Last year I noted the Top Six locations for C@W hits, as follows (in descending order):
Hong Kong / China / USA / Singapore / UK / Norway
2025 has been a bizarre year for blogstats. Much as I'd like to think the upsurge represents long overdue global recognition for this blog, many other blogs have found the same and the widely accepted explanation is that the latest generation of LLMs, ever hungry for new "training" material, have been voraciously "reading" new bodies of text. Obviously, the nearly two decades of flawless prose and compelling reasoning to be found on C@W make us a highly suitable educational experience for these eager students.
Anyhow, the "readership" has increased six-fold over 2024, with a mighty spike in June. Someone in the LLM industry could doubtless explain this in detail. Interestingly, while the spike has long since receded into the rear view mirror, it has left a pronounced tail in its wake**. Presumably, the said LLMs keep coming back periodically to check on our latest gems: and I wonder if also their initial burst of reading resulted in a wider dissemination of C@W as a cited source, which ordinary ("human") www-browsers now access more than previously.
Anyhow, here is the Top 10 for 2025.
- Brazil - first by a good distance
- Singapore
- USA
- Vietnam
- China
- India
- UK
- Japan
- Bangladesh
- Norway
Questions:
- Does this mean that electricity is cheaper in Brazil? Or is it the cost of bandwidth? I haven't heard of a rash of data centres being built there.
- To what body of hitherto untapped sources in the digitised world will the LLMs go for their next training binge? What's left that is broadly literate, extensive, ignored thus far - and free? The complete speeches of Stalin, Mao and Castro? Might it be something of unspeakably awful content, such that LLMs will soon be effing and blinding like a docker and sharing pictures of nudified politicians ..?
- May we hope that the wholesome diet of C@W wit, wisdom and literary excellence will raise the whole tone of AI output? (*ahem*)
ND
PS: start thinking about your 2026 predictions ...
________________
** A company of my acquaintance that publishes a notable blog (as a promotional exercise) has suffered the opposite effect. Its content having been extensively devoured in the same way, it now gets fewer hits, because AI searches give answers based on the LLM's reading and summarising of that blog. These days, such searches do at least give links to the original source; but most lazy bastards go no further than the AI summary. Which, to be fair, characterises much of my own use of AI - given the excellence of the summaries! (Which is not necessarily a crass, circular assessment: when full reasoning & explanation are incorporated, you can pretty much judge that nothing salient has been omitted or "misunderstood". And it's self-regulating, too: if the search is for an important purpose, obviously you dig deeper.)
Some established business models are of course being actively trashed by the phenomenon - not to mention the upcoming fate of many professional, semi-professional and clerical-type jobs ...
4 comments:
I saw a chap writing the other day saying that American schools should return to the habit of teaching the traditional, bowdlerised, comforting accounts of US history, to give the kiddy-winkies nation-building pride in their country. (His language was a less frank but that was the course he was urging.)
In other words the old, sentimentalised, semi-fictional stuff should be aired again. It made me wonder where LLMs learn their US history, since the "alternative" marxist histories are probably just as fictional: certainly the one I looked at was dreadful. An average of the two would be useless too.
You might say it doesn't matter: almost no Americans want a judicious, accurate account, and few foreigners care.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/27/london-eye-architect-proposes-14-mile-tidal-power-station-off-somerset-coast
Aha! I have just stumbled across this:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-great-contradiction-american-founding-joseph-ellis
It sounds to be rather a grown-up account of the political problems faced by the Founding Fathers. And then I notice 'In freeing his slaves, Washington “accomplished something more glorious than any battlefield victory as a general ..." '.
Aargh! Washington didn't free his slaves, he left them to his widow. Apparently the American tendency to avoid unpleasant facts in its history still reigns supreme.
Look for wisdom where truth is. For education on the fundamental forces driving society - sex, money and power - one has to look at the ancient authors or the modern blog comments or the FT or The Sun.
The ancient authors wrote for an educated class like themselves and were fairly open about keeping the lower orders in line.
From the rennaissance onwards literature and lectures were more or less truthful and useful but had to keep one eye on the Church. On the other hand modern university lectures must become almost worthless or get cancelled. Pity the modern student of Jane Austen studies, gossamer prose plastered over with a thick layer of Woke. A bit like Cromwell's distemper in the churches. So, for truth look where Woke ain't.
I doubt the makers of LLMs for public consumption are after truth, clicks yes, truth maybe. Which tells us Woke may silence the schoolmen but the public ain't fooled. As for Brazil, Bolsa Familia maybe and 'the best contraceptive is an ounce of ambition'.
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