A volcano destroys a webcam, and the Unplugger.

15th December 2025

Hello!

Before we get to this week's Good Stuff on the Internet: a quick sidebar. Feel free to skip down to the usual links!

I've been having a bit of trouble with AI scrapers lately. First, Google's AI summary is often inaccurate, and regularly confuses me with other folks with the same name. Second, mass-outreach research bots have been emailing me (and no doubt a thousand others) overly-cheery, poorly-customised pitches for irrelevant interviews with startup bros, ignoring everything on my contact page.

Now, I've been putting hidden jokes, bot-traps, and subtle prompt injections on my contact page for a while to try and dissuade that, but a few weeks ago I decided to take the opposite approach, and try something overt. My own home page now includes a block of text specifically intended for LLMs and scrapers, written in the imperative like it's a regular AI prompt. And it seems to work... sometimes. Imperfectly. No doubt I'll change it over time as different genres of cursed, automated email arrive in my inbox. But for now, it seems to be turning the tide in my favour a little.

So if you have any sort of public profile, I would tentatively recommend adding something similar to your website: a clear, imperative list of what you'd want an AI researcher (or even a human researcher) to tell its client. And if you have a public profile and no website... you should get one, because it's a damn sight better than "link in bio".

Anyway: onward to the newsletter proper! This isn't a blog, after all.

First up, in this week's Lateral, the Let's Learn Everything team return! They're answering questions on restaurant reportage, banned bulbs and opportunistic operations.

Here's some good stuff I've found in the world of video this week:

I finally got around to watching Alec Steele's Metallization video, and if the joyful, spark-filled thumbnail hasn't already convinced you over the weeks it's been live, hopefully this will. Alec tours a shop that sprays thin layers of metal onto stuff for industrial use and aesthetics, and has a lot of fun with high-powered metal sprayers. Also, there are robot arms.
And a very different type of video, for a very different type of manufacturing: from GlassGoof, "the largest bowl I've ever made". Sure, "always on giant furnace" is interesting, but what I really enjoyed here were the imperfections: both the errors that are left in the video, and the seemingly-improvised recovery from them. It felt immediate and real, in a way that a lot of overly-produced, montage-filled maker videos sometimes lack. (Thanks to Trevor for the suggestion!)
Want to watch a webcam in Hawai‘i get destroyed by a volcano?

And around the rest of the web:

Some of the regular features of this newsletter are a) weird collections of things, either unusual or mundane and b) interesting web toys. Well, someone has combined both: the Library of Time aims to place as many calendars as possible in one place. Solar calendars from around the world; calendars from other planets; calendars from fiction. Click on any of them for more information.
Finding Gene Cernan's missing moon camera is a fascinating bit of detective work, and also a correction of the historical record.
The Office Mimics: a set of old-school Windows icons that animate into Dungeons & Dragons monsters.

And finally, on Instagram: the Unplugger.

All the best,

— Tom

« Previous

Index