Chris Lynch: Technologist

Chris Lynch has worked in technology for over 20 years as a developer, system architect, project manager, digital marketer, CTO, and now IT Director for InsureTech business Source Insurance.

Chris considers himself a bit of an old war horse now and says he's seen a few things.

"I remember a time when Google wasn’t the biggest search engine on the planet, people still believed that fax machines wouldn’t be replaced by email, having a smart-phone meant you’d bought a leather case for your Nokia 3210, and a “Face Book” was something serial killers kept under their beds. Although the landscape around me has changed almost constantly, my love for technology has never waned."

Since Chris' early days working for the NHS, he has been a huge advocate of open source technologies. Chris is currently fascinated by containers, nodeJS and the npm ecosystem, and building microservices. Chris is also still enjoying working with the LAMP stack and recently converted this website from Wordpress to Kirby (running in a container, of course!).

Chris Lynch has created several open-source projects of his own, including:

Bubble: A web based editor for comic book scripts
Return: An SEO auditing utility

and a range of technology demonstrations/shared scripts.

ChatGPT agrees – AI creations are derivative and subject to copyright law

The battle between copyright holders and generative AI platforms is heating up. What happens when I ask Open AI’s ChatGPT for some copyright advice?

On the topic of AI; Chat GPT and Stable Diffusion

I’ve come to the conclusion that how impressive you think a piece of AI is directly correlates to your level of expertise in the skill that the AI is emulating (AIs don’t have skills, in my opinion – they emulate them by shredding, blending, and regurgitating the work of others).

Stable Diffusion won't steal your art (if you tell them not to)

StabilityAI has announced that they will honour artists who choose to “opt-out” of having their artwork included AI training data for the next iteration of their picture-making machine, Stable Diffusion 3.

Mastodon Servers for Writers

Which servers are best for writers joining Mastodon? Here’s how to decide where to make your new digital home…

Roll up! Roll up! OpenAI now offering a miracle cure… for ChatGPT

OpenAI are making an astoundingly successful business out of releasing products that sort of work, most of the time, but that they themselves say you shouldn’t use and will probably make mistakes…

You Should Try Chrome OS Flex

I wish more people knew about Chrome OS Flex.

The Theft of Code by Microsoft Co-Pilot Will Be Decided in Court

Once upon a time, three witches sat around a cauldron. Their names were Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. They were the three merry witches of Microsoft and under the silvery light of a crescent moon, they were casting a spell to rid the world of their mortal foe – open-source software.

Mastodon Tips for Writers

I’ve had my eye on Mastodon for a while. When I was last revamping my website, there was a time when I was considering running a Mastodon server as a place to host my own “microblog”. I love microblogs but I’m always wary of putting all my content on someone else’s platform – so over-investing in Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram has never sat well with me. With my fellow writers running around like people looking for lifeboats off the Titanic as Twitter threatens to sink (either offline or into some kind of terrifying hellscape), I’m feeling a little vindicated that I’ve always tried to keep my audience on platforms where I have a degree of control.

When You're The Product But It Turns Out You're Kinda Worthless

First Twitter, now Alexa. We are seeing an important shift in the “users = profit” dogma that could have huge ramifications in the tech startup space.

Would You Pay To Tweet?

I’m amazed this video isn’t being shared more widely…

Social Media Is About Control

I saved this image when I first saw it back in October. Since then, Elon Musk has bought Twitter, and in the days and weeks that have followed the acquisition, there has been a crash in advertising revenue, mass layoffs, and an exodus of users. Amongst those losing their jobs are content moderators who have been at the forefront of the battle to keep misinformation and hate speech off Twitter.

What's Wrong with the Metaverse?

"Our belief is that this device [the smartphone] will be overtaken by a metaverse experience in the second half of the decade" - Nishant Batra

The Cost of Open Source is Constant Vigilance

We take Open Source software for-granted today. Statistically, there's a good chance that you are reading this article in a web browser based on Chromium, the open source browser that Google markets as Chrome, or that uses Webkit, connected to this website using security powered by SSL, transported over HTTPS and TCP/IP, using DNS to translate a domain name into an IP Address. The page is written in HTML and uses CSS and Javascript, all open standards.

Is Web Assembly a Security Risk?

Cyber-criminals are increasingly using Web Assembly (WASM) to deploy malicious code, raising serious questions about the security model around Web Assembly and its future.

The Crypto Winter is Coming

Back in 2018 when I wrote The Truth About SEO I made a reference to cryptocurrencies...

Bigger boys made me do it: Why copying "leaders" is sometimes a bad idea

If you've worked for any serious amount of time in eCommerce or digital marketing, you'll have come across a client who wants to copy functionality or design from another company. They probably also think it's easy to do this.

WebAssembly 2.0 seeks to fix the gaps in current WebAssembly

I previously wrote about the excitement around WebAssembly and, having seen many technologies like this come and go in the past, my analysis of why WebAssembly might be a bad idea. In summary, it's not that it is technologically bad - it's simply that I don't see a space for it in a world where computing power has been becoming thinner on the client-side for years and microprocessor prices are skyrocketing.

Confirmed: AI-Generated Content Is Against Google's Guidelines

Throughout my career in digital marketing, there were a few rules that I always held to be immutable. One of them was this - If you can automate it, it's probably SPAM. This rule steered me the right way on many occasions when tempting shortcuts were offered to me. I'd lived through the dark times of SEO, you see, times when Google was more easily fooled than it is today and SEO forums were awash with hacks, grifts, and ways to "trick" Google.

Niche vs. Brand Marketing (Goodbye chrislynchwriter.com)

My ruthless cull of domains continues! Now that all of my books, short stories, and movies are listed on this site I'm dropping more of my niche-specific domains and redirecting all of the traffic here. In some instances, the timeline for this is short, the expiry for the domains coming around sooner than it might have done if I was working with a strictly timed plan.

Why I Think WebAssembly is a Bad Idea

If you haven't discovered WebAssembly yet, it's a pretty exciting technology that allows you to code in a range of languages (C++, Rust, and Typescript most notably) then compile your code into a WASM file that can run in all popular web browsers. Because the code is compiled it runs quickly and consistently across all devices. WebAssembly can't render directly and has to rely on being called by and emitting Javascript to manipulate the DOM, but it still opens up some exciting options and introduces the potential to do things in the browser that we just can't do right now like 3D games, heavy image manipulation, cryptography, etc.

How Google's Pirate Update can kill off sites stealing your content

Google has revealed that it now has a specific penalty that it applies to sites that receive repeated upheld DCMA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown requests. In other words, it has a special button it can press to kill off sites hosting pirated content.

Facebook vs. Google vs. You: How your privacy became the ball everyone's fighting over

It's common knowledge that Facebook (or "Meta" if you prefer) likes to track you around the internet, seeing where you go, what you look at, and then use that information to help target advertising.

Picking a Domain Name When There's No SEO Bonus For Keyword-Based Domains

In a boost for digital agencies with names like "Tangarine Kangaroo" or "Excessive Aubergine", brands that took the name of a thing and just shoved "ly" or "ify" on the end, and former digital marketing CTOs who have decided to dump nearly all their domain names and put all their content on one site... Google has confirmed that there is no specific SEO bonus for keyword-based domains.