Sparkline to count RSS subscribers

Hey, kids! Sparkline!

That’s the estimated count of RSS subscribers to this blog. This is scaled and goes back to about the beginning of the year.

Not perfect—if a desktop RSS user switches clients or networks they get counted twice, but it does use the subscriber counts thatservices such as Feedbin and NewsBlur pass in the User-Agent header. And I think it fluctuates based on people trying different clients, scraper runs, and other trends. (When Iget on “Hacker News” for something, there is always a bunch of weirdly configured bot traffic. A lot of it looks like requests for LLM-generated URLs that I might have used but never did.)

This is basically following the method in Easy SVG sparklines by Alex Plescan, except that in order to work as an img, the SVG file needs an XML namespace. SeeSVG Not Showing in Browser? Fix It in 30 Seconds on the SVG Genie blog.

Bonus links

Section 230 Doesn’t Apply to Generative AI Enhancements to Ad Copy (But the Plaintiffs Lose Anyway) by Prof. Eric Goldman. One way of reading this decision is that Section 230 has limited applicability to Generative AI outputs. If the model outputs something new (as opposed to verbatim replicating material in its index or provided by the user), then the newly created material isn’t covered by Section 230.

The Cases That Don’t Exist by Robert X. Cringely. The entire defense of the American legal system against fabricated authority is a human being, by hand, looking up whether each cited case is real. Sometimes that human is opposing counsel. Sometimes it is a magistrate judge who, rather than deciding the motion in front of her, must stop and survey the caselaw on attorney misconduct to work out what to do about the five cases that don’t exist. Sometimes, God help us, it is a retired colonel representing himself. The work gets done by whoever happens to notice — which means, most of the time, it does not get done at all.

Andor and Authoritarianism by Daniel Solove. Andor has something to say. It transcends Star Wars and also returns it to its roots, as a story about resistance to authoritarianism. It i hands down the best creation in the Star Wars universe since The Empire Strikes Back. And, in many ways, it surpasses the originals in the depth of its writing and the seriousness and rigor in which it explores its themes. It is Star Wars without the silliness, and well worth a watch even if you don’t like anything made in the Star Wars universe since the original trilogy . . . and even if you’re not fond of those movies.

A Handful of Companies Control the Web. AICOA Can Change That. by Jenn Taylor Hodges and Elise Phillips at Mozilla. (And then theattribution cartel can put the web right back under big company control again.)

Pluralistic: The world has moved on (11 Jun 2026) by Cory Doctorow. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that the world has moved on, then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity.

Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications by John Scalzi. At this point, my brain immediately and directly associates AI text in email with scam. That is its only purpose. The thing is: I’m not special. Every writer and creative person, from the most successful down to the very newest, is inundated with these scam spam emails. Lots of them, every single day. Pretty much every one of us, I assure you, now associates AI-generated text with attempted fraud.

Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time by Matthew Sparkes. The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage Terminator mode, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets.

How States Can Use Consumer Protection Laws to Fight AI Fraud and Fakery by Stephanie T. Nguyen. (One of the qualities that makes this material suitable for scams is that it can be highly individualized, targeting specific individuals, groups or contexts based on data, profiles, or inferences the tool may have about the person. Related:Meta will use your activity on other websites to personalize your feeds by Emma Roth. Yes, theywant to turn people into dinosaurs.)

The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji. by April Glaser. Come October, the beaver emoji will be among this year’s class of new emojis, though it may take a whole year after that for the bucktoothed rodent to hit your phone. The proposal to include the beaver emoji comes thanks to a cadre of Canadians, lesbians, semi-aquatic mammal enthusiasts, and emoji specialists who wrote an extremely convincing and rather hilarious proposal, which in March was submitted to the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit responsible for standardizing text and emoji across devices. (Good news for capybaras, IMHO. Denied in 2017, 2020, and 2025, will beeligible to re-submit in 2029.)

Google’s AI opt-out leaves publishers with a choice they can’t safely use by Jessica Davies and Sara Guaglione. The practical questions now are who, if anyone, will flip the toggle and what level of traffic loss makes that untenable. Many believe the combination of opt‑out, lack of data and competitive pressure means very few publishers will actually pull their content. (Realistically, if a publisher blocks their content from direct use by AI Overviews that just means more incentive forvibe CMS providers to paraphrase it. The vibe CMS sites themselves aren’t breaking any law, but solve the samecheap content problem for Google that infringing sites do.)

You Don’t Love systemd Timers Enough (IMHO has someone who has both had to administer network services and written web applications, the main good part about systemd is not so much the sysadmin side, but the way that it lets you delegate the service management stuff from the application side. You don’t have to develop and maintain the “daemonizing” and scheduling and other features that ever service needs.)

Just Fucking Use Go You know what compiles in two seconds, deploys as a single binary, and doesn’t shit itself when a transitive dependency gets yanked from npm at 3am? Go. The same way HTML has been sitting there since the dawn of the goddamn internet waiting for you to stop overcomplicating the frontend, Go has been sitting there for over a decade waiting for you to stop overcomplicating the backend.