This post has now been moved to…
This post has now been moved to https://jasuja.us/2025/03/i-broke-grok-and-sent-it-into-an-infinite-loop-without-meaning-to/
The Diffen Blog
Diffen is a difference engine that lets you compare anything. This blog chronicles our experiences raising this media property.
Latest posts
p(doom) ≈ 1. Resistance is futile. Or is it?
I love what we’re able to do with AI today and what we’ll be able to do in the future. Smart people have raised existential questions about what it would mean to have a fulfilling work life if AI is better than you at everything. But I think we will find answers to this. The nature of work will change, the skills that are highly valued will change. But humans will find meaningful work…
The 5 building blocks of intelligence
On a recent episode of the No Priors podcast , Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop said that: The consensus definition of AGI (artificial general intelligence) these days is: “AGI is a system that can do the majority of economically useful work that humans can do.” He believes this definition is incorrect. He believes that François Chollet’s definition of general intelligence is the…
AI Companies vs. The Open Web
Robb Knight recently posted how Perplexity is lying about their user agent . I wrote a short comment on Hacker News around this and there were interesting responses to it that spurred some debate. So I wanted to expand on the tensions between what users want, what publishers need, and how the tradeoffs affect the ecosystem of the open web. Robb Knight’s blog is the latest story in a string…
PHP: Finding all instances of “Optional parameter declared before required parameter”
Among the many backward incompatible changes in PHP 8.1 is this one: Optional parameters specified before required parameters An optional parameter specified before required parameters is now always treated as required, even when called using named arguments . As of PHP 8.0.0, but prior to PHP 8.1.0, the below emits a deprecation notice on the definition, but runs successfully when called. As of…
Using Cloudflare Workers to get your Fastly cache hit rate to 95%
I love both Cloudflare and Fastly, and use both services for Diffen . Cloudflare powers the DNS and delivers the assets (images and JS) on static.diffen.com. Fastly is the CDN for serving HTML content, powering the main www subdomain. (if you’re wondering why, it’s because Fastly lets you stream your access logs to Bigquery, a feature only available to enterprise customers on Cloudflare.) This is…
You’re Doing Social Logins Wrong
Social logins can be great because it’s one of those features that’s good both for users and for app developers. Users often don’t want to create yet another account with yet another username and password. They may end up re-using the same password across many sites, which leaves them vulnerable . App developers want to reduce any friction they can to increase user engagement. Creating an account…
How do I reference the diffen website in APA style for a research paper?
You can see the How to Cite article: http://www.diffen.com/difference/Diffen:Citation
How a Progress bar for AJAX requests helped increase conversions by 38%
The NY Times published an interesting article this week about how progress bars can make it easier for people to wait for computers to respond. This idea is not new ; usability experts have long advocated their use. Developers and designers have even tried to have some fun with progress bars . When we launched the Get from Wikipedia feature on Diffen, we wanted to make the wait bearable for our…
The Decline of IE and Firefox
Windows and IE are dying under the assault of iPads and other tablets from the left, and Chromebooks from the right . This is not surprising, or even news to people who spend a lot of time in the tech world. What surprised me recently was how precipitous the decline of Internet Explorer has been in the past few months. ( update : some comments on Hacker News questioned why the y-axis on this graph…
2 million unique visitors in September
It took Diffen several years to get to a point where we crossed 1 million unique visitors a month. The next million took only 1 month. After flirting with the 1MM mark a couple of times, it finally happened in August 2012. And in September traffic to Diffen crossed the 2 million unique visitor mark. Totally awesome! But we’re not going to get carried away with this success. Growth cannot…
link rel=twitter - A proposal for mobile browser makers
It is generally easier to share what you’re reading on a mobile device than desktops. Mobile browsers allow you to email, share on Twitter and, with the latest Chrome and iOS 6, share on Facebook. One advantage of Twitter’s sharing widget aka Tweet button is the via field. Mobile websites cannot afford to add bulk by loading the Twitter widget. So perhaps mobile browser vendors should…
Analysis of the “bump” caused by the Republican and...
Analysis of the “bump” caused by the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Here’s a look at the bump caused by the two major conventions. Both events caused an increase in the number of people comparing the Democratic and Republican parties but the DNC caused a bigger spike. And what of the candidates? More people where comparing Romney and Obama on each day of the DNC than after the…
Experiences hacking GA event tracking
Last month we started using event tracking in Google Analytics (henceforth forever called GA). Should have started years ago but as they say - better late than never. Thought it might be a good idea to share a few things that we learned. 1. Have clear goals We have a pretty high bounce rate so we wanted to understand what people are clicking on to see how we could make the product more engaging.…
1 million unique visitors a month
On Aug. 27, we hit a milestone in the history of Diffen. 1 million unique visitors in a calendar month. We had come close before and flirted with 1M on a couple of occasions. But missed the mark by a few thousand. But August was different. We crossed the milestone with a few days of August to spare. Yes, we know that we’re too dependent on Google right now and one change of their algo can…
W00t!! We love round numbers.We know that one Google algorithm...
W00t!! We love round numbers. We know that one Google algorithm update can easily set us back but today is a day to celebrate!
Joe Biden vs Paul Ryan ratings Biden’s rating includes...
Joe Biden vs Paul Ryan ratings Biden’s rating includes votes from the 2008 election comparison so it’s not going to be an apples-to-apples comparison with Paul Ryan immediately. This snapshot is a good indication of their starting scores so when we examine their ratings a few months from now we’ll know how each candidate did. Behavioral psychologists will tell you (and we would too) to take these…
Mysterious rise in 404 errors in GWT
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting that in the last month the number of 404 errors has skyrocketed from about 9,000 to 77,000. We can’t figure out why. In fact, when we check our server logs and look for 404 status codes returned to Googlebot in the last month, there’s only about 10,000 (which might even have some duplicate records..we haven’t checked). So what in the name of…
Mandel vs. Brown - who's leading?
Mandel vs. Brown - who's leading? : Brown is ahead in the polls but Mandel is all over YouTube. This is the most expensive race in Ohio’s history - over $24 million have been raised.
Market share for different versions of Internet Explorer. IE 6...
Market share for different versions of Internet Explorer. IE 6 is dying!!