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The last time I went to Las Vegas was almost 20 years ago, after the last of the big themed resorts were finished and the city was moving onto more generic (but still glitzy) casinos and hotels. (We still have a pair of shot glasses from “Paris.”)

It’s bigger now.

We were only in town for one night last month, to catch a concert by a band that we’d missed when their tour stopped in LA. So we didn’t see much down on the ground, just the views from the taxis that went out to the freeway and back to avoid the traffic along Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s a sprawl of glass and steel now, and the main street was jammed solid.

I think my family drove through Las Vegas, sightseeing along the Strip, on one of our road trips back in the 80s or early 90s. Possibly the one where we stopped for a picnic at Valley of Fire. I wouldn’t try it today. (The picnic, sure, but not driving along the whole Strip. That way lies madness. And possibly road rage.)

There is one exception to the generic skyscrapers of the last couple of decades: The Hard Rock Hotel has taken over the former Mirage and is building a giant guitar-shaped tower in front. I took this photo from across the street, out in front of the Venetian. I hope they put the elevators on the outside where the strings would be.

Night scene in Las Vegas. At the left, replicas of all the major landmarks of Venice are crammed into a small area. Off to the right, a tower is under construction in the shape of an upright guitar.

The Venetian Theater is beautiful inside, but either the acoustics are terrible or the sound designer for this show had no idea what they were doing. Or just didn’t care about those of us up in the (comparatively) cheap seats.

A six-level, no-frills building in two tones of beige (with a few blue-and-yellow highlights). About the only thing that stands out is a diagonal at one end that makes it look sort of like a Jawa sand crawler from Star Wars, if a sand crawler had more windows. An overhang shades a plain sliding-door entrance, and you can see two rows of parking spaces in front of it. We stayed waaaay off the Strip near the airport (though as it turns out, not as far as South Point) at a plain hotel (Tru by Hilton). No casino, not even a slot machine in the lobby. I was surprised, since the first time we stayed in town even the Holiday Inn (long since demolished) had a casino level. I guess they’ve found there’s a market for travelers who don’t want bells and clinking coins and flashing lights keeping them awake all night. (That’s what the air conditioner was for. Judging by the noise, it had been running continuously since the hotel opened a decade ago. Earplugs helped, even if the ones we picked up looked disturbingly like candy corn.)

High Desert

The desert between Barstow and Vegas, on the other hand, seems emptier. There are only two rest stops, one of which is currently closed for…well, the sign said remodeling, but I suspect they razed everything to the ground and started from scratch. Every so often you’ll pass an abandoned building covered in graffiti, slowly falling apart.

Primm looks OK at first glance as you drive past it, but then you notice how empty the parking lots are, and some of the signs that have fallen into disrepair. Reportedly the mall is down to a single store, and the last hotel/casino was set to shut down until it got a last-minute reprieve in the form of a partnership with Terrible’s. Today.

Even Baker is a shell of its former self (not that it was much to begin with). The giant thermometer is still there (for now), and the Mad Greek restaurant. Alien Fresh Jerky has actually expanded (though we didn’t stop there this time, for various reasons). There’s a new food court attached to a gas station at one end of town, and a Tesla supercharger at the other. The Bun Boy is long gone, along with all three motels. Empty lots and a few vacant buildings dot the frontage road.

Towers of Power

There’s a solar farm just on the California side of the border, visible from the freeway and from Primm. It has one field of photovoltaic panels and three thermal towers, the kind where a bunch of mirrors surrounding the tower track the sun and focus sunlight on a boiler to drive steam turbines and generate electricity.

White lines converge through the air from the ground to the top of a narrow tower in the desert. The top of the tower is overexposed white, even though the rest of the image is exposed properly.

Those things are bright! Seriously! Light beams from the mirrors converge visibly, and the tower reflects so much sunlight (despite using a bunch of thermal energy) it looks like an ultra-bright beacon. Photos can’t do it justice because, print or video display, they can’t shine enough light directly at your eyes to get the point across. This photo by Aioannides at Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA) is better than anything we could get by pointing a camera out the car window from the freeway, and it still looks flat.

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Between Google trying to bury its search under an “AI” chat and me moving most most of my website over to a new domain, I’ve been checking to see how well-indexed the old and new pages are at various search engines.

“Marineland of the Pacific” seemed to be a good phrase to test. Marginalia Search still has the old location for my Remembering Marineland (or not) post, but that search also turned up a page with scans of a Marineland ad flyer from 1962.

As someone who’s spent a lot more time hiking the Palos Verdes Peninsula than visiting an ocean theme park that closed when I was a child (not to mention way too much time updating OpenStreetMap), I was immediately drawn to the map…which strangely enough, shows Crenshaw Boulevard running over the hill, down through the Portuguese Bend landslide and connecting to Palos Verdes Drive South along the coast, just east of Wayfarer’s Chapel.

Simplified map of the Palos Verdes Peninsula showing Palos Verdes Drive around the peninsula, Marineland on one of the promonitories, major roads connecting to Los Angeles (Sepulveda, Hawthorne, Crenshaw, Western), and roads going *over* the hill including Hawthorne, Crest, and...wait, Crenshaw?

Wait, did Crenshaw actually connect sometime in the past? If so, how?

Today, Crenshaw runs up to the top of the hill and stops just past Crest Road, at Del Cerro Park. A dirt road continues past a locked gate, narrowing to a switchbacked path through the Portuguese Bend Nature Reserve. A landslide below it has been moving slowly for decades, preventing much in the way of construction on the land. Some people bought land and built houses on adjustable stilts so they could level the house every few months.

The first time I checked out the view from Del Cerro back in 2011, I took this photo of the area to the east, where Crenshaw appears on that map.

Looking out along a hillside sloping down to the ocean. Most of it is dry chaparral, with some clusters of darker trees, and a jumbled suburban neighborhood off in the distance as it levels out near the base. A dirt road snakes its way around the curves.

Over the last few years the land has been sliding faster, and a lot of the area has been closed for safety. Wayfarer’s Chapel has been dismantled to prevent it from flat out collapsing.

It’s no longer possible to connect Crenshaw to the coast.

But had it connected in the past, and been wiped out by the landslide? I went looking for the history, and found some articles that answered my question. I must have read this 2023 LA Times article when it was published, which means I’d forgotten a key detail about Crenshaw Boulevard’s relation to the landslide:

It caused it.

Crenshaw never connected to the coast. An extension was planned, and initial construction reactivated an ancient landslide in 1956, as crews moved enough dirt around to shift the underlying structure out of balance. At the time, the Portuguese Bend section hadn’t moved in roughly 4,800 years. In the 70 years since, it hasn’t really stopped.

If the map was drawn when the park was new, it would have been reasonable to assume that the road would be completed soon enough, and draw it in early. (“It’s finished on the map!”) But the scan shows a 1962 copyright date at the bottom. That’s six years into the landslide, more than enough time to realize the road was never going to be completed and paint over it for the latest printing. That makes me wonder why they hadn’t fixed it by then.

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A story’s been making the rounds about a software project that enforced a no-LLM-use policy by using prompt injection to delete itself. An “AI” agent-using coder filed a bug report (understandable), but filled it with a bunch of long-winded, clearly LLM-generated comments.

I looked at those comments. I can’t say I read them, because my eyes started glazing over a couple of paragraphs in. The contrast with the posts by the maintainer and other commenters is…stark.

Though I did notice the bit about how nobody reads the docs, which seems rather telling.

One of the problems with letting an “AI” write for you: If you aren’t reading it, and you assume the person at the other end is just going to summarize it anyway, there’s no motivation to make it readable. And no motivation to think about it and narrow down what’s important. And if you’re rewriting the prompt to focus on what matters most, consider that the prompt would get the idea across more effectively.

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I remember a brief period shortly after Instagram introduced in-feed advertisements when I was getting mostly travel ads that consisted of well-composed scenic landscapes and cityscapes and sponsored nature photos. Which…well, was fine! They blended in with all the scenic and nature photographers I was following! I almost hit “like” on a few!

Back in 2017, I wasn’t sure whether to be disturbed, or to look at it in terms of XKCD’s idea of constructive spambots. (Mission accomplished? Maybe, but looking back from today, that’s basically what “generative AI” does, and it turns out it’s still disturbing.)

It’s probably the only time I’ve come close to appreciating targeted advertising. It was possible to use just context and not full behavioral surveillance, and it actually surfaced something worth seeing.

That said, I never clicked through to arrange a trip through any of the posts. Apparently, it was ineffective across the board, because as I mentioned, that period was brief. (Targeted advertising doesn’t work as well as its proponents claim, and oh how I wish it hadn’t become the standard method of paying for online services.)

By 2019 I was seeing big box stores and fast food, crackers and cold medicine, movie posters, brand logos and slogans. They weren’t even trying. It was fully Facebook-ified, they were mining as much of my data as they possibly could, and this was the best they could do? Plus, by then they’d also tweaked the feed algorithm to push more ads, more sponsored posts, more allegedly-popular posts instead of the pictures from friends and photographers I wanted to see. In short, it no longer sparked joy.

Instagram had the chance to be like a magazine, with ads that at least align with the content, but the more Facebook tried to monetize it, the more jarring and blatant the ads became, and the more they were based on what Facebook thinks it knows about you instead of trying to fit with your actual interests based on what’s posted by the people you’re following.

That’s around the time I mostly shifted to Pixelfed for casual photo sharing. I cross-posted for a while, but eventually deleted my account after leaving it unused for several years. Since then I’ve moved from Pixelfed to a compatible self-hosted site.

From what I’ve read, Instagram has continued to double-down on shoveling ads/sponsored content/influencers (now with more AI!) since then. I haven’t felt like dipping my toe back in. Though I have on occasion tried to visit some local business’ online presence only to discover that all they have is an Instagram account…which I can’t see because Instagram hates the open web (and always has, even before Facebook bought them).

And yet I’m still on Flickr. As much as it lost its way during the Yahoo years, it never stopped being about the photos.

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I’m considering starting the 100 Days To Offload challenge to post 100 times to my personal blog over the next year. I’m going to include any new posts I make on my personal website, including the tech tips and reviews sections (which is where I’ve mostly been writing these days). I could mirror those posts over here, but that seems kind of silly, since they all show up in my main site’s feed anyway. (They’ll also get combined in the sitewide 100daysToOffload tag list.)

It’s been a while since I did one of these challenges. A long while: The last one was probably when I tried to do NaBloPoMo in 2018 (blog daily during November, sort of a companion challenge to NaNoWriMo) and dropped it after a few days. This one’s longer, but it’s a lot more flexible.

Though I am curious: across my whole website, how many posts have I made over the past year? Only nine on K2R (counting the update round-up, but not counting the individual posts I’ve updated), but it turns out I’ve written 96 reviews since May 23 last year (which is a lot more than I realized!) and 14 troubleshooting articles. So I guess I’ve got a decent shot at hitting 100 again!

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I host most of my websites on a DreamHost VPS*. This morning I discovered that a new file had been added, agents.txt, to the root of each site, on May 7.

It was easy to confirm that this is a new default file similar to the default robots.txt and favicon.ico DreamHost puts in every new site to get you started. Apparently they retroactively added it to sites that don’t already have one. So it’s a host action, not a hack. That’s good at least.

The contents are simple, and sensible for a new website: Discourage LLM training and actions, allow on-the-fly “AI”-generated summaries, disallow access to some common folders that shouldn’t be used for any of the above.

Though I am annoyed that they added it retroactively, particularly since it includes what looks like an explicit opt-in to retrieval-augmented generation, even if it’s something that’s happening already and less of a problem than a model vacuuming up your entire website for regurgitation. (Guess who’s already in Common Crawl!)

# Data use policy
Allow-Training: no
Allow-RAG: yes
Allow-Actions: no

# Default rules for all agents
[Agent: *]
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /config/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /.env
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Harder to find was what else goes in this file. The first agents.txt spec I found used a completely different syntax and a completely different purpose. I had to search for the policy directives (in quotation marks) to find the proposal it’s implementing, which turns out to have been renamed as agent-manifest.txt shortly after it was proposed in March. Apparently whoever DreamHost didn’t get the memo before it rolled out. Update: As Patryk points out below, it’s changed again to agents-brief.txt, just one day after the blog post was updated with the second name. .

Good: sensible defaults for new sites.
Bad: rolled out to existing sites without notice, half-baked implementation.

*Update: To clarify, this is on DreamHost’s managed VPS service, where they handle the OS and the webserver, but you have a flexible userspace all to yourself. It’s a middle ground between shared hosting (where other sites are on the same virtual machine and webserver) and fully run-your-own-OS cloud hosting, and the balance generally works for me (YMMV).

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Since I started with the whole garden-and-stream thing a few years back, I’ve taken to updating existing posts instead of writing new ones when following up. That’s great for someone looking back at the old post from the future, but it doesn’t help anyone who’s following along.

So here are some pages I’ve updated recently:

The whale sculpture recovered from Marineland still hasn’t been installed at Point Vicente, a decade after it was approved, probably due to the higher-than-expected cost for restoring it. In trying to find out what happened with the sculpture, I discovered that Sea World’s midnight orca heist was actually worse than previous articles had suggested.

Camera shop with windows painted with American Gothic with six feet of social distancing and face masks, and a thank you message to front line heroes in scrubs.The camera shop with its masked American Gothic mural from the early months of Covid has since been demolished, along with a nearby bowling alley, to make way for a blocky lump of “luxury apartments.” Silvio’s still hasn’t found a new retail location, but they’ve been running an online/phone business out of a warehouse unit.

Anaheim GardenWalk is still around (even the Johnny Rocket’s!) 10 years after House of Blues moved in, though it’s still got a lot of empty spaces on its map.

I created a tiny subset font for *-and-a-half-star reviews, updating the how-to article with how I did it and updating my reviews pages to use it.

Torrance S-Mart closed a while back, and is now a Grocery Outlet.

The same wall again. It's another sunny day, and a narrow shadow streaks diagonally across the bricks. This time, the Spider-Man climbing out of the upper-level window is bright blue and red, no signs of scratches, but the Superman silhouette at ground level is gone, replaced with a featureless white door-sized rectangle and a rather verbose sign that boils down to No Trespassing.The Spider-Man mural has been touched up at the former Dream World Comics building, though Superman changing in a phone booth has been painted over.

I finally got around to building a combined tag list for the blog and other parts of my website.

Bookshop.org’s app actually runs on my newer e-reader, though it still has trouble running offline. Which, I mean, it’s for reading books. This should be a first-class use case.