New Old Web

A Five-Step Approach to Deploying AI in Labor-Intensive Businesses

Austin Smith — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 02:26:10 +0000

A recent academic paper about the economic significance of the “up or out” employment system used by famous consulting firms got me thinking about the economic liberty of employees in the age of artificial intelligence. Consulting is labor-intensive and thus very attractive to both consulting firms and AI tool-builders, but the early returns have mixed…

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Vibe Coding is Just Another Way to Say the Same Old Thing

Austin Smith — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:49:36 +0000

Those of us who have been writing code since at least the early 2000s are familiar with the stereotype of the “cowboy coder.” The term is sort of a double insult — it’s an insult to the individual developer, and it’s also unhelpfully gendered. While I’ve never heard anyone called a cowgirl coder, I have met…

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Why Doesn’t Bloomberg Put Money Stuff Behind the Paywall?

Austin Smith — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:47:03 +0000

One of the best and most popular email newsletters I read is Matt Levine’s Money Stuff. It’s a must-read for folks in lots of finance and finance-adjacent circles, and stylistically one of a kind. Bloomberg, Levine’s employer, is a business, and a pretty good one at that. So why don’t they put his terrific content…

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Spotlight, But Only News Technology

Austin Smith — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:09:56 +0000

Spotlight is one of my single favorite movies ever, and I’ve probably seen it a dozen times. I use parts of it to discuss various aspects of the the news business when I’m talking with folks in journalism, because we’ve almost all seen it, and if you haven’t — drop everything! On the flight home from…

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Buried Alive! Publishers are Distracted by Guerilla Marketing

Austin Smith — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:52:41 +0000

Nothing is classically spookier than claiming something is dead when it isn’t actually. See Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial for a sense of just how clearly haunting — and seasonally appropriate! — this concept is. To a marketer, declaring things dead serves two purposes. First, it ends the conversation. Why are we still talking about something…

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Analyzing 5,818 Publishers’ robots.txt Files: Most Non-profit News Organizations Allow AI Bots, OpenAI Most Commonly Blocked

Austin Smith — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 17:13:56 +0000

Robots.txt is a common code format that allows website owners to instruct and direct crawlers, scrapers, spiders, and other automated systems that identify themselves as a unique user agent. Once used to green or red light search engines from accessing a site’s content, publishers are now relying on robots.txt for something completely new: Managing web…

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Classic bottlenecks are unhelpfully obscured by fast hardware

Ricardo Moraleida — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 19:46:01 +0000

Sometimes here at Alley and Lede we half wish that our servers would strain under pressure like they used to. As we’ve written previously, hardware performance improvement has outpaced the demands of even the largest news websites over the past decade. Add in software improvements, especially in databases, where columnar storage systems have supplanted a…

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Chose your glue carefully

Austin Smith — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 01:13:00 +0000

A growing imperative for media companies of all sizes is to directly manage first-party audience data so they can own the customer journey, so selecting the right providers for performance, value, and flexibility is top of mind.

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Web Scale is People

Austin Smith — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 21:18:00 +0000

Alley has been in business for more than 15 years now, many lifetimes ago in the fast-paced world of web technology and the evolution of the media industry. Some of the challenges in scaling digital platforms we faced back then have become table stakes for any website in 2025. As the industry has evolved and…

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Technical Debt is Easier to Create but as Expensive as Ever

Austin Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 21:27:00 +0000

Technical debt is one of the most apt metaphors in software development. It’s so apt, in fact, that it might deserve an accounting system of its own. The widespread use of AI coding tools has made technical debt cheaper than ever to accrue, but skills gaps and a lack of awareness could make it harder…

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