Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog

The “AIs” are contained

Jack Yan & Associates — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 07:08:11 +0000

From people far smarter than me on computing, countering those stories about “AIs” being so powerful they escaped their computers and went on to other ones. The thread began with a CEO who had run his web server as root. Mathias Hasselmann wrote (I’d embed but the system won’t let me): That’s actually the point [...]

Keep it on the low-down

Jack Yan & Associates — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:23:24 +0000

I had an interesting chat to one of the crew, regarding Lucire’s low social media metrics. This has come up once before—that the enquirer couldn’t see that an operation that began on the web before Google, extended its brand into print (one of the first to do so—and by some definitions the first), then into [...]

“AI” companies do the modern form of book burning

Jack Yan & Associates — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:53:02 +0000

Local bookshop Book Haven in Newtown, among others around the world, has seen an uptick in orders—and it’s clear that it’s “AI” companies buying up obscure texts. The tragedy is, after scanning the texts, they’re potentially destroying the books, removing an original source for someone else to enjoy. Book Haven has rightly refused to sell [...]

Don’t mess with an INFJ

Jack Yan & Associates — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:13:08 +0000

My first real Myers–Briggs test was at university. Our lecturer in human resources, his first time teaching, kindly arranged for a firm to process our tests. We were then divided into groups in the class based on our Myers–Briggs types, and we had to see if we had commonalities, reporting back to the class. He [...]

Keeping the humanity, because tech is coming for it

Jack Yan & Associates — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 07:57:50 +0000

I’ve had this bookmarked for some time: ‘Facebook allegedly detected when teen girls deleted selfies so it could serve them beauty ads’, in Futurism, and it’s not just Sarah Wynn-Williams saying this. The Murdoch Press, which commendably has done its share of exposés on Big Tech, ‘alleged that the company had crafted a pitch deck [...]

The reason for having a personal Instagram is to know who to block

Jack Yan & Associates — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:18:15 +0000

I recently popped into my old Instagram—which I haven’t touched regularly since the start of the decade—to find that Meta, as usual, changed all the privacy settings in the advertisers’ favour and without my consent. This is the norm for the company: even back in the 2000s I used to say the only reason for [...]

‘I am the death of real’

Jack Yan & Associates — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 04:14:00 +0000

Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have been filled with bots for years. When I used Facebook personally, it was already bot city, and the last time I did a calculation on its user base, I seem to recall half was bot. I’m betting it’s more now, the same with Instagram. And we need to add one [...]

Covering 38 years in an hour with Austin Holmes on OverPressure

Jack Yan & Associates — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:43:08 +0000

Absolutely thrilled that my friend Austin Holmes has uploaded our OverPressure podcast interview on to YouTube—and what a joy to find that this was one of his favourites! I cover my type design career, publishing, branding, and some of the stories that I’ve never shared before, within the contexts of entrepreneurship, leadership, and service. [...]

There’s one US export I wish they wouldn’t peddle

Jack Yan & Associates — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:47:56 +0000

It’s very easy to get the impression that US Big Tech is fundamentally dishonest. Examples abound. Its politicians seem dead keen on balkanizing the place, so on public and private fronts, the image the US projects is decaying and untrustworthy. Words like honour and integrity mean little when everything about that level of the US [...]

A Curlie-influenced web is starting to happen

Jack Yan & Associates — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:45:55 +0000

I had an idea last year about getting rid of the junk in search engine results, and that was to link them to Curlie, which effectively succeeded the old Open Directory Project (Dmoz, Newhoo, Gnuhoo, and other names). Curlie isn’t funded anywhere nearly as well as ODP, but something like it is actually fundamental to [...]