Thomas Hurst

Software "Engineer". Autistic weirdo. He/they.

• • • @[email protected]

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@stocktoncouncil Sold by the council in 2007 for £16.7 million (adjusted for inflation - £29.4 million), only to be bought back in 2026 for £13 million.

Another win for privatisation!

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@RutkowskiHQ Getting that eyeball via a weird blog with an impossible post cadence full of LLM-isms seems a bit counterproductive, even if you get more of them. You'll be loudly broadcasting the worst signals.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@RutkowskiHQ Consider the worst possible Watchgoose: You're a lazy nerd. You clone a public git repo, prompt Claude to rebrand it, drop it on the cheapest VPS you can get, and hook it up to a payments processor.

How do you convince an eyeball that you're better than that and worth the money?

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@RutkowskiHQ Ads are at least relatively honest about their purpose. A website purporting to be a technical blog that's actually full of low-effort LLM keyword bait, I'd consider to be closer to an active attack against shared common infrastructure. Spam, effectively.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@RutkowskiHQ Nobody wants to buy a monitoring service from someone who's only interest is making money with the least effort possible. Your engineering is really important - show people that you know what you're doing and that you care about it and SEO *that*.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@RutkowskiHQ This isn't just SEO, this is fabricating content at high volume. It's automatable in the same way spam is, and I would hold it in similar regard.

Why should we trust you to monitor our backup jobs? Because you paid an LLM to flood a blog, like some outright scam services do?

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@AaronBastani Broadcasting *what*? Is being distracted by having a website the reason their lineup is unappealing tripe?

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@ToniaAntoniazzi So, let me get this straight: your mum is a loudmouth bigot, you were worried that a member of the minority she acts hateful towards was present, and therefore the minority should be excluded from a hospital ward? For the sake of a bigot?

Do you not see how disgusting this is?

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@cmsj Unless you cooked your tomato by boiling it in a swimming pool I'm pretty sure you created more value by eating it.

[Bartek Rutkowski @RutkowskiHQ]

Here is https://t.co/KwB7Yxt9Ke in numbers from September 2026.

I've got 76 new accounts, which is 7x more than a month before. Interestingly, the biggest source attribution for those new accounts is AI - 29 accounts, 38%. The others sources were (percentage numbers rounded up):
- Social media - 2 accounts, 3%
- Reddit: 2 accounts, 3%
- Other: 2 accounts, 3%
- Newsletter/blog: 1 account, 2%
- Search engines: 1 account, 2%
- Not recorded: 39 accounts, 52%

Signup methods were (percentage numbers rounded up):
- GitHub: 49 accounts, 65%
- Email: 25 accounts, 33%
- Unrecorded: 2 accounts, 2%

This one is interesting, because GitHub was added in September as a "user conversion experiment" to existing email signup method and these numbers show that it totally paid off. I guess I'll be adding Gmail signup too!

Most visited pages were:
- Homepage: 415
- Pricing: 70
- Open Source: 52
- Signup: 33

The Open Source page was also the entry page for 39 visitors, making it a very strong acquisition landing page. I guess people appreciate Watchgoose Open Source Program like I hoped they would :)

Watchgoose cron jobs, backups and other scheduled workloads traffic were as follows:
- Total pings: 11,902
- Success pings: 11,506
- Explicit failure signals: 211
- Start signals: 185

This is very exciting, because that's exactly what Watchgoose is meant for: 69% of recorded "down" states came from missing expected pings, what means we are catching unexpected failures for our clients!

I hope you find it interesting and if you do, there will be more reports like this coming from various SEO/ads/traffic experiments I'm running (and more monthly reports like this). Let me know if you'd like to hear about some other stats and data.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@cmsj @01fifi10 @Clopclopblop @EducativeFunds @Sosowski You'll be eating crow when someone finally finds the tiny RS232 port built into every neuron.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@cmsj @01fifi10 @Clopclopblop @EducativeFunds @Sosowski You can't copy the nanosecond timings between hardware interrupts, the precise skew of the various crystal oscillators, the thermal/electrical noise which seed the hardware RNG. Your "perfectly reproduced" computer copy will diverge quite quickly.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@jhgfgjkhhggjkh @01fifi10 @EducativeFunds @Sosowski Quantum effects play a role in transistors, NAND flash, hard disk read-write heads... even the little light that tells you your computer is on is a quantum-mechanical device.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@cmsj @01fifi10 @Clopclopblop @EducativeFunds @Sosowski You can't have a complete physical description of your computer, either. That doesn't mean it does anything non-physical, even if most of it depends heavily on quantum mechanics to work at all.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@ChrisMcDonaldMP Per 2018 figures, 1,600 cows worth every week.

40,000 tonnes per year - if we approximate density to that of water, that's around 1.3 litres per second, enough to fill your bathtub in a minute or two, and your house in a day or two.

https://t.co/b8bp9aFf7R

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@lembitopik @Bishophome4369 No you're not. You're a shameless charlatan with the same level of intellectual honesty as a holocaust denier.

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@RutkowskiHQ Cheers for your help with making computers shout at me!

https://t.co/ilxRNqN9rK

[Bartek Rutkowski @RutkowskiHQ]

https://t.co/M6344EJnV4 is the latest (and third) Open Source project supported by Watchgoose under our OS Support Program 🙂

https://t.co/he28lOA4tf

Sharing is caring, so support Open Source!

[Thomas Hurst @blaagh]

@HullTweeting @Telegraph ADHD is substantially under-diagnosed, particularly in adults. Other countries diagnose and treat at higher rates - substantially so in the US.

Support and treat people with the problems they have and maybe they'll be more productive, yeah? Why is this difficult?