modern
Thirteen Years an Index Investor
There is an urban legend that a brokerage once found that its best-performing accounts belonged to clients who were dead so could not meddle.1 Financial planners often rely on the theoretical performance of different strategies because actual investors keep putting in money, changing strategies, and taking out money. Skeptics often warn that in practice there are various costs and delays which make the same strategy work differently in real life. Sometimes you take out money to fix your roof just before the market crashes, or put in your whole tax refund just before it booms, or the country with the big investment returns also has big taxes on foreign investors. It occurs to me that I have an account which has followed the same strategy with no new money or withdrawals since 2014.
(This is another post outside the main topic of this blog! If you just want to read about books and swords, my article on ancient spears just appeared with Marine Corps University Press and is open-access!)
Read morePraising by Faint Damn
A chat about an eugenicist in California made me think about rhetorical tricks. My gentle readers are familiar with objective allies, where the centrist journalist cries “that candidate is horrible and awful and I am going to put his words on the front page and in the prime-time news every day” and watches the ad revenue roll in, while the candidate launches a line of propaganda on the theme “look how much those elitists hate me and how powerful I am” and hires a new accountant to track his donations. Ever since smartphones came out, vlogs and podcasts are funded by people declaring another influencer the enemy, launching a five-part series to attack them, and sending their viewers to the ‘enemy’ channel until the ‘enemy’ returns the favour by launching a counter-video or anti-episode. This pays much better than useful factual videos on knitting or woodworking. There is a related concept whose name I am trying to find.
Read moreThe Great Rebalancing
In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.
Read moreUpcoming Blog Posts
I have no blog post today, just one scheduled and three almost complete. My review of the “Matthew Amt” kopis from Deepeeka in India is complete except for editing and photography (I need a sunny day with no day job). I have a post about Google declaring war on the web, and why now is an excellent time to disconnect from centralized American services. And because it is income-tax and rebalancing season, I have two posts on personal finance: one offering two cheers for dividend stocks, and the other on the performance of an actual index portfolio over thirteen years. Instead of finishing this post I attended a Victoria Civic Orchestra concert at Oak Bay High on Saturday, then picked up a preorder copy of Greeley’s Almighty Dollar at Munro’s and checked the posters for events along Government Street.
Read moreSometimes The Battle is Rigged
In 1845 the Sikh Empire and the John Company stumbled into war with one another. The causes were petty and nobody can agree who made the first provocation, but the two powers were rising in northern India and the British had been recently weakened by losing an army in Afghanistan. This is not a story that many people outside India know, unless they are Sikhs themselves. But if you take the time to hear it, it gives you some new questions to ask yourself as you think about ancient battles and adventurers.
Read moreWhat Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?
The Latin language is always expanding. Sometimes this is easy, as when it picked up gladius “sword” from Celtic and sclopetum “arquebus, smoothbore gun” from Italian. Other times it is hard and you have to invent a new word or phrase. Sometimes you even think for a long time and decide that crisare “to shake one’s hips” is good enough substitute for to twerk. Trying to settle an argument by pulling out a dictionary is an argumentum ad dictionarium.1 What should we call trying to settle an argument by quoting a chatbot?
Read moreHow Generative ‘AI’ Pollutes Search Results
In February 2026 I forgot to use noai.duckduckgo.com and saw a result from their AI assistant at the top of my search results. Like a lot of things produced by ‘generative AI’ it looks fun at first glance but sad as soon as you pay attention. Today I will post about what is wrong with this answer and with the whole premise.
Read moreA Letter to the Prime Minister’s Office
I woke up to read the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs on the latest foreign attack on Iran. My response is below the fold.
Read moreCross-Post: Conference on Arms and Armour beyond Christian Europe, 13-14 March, London
The renowned Wallace Collection in London is hosting a hybrid conference. Museums rarely have much of a budget for research, let alone research on arms and armour, so this is a rare opportunity.
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