Ian Howells

Mostly tinkering. Dangerously skips permissions.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Back online and preserved for the olds and youngins alike. Will eventually clean this up a bit, but for right now at least everything's accessible.

Thanks to @GrindstoneSEO and @jonnyplatt for the revival assist🍻

https://t.co/e2gla5EpTf

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@GrindstoneSEO Re: local - DataForSEO, set the location code for the right area, search the main term and the near me version, still using national for the city-explicit 'city-name attorney'
https://t.co/l9uEzXNbaT

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@lilyraynyc Revisionist history IME. In the moment, most leaders avoid the person saying it might be a bad idea and are utterly captivated by the grift. "I didn't know!" is a choice they made. There was often someone who knew - it was just clear you wanted them to shut up. (again, IME)

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Have your AI work the night shift.. and make them track their time.

Welcome to being an agency employee, lil buddy.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Much in the same way...

"You don't need a sitemap to rank well." and..

"Sitemaps can help crawlers more easily find your pages"

Do not contradict each other in any way.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

This industry is something.

"Things to appear in our AI results" and "Things to have your website or app more easily used by an AI agent" are separate areas of concern and do not require aligned advice.

Trying to internet-dunk here just makes me think you can't read.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Good ol codex and the godaddy API helped me finally transfer out the last ~50 domains that were in that utter shit hole of a service.

Porkbun is dirt cheap and the team there is fantastic. Highly recommend moving.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Took literally years but finally was able to get https://t.co/47vJ1B2UhM

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@AdamJHumphreys @wilreynolds Everything that was there in 1995?

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@lilyraynyc “We only want people who didn’t have a job 30 months ago.”

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

It's nice to be reminded that other spaces are full of utter grifting as well.

[The Composite Guy @CompositeGuy_]

In his debate with Gary Priestley, Gary Stevenson claims he makes so much money on the markets, his kids will be multimillionaires, while also claiming that everyone else cannot afford to feed their kids or keep the heating on.

Strange then, that after a hiatus last year, his return video announced the launch of his Patreon, directly asking his audience, whom he describes as struggling, to fund his work.

He explained that, despite his massive personal wealth, he needs their support to create more 'ambitious' and 'creative' content beyond simple talking-head videos. Yet since launching the Patreon, he has released 22 videos in the exact same format, with fewer guests than in earlier periods.

He has 2,121 paid subscribers on Patreon, meaning that at a minimum he makes £153k a year from his viewers. He likely makes a similar amount from ad revenue alone, let alone the millions he claims to make on the markets.

His entire platform is built on the idea that the rich extract wealth from everyone else. The brazen hypocrisy of him doing this to his own viewers, in the most direct way possible, is incredible.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Your limitations are now 'just'

Good ideas
Clear directions
Effective processes

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Not wrong on the whole, but hyperbole is silly.

Of course they're better than guessing. You can use your real traffic to find the tool margin of error in your space. Unless you can guess *better* than that margin, reliably, it's obviously better than guessing.

[Martin MacDonald @searchmartin]

Semrush and ahrefs traffic "estimation" numbers are no better than guessing, stop taking business decisions based on them.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@NickLeRoy The shit part is the people who have to go along with the C-level 'we need to show in AI!' push and then get hung out to dry when their dumb ideas turn out to be dumb.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@NickLeRoy C-suite is just begging to be conned. Won't accept that visibility is a bad metric and there isn't an ROI calc, will throw money at obvious grift, and then pikachu face when there's no clear ROI later. Everyone makes their bed 🤷‍♂️

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@NickLeRoy The issue seemed to really stem from the entirely made up assurance with which people pushed this as if it was a real thing. And I say that as someone that loves a good llms file like https://t.co/nG1GigNcI7 that I can point codex to.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

This year has not been it for Claude, IME.

Same workflow used through the move from Opus 4.5 > 4.6 > 4.7 and all the CC harness updates this year.

Results: More tokens burned, more mistakes that are all 'You're right, I ignored the skill instructions.'

Codex-pilled.

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Stile.

[Mistress Dividend @mistressdivy]

What’s a "lost" website from the early 2000s that you still think about today?

[Anneshu Nag @anneshu_nag]

> March

Claude users: "Opus has been feeling noticeably dumber lately. Something's off."

Claude team: "You're all just imagining it. Classic user delusion. Touch grass. Maybe try not being bad at prompting."

> 1 month later

Claude team: "After extensive internal analysis, we can now confirm that Opus was, in fact, dumber for the past 31 days. Here's our 47-page technical report with graphs, appendices, and a very polite explanation of the mysterious regression that definitely wasn't our fault."

ps: "Also since today GPT-5.5 dropped here's a limit reset just to distract y'all from our failures."

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

Everything old is new.

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

So now multiple new GEO tools are formally, publicly launching paid linkbuilding networks? What can go wrong? 🫠🫠🫠

[Ian Howells @ianhowells]

@bryanfcasey @gaetano_nyc @gaganghotra_ I'm not claiming they're bad. Just... this idea doesn't seem to survive contact with general reality. If you have to be way early or on a great EMD, it's not actually useful advice for people. When I see 10x content breaking small brands into big SERPs, I'll be a happy believer.