shortformblog

Hi I'm the author and yes, this.

The point of the story was that I built a thing about Mechanical Turk to promote its money-making capabilities, and ironically made more money from it indirectly than I ever did directly. Considering that point was implied by my framing, you did in fact miss it.

I’m not saying that you have to like a story, but your framing felt unfair, which is why I responded that way.

I see you missed the point of the story. But whatever. I'm sorry my dire financial situation didn't tie up in a nice enough bow for you.

I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.

I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.

So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again.

Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.

Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.

That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)

If you want to get an idea of it, there was one capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124231722/http://www.turkin...

The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.

But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.

(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)

I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.

That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.

I have one of these that was donated by a reader. I've never been able to get it to work because its battery (its infamous Achilles heel) would not charge.

If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.

I got the Gigabyte 5060ti AI Box, which is good but a real pain to set up on Linux. Not enough to run Deepseek but a lot of good options.

https://tedium.co/2026/06/10/gigabyte-aorus-5060-ti-ai-box-e...

FWIW, I have found Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5-Pro to be a pretty cost-effective alternative. https://mimo.mi.com/models/en-US/mimo-v2.5-pro

While it won’t cover everything DeepSeek does, it handles sophisticated tasks quite well. I found it after spotting it on a chart of different models and it was listed as being near Deepseek v4 Flash’s price/performance levels.

I have noticed by the way that DeepSeek’s API has been pretty slow the past couple of days. This feels like a demand-driven move more than anything. Good thing I invested in an eGPU!

Honestly, I found managing a Bulma codebase significantly more of a pain in the ass than Tailwind. Tailwind offers the expressiveness of actual CSS with the ability to make quick changes on the fly. As someone who has spent a lot of time working in CSS frameworks over the years, it is one of the better abstractions of its kind.

I sort of feel like this argument is trying to put a train that is already halfway across the country back in the station on the East Coast.

It is so wild that this got shared, as I was working on a project that very specifically was hoping to integrate a feature like this. Psyched to try it, I’ll credit the author in the credits of the site I’m building.

The problem is less the color than the weight. If it was 500 rather than 300 it would be perfectly fine.

Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python.

It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.

Quick add: I tested VivaDesigner on some old InDesign docs and I found it did not handle color blend modes very well, which is kind of an essential for a risograph project like 404’s. Nonetheless, the fact that it was able to open an InDesign doc more or less intact makes it a useful tool for a switcher.

Thanks for pointing out VivaDesigner—I’m surprised in the many obsessive searches to find something like this, it never came up! (I will note that there are a lot of pretty obscure layout programs out there. At my first newspaper, I was brought in to help with the transition to CCI, which was a full-stack publishing tool popular with newspapers of the era. As a result of this, I was introduced to their old system, by Harris, which relied on Windows NT 3.1. Fun times.)

This project is probably a no-go with it (for kicks, I did try importing a PDF of the final doc) but I will keep it in mind in the future from an analysis standpoint.

The other point I’d make is kind of a tipping-point argument. While VivaDesigner can export into IDML it looks like, Affinity has gone just mainstream enough that it won’t be turned away at print shops, which is a real risk. PDFs can get you most of the way, granted, but some print shops want to edit the file, which makes sense.

Claude can't properly count the number of characters in a sentence. It's asking a lot to assume it can get pixel perfect.

I followed the same steps the Verge reporter did: Downloaded GameHub, connected my Steam account. The initial boot was lengthy, but it worked.

I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it’s even possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as more games get optimized.

Affinity I believe is C++ with C# used for the front end on Windows.

The code doesn’t have nearly the legacy of Adobe’s code, so the result is that Affinity already runs very well in WINE thanks to some passionate fans that really want to see this use case.

This poor man is in a losing battle with modern computing.

They mention Hollow Knight in their update, but I should note that Silksong also works on my M1 Air flawlessly. Games with more 3D graphics also work to some degree. I tried Bakeru on it and got decent results though the texture load time was significant.

Asahi has been fun to watch, and I’m happy it’s still moving along, even with the messiness of the past twelve months. I rarely boot into MacOS on the machine these days, and while I’m mostly using a PC these days, I am debating getting a used M1 Pro or Max for the battery life benefits (and access to Mac graphics programs on the rare occasions I need them).

The fact that M3 is technically possible, even if likely a while off, is promising.

Thanks for the reminder that what the Internet Archive did in its case would have been legal if it was in service of an LLM.

I use Craft CMS’ GraphQL capabilities with my Eleventy site. Works well and helps me keep my page loads static. I would also recommend Directus for this, as it has some nice quality-of-life benefits.

To manage deploys, I have used Cleavr, which does a good job at it without being too user-unfriendly. That’s a paid service, about $6/month.

I like the spirit of this, but I just think Mavericks is a bizarre break point for this type of approach. At least hit Yosemite so you can benefit from NVMe. For me, Mojave feels like the neatest break point, but if you’re rocking Nvidia, there’s also a case for High Sierra.

You’re describing socialism (wealth redistribution to be exact). At this point, just make that money a tax and give it to the publishers directly. Cut out the middlemen.

LOL, you don’t. You really don’t. As I told you like four hours ago, ads are impression-based. Just because you bought something that helped them buy an ad doesn’t mean you did shit for my website.

In fact, you did the opposite.

Maybe in the cosmic sense you are, in that they have a giant pile of money, and you contributed a few pennies to it, but this is not how accounting works. Your transaction and their ad budget are separate things.

Also, advertising does other things than tell you to buy something, and it doesn’t always take the form of banner ads. Apple, for example, does a ton of brand awareness advertising. Affiliate marketing often targets direct transactions. Maybe your goal is to simply start a relationship that might someday lead to a really big purchase.

Often, in the era of SaaS, people advertise to existing customers. Apple does this—they have a TV service and a music service and a cloud service.

There are plenty of reasons for them to advertise after you bought the original product.

But your original point was that customers bought the ads. Maybe they didn’t! Maybe they were given funding by a VC firm and the company decided it wanted to build an audience. Maybe they want to advocate for a political issue.

I think the biggest problem with your argument is that it has tunnel vision and sees advertising as this one dimensional thing, when in reality it takes many forms. Plenty of those forms are bad, but it is not as simple as “I bought a product, now I never want to see an Apple ad ever again.” Many businesses (Amazon, eBay) make most of their money off of customers they’ve already advertised to that they advertise to again and again.

It’s up to them how they spend their money, not you. You can complain if they somehow damaged your product, they got your money unfairly, or were somehow doing something bad with your data, but at some point it is their money to spend how they see fit. They earned it, and they might spend it on advertising.

If I buy stuff at a grocery store, I can’t get a random bagger fired just because I feel like it. At some point the transaction ends and they ultimately continue to operate with or without your input.

Your point is illogical. It’s like you’ve invented a theory as to how companies advertise that has zero tethering to reality.

It’s especially stupid because it doesn’t include publishers in the equation at all. It’s just you looping over yourself attempting to validate your choice for running an ad blocker.

Admit you’re doing it because you want to callously screw over publishers. You certainly haven’t put their thoughts into consideration here.

To be clear: Run an ad blocker if you want, but stop acting as if you bought those ads. The chicken dinner I ate the other night has no say how I live my life after our transaction has ended.

Publishers don't get paid a dime if you block the ad unless they are doing a direct ad transaction. Adtech has largely made that transaction a rarity for like 30 years.

It's not like newspapers where advertising is paid in full before publishers put stories online. It has not been that way for a long time.

Your reasoning for not accessing advertising reminds me of that scene in Arrested Development where, to hide the money they've taken out of the till, they throw away the bananas. It doesn't hide the transaction, it compounds the problem.

If publishers were getting paid before any ads ran the publishing business would be a hell of a lot stronger.

I, for one, think it’s hilarious that a company that put so much energy into being ultra-exclusive ended up getting acquired by a company with such a mainstream reputation. Grammarly’s target audience is the people who couldn’t join Superhuman in a timely fashion.

Superhuman made one of my accounts wait for four years for an invite.