Snappish Productions

This article by Drew Magary gets at the heart of the craziness behind Google’s recent decision to go all in on AI and essentially declare war on its own historical business model. I’m not really sure how that’s going to work out for them, but I also have some thoughts — thoughts that I imagine would be incredibly unpopular across parts of the internet and Bluesky: which is that the World Wide Web is not the only model for the information superhighway, and I think we possibly forget that. Google’s search/ad dominance led to the world of SEO, ragebait, and our current international nightmare…maybe its interaction with the web just wasn’t healthy at any point.

Back in the ’90s, things like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, David Brin’s Earth, and the Knowledge Navigator video from Apple — which is one of my secret origin stories — presented a different world, a world that was not taken. You can also see it in the documentary on General Magic, where their initial vision was very much ‘agentic’ before the Web came and killed them stone dead. You can catch glimpses of another world in The Net, which had indepth segments on anonymous FTP servers and USENET.

But whilst I agree with Drew that Google declaring war essentially on the rest of the web is a terrible idea, I’m also wondering: is it possible that the web itself is something that might need to go away? This is one of those things I keep toying with in the back of my head; I do not particularly want to live in a world where everybody lives in Sam Altman’s walled gardens.

The new frontier models are powerful and amazing, and everybody should have them. I remember arguing on the web a few years back that all I wanted was an army of trans cat girls with a lava lamp in their basement doing crazy things locally on Llama models. I still believe that (although I’ve moved on to Qwen models in 2026). I think democratizing these things to the extent that they run in everywhere is potentially as revolutionary a change as having a computer in every home.

But I’m starting to think: can we take that a bit further? Like: “No, son, we have Google at home.” What would it take ti give everybody had their own search engine at home? Could we put something akin to 2000-era Google on your PC / Mac / Laptop? What would that look like? Is it feasible? How does it update? Sure, it doesn’t solve the money problem, but it might help keep the open web alive.

Obviously a lot of this comes from the fact that I’m completely obsessed with search. If Google isn’t going to be the only search engine around any more, then maybe we have to look back to the situation that existed in the mid-to-late ’90s. Infoseek, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, MetaCrawler, HotBot — all the different search engines that were the way we interacted with the web; each engine had its pluses and minuses and required a bit of knowledge (or research) to work out which one to use for what scenario.

What I envision is a three tier local system. Tier 0 is your emails and documents. Tier 1 is the main search engine, where something like 100m documents from the web can be searched locally. This engine is updated on a monthly basis based on a user’s explicit wishes and implicit signals from what they’re searching, drawing on the monthly Common Crawl dump to stay current. And then there’s Tier 2, which is the connection to the outside world. Paid API sources like Kagi, Bing, and anything else that you’d like to plug in. There would be a program on top of this¹ that would do routing for search queries, working out when a queries need to go to the outside world, or if they can be answered locally and delegating appropriately (balancing API costs and whatnot, obviously).

But who would build such a thing. Well…I have the local search engine prototyped already…

Okay, so last week I promised a longer diatribe, and I swear that I haven’t forgotten about it; it needs to be edited down a bit, but it does exist, and I’ve also actually written a bunch of code to prove that my idea is at least viable. But…well, something happened this weekend that means it’s been bumped, probably until mid-week.

Almost twenty years ago, I bought a copy of The Complete New Yorker. This was a very interesting collection of DVDs that contained every copy of The New Yorker from 1925 until 2005. Spread across 8 DVDs, it had a proprietary viewing system locked down with DRM, but it was still quite a fun thing to have. The main problem was that the Mac version of the software was compiled for 68k Macs. This suddenly became a big issue when Apple switched off 68k Rosetta support; instead of 8 DVDs filled with decades of print, the collection ended up being a brick. Even the Windows software eventually bitrotted, and the collection has just been hanging out on my bookshelves waiting for the DVDs to fail.

Over the past decade, I have probably searched once or twice a year to see if anybody has cracked the DRM encryption. The closest I’ve ever got was this user over on GitHub, who cracked equivalent versions for Rolling Stone and Playboy. Hints were dropped that the New Yorker collection would soon follow, but that was two years ago, and things have been silent. But it did suggest there was some hope.

Enter Claude.

Claude Opus spent an afternoon this Saturday with the NSA’s Ghirda reverse engineering framework and comprehensively cracked the DRM. NewYorkerUnbound hosts little more than a simple Python script (with in-line dependencies, even!) that will take any file from the DVD set and produce an uncracked DJVU file, with an optional PDF export if you have the right support on your Linux box.

After almost 15 years of them sitting idle, I have 80 years of the New Yorker available again. Hurrah!

(I was so very excited that I didn’t do anything that I had actually planned to do this Saturday, which was probably a mistake…)

Well, I can finally talk about the thing I couldn’t talk about. Last Friday was Sava’s last day at Lucidworks after almost ten years. We’ve been together for thick and thin, even during the year where I wasn’t even at Lucidworks. That there won’t be an early morning rant waiting for me in my Slack DMs tomorrow is hitting me like a body blow. But it is not the end. We’re already making plans to meet up this September when I’m in town for the last Saint Etienne tour¹.

Next week: something longer…and perhaps a little more controversial, providing I can finish my Friday night thoughts on the future of the web, and the past of the information superhighway…

Normally after my family leaves, there are a few days where everything seems a lot quieter. Less hustle and bustle in the house, less to do, etc. Well, with a three year old, we don’t get that luxury; she starts at 6:30am whether or not family is visiting, and she would quite like the Ms. Rachel episode with the baby dolls in, thank you very much (at this point, I retire to make tea, as I need something to cut against Ms. Rachel’s voice first thing; she’s a lovely person. But still…).

We have a brief interregnum of a week before the house is full again, this time with some of Tammy‘s high school friends, which means I have to clean the house to a slightly higher standard than when family comes (this mostly means: ‘probably do something with the IKEA circus tent and clear off all the DVDs waiting for encoding in the back bedroom). Otherwise, not a huge amount going on at the moment. We are doing Memorial Weekend DIY things, I have downloaded all of A Very Peculiar Practice for my pre-2000 TV viewing requirements, and this week at work is the end of an era as one of my close coworkers will be leaving this Friday which I am quite sad about. But he did get me this watch!¹

It is perhaps the most American middle class thing to be outside on your deck on a Sunday morning cooking breakfast on a Blackstone griddle. I was literally wearing a LL Bean dressing gown and slippers.¹

The family is visiting right now (hence the above; it’s not a regular Sunday thing, I promise), which means that Maeryn runs all over the house shouting ‘grandad!’ and has more people to pick her up than usual. We are also now doing a comedy turn pretending to be a cat and an extended performance act piece entitled “I Will Sleep On This Hard Table But Don’t Move Me Anywhere In The Direction Of My Actual Bed”. Definitely enjoying herself, and we’re visiting yet more of the area’s bizarrely fantastic playgrounds.

A few days left of the family visit, and it seems just a few days left of May too. Lots of new things coming in June…

A link blog entry? In 2026???

An interesting article about indie record labels, which definitely undercuts a few popular narratives (though I say that as somebody who in the year 2026 still doesn’t have a streaming subscription)

The insanity of making NHPTV work

Sometimes, I get nostalgic for things that were just background radiation. We were and are not a Radio 4 household. The Shipping Forecast existed only as gags in comedy shows. But oh, I covet this poster. Sure, it may be sold out. But I have ways.

If you can read this, then a) the remote uploading process did in fact work, but more importantly, b) I made it to Atlanta. I was planning on writing things during the trip, but after I went into Buc-ee’s and experienced the madness, I just wanted to get out and on the road again. Besides, they didn’t have anywhere to sit? Which is just madness. You know what I like? A service station that knows what it’s there for and has seats for days.

Accept no substitutes. Even they come bearing an entire wall of jerky and the promise of petrol pumps that stretch over the horizon.

Anyway, it was a pretty uneventful trip, which I think is the best kind for an 8 hour drive. The hotel is pretty close to the Atlanta bypass, so I was able to avoid most of Atlanta itself (except for a short stop in Marietta for Cookout, because you have to). I am currently typing this in the courtyard of a very fancy shopping mall, decked out with a Balencigna, Valentin Statin, and Alexander McQueen. Basically, like Bicester Village except there’s no discounts and no Pret. s you can imagine, terribly lifeless, but it does have very sturdy marble benches (my knees remember that from January). Strangely, everything is shut. Like I know it’s 18:00 on a Sunday, and my ingrained feeling is to have a sausage roll and watch Time Team, but even the food hall is weirdly shut. You are an emblem of American excess and capitalism! Why aren’t you open? Oh, yeah, that’s probably right.

Okay, I am now of to find some Diet Coke to get me through the evening. This is in addition to the Diet Coke I brought in the car to get me through the week.

There is A Lot That I Can’t Talk About this week, so instead, a preview of next week. In seven days, I will wake up, get dressed and showered, and then get into my car for a seven hour drive to Atlanta. I could fly. Work will absolutely pay for that, I swear. But last time I flew to Atlanta, I got so sick that I spent all week in the hotel room (when I wasn’t throwing up in Target) and then got stuck overnight in Charlotte. I am not going through all that again, so the fewer people I meet on the trip down, the better. And also, there’s Cook Out. This cannot be understated - there’s one just off I-75 as I get into the outskirts of Atlanta, and so I must go.

When I’ve told people of this plan, there’s a certain split. Americans cock their head at the drive time and then say “ah, that’s not that bad.” British people look at me as if I have completely lost my mind, given that it’s a longer trip than London to Edinburgh. But don’t worry! I will be bringing snacks. Of course, I normally load my iPad up with a host of British television the 1970s and 1980s for the plane ride…and while I can do that again, it’s probably not the best idea to try and watch any of it during the trip¹. So…podcasts? But I’m not really a podcast person. Seven hours of “Ian’s old ‘walk to Activision’ playlist from 2011”? That is somewhat more likely.

(I did look into going via train as well. Obviously, that just sent me into a spiral of “look at all the train lines China has built in the past 30 years!!” after seeing the Amtrak schedule)

I will also try and test my all-new remote posting set up next weekend, allowing me for the first time in over 10 years to post without out my personal laptop. Less exciting for all of you to be getting updates from Buc’ees, mind you…

One thing I continue to find amusing, almost eight years to the day that I moved to Cincinnati, is that I can be in the middle of Kroger and get a call from the Mayor. Admittedly, a former mayor (though seemingly a popular one!), and he’s only phoning me because he’s my next-door neighbour and one of our visitors has left their tailgate down, but it’s definitely somewhat unique to where I’m living now.

(Other neighbour interaction of the week — the one who came around, invited us to her church, and then politely asked if we were running a daycare. It’s the Melissa and Doug grocery shop that’s visible from our windows, isn’t it? That and the massive adventure playground in the back garden, I guess…)

And then the other big thing of the weekend. Tammy is amazing. She’s the person that sees the retaining wall go up with a small digger and thinks “that would be really useful to have to level out the back garden and clear the hill.” And then the next day: “Oh, they’ll be dropping it off on Thursday.” From never having even touched one of them before, in the matter of a week, she’s got a hard hat on and tearing the hill down. There’s now straw down, grass growing, an adventure playground moved into a brand-new and perfect position, and the sense of a garden coming together. I’ve already told Maeryn I’ll be teaching her French Cricket soon enough.

Honestly, I don’t know who could say no to a three-year old saying that. I couldn’t, anyway. That’s why, after making chocolate cornflake nests for the first time¹, it was time for an…adventure! Though an adventure in an understated manner, as I hadn’t really slept and didn’t think I could do an awful lot. And so it was that I searched for adventure playgrounds and again stumbled onto one of the weird things about the USA: for all its failings (and yes, as we can clearly see right now, there are a lot), it is bloody good at libraries and adventure playgrounds. We’re talking swings, two different sheltered areas, a Teletubbies/That Black Hole Episode of Blue artificial hill area with tunnels and slides, a separate toddler area complete with playhouse, fake small rock wall, zip line, instrument corner, a three-level adventure playground…and a maze. Yeah, just a small maze they seemed to drop in for fun. And working toilets! All less than a ten minute drive from the house and completely new to all of us. Needless to say, fun was had, and Maeryn was able to tell Mummy when she came in that she’d had an adventure.

In fact, it was a bit of an Adventure Saturday, because Tammy and I went out for a birthday/anniversary dinner with a sneaky trip to Jungle Jim’s afterwards. The Corner Dumpling House does indeed do very good dumplings…though we were. A touch sad that the sesame noodles had been pulled off the menu to make room for…Cincinnati chilli noodles. The type of fusion that justly starts wars. Also, I’d forgotten that JungleJim’s imports British Easter eggs during the season, but that actually worked in my favour for once as I walked out of there with a £15 egg for $9.

As for today, there was a Costco visit and no gardening while MAeryn has her afternoon nap. Just a good simple weekend. That’ll do.

The surveyors has rendered their verdict…and that is: the garden is about twice as large as we thought it was. I am apparently incapable of buying a house in this country without a huge garden. Right now, it’s just going to be extra grass for Maeryn to play on, but let’s not kid ourselves that I’m not having Grand Designs thoughts and looking at Dezeen for concrete ideas. Don’t worry, I won’t need an architect!

Ooooh, look at this…

I spent a good half-hour standing in the middle of my new domain, working out where the stilts and cantilever would go…and then I came to my senses a little and thought about where we could place a bench where we could sit whilst Maeryn plays. That feels a bit more realistic, but also great in its own way.