/reader

We both laughed at the idea that Nvidia gets to invest and own a piece of OpenAI for $100 billion, but AMD has to sell a piece of itself for OpenAI to use its GPUs. (Okay, I’m simplifying the whole financial rigmarole, but you get the joke. I hope.) The more I heard Josh talk about this conference, the more I realized that the whole conference model is completely broken.

There is a certain inverse proportion between the quality of the discourse and the frequency of a speaker’s appearances.

About a dozen years ago, I sat down with Andy Bechtolsheim to talk about the evolution of chips, infrastructure, and cloud computing—the big shift to data-first computing. That conversation left a lasting impact: genuine lessons and a roadmap for making smart decisions for a decade. Andy doesn’t speak often, but when he does, he leaves behind a pot of gold. He was the kind of speaker I loved having at my conferences.

Now contrast that with the AI futurists showing up at twenty events a year. How much new stuff do you think they have to say every single time? It’s all just noise. Or take Ray Dalio and Cathie Wood—how often do you want to listen to them? They keep saying the same thing. They’re simply talking their book, no matter how wrong they are. The more they repeat themselves, the more the world views it as actionable wisdom, when, in fact, it’s far from it.

My personal thesis is that you have to ration your words and use them to have an impact. One of the reasons I never write more than 1,200 words a day is because I find myself repeating myself. And that’s not good for the reader. Or for me, for that matter.

I used to organize a lot of events—it’s been over a decade now since my last one. But I had a very strict rule: bring value to the attendee with the highest possible editorial quality. That is why my events became successful.

Structure, the conference that set the agenda for the coming cloud revolution. Structure Data, which started discussingdata society long before it was even a popular term. NewTeeVee Live, focused on internet video (I hosted it in 2008). And my last event was RoadMap, about design and its future. I took a lot of pride in finding obscure speakers who added intellectual heft to my events.

You start an event with all the right intentions. The high-signal quality makes people want to show up. Then it becomes bigger and bigger, and the original intent is lost, sacrificed to the gods of lucre. With size comes the economic compulsion to put more butts in the seats. To do that, you have to find speakers who are famous, have name recognition, and—more recently—social media influence.

At some point, my own events became victims of their own success, and I found myself constantly struggling to balance speakers with ‘intellectual weight’ against ‘speakers in the bright lights.’

Maybe because I know how the sausage is made, I avoid most events now. The more famous the speakers, the less I’m likely to learn. After all, no event organizer is going to ask tough or real questions to their prized bold-faced speaker. I would go as far as to say that most event organizers don’t really care who the speaker is, as long as they’re famous, have name recognition, and a social media following. And if they don’t want a speaker fee? Even better.

And that means these speakers are always going to be promoting their own spiel. They’re not going to be imparting any real wisdom or knowledge. They will market themselves as best as possible.

I can’t blame the speakers—the problem is more systemic. Small events don’t make enough money to be worth the effort. Larger events make a lot of money but need all the marketing sizzle. Things have gotten uglier since advertising revenues started to evaporate, and companies have added “conferences” as a new line of business. Whether it’s The Atlantic, The New York Times, or The New Yorker, they’re all peddling the same speakers with the same conventional conversations. They’re doing it because conferences are now a “revenue stream.”

It’s such a blatant game that I laugh every time I get a sales email in my inbox. The only party that gets shortchanged in the end is the paying attendee—my friend Josh—who is looking for wisdom, knowledge, and insights he can put to work.

How would I do things differently? Well, I would start an event primarily from the perspective of adding value to the paying customer—the attendee. For me, they’re no different from my readers. They’re giving me their attention and time. I better give them value for money.

I would keep things small so everyone can meet, network, and learn from each other. I’d start an event long before something becomes part of mainstream conventional thinking. I love doing events around obscure concepts—micro apps (widgets) in 2006 was such an alien concept. I wanted to do that event because it was about the future, and it attracted the builders. Hell, I even did an event around Hadoop in 2008. Fun stuff.

These days I find myself attending academic conferences that focus on emergent science, so I can see what’s going to happen in a decade. I attend only to learn, hoping that I’ll be smarter at the end of the day. Some of these are online, so I don’t even have to get out of my sweatpants. The point is, I don’t want to network or tell others I went to an event (looking at you, TED attendees). Frankly, I don’t really think most of these bold-faced people are that interesting. They had their good ideas a long time ago. It’s unlikely they’ll have a good one again.

Give me Pico Iyer any day as a speaker. I’ll pay to hear him speak again because each time he has fresh wisdom. Maybe even Josh will join me and not feel cheated. 

October 11, 2025. San Francisco.

But what if, hear me out here, instead we manufactured tiny microchips with sensors and embedded them in all blades?

Then we program them such that if they break human flesh, we send data — time, location, puncture depth, current blade sharpness, etc. — back to our servers for processing with AI.

This data will help us understand — without bias, because humans can’t be trusted — how people cut themselves.

Thus our research scales much more dramatically than talking to individual humans, widening our impact on humanity whilst simultaneously improving our product (and bottom line)!

I am accepting venture funds for this research. You can send funds to this bitcoin address: 17HzyHWNrdS7GpMArshSBLpJpcvrre93P6.

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I’m still finding things that I’d changed in my PaperMod fork that I kind of need now that I’ve switched to the stock version. The Reply-By-Email button, for one. My improvement to image rendering from yesterday doesn’t work in the RSS feed because it uses a relative URL for the image. I had fixed this in my fork, so I copied that over. I also tried adding the reply button there, also.

Here’s an image to test the RSS version of the link:

Now to figure out the reply button. It’s in the XML but I don’t see it in Innoreader but do in elfeed.

The UGREEN NAS arrives today. I’ve pulled everything off the old Synology that I need and will move those drives into the UGREEN and format everything. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a maintenance nightmare. It’s going to replace the little Mac Mini server and the drives hanging off it, which has been working fine.

✍️ Reply by email

Disappearing Contact Forms

It makes me sad to see the gradual disappearance of the contact form from personal websites. They generally feel more convenient than email addresses, although this is perhaps part of the reason that they come under attack from spammers in the first place! But also, they provide the potential for a new and different medium: the comments area (and its outdated-but-beautiful cousin the guestbook).

Comments are, of course, an even more-obvious target for spammers because they can result in immediate feedback and additional readers for your message. Plus – if they’re allowed to contain hyperlinks – a way of leeching some of the reputability off a legitimate site and redirecting it to the spammers’, in the eyes of search engines. Boo!

But I’ve got to admit: there have been many times that I’ve read an interesting article and not interacted with it simply because the bar to interaction (what… I have to open my email client!?) was too high. I’d prefer to write a response on my blog and hope that webmention/pingback/trackback do their thing, but will they? I don’t know in advance, unless the other party says so openly or I take a dive into their source code to check.

Your Experience May Vary

I’ve had both contact/comment forms and exposed email addresses on my website for many years… and I feel like I get aproximately the same amount of spam on both, after filtering. The vast majority of it gets “caught”. Here’s what works for me:

My contact/comments forms use one of a variety of unobtrustive “honeypot”-style traps. These “reverse CAPTCHAs” attempt to trick bots into interacting with them in some particular way while not inconveniencing humans.

• Antispam Bee provides the first line of defence, but I’ve got a few tweaks of my own to help counteract the efforts of determined spammers.
• Once you’ve fallen into a honeypot it becomes much easier to block subsequent contacts with the same/similar content, address, (short-term) IP, or the poisoned cookie you’re given.
• Keyword filtering provides a further line of defence. E.g. for contact forms that post directly back to the Web (i.e. comment forms, and perhaps a future guestbook form), content with links goes into a moderation queue unless it shares a sender email with a previously-approved sender. For contact forms that result in an email, I’ve just got a few “scorer” rules relating to geo IP, keywords, number and density of links, etc. that catch the most-insidious of spam to somehow slip through.

I also publish email addresses all over the place, but they’re content-specific. Like Kev, I anticipated spam and so use unique email addresses on different pieces of content: if you want to reply-by-email to this post, for example, you’re encouraged to use the address b27404@danq.me. But this approach has actually provided secondary benefits that are more-valuable:

• The “scrapers” that spam me by email would routinely send email to multiple different @danq.me addresses at the same time. Humans don’t send the same identical message to me to different addresses published on my site and from different senders, so my spam filter picks up on this rightaway.
• As a fringe benefit, this helps me determine the topic on an email where it’s unclear. E.g. I’ve had humans email me to say “I tried to follow the guide on your page but it didn’t work for me” and I wouldn’t have had a clue which page had they not reached out via a page-specific email alias.
• I enjoy the potential offered by rotating the email address generation mechanism and later treating all previously-exposed addresses as email honeypots.

Works For Me!

This strategy works for me: I get virtually no comment/contact form spam (though I do occasionally get a false positive and a human gets blocked as-if they were a robot), and very little email spam (after my regular email filters have done their job, although again I sometimes get false positives, often where humans choose their subject lines poorly).

It might sound like my approach is complicated, but it’s really not. Adding a contact form honeypot is not significantly more-difficult than exposing automatically-rotating email aliases, and for me it’s worth it: I love the convenience and ease-of-use of a good contact/comments form, and want to make that available to my visitors too!

(I also allow one-click reactions with emoji: did you see? Scroll down and send me a bumblebee! Nobody seems to have found a way to spam me with these, yet: it’s not a very expressive medium, I guess!)

💖 RSS is fantastic, and so are you for using it. 🎆