci French

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Frieda Klein is a great detective despite not being a detective. She’s like The Mentalist, and this final chapter of her series is her clash with Dean Reeve, the Red Jon of the series.

I think I liked this series more than The Mentalist. Frieda has no superpowers, other than maybe her ability to last for days with little to no sleep. The main antagonist is well-known, it’s clear who he is, how he hides, and so on. Doesn’t have the aura of mystical superhumanity that Red John has.

Book 8 of the series is calm and relatively short compared to the other books. The fall is coming, and people would be just like leaves. Except some of them who have the will to last.

5*/5, I liked the whole series very much. I regret that it ends after only 8 books.

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.