Wow, it's the site's 47 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits are easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:
73.83.151.13 - - [12/May/2025:18:11:05 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 1441 "https://iask.ai/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/135.0.0.0"
Ah, this was a bot from the iAsk "ask AI" company, checking on my site's "favicon," a little icon to display as a little picture in web browser tabs. Of yesterday's ~8500 hits, ~2800 of them (about ⅓) were this stupid bot checking for the favicon. "Has Larry updated this one thingy in the past 30 seconds? Better check! Nope, no change! Well, better get ready to check again in another 30 seconds!" I meant to blog about this site's 46 millionth hit, but I wasn't paying attention when it snuck by. I didn't think I needed to pay attention so soon, but my site's been getting so many more hits lately from poorly-programmed bots for AI companies that the numbers whooshed past.
Speaking of things I would have blogged about but they whooshed past when I wasn't looking, behold this graph of the past couple of months of San Francisco COVID data:
As you remember, I have a little dashboard of San Francisco COVID data that tracks three numbers. I blog about when all three numbers cross below the "pretty-safe" line (yay!) and blog again when a number crosses above the "pretty-safe" line (boo!). Looking at that chart, you'll see there was a span of time when all three numbers were "pretty-safe" (yay!) but I didn't blog about it. Why not? Alas, the California Department of Public Health didn't update their wastewater data for about a month. As far as I knew, that number was just a little above the "pretty-safe" line… By the time the Health people were publishing numbers again, the numbers were high again. I only learned about it well after the fact.
I bet the Department of Health relies on some professor-type to put the wastewater data together. I bet that professor-type has a Spring Break. That would also explain why they stopped updating their numbers around Winter Break time (including, annoyingly, around MIT Mystery Hunt time so I chickened out on gathering with puzzle nerds because I thought the numbers might be high… but I'd later learn they'd been low).
Anyhow, the numbers continue to whoosh around, sometimes invisibly. Enjoy the ride.
