Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog

Palantir’s dystopia

Jack Yan & Associates — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:10:10 +0000

Here are two disturbing opening paragraphs from The New Republic in March (link to X removed): Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men. “This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power [...]

The best is yet to come—if we can centre it in good

Jack Yan & Associates — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:35:07 +0000

One friend said to me that he was resigned to the fact that his best work had been done. That it was in the past. I reject that premise entirely. I may be in my 50s but I still see some of my best work ahead of me. Times change, technologies change, media change, and [...]

What’s our “AI” policy? For us, there’s a very clear line

Jack Yan & Associates — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:53:02 +0000

Eerily good: an image of me sent by a friend generated (with my permission) by an “AI”. Not perfect but good enough to fool most people. One of our team, and a good friend, returning to writing for Lucire after a while, asked me what our AI policy was. The only stated policy we had [...]

Google doesn’t understand consent (or, more bots to block)

Jack Yan & Associates — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:04:25 +0000

Google has two bots which will ignore websites’ robots.txt files. In other words, to heck with consent. Like a rapist with ‘She was asking for it’ (credit to Kilroy for making the analogy), Google’s justification is ‘Because the fetch was requested by a user, these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules.’ As explained by Thomas Baekdal [...]

Google’s opt-out cookies still ignored, 15 years later

Jack Yan & Associates — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:40:47 +0000

There’s an excellent report in 404 Media by Matthew Gault with the headline, ‘Google, Microsoft, Meta all tracking you even when you opt out, according to an independent audit’. That audit was done by WebXray, which ran it on over 7,000 popular websites in California. ‘Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of [...]

Up the national brand

Jack Yan & Associates — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:32:26 +0000

It’s always nice to get mentioned. I noticed one Mastodon account said that Lucire is ‘originally based in Aotearoa/NZ’. I welcomed their link to our Mastodon account, but had to add that we’re still HQed in Aotearoa, but that we have licensed editions internationally. There’s nothing in particular that says we’re foreign, but it’s something [...]

Too lazy to do anything but parrot the voices of the rich

Jack Yan & Associates — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:33:41 +0000

Well written words from Adriana Wilhelmina van Altvorst on Linkedin, powerfully summarizing in seven paragraphs one angle of the reports from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19. Those who occupied Parliament in March 2022 claimed that they were a silent majority, but van Altvorst notes that 82 per cent of New Zealanders chose to [...]

Why would anyone work for Elon Musk for free?

Jack Yan & Associates — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:57:54 +0000

Robin Berjon has an excellent piece, penned at the end of 2025, on why it makes no sense for non-Nazis to be on whatever Twttr is called these days. Their notion that we need to be there to prevent the bastards from winning (which I heard from one leftie friend) doesn’t work in practice, argues [...]

Apologies to Viettel customers—and why is Harvard loading myriads of our images?

Jack Yan & Associates — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:30:36 +0000

While we’ve blocked obvious ASNs where we suspect evil might congregate—Google’s cloud service, for instance, and all of Microsoft excepting Bingbot—last week, we had to issue a block on the main Autocade website for all Viettel customers. This was with great regret, as I am sure there are legitimate people on Viettel who use Autocade. [...]

Family loses all their accounts and data on Google—debunked

Jack Yan & Associates — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:13:38 +0000

I’m not going to preach here, especially with how much this family is going through, their livelihoods threatened and a dissertation up in smoke, all because they had everything hooked up to Google, and the 14-year-old did something in front of Gemini Live. Google’s parental controls failed here, as they did not cover Gemini Live. [...]