Doctorow breaks down the Hugging Face hacking incident, showing how OpenAI's chatbots didn't actually "go rogue"—they just followed training data from decades of CTF competitions and hacker culture. The real problem isn't that AI is becoming autonomous; it's that hyperscaler companies deliberately stoke terror about their products to raise capital, and we keep repeating the scary stories without understanding what actually happened.

Design. Simple, with a focus on typography and curated stock photos. No cluttered templates.

Architecture. Lightweight. Static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No heavy frameworks or platforms like WordPress and Ghost. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Dynamic behavior runs through Cloudflare Pages Functions — small serverless handlers.

Listening. Spotify Web API, OAuth authorization code flow. A refresh token is stored in Cloudflare KV. The page calls Spotify's currently-playing and recently-played/top-tracks endpoints through a Function, which mints a fresh access token as needed. Playback happens through Spotify's own embedded player, authenticated as the visitor.

Reading and "Shit AI Says." Cloudflare D1 (SQLite), two tables. A private admin form inserts, updates, and deletes rows. Adding a reading entry can optionally call the Anthropic API (Claude Haiku) to draft a headline and a short note from the article's text.

Musing and Tinkering. Markdown files, one per post, each with a frontmatter block. No database, no server-side moving parts.

Observing. A folder of photos, resized and stripped of metadata with ImageMagick. New photos are checked against the existing set with a perceptual hash (an averaged 8×8 grayscale fingerprint, compared by Hamming distance), so the same photo added twice — even recompressed differently — doesn't get duplicated. This makes adding new photos easy.

Contact form. Cloudflare Turnstile verifies the submission is from a person, checked server-side before anything is sent. Email goes out through Resend's API.

Access control. Cloudflare Access controls who can reach the content-management pages, requiring an email-verified login before any of the site's own code runs.

Deployment. The repository is connected to Cloudflare Pages directly. A push to the main branch on GitHub triggers a build and deploy automatically.

Cost. Free, apart from a small, variable charge for the Anthropic API calls used in Reading's summarization.