So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again.
Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.
Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.
That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)
The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.
But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.
(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)
I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.
That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.
> Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.
Nothing wrong with your story, but that summary is terrible. You had a domain for a blog and someone bought it. That’s it. Mechanical Turk is inconsequential, as is the subject of the blog, the story would have been exactly the same if your blog had been about turkey sandwiches and Burger King offered to buy it.
I honestly don’t see what you don’t understand about “Nothing wrong with your story”. It’s literally the start of the first sentence. It seems pretty clear to me the mild criticism is directed solely at the summary (you know, the quoted part), not the story.
Ironic that you’re accusing someone else of “missing the point”, considering.
The point of the story was that I built a thing about Mechanical Turk to promote its money-making capabilities, and ironically made more money from it indirectly than I ever did directly. Considering that point was implied by my framing, you did in fact miss it.
I’m not saying that you have to like a story, but your framing felt unfair, which is why I responded that way.
I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.
I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.
I have one of these that was donated by a reader. I've never been able to get it to work because its battery (its infamous Achilles heel) would not charge.
If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.
While it won’t cover everything DeepSeek does, it handles sophisticated tasks quite well. I found it after spotting it on a chart of different models and it was listed as being near Deepseek v4 Flash’s price/performance levels.
I have noticed by the way that DeepSeek’s API has been pretty slow the past couple of days. This feels like a demand-driven move more than anything. Good thing I invested in an eGPU!
> MiMo-V2.5-Pro to be a pretty cost-effective alternative ... I found it after spotting it on a chart of different models and it was listed as being near DeepSeek v4 Flash's price/performance levels.
MiMo v2.5 Pro is at DeepSeek v4 Pro price level (but consumes lesser tokens per task, so cheaper overall). DeepSeek v4 Flash costs ~3x lesser than the Pro variant!
Honestly, I found managing a Bulma codebase significantly more of a pain in the ass than Tailwind. Tailwind offers the expressiveness of actual CSS with the ability to make quick changes on the fly. As someone who has spent a lot of time working in CSS frameworks over the years, it is one of the better abstractions of its kind.
I sort of feel like this argument is trying to put a train that is already halfway across the country back in the station on the East Coast.
It is so wild that this got shared, as I was working on a project that very specifically was hoping to integrate a feature like this. Psyched to try it, I’ll credit the author in the credits of the site I’m building.
Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python.
It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.
Thanks for pointing out VivaDesigner—I’m surprised in the many obsessive searches to find something like this, it never came up! (I will note that there are a lot of pretty obscure layout programs out there. At my first newspaper, I was brought in to help with the transition to CCI, which was a full-stack publishing tool popular with newspapers of the era. As a result of this, I was introduced to their old system, by Harris, which relied on Windows NT 3.1. Fun times.)
This project is probably a no-go with it (for kicks, I did try importing a PDF of the final doc) but I will keep it in mind in the future from an analysis standpoint.
The other point I’d make is kind of a tipping-point argument. While VivaDesigner can export into IDML it looks like, Affinity has gone just mainstream enough that it won’t be turned away at print shops, which is a real risk. PDFs can get you most of the way, granted, but some print shops want to edit the file, which makes sense.
Oh my goodness! I - really did not- expect to reach the author himself! Hello sir, your work is rad and am excited to see the zine!
My partner and I run our design studio on Linux these days and so we're always on the hunt for software to better replace the PC / Mac software we walked away from, so I explored running Affinity a couple years ago and couldn't get it going properly. Then last year I had to put together a big important document, so I had extra motivation to find a replacement.
I tried almost literally everything that was Linux native over a few weeks when I was getting started. I was impressed with VivaDesigner, but decided to just use LaTeX in VSCode - ahich was both awesome and terrifying for what wound up a 390pg document. And would be a huge PITA for this purpose.
Back to your post specifically - I can imagine how insane the old system you helped replace was.
And yes, I think that the "tipping point" is an important consideration. Maybe in Germany where Viva is based they might not think twice if you bring in a live file, but it does seem like Affinity is far and away the leading challenger in the states. I'm sure it's a miniscule share and Adobe is still the 8,000 pound gorilla.
Quick add: I tested VivaDesigner on some old InDesign docs and I found it did not handle color blend modes very well, which is kind of an essential for a risograph project like 404’s. Nonetheless, the fact that it was able to open an InDesign doc more or less intact makes it a useful tool for a switcher.
LLMs can, for example, write a script to calculate all permutations of the levenshtein distances between words in a sentence and deliver it before the average programmer even understands what this means. Trivialy.
You're just holding it wrong if you're asking it to simply count the characters in a sentence.
I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it’s even possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as more games get optimized.
Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.
Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.
That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)
If you want to get an idea of it, there was one capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124231722/http://www.turkin...
The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.
But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.
(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)
I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.
That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.
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