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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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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I recently passed a milestone: I've walked over 10 million steps while playing the game Pikmin Bloom. I didn't notice at the time; the app didn't pop up an achievement badge for 10 million like it di...
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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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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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Wow, it's the site's 38 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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Wow, it's the site's 37 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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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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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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Milestone: 32 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 32 millionth hit.(Well, sort of… remember a few months back I whined about how my then-web-hosting provider had messed up some things? I lost a few weeks' worth of logs th...
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Milestone: 30 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 30 millionth hit. (I'm a little slow to report this; it happened a few days ago and I wasn't checking the numbers. By the "usual" amount of traffic, I shouldn't have had to check...
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Milestone: 28 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 28 millionth it. 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 so...
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Milestone: 27 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 27 millionth it. 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: 26 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 26 millionth it. 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 so...
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Milestone: 26 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 26 millionth it. 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 so...
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Milestone: 25 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 25 millionth it. 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 som...
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Milestone: 23 Million Hits
It's the site's 23 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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Milestone: 22 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 18 (edit: can you tell I "wrote" the intro to this post by copy-pasting an old post?) 22 millionth hit. (Not as impressive as it sounds. It's hits: someone loading a page that sh...
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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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Milestone: 20 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 20 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 207.46.12.178 - - [25/Dec/2011:22:21:57 -0400] "GET /new/atom.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 15073 "-" "msnbot-UDiscovery/2.0b (+http...
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Milestone: 18 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 18 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 66.249.67.228 - - [29/Dec/2010:07:30:11 -0400] "GET /frivolity/photos/200405_rwc/10_earth_mover_cliff_tank.html HTTP/1.1...
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Milestone: 17 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 17 millionth hit. Looking at the apache log line, I see: 70.38.64.234 - - [06/Sep/2010:02:36:30 -0400] "GET /departures/SFO/hawk_hill/42_golden_gate_bridge_halfway_along.jpg HT...
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Milestone: 16 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 16-millionth hit: 207.46.13.132 - - [08/May/2010:13:51:57 -0400] "GET /frivolity/photos/old_misc_sf/sffloat.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot....
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Milestone: 15 Million Hits
I'm writing this in kind of a hurry. An out-of-town cousin is in town. There have been fun activities. There will be more. Thus, apologies. I write in haste. The 15 millionth item (modulo the us...
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Milestone: 14 Million Hits
Wow, it's this web site's 14 millionth hit. The people and the robots, they keep showing up. 118.237.143.134 - - [06/Jul/2009:04:35:09 -0400] "HEAD /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Wi...
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Milestone: 13 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 13000000th hit. (Sort of. Actually, it probably passed 13000000 a while back. I skipped counting a bunch of hits (most of them?) during October-November. Anyhow.) 124.185.38.69...
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Milestone: 12 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 12 millionth hit. Let's look at the log: 66.249.73.131 - - [27/Jun/2008:00:13:43 -0400] "GET /new/archive/2005_08_01_index.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Go...
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Milestone: 11 Million Hits (plus gratuitous Taft domain pestering)
Wow, it's the site's eleven-millionth hit. 195.225.178.21 - - [20/Feb/2008:06:20:03 -0400] "GET /anecdotal/hunt/15/darcy_ian.html HTTP/1.1" 200 853 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT...
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Milestone: 10 Million Hits (including 26000 strange ones)
Wow, it's the site's ten-millionth hit. In decimal notation, that is a very round number. Let's take a look at the log record of that hit: 219.142.53.25 - - [23/Oct/2007:08:33:47 -0400] "GET /friv...
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Milestone: Nine Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's nine-millionth hit: 66.249.70.236 - - [10/Jul/2007:21:58:59 -0400] "GET /departures/monterey/0/3267_diver_tm.jpg HTTP/1.1" 301 376 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0" It looks like some G...
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Milestone: 8 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's eight-millionth hit! Please pardon me as I now babble on about web minutiae. Starting with... let's take a look at the log of that hit: 69.41.96.6 - - [02/Apr/2007:13:03:28 -0...
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Milestone: 6 Million Hits
[Update: I meant seven-millionth. It's seven. I'm not re-celebrating six. Sorry, I posted this in a hurry, didn't proof-read, didn't fact check, sloppy work, sloppy.] Good gracious, it is the sit...
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Milestone: 6 Million hits
Today, this website enjoyed its six-millionth hit. That hit was all about Amazingly Big things up in the Seattle area. I'm talking about the Pier 86 Grain Terminal and Microsoft. Let's take a look...
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Milestone: 5 Million Hits
Good gracious, it is the site's five-millionth hit. That's five million hits in seven years (plus a couple of days). Let's look at the log record for that five-millionth hit: 71.112.234.3 - - [12...
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Site: Milestone
Wow, it's the site's four-millionth web hit: 66.249.64.68 - - [28/Sep/2005:23:09:05 -0400] "GET /self/MBrooce/MBbruce.html HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" Ah, t...
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