Wow, it's the site's 50 millionth hit. 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:
68.221.75.24 - - [05/Nov/2025:16:34:02 +0000] "GET /frivolity/prog/phraser/words_500K.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 6452256 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot"
Ah, it looks like a bot is reading words_500K.txt, that long list of words I use when writing and solving word puzzles. This bot says it's from openai.com, the ChatGPT company. If I look up the 68.221.75.24 address at the beginning, I learn that the machine making this request is running on Microsoft's Azure cloud. Or it could be a bot from some other company running elsewhere; that "openai.com" and "68.221.75.24" info is fake-able. That's something you read about on the socials, these days. Some web-publisher gets annoyed at a bot from an AI company, and blocks it; just to notice that requests start coming in seemingly from other organizations running on some other cloud…but that data is fake, it's just the annoying bot trying to be sneaky. It's easy to understand why a web-publisher might get annoyed; some of these bots are pretty stupid. If your memory is amazing, you might recall some months back when I posted about this site's 47-millionth hit, it was a bot checking to see if I'd added a little graphic (I hadn't.), which it re-checked 2000+ times over the course of that day. At the time, I wrote "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!'"
When I looked at yesterday's logs to pick out the 50 millionth hit, I saw it was openai looking at words_500K.txt; and then my eyes looked up and saw that the previous hit was openai looking at words_500K.txt; and then my eyes flicked down and saw that the next hit was openai looking at words_500K.txt. I search the logs: Of yesterday's ~15000 hits, ~5000 of them (about ⅓) were this stupid bot checking words_500K.txt. I update that file a couple of times a year, but OpenAI's stupid crawler-bot checks three times a minute.
It occurs to me that a lot of these AI companies are maybe using AI to write their computer programs. Thus, they might have a lot of darned-poorly written computer programs. Maybe that's why their crawler-bots re-check unchanging web pages so enthusiastically? Anyhow, welcome to the site, bots and humans of varying levels of sophistication. Enjoy your read.
