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.
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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.
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Today, I reached level 100 in Pikmin Bloom, a walk-around-with-your-phone game. That's the highest level achievable. And Alexander humblebragged: "Oh woe is me, I just don't know what to do wit...
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Milestone: 44 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 44 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 s...
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Milestone: 42 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 42 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 s...
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I have gone five million steps while playing the Pikmin Bloom phone game. Look on my walks, ye mighty, and despair! (Yeah, yeah, I know some other people have more steps than this. I bet there's...
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Some weeks back, I set up a dashboard of San Francisco COVID-19 data. It showed data that was already available elsewhere, but zoomed in near the low end of the graph. I wanted a graph that I could g...
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Milestone: 39 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 39 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 s...
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1 Million Steps
I'm still playing that Pikmin Bloom walking-around mobile phone game. I recently hit a milestone: I've walked a million steps while playing the game. ...
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Nowadays, I appreciate outdoor hot dog stands. They're very well ventilated and I can buy food unlike that I'd cook for myself. When I ran the hotdog stand at the MIT Mystery Hunt, I made more hot d...
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Today, I note a major milestone in my recovery from shelter-in-place. (To be clear: I don't think I caught/recovered from COVID. This is recovering from the measures I took to evade COVID.) The miles...
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You may recall that some months back I started playing a walking-around game called Orna. I'm still playing it these days and hit a milestone this morning: My character is №100 in my region (Northern...
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Wow, it's the site's 36 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 s...
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I have walked 1000km while playing that Harry Potter Wizards Unite game. (That milestone doesn't capture the fun of the game, but it's something that folks can understand even if they don't know t...
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Milestone: 35 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 35 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 s...
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Milestone: 33 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 33 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 s...
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One Year of Octothorpean
The Octothorpean online puzzle-hunt launched a year ago today. How have things gone since then? Pretty well, I think. On the other hand, for the goals I had… They're not so easy to measure. S...
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Milestone: 24 Million Hits
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: everytime a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human ...
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Milestone: 21 Million Hits
It's the site's 21 millionth hit! (As usual, this isn't as impressive a number as you might think at first: these "hits" include, e.g., one for each graphic on each page loaded, visits from search-en...
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