Double Taps on Tap

May 20, 2026 ·

Noticed something interesting in the attention tracking mechanisms on here; that likes and views sometimes jump up exponentially. I wrote more about setting them up here. This is just a personal website so it hardly matters, but on YouTube views and if it's stream counts on the new Drake album, these things start to matter. So I looked into it and implemented more fine grained controls; also reverted the like count on the home page back to 22 or whatever it was. It started saying 4,000+ people liked the page and obviously that never happened. Maybe there are similar errors on other pages so I'm capturing and acknowledging those errors generally here. Any awards granted to myself have the possibility of being inflated.

This phenomenon of a central party having the power to change numbers in a database of record is perhaps most seriously discussed and debated in blockchains which aim to solve this exact problem. Ethereum's famous DAO hack comes to mind where the chain was agreed to be reverted to a previous state. Something similar happened in the early days of Bitcoin apparently but I can't recall those details off the top of my head.

Maybe I can convert these mistakes into starting a service upregulating people's likes and views on social media sites. Start a whole bot farm or whatever they're called. I am kidding. In other news my book project is coming along well but I don't want to work on it today; maybe tomorrow. Also the daily newsletter thing is coming along well, I wake up to consolidated reports which is how I discovered this error. I should add more things to that but I need to think about what all I want to read about first thing in the morning.

Evening update: the view and like counter messed up again so I have removed it entirely. Site appears more peaceful without it. There was a sparkline at the homepage counting views that now displays number of words written and contributions made to the GitHub repository which feels more honest.