David Blume

We Got Hit by a Google Penalty After Publishing 22,000 AI Pages. Here's What Happened. How we lost all our organic traffic overnight after publishing 22,000 AI-generated pages, what we learned from the penalty, and how we rebuilt with a better approach.

While Google search provides AI summaries causing dramatic drops in click rates to sites, sites are using AI to create more pages for PSEO for clicks. Great. Let's fight AI summaries with incessant AI slop, ignoring that pre-AI search wasn't so bad. tailride.so/blog/google-... #ai

That's not far from my home town. How do more than 1,000 dentists set up shop there? There's nearly nothing there!

If you were alive in the 1980s, this is among the most wonderful & truly incredible things you have ever witnessed in your lifetime.

Yes, strangely the same moment this timeline didn't make the X-23 movie with Summer Glau.

Down with measurements For WaPo Opinion, Catherine Rampell describes this year’s string of resource reductions for U.S. government statistical agencies. To be clear, administration officials do not appear to be ove…

"People would often say that you can’t fix what you can’t measure. The premise was that we should collect data on all the things to make things better. I didn’t realize at the time that some people heard that and went a different direction." - @flowingdata.com flowingdata.com/2025/07/22/d...

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Map showing that Africa's median age, 19, is younger than the median age in any other region.

Half of the people living in Africa haven't yet had a 20th birthday. In Europe, more than half of the population has already turned 40.

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.

"So many publications are leaning into ‘how can we use AI to publish more’. It’s not going to work because you’re competing against a child in Romania who is publishing 9,000 articles a day and they don’t care about facts, but an SEO algorithm..." www.404media.co/the-medias-p... #ai #media

Morning friends

Happy Thursday, bluesky.

The most majestic thing you will see on #bluesky today. 😇

just casually drops the facade about other countries paying tariffs and admits it’s American companies who pay them

America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.

Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.

As someone who mostly reads horror, I'll never understand the vitriol towards "cozy" books. People say they are escapist, unserious, allowing readers to avoid big issues. And I'm like, girl, WHEN did your dark romance book fix society? Did I BLINK and miss your detective thriller solving crime?

Was consumed all day at work by the fact that trump tweeted "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!" at Iran, which from any normal president would be hugely consequential and it wasn't even a story because the media has just sort of deformed itself into nihilistic acceptance of the fact that he's insane

a nation on edge holds its breath as the former host of celebrity apprentice huddles with his advisors, the wrestlemania ceo and the former co-host of fox & friends weekends

The stupidest people are in charge because we couldn’t prosecute a political crime because it would look too political.

I really really needed to see that people hadn't given up and accepted this shit as inevitable, or (even worse) embraced it.

And today showed us that beautifully.

No one wanted in on his tank show, but people WERE HUNGRY to tell him to go fuck himself.

Wow when I saw this post, it was so wild, I had to look up the raw trade data for myself.

Sure enough, U.S. wine exports to Canada have fallen off a cliff:

Cute little mouse… Rest here weary doom-scroller, you've seen enough bullshit for one day. @DDC

Signing Off… Good Night Y’all! 🐭

If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.

A computer scientist’s perspective on vibe coding:

"I like the fact that Earth has an entire surplus continent, but everyone still fixates on Mars. We have barren ice desert at home!" - Maciej Cegłowski #mars #space

Hells Librarians🔥 #LibrarySky #ReadToLive

Since I administered the WH emoluments rules, let me explain why this is forbidden

Trump expressed interest in it before it was offered

He is going to use & benefit from it a while in office

And he's going to keep using it after he leaves!

Functionally, it's a gift to him & so it's illegal

note to self: copypasta for "monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices" at www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/...

Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up

"Every complex ecosystem has parasites." Esp. every *successful* complex system.

This post by Cory Doctorow stuck with me. The is a point of diminishing returns, even when chasing waste and corruption. pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/h...