Atomic Media

Fortune favors the bold. And, at least temporarily, it may favor the criminal. Related current cases: civil SEC case 25-cv-00946 and criminal case 3:22-cr-00352-K.

Got a fortune cookie that said if I made a big bet, it would pay off.

On the back there was an ad for a casino.— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) April 25, 2026

The big issue with relying on karma or the afterlife is some people do not believe in them in the least. This means the concepts have no impact on their behaviors, but any belief in them by others is seen as a mental flaw, and an exploit vector to use.

Don’t expect me to cry
For all the reasons you had to die
Don’t ever ask your love of me

Much of life is simulacra and unattributed quotes from forgotten sources, where ultimately patterns drive outcomes even as we forget the who and why.

When you have a setback - it’s a good idea to look at how people react. Some people will help you, some won’t. But most interesting are the people who express concern, but seem happy about it. Those are the real scoundrels - people to watch closely.— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) April 25, 2026

Wars are started, people die, families are ripped apart, all while those who drive the destruction use political power and corruption to try to hide their influence.

Momentum is its own life force.

Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire

We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it

In light of today’s whistleblower testimony that Fauci was aggressively pushing his fraudulent Proximal Origin authors into the intelligence community to seed the false natural origin narrative, all while pretending not to know who the authors were, here is an email from lead… pic.twitter.com/UUXF1qpZMC— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) May 13, 2026

The formal feedback loops and the formal systems of power are intentionally broken in such a way that they can try to break a person who cares while being stupid enough to adhere to the system. Ultimately the outcomes of a system reflect the underlying goals of it along with the stakeholder preferences.

Game theory explains why working harder inside a broken system is the worst response to that system. Because a system is never truly broken. It’s just producing exactly the outcomes its own incentive structures were designed to produce, whether intentional or not. Working harder…— Incentivising (@incentivising) April 28, 2026

The same Mary a thousand times,
back then on working lines
and I’ll face the wall and the day again.
See if she won’t buy some wine,
we’ll take two to the restaurant
and fight it out with our wives in the basement.
I pulled the tears out of that face,
head long in the right place
and I want to join in with the right race.

Eventually someone decides they do not give a crap, and they reset the deck.

The more personal the crime, the more personal and valuable the response.

Ultimately, she can’t outrun Interpol.

There’s something that’s invisible
There’s some things you can’t hide

One particular sleezy person who made a lucrative career being a criminal - let’s just call her Stella Huh - tried to ruin our family for over a decade straight, with extra salt nearly a decade prior. As a psychopath, that person has the EQ matching a horned Lizard. She actually told my wife to cleanse her soul by allowing the criminals to keep the money. That is not how life works if one is multiple standard deviations above the mean IQ.

You only live once.

If your adversary hacks your wife’s computers and then does AI layovers full of sleazy misinformation about you. Then there is no olive branch path toward forgiveness - only delivering an appropriate level of punishment.

People who want to have a profound impact on your life will find their goals are rather reflexive. They need to either hire Dennis Rodman, or watch out for the hazardous rebounds tied to their long stream of bricks!

If criminal fraud Stella Huh believes I can not prove her culpability in that particular type of wire fraud she should open up some new bets on Polymarket and Kalshi, so that she can proudly express her level of confidence. I will take the other side of those bets, and we will have a market and a timeline for delivering joy.

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Aaron Wall: So when, like, a computer paper is printed out, there’s some, uh, like, kind of almost like invisible ink which shows which printer it comes fromThat sort of technology exists elsewhere in the tech stack. You can think of it in, like, code on a computer with, like, IP addresses or other code dependencies or, you know, other things where-

Stella Huh: Okay.

Aaron Wall: … like, this chain of things, it would be like this, this, therefore that. Then you could kind of… Once you got a, a fingerprint or footprint or something in one area, it can carry across in ways that are very specific.

Stella Huh: Okay.

Aaron Wall: Yeah. You’re a programmer-

Stella Huh: And?

Aaron Wall: … you know.

Stella Huh: Uh-huh. And? What does that have to do with me?

Aaron Wall: Uh.

Stella Huh: You’re saying that I hacked into your… It’s, it can be traced back to my IP?

Aaron Wall: I gave examples. I did not say you hacked. I just threw out like five or 10 random things just for examples. Did you say you hacked into something?

Stella Huh: No. I don’t- I’ve never done… I mean, why would I? Why would I? What is the motivation there? First of all, I am not interested in security, computer security because I’m not, I have no interest in hackers or hacking. I think it’s really boring. And no offense, I’m not interested in your life, Aaron. [sighs] So why, so, so why do I need to be there for… I mean.

Aaron Wall: I mean, some signals carry better than others in, in different mediums, I guess.

I have seen intelligent people destroy their careers by never learning to play dumb.

Conveniently, game theory explains why that happens:

In most high-stakes hierarchies, influence is perceived as a zero-sum game.

If you appear “too intelligent,” you are perceived as a… https://t.co/lPK5bUNZnY— Incentivising (@incentivising) May 14, 2026

When the criminal has been fingered, you must make it hurt as a matter of principle, as an acknowledgement of the importance of self-respect, and to let the people you love know you care about them and learn from mistakes.

All of that is before one considers the value of retribution in accounting and providing a signal for balancing the flow of karma across the cosmos.

To defeat your enemy you absolutely must stoop to its tactics. The whole idea that you shouldn’t is something your enemy came up with.— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) May 14, 2026

Some might suggest stooping to the level of the criminals to get back at them, but I find it much more satisfying knowing I am going to win without becoming a criminal - there Stella Huh will stand alone - or, perhaps more appropriately, with her fellow racketeers.

I would recommend never stooping so low (In using an enemies tactics) that you don’t much feel like living with yourself after. Man is the only creature capable of acting beneath it’s nature. If you win, but you contaminate yourself with bad deeds that are grotesqueries of human…— MeaghieWalkerWilliams (@MeaghieC) May 14, 2026

So take the photographs and still frames in your mind
Hang it on a shelf in good health and good time
Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial
For what it’s worth, it was worth all the while

Investing in subversive entropy causes much more societal destruction than it leads to personal gain, because ultimately you do not get away with anything. The violent criminal who gets 37 second chances eventually kills someone. The financial fraudster leads to deaths of despair or other forms of violence on their victims. This means that if you are aware of the level of depravity of a malevolent psychopath who has harmed people you love, you have a moral obligation to view yourself as an agent of God which helps push forward accounting here on Earth, so that any future harms they cause are limited.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side

As David Foster Wallace stated in his famous This is Water commencement speech, everyone worship’s something.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Well, the night makes moves
And she shatters like broken glass
Better play it cool
Better let it pass
Have you been screening your smokes?
And whispers in an all night bar
Better off as the fool
Than the owner of that kind of heart

Does sadistic & malevolent psychopath criminal Stella Huh believe Aaron Wall keeps receipts?

Would he still have the hate emails flowing all the way back to 2007 in his Gmail?

It appears he does.

But it also appears he has MUCH more, and some of it shows how Stella Huh is not a very good liar! Below is a quick audio recording with Stella Huh and the transcript of it, along with pictures to show the farce as it is.

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Stella Huh: If a friend, a friend is talking to a friend, then do, do they need to be involved?

Aaron Wall: Well, if they’re a friend, they shouldn’t be doing dissemblings and, uh, such.

Stella Huh: But I wasn’t the cause of your divorce.

Aaron Wall: Okay. You, uh, you’ll own whatever you should and not what you shouldn’t. Things will all wash out.

Stella Huh: I was concerned as a friend, and I was saying that she’s in a toxic marriage, but I wasn’t the cause of your divorce. Gigi always wanted to stay in the marriage despite everything that happened.

Aaron Wall: I remember distinctly in 2020 she sent you a picture of me looking dejected when things were rough ’cause she was down with the COVID lockdowns and some other stuff, and you had a quote like, “Wow, Aaron must be really hurt. Don’t overthink it. Continue, blah, blah, blah, blah.” May even have-

Stella Huh: I don’t remember that.

Aaron Wall: Yeah, okay. Well-

Stella Huh: I remember, I remember the picture, but I don’t remember saying that.

Aaron Wall: Oh, you… Okay. So you do remember the picture, though. But it- you’re the type of person, of the character, that would say something like that.

Stella Huh: I feel like, I feel like I would sympath- I sympathize with you because you were literally hurt. That’s what, that’s what I remember of it, but your real memory is different from mine.

Aaron Wall: Yeah. Well, my memory, my memory is accurate. It’s the o- you could call it photographic, if you would.

I have many gifts to share with Stella Huh.

• Autistic organizational skills well-honed by years of organizing & selling collectables, decades of information retrieval algorithmic testing, and nearly a half-decade of editing reactor plant operating manuals
• widely used OCR
• real programmers who work full time on our team
• device-level logging with backups (and backups of the backups - you can never be too safe!)
• a surprise digital forensic expert who knows her work intimately well

She may not like them, but she won’t forget them while she is looking at the bilge gray paint in her prison cell, hoping that this week will be better than the last & that there will be a hard boiled egg on the menu on Sunday.

Ultimately, INXS was on point.

I was standing
You were there
Two worlds collided
And they could never tear us apart

So were The Flaming Lips with Do You Realize??

Do you realize
That everyone you know someday will die?
And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn’t go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ’round

Life doesn’t get much better than going to a Flaming Lips concert with a beautiful Asian woman who’s eyes are so undeniably stunning that the random guy high on shrooms in the lobby had to point that fact out to her!

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Love is putting in the requisite effort to sacrifice and share, denying entropy for another, even if you believe the efforts could ultimately be arbitrary as the conclusion is the same. One of my proudest moments in recent years was seeing the hope rush back into my mother’s voice on the phone as she played the following video in the hospital.

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That Kenny G personalized video from just before Christmas in 2021 may have helped give her the hope and drive to add a couple years to her life, as she finally passed last year.

Here is Stella Huh doing her best fake care message, while still promoting divorce yet again.

I wonder how many times she has promoted divorce. Should I look at the blended media database to see 127 citations, or should I just hazard a rough guess?

Decisions, decisions.

This November there is a court date where a whole lot of criminal garbage is going to prison for life. I will be blogging a regular stream of related background right up until the mass caging main event featuring Stella Huh and her team of Tim Barton racketeers.

Red Hot Chili Peppers perform “Don’t Forget Me” live at Slane Castle, Ireland - August 23, 2003.

I’m the rainbow in your jail cell
All the memories of everything you’ve ever smelled

The back story is probably too long to read, but one of the reasons I have not been blogging is some people in an organized crime group have been spending a lot of money to try to ruin my family. It took a while to sort of piece together the who, what, and why, but on March 5, 2026 I sent the following email to the Barton Receivership with regards to civil sec case 25-cv-00946 and criminal case 3:22-cr-00352-K.

——————————–

March Fifth Email

Hi Cort,

My name is Aaron Wall. In 2016 my wife Giovanna Villanueva and I invested over $3.375 million into a person named Christopher Angus who later confessed to being a criminal fraud.

Christopher Angus

When he confessed to being a fraud he stated the money was “lost” due to bad trading, and Crown Police in the UK were too lazy to analyze the devices they seized from him, plus refused to give me access to his accounts used for fraud, suggesting that they somehow had GDPR protections.

Here is the details of the account Christopher Angus was wired to.
Beneficiary Name : Christopher Angus
Beneficiary Address 1 : 48 Kimmeridge Rd, Oxford
Beneficiary Address 2 : OX2 9RF
Beneficiary Country : UK
Beneficiary Account/IBAN Number : GB03 BARC 2097 4800 1171 88
Beneficiary Bank Name : BARCLAYS BANK
Beneficiary Routing Type : BARCGB22
Beneficiary Bank Address 1 : 30 Market Square, Witney
Beneficiary Bank Address 2 : OX28 6BJ
Beneficiary Bank Country : UK

Shortly after receiving the first wire, on February 4, 2016 Chris “joked” about converting the money to Bitcoin and stealing it. Here is an image from our Skype chat history

Here are the wire dates & associated Bitcoin quantities if the investment were instantly converted to Bitcoin.

The above presumes same day investment into Bitcoin, and no spread on the investments. There could maybe be a 1% or 2% spread on the FX and the bitcoin investments, BUT the scumbag criminal fraud Christopher Angus only paid a £1 fine for producing a 99% investment return loss on his alleged “poor trade” frauds.

Anyhow, Stella Huh has been trying to ruin or life and family for years. She hacked my wife’s computers, claimed to be my sidepiece lover, claimed I gave her hundreds of millions of Dollars, stated she paid a fake witness to create a domestic violence case against my wife in Lisbon, any many other very dark things.

Stella Sung Ha Huh

Recently while acting as hacked Google Gemini Stella associated herself with alias Saskya Bedoya and sent my wife instructions for how to make Stella look like a victim and me the mastermind of Stella’s fraud ring.

When Gio did not listen to Stella she instead linked her to a news story featuring a high-powered Florida lawyer who took down some big banks for accounting fraud and wire fraud. Within a day of showing Stella that story, Stella sent my wife a death threat targeting our daughter. I immediately called 9-1-1 on that, and am going to stop at nothing to ensure she gets locked away for her suite of racketeering criminal activities.

Stella Sung Ha Huh’s Fake Google Gemini Ballistic Protection Death Threat

Today I just stopped by the Dallas FBI field office to hand deliver a complaint in regards to the above.

Dallas FBI Field Office Form Submission

If you need anything from my wife or I with regards to how we can formally file for receiving assets from the frozen asset pool just let me know.

In addition to the money they stole and converted to Bitcoin they have spent millions of dollars trying to ruin our lives.

• We’ve bought about 50 cell phones, laptops, tablets, and computers to try to get around the hacking.
• In early 2023 San Francisco Stella pushed our daughter off a couch and hurt her neck.
• My wife has a bogus domestic violence case against her in Lisbon where the witness was clearly paid to make false claims.
• We moved from Lisbon to California to escape an unending bogus domestic violence charge.
• In California our computers got hacked & someone also phoned in a bogus child and family services call.
• Someone knocked over the plants on our porch in California as an intimidation tactic.
• Someone stole around $300,000 in gold coins and jewelry from the Concord, California home.
• We moved from California to Washington to get out of the hacking situation.
• The hacking followed us, plus in Washington state an anonymous person can call in a fraudulent domestic violence complaint, leading to a mandatory arrest. Based on that, I also have a bogus domestic violence case against me in Washington state.
• Stella threatened to drain Giovanna’s bank accounts, so they were froze, requiring an HK visit to reopen them.
• Stella threatened to murder my wife in Hong Kong, so she wanted me to fly with her, so no contact order violation and another arrest.
• Stella constantly promotes high-conflict divorce & is trying to ruin every aspect of our family. She even followed our daughter in Roblox and told her “you have no dad” while she was playing.
• Between our time and legal counsel we have spent millions between the original Christopher Angus case, the fake DV case against Giovanna in Portugal, the junk DV case against me in the United States, drafting contracts to try to negotiate with the criminal frauds only to have them constantly do a “who moved me cheese” and waste our time and money

Attached are screenshots from Google Gemini, where the “AI” is not actually from Google, but is Stella Huh (AKA Saskya Bedoya) offering death threats, giving a guide on how to get Stella off of consequences for her crimes, creating a roadmap to frame Aaron for her crimes, etc.

Technically I still have a no-contact order in place from my fraudulent domestic violence case where it is illegal for me to contact my wife, so I did not CC her on this email. You can email her directly at __@_________.com

My wife’s name is Giovanna Villanueva. Her phone number is (___) ___-____

My name is Aaron Wall & I can be reached at either of the following numbers: (___) ___-____ or (___) ___-____

We want to ensure the criminals are caged and would love to get the Bitcoin they stole & whatever they purchased with it back ASAP.

• ​new images.zip​ - images taken from the recent chat with Stella Huh powered Google Gemini where she confirmed her association with Saskya Bedoya.
• ​stella-huh-saskya-bedoya.pdf​ - PDF export which partially overlaps some of these images. the PDF offers instructions on how to frame Aaron Wall for Stella Huh’s fraud.

Thanks for doing all you do to help victims of these scumbag frauds get something back & help hold the criminals accountable for their actions Cort!

Thanks,
Aaron

——————-

Please Help

If I have ever done anything kind for you or anyone you know please share this post on any medium you can. My daughter and wife have been put through hell as a side effect of me trusting criminal fraud Christopher Angus. I owe them some upside for all the pain they have endured. The criminals have made it clear they are going to keep spending portions of the stolen money to try to ruin our lives and family rather than give back what they stole.

Only through this story spreading and going viral do we have a solid chance at justice, because the criminals have bought off many politicians and bribed many people. One of the Timothy Barton cases went all the way to the Supreme Court, and there are still multiple ongoing cases.

Thanks so much for helping my family dig out of this rut and doing whatever you can to help me help make things right for them as best I can.

I’m sorry Giovanna. I’m so sorry Aja. You both deserved way better than this garbage you have endured based on my misplaced trust in utter human garbage. I had no idea Christopher Angus was tied into an international racketeering crime syndicate until this year, but at least I now know why Stella Huh has hated me so much for so long - her keeping the stolen Bitcoin without being charged for her crimes required destroying our family.

Many years ago one of our community members mentioned they were at an SEO conference where a speaker from Distilled mentioned that SEOmoz had hired them to try to outrank us for seo tools, though they were unable to. At the time I think Moz had around 200 employees, while I had around 2.

How was I able to outcompete at like a 100:1 ratio? At the time I chalked it up to love for SEO. However, if you are self-employed and are hyper-successful that can hide autism quite well.

My daughter recently turned 9 and was diagnosed as being autistic. Years before she was diagnosed formally I thought she might have been a bit on spectrum from an interaction we had. My wife bought some new shoes (from Dr. Comfort no less!) that did not have particularly good grip, and she missed a step on the stairs, breaking a bone in her foot. When I had Giovanna in a wheel chair and we were about to leave Aja came over and I thought she was going to wish her mother a speedy recovery, but instead she asked what button she should press on the iPad playing a game. Upon seeing that I was like … I think she might be a bit on spectrum.

Years later, after multiple other examinations, the same conclusion was a formal medical analysis. After she was diagnosed, I spoke with some mental health people and took an online test recommended by Allison Osborne.

When I took the test I was thinking I bet I score a bit high. Then I saw the results and was like … yup.

—-

The respondent’s score on the Attention Switching subscale is on the 99.93rd percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 87th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This suggests a preference for predictability and routines, and they may experience increased stress in response to unexpected changes. They might find it challenging to shift focus quickly, impacting their ability to adjust to new activities or interruptions.

The respondent’s score on the Social Skill subscale is on the 99.1st percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 60th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This suggests possible difficulties with social confidence and comfort in interactions, which may lead them to feel less at ease in social situations or less inclined to engage in group activities. They may find social norms unclear or challenging to navigate, impacting their preference for or
enjoyment of social gatherings.

The respondent’s score on the Communication subscale is on the 97.1st percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 27th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This indicates potential difficulties in conversational flow and understanding indirect communication cues, such as tone of voice, body language, or facial expressions. They may find interpreting these social cues challenging, which could contribute to occasional misunderstandings in social exchanges.

—————-

A lot of life experiences made sense when I examined them through the above lens. Like a lot of my jokes tend to be deadpan or plays on words. My wife is a social butterfly, so I seem more colorful and real when I am under her halo. When I am by myself most of the time I prefer to be in my own world thinking and learning, or walking and singing without much talking to other people.

Some of the experiences which are a bit aligned with the above are related to times in the Navy. When September 11th happened my boss and his boss were off the submarine and we were cooling down the reactor plant, then the planes flew into the World Trade Center buildings during the middle of that, so we flipped and brought the reactor plant back online. I think I was the second most junior person in my division but was responsible, so I was leading the division that day. A 4-star admiral was in the engine room and asked the boat’s captain how long until the reactor plant checklist would be completed and I answered “about a half hour, but you are both in the way.”

In retrospect that is pretty absurd, but that’s sort of just how I work when I am locked in on a particular task. The other side of that intense focus is the ability to do things to an extreme degree that most can not comprehend. Like when we did drills I was always given the hardest drill set because I was best at being really aggressive with rapidly raising reactor power while still having it be controlled - like perfectly riding the line of the limit. You can imagine growing power at like a half million or three million percent each minute and keeping it there until the reactor plant is fully up. A person on this page mentioned 9 decades per minute, though our limit on the sub was a bit lower than that.

When you are low in the power range the stabilizing aspects of the negative coefficent of reactivity doesn’t really kick in the way it does when you are higher in the power range. Sometimes there are errors too, like one time my roommate put the air conditioning plant online when we were still low in the power range and I had to shim in the control rods for about a minute and a half straight to offset the impacts of the more dense moderator from the cooling of the plant by the heavy HVAC load.

On the submarine I think there are 7 different copies of the reactor plant control manuals. Some aspects of the manuals are based on limitations from prior plant designs and then they update them periodically over time. I was the person who put all the manual changes in all 7 sets, which made it easy to memorize the changes as they happened. Sometimes during ORSE they would grade you on a drill that you were not allowed to even test on, and then if you did something in a way that would be the logical way to do things you could lose points for not doing the procedure aligned with older way on older ship designs, and then they would update the reactor plant manuals to the way you should do them as you did & lost points for.

The ship also had the ability to run the coolant pumps and arbitrary frequencies to change the submarine’s sound signature. One night while standing watch one of the pumps went offline and I had to switch the pump configuration. If you were in an active war zone the response procedure to this would be different than the response when you are not. This is something you are never drilled on either.

When I joined the Navy I had a 99 score on the ASVAB and then took the nuclear test, which was mostly just math and logic stuff. The test had 80 questions on it and they asked me how many I thought I got right. I said 76 and they laughed at me, saying nobody ever scored that high. Then I explained there were 4 questions left when I got bored and the correct answer was not even listed as an option one of those last four questions and they said “oh you saw that one” and I was like “yep.” They then got my test score and it was 76.

The above math stuff was consistent with early childhood. In second grade my teacher would take the workbook away from me because I would do it in advance. After grade school they had me take the college level entrance exam and I was at college sophomore level in math and was only at around my grade level in literature. Thus, as logic might not suggest, I became a writer.

My wife met me around the height of my popularity, so my domain expertise hid a lot of the … erm … flaws in my personality. Like if you love a topic and are seen through that lens you look better than you are, because you are being judged at your best rather than your average. Quite often I swing and miss on the social front. If ever I get too frustrated with things I just walk away to reframe because sometimes I don’t know how to re-center without like a frame switch. My wife and I both like watching the Love on the Spectrum series on Netflix, though she still wants to see me as being a bit less eccentric than I am (love is blind & all of that).

Also, for as horrific as my interpersonal skills are, which rely on socially awkward jokes as like table stakes right after hello, my old business partner who made it to partner at an ad agency before quitting the agency world to work online told me I had the best marketing instincts he had ever seen by someone not actually formally trained. But, me being the fool that I am, I tried to pair him (an eloquent perfectionist who has a keen eye for kerning and monochromatic design) with another one of my friends who tended to do things a bit sloppy but was fast as hell. That did not work out too well. My social awkwardness made me unaware that my range of being able to work with A or B did not mean A and B would work well together. It was only after I engineered that trainwreck that I realized what I did there.

A lot of my marketing knowledge actually came from collecting baseball cards in high school and selling them at flea markets and baseball card shows. One time at a flea market an older guy who was selling cards came by with a fat stack of cash and was like “I am cleaning up” so then I checked out his layout and approach and instantly got the contextually relevant stuff. The baseball player who was born nearby will sell for above book price, organizing cards by favorite player makes it easy for people to self-select categorizing what they would like to pay the most for, having oddities that are offbeat or weird guarantees having something that a player collector does not yet have, you don’t always need to have the newest products to make sales, being organized was a great way of adding value to product, some cards would sell better at card shows and others would sell better at flea markets, you can predict trends by media coverage and (for example) know that certain players would become widely collected as their media coverage went up after being traded (like Dennis Rodman going to the Chicago Bulls), and on and on.

One time in high school I was sick the same day that another kid named Aaron was sick. He was a year ahead of me in math. Then the next day the math teacher was sick and the substitute teacher gave me the wrong exam. I did a little over half of the test and I turned it in to the teacher because I explained it had to be the wrong exam as it would take me almost the entire period to complete. She asked if I was sure because I had all the answers right so far.

Somehow a lot of my life has been a bit self-organized around autistic stuff without any of it being intentional. I told my friend who was the best man at my wedding about my daughter being diagnosed as on spectrum and he told me the nut does not fall far from the tree, he is on spectrum and is almost certain I am. My lead writer I am sure is on spectrum. When we had an office he was in his own world in a way that our glue player and lead designer were a bit in awe of. He added social charm to situations in about the same way I did. When I showed my head programmer my test results he (who calls me out when I am wrong) was arguing that if anything my answers were completely reasonable to him and his score would be even higher, then he sent me Am I German or Autistic?.

Result: Both. The Wittgenstein Result. German 47%. Autistic 51%.

For the skills I have in math some of the interpersonal skills I have suck because I can get bored or sidetracked. I have always only ever had like a few close friends who really cared for me and then not much of a big circle beyond that. You can always go watch pro sports, live music, or Cirque du Soleil for some inspiration. Though most of life is the boring day to day stuff. Having a consistent routine, trying to be healthy, and trying to get your 20,000 steps a day if you can.

Tokyo is such a great city to walk around.

There are certain actions people take that I would just not estimate were in the realm of human potential. Like historically I thought some large systems of power were highly corrupted through layers of inefficiency and agent-principle problems stacked atop each other, but I simply failed to grasp how some people are absolute psychopaths.

The good news for psychopath criminal frauds Christopher Angus and Stella Huh is they are going to get a lot of media exposure in the near future.

The bad news for psychopath criminal frauds Christopher Angus and Stella Huh is the type of exposure they will be getting.

They will be accurately branded as the utter human garbage that they are. I will blog regularly until both of the criminals are rotting in cages where they belong. And since their crimes are of the racketeering variety each charge of each type is a separate 20 year sentence. Both of these scumbags will die in cages - as they should.

Shout out to Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson from Conversion Rate Experts. Back when we worked together they told me their favorite blog posts of mine were the flame-styled posts. Those posts never made many sales but were always super satisfying, as though a blog post was helping to realign the universe. I predict a record fruitful harvest this year. Karl was a former rocket scientist, and I am about to blast off soon. I hope Chris and Stella enjoy the ride as much as I will love becoming the captain of their lives.

The crypto industry thinking they won after becoming Trump’s largest donorpic.twitter.com/bA5kPs70xk— Pledditor (@Pledditor) April 12, 2026

For as broad and difficult of a problem running a search engine is and how many competing interests are involved, when Matt Cutts was at Google they ran a pretty clean show. Some of what they did before the algorithms could catch up was of course fearmongering (e.g. if you sell links you might be promoting fake brain cancer solutions) but Google generally did a pretty good job with the balance between organic and paid search.

Early in search ads were clearly labeled, and then less so. Ad density was light, and then less so.

It appears as a somewhat regular set of compounded growth elements on the stock chart, but it is a series of decisions. What to measure, what to optimize, what to subsidize, and what to sacrifice.

Savvy publishers could ride whatever signals were over-counted (keyword repetition, links early on, focused link anchor text, keyword domains, etc.) and catch new tech waves (like blogging or select social media channels) to keep growing as the web evolved. In some cases what was once a signal of quality would later become an anomaly … the thing that boosted your rank for years eventually started to suppress your rank as new signals were created and signals composed of ratios of other signals got folded into ranking and re-ranking.

Over time as organic growth became harder the money guys started to override the talent, like in 2019 when a Google yellow flag had the ads team promote the organic search and Chrome teams intentionally degrade user experience to drive increased search query volume:

“I think it is good for us to aspire to query growth and to aspire to more users. But I think we are getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company.” - Googler Ben Gnomes

A healthy and sustainable ecosystem relies upon the players at the center operating a clean show.

If they decide not to, and eat the entire pie, things fall apart.

One set of short-term optimizations is another set of long-term failures.

The specificity of an eHow article gives it a good IR score, and AdSense pays for a thousand similar articles to be created, then the “optimized” ecosystem gets a shallow sameness, which requires creating new ranking signals.

In the last quarter, Q1 of 2025, it was the first time the Google partner network represented less than 10% of Google ad revenues in the history of the company.

Google’s fortunes have never been more misaligned with web publishers than they are today. This statement becomes more true each day that passes.

That ecosystem of partners is hundreds of thousands of publishers representing millions of employees. Each with their own costs and personal optimization decisions.

Publishers create feature works which are expensive, and then cross-subsidize the most expensive work with cheaper & more profitable works. They receive search traffic to some type of pages which are seemingly outperforming today and think that is a strategy which will help them into the future, though hitting the numbers today can mean missing them next year, as the ranking signal mix squeezes out profits from those “optimizations,” and what led to higher traffic today becomes part of a negative sitewide classifier the lowers rankings across the board in the future.

Last August Googler Ryan Moulton published a graph of newspaper employees from 2010 until now, showing about a 70% decline. The 70% decline also doesn’t factor in that many mastheads have been rolled up by private equity players which lever them up on debt and use all the remaining blood to pay interest payments - sometimes to themselves - while stiffing losses from the underfunded pension plans on other taxpayers.

The quality of the internet that we’ve enjoyed for the last 20 years was an overhand from when print journalism still made money. The market for professionally written text is now just really small, if it exists at all.

Ryan was asked “what do you believe is the real cause for the decline in search quality, then? Or do you think there hasn’t been a decline?”

His now deleted response stated “It’s complicated. I think it’s both higher expectations and a declining internet. People expect a lot more from their search results than they used to, while the market for actually writing content has basically disappeared.”

The above is the already baked cake we are starting from.

The cake were blogs were replaced with social feeds, newspapers got rolled up by private equity players, larger broad “authority” branded sites partner with money guys to paste on affiliate sections, while indy affiliate sites are buried … the algorithmic artifacts of Google first promoting the funding of eHow, then responding to the success of entities like Demand Media with Vince, Panda, Penguin, and the Helpful Content Update.

The next layer of the icky blurry line is AI.

“We have 3 options: (1) Search doesn’t erode, (2) we lose Search traffic to Gemini, (3) we lose Search traffic to ChatGPT. (1) is preferred but the worst case is (3) so we should support (2)” - Google’s Nick Fox

So long as Google survives, everything else is non-essential.

StackOverflow questions over time, source SEDE; sadface, lunch has been eaten pic.twitter.com/tXZShoIBfG— Marc Gravell (@marcgravell) May 15, 2025

AI overview distribution is up 116% over the past couple months.

Yep, I have seen this too. AIOs surged with the March 2025 core update -> AI Overviews Have Doubled (25M AIOs Analyzed)

“The total number of AI Overviews grew by 116% between March 12th (pre-update) and May 6th, according to our database.”

And: “Reddit now appears in 5.5% of… pic.twitter.com/W0FxWo3qlQ— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 13, 2025

Google features Reddit *a lot* in their search results. Other smaller forums, not so much. A company consisting of many forums recently saw a negative impact from algorithm updates earlier this year.

VerticalScope, behind 1,200+ online communities, just confirmed Google updates have negatively impacted their business.

Some highlights from their Q1 ‘25 earnings update:

- Revenue decreased 8% to $13.6M
- Increased consulting costs for “AI initiatives and SEO optimizations”… pic.twitter.com/1OYsxEKm9e— Glen Allsopp (@ViperChill) May 14, 2025

Going back to that whole bit about not fully disclosing economic incentives risks promoting brain cancer … well how are AI search results constructed? How well do they cite their sources? And are the sources they cited also using AI to generate content?

“its gotten much worse in that “AI” is now, on many “search engines”, replacing the first listings which obfuscates entirely where its alleged “answer” came from, and given that AI often “hallucinates”, basically making things up to a degree that the output is either flawed or false, without attribution as to how it arrived at that statement, you’ve essentially destroyed what was “search.” … unlike paid search which at least in theory can be differentiated (assuming the search company is honest about what they’re promoting for money) that is not possible when an alleged “AI” presents the claimed answers because both the direct references and who paid for promotion, if anyone is almost-always missing. This is, from my point of view anyway, extremely bad because if, for example, I want to learn about “total return swaps” who the source of the information might be is rather important — there are people who are absolutely experts (e.g. Janet Tavakoli) and then there are those who are not. What did the “AI” response use and how accurate is its summary? I have no way to know yet the claimed “answer” is presented to me.” - Karl Denninger

The eating of the ecosystem is so thorough Google now has money to invest in Saudi Arabian AI funds.

Periodically ViperChill highlights big media conglomerates which dominate the Google organic search results.

One of the strongest horizontal publishing plays online has been IAC. They’ve grown brands like Expedia, Match.com, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Vimeo, and HSN. They always show up in the big publishers dominating Google charts. In 2012 they bought About.com from the New York Times and broke About.com into vertical sites like The Spruce, Very Well, The Balance, TripSavvy, and Lifewire. They have some old sites like Investopedia from their 2013 ValueClick deal. And then they bought out the magazine publisher Meredith, which publishes titles like People, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, and Travel + Leisure. What does their performance look like? Not particularly good!

DDM reported just 1% year-over-year growth in digital advertising revenue for the quarter. It posted $393.1 million in overall revenue, also up 1% YOY. DDM saw a 3% YOY decline in core user sessions, which caused a dip in programmatic ad revenue. Part of that downturn in user engagement was related to weakening referral traffic from search platforms. For example, DDM is starting to see Google Search’s AI Overviews eat into its traffic.

Google’s early growth was organic through superior technology, then clever marketing via their toolbar, and later a set of forced bundlings on Android combined with payolla for default search placements in third party web browsers. A few years ago the UK government did a study which claimed if Microsoft gave Apple a 100% revshare on Bing they still couldn’t compete with the Google bid for default search placement in Apple Safari.

Microsoft offered over a 100% ad revshare to set Bing as the default search engine and went so far as discussing selling Bing to Apple in 2018 - but Apple stuck with Google’s deal.

In search, if you are not on Google you don’t exist.

As Google grew out various verticals they also created ranking signals which in some cases were parasitical, or in other cases purely anticompetitive. To this day Google is facing billions in of dollars in new suits across Europe for their shopping search strategy.

The Obama administration was an extension of Google, so the FTC gave Google a pass in spite of discovering some clearly anticompetitive behavior with real consumer harm. The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles from getting half the pages of the FTC research into Google’s conduct:

“Although Google originally sought to demote all comparison shopping websites, after Google raters provided negative feedback to such a widespread demotion, Google implemented the current iteration of its so-called ‘diversity’ algorithm.”

What good is a rating panel if you get to keep re-asking the questions again in a slightly different way until you get the answer you want? And then place a lower quality clone front and center simply because it is associated with the home team?

“Google took unusual steps to “automatically boost the ranking of its own vertical properties above that of competitors,” the report said. “For example, where Google’s algorithms deemed a comparison shopping website relevant to a user’s query, Google automatically returned Google Product Search – above any rival comparison shopping websites. Similarly, when Google’s algorithms deemed local websites, such as Yelp or CitySearch, relevant to a user’s query, Google automatically returned Google Local at the top of the [search page].””

The forced ranking of house properties is even worse when one recalls they were borrowing third party content without permission to populate those verticals.

Now with AI there is a blurry line of borrowing where many things are simply probabilistic. And, technically, Google could claim they sourced content from a third party which stole the original work or was a syndicator of it.

As Google kept eating the pie they repeatedly overrode user privacy to boost their ad income, while using privacy as an excuse to kneecap competing ad networks.

Remember the old FTC settlement over Google’s violation of Safari browser cookies? That is the same Google which planned on depreciating third party cookies in Chrome and was even testing hiding user IP addresses so that other ad networks would be screwed. Better yet, online business might need to pay Google a subscription fee of some sort to efficiently filter through the fraud conducted in their web browser.

HTTPS everywhere was about blocking data leakage to other ad networks.

AMP was all about stopping header bidding. It gave preferential SERP placement in exchange for using a Google-only ad stack.

Even as Google was dumping tech costs on publishers, they were taking a huge rake of the ad revenue from the ad serving layer: “Google’s own documents show that Google has siphoned off thirty-five cents of each advertising dollar that flows through Google’s ad tech tools.”

After acquiring DoubleClick to further monopolize the online ad market, Google merged user data for their own ad targeting, while hashing the data to block publishers from matching profiles:

“In 2016, as part of Project Narnia, Google changed that policy, combining all user data into a single user identification that proved invaluable to Google’s efforts to build and maintain its monopoly across the ad tech industry. … After the DoubleClick acquisition, Google “hashed” (i.e., masked) the user identifiers that publishers previously were able to share with other ad technology providers to improve internet user identification and tracking, impeding their ability to identify the best matches between advertisers and publisher inventory in the same way that Google Ads can. Of course, any puported concern about user privacy was purely pretextual; Google was more than happy to exploit its users’ privacy when it furthered its own economic interests.”

This chat was deep in the spoliation evidence of the cases (it wasn’t purged) to demonstrate the substantive discussions Google senior execs (Sissie) have over chat. My read is she is weighing in on the same issue from a different forum (privacy law in EU). 2/2 pic.twitter.com/11EBO7xqqh— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) May 9, 2025

In terms of cost, I really don’t think the O&O impact has been understood too, especially on YouTube. - Googler David Mitby

Did we tee up the real $ price tag of privacy? - Googler Sissie Hsiao

Google continues to spend billions settling privacy-related cases. Settling those suits out of court is better than having full discovery be used to generate a daisy chain of additional lawsuits.

As the Google lawsuits pile up, evidence of how they stacked the deck becomes more clear.

User interaction signals

Create relevancy signals out of user read, clicks, scrolls, and mouse hovers.

Not how search works

Search does not work by delivering results which match a query that ends at the user. This view of search is incomplete.

How search works

The flow of the engagement metrics from the end user / searcher back to the search engine helps the search engine refine the result set.

Fake document understanding

Google looks at the actions of searchers much more than they look at raw documents. If documents elicit a positive reaction from searchers that is proof the document is good. If a document elicits negative reactions then they presume the document is bad.

Google learns from searchers

The result set is designed not just to serve the user, but to create an interaction set where Google can learn from the user & incorporate logged user data into influencing the rankings for future searches.

Dialog is the source of the magic

Each user interaction gives Google data to refine their ranking algorithms and make search smarter.

Happy users provide informed user interactions

Informed user interactions are part of a virtuous cycle which allows Google to better train their models & understand language patterns, then use that understanding to deliver a more relevant search result set.

Prior user behavior is used as a baseline.

Google is not pushing search personalization anywhere near as hard as they once did (at least not outside of localization) but in the above Google states prior selections is one of Google’s strongest ranking for rankings.

Once again rather than understanding documents directly they can consider the users who chose the documents. Users can be maps based on actions outside of standard demographics so that more like users are given more weight on their user interactions with the result set choices.

Google revenue growth is consistent

Core Google ad revenue grows much more consistently than any other large media business, growing at 20% to 22% year after year for 8 in 9 years with the one outlier year being 30% growth.

Apple is paid by Google to not compete in search.

Apple got around a 50% revshare in the mid 2000’s on through to the iPhone deal renewal.

Manipulating ad auctions

Google artificially inflates ad rank of the runner up in some ad auctions to bleed the auction winner dry. Ad pricing is not based on any sort of honest auction mechanism, but rather has Google looking across at your bids and your reactions to price gouging to keep increasing the ad prices they charge you.

Organics below the fold

Google not only pushes down the organic result set with 3 or 4 ads above the regular results, but then they can include other selections scraped from across the web in an information-lite format to try to focus attention back upward. Then after users get past a singular organic search result it is time to redirect user attention once again using a “People also ask” box.

Google can further segment user demand via ecommerce website styled filters, though some of the filters offered may be for other websites, in addition to things like size, weight, color, price, and location.

On February 18, 2025 Google’s Hyung-Jin Kim was interviewed about Google’s ranking signals. Below are notes from that interview.

“Hand Crafting” of Signals

Almost every signal, aside from RankBrain and DeepRank (which are LLM-based) are hand-crafted and thus able to be analyzed and adjusted by engineers.

• To develop and use these signals, engineers look at data and then take a sigmoid or other function and figure out the threshold to use. So, the “hand crafting” means that Google takes all those sigmoids and figures out the thresholds.
  • In the extreme hand-crafting means that Google looks at the relevant data and picks the mid-point manually.
  • For the majority of signals, Google takes the relevant data (e.g., webpage content and structure, user clicks, and label data from human raters) and then performs a regression.

Navboost. This was HJ’s second signal project at Google. HJ has many patents related to Navboost and he spent many years developing it.

ABC signals. These are the three fundamental signals. All three were developed by engineers. They are raw, …

• Anchors (A) - a source page pointing to a target page (links). …
• Body (B) - terms in the document …
• Clicks (C) - historically, how long a user stayed at a particular linked page before bouncing back to the SERP. …

ABC signals are the key components of topicality (or a base score), which is Google’s determination of how the document is relevant to a query.

• T* (Topicality) effectively combines (at least) these three ranking signals in a relatively hand-crafted way. … Google uses to judge the relevance of the document based on the query term.
• It took a significant effort to move from topicality (which is at its core a standard “old style” information retrieval (”IR”) metric) … signal. It was in a constant state of development from its origin until about 5 years ago. Now there is less change.
  • Ranking development (especially topicality) involves solving many complex matheivlatical problems.
  • For topicality, there might be a team of … engineers working continuously on these hard problems within a given project.

The reason why the vast majority of signals are hand-crafted is that if anything breaks Google knows what to fix. Google wants their signals to be fully transparent so they can trouble-shoot them and improve upon them.

• Microsoft builds very complex systems using ML techniques to optimize functions. So it’s hard to fix things - e.g., to know where to go and how to fix the function. And deep learning has made that even worse.
• This is a big advantage of Google over Bing and others. Google faced many challenges and was able to respond.
  • Google can modify how a signal responds to edge cases, for example in response to various media/public attention challenges …
  • Finding the correct edges for these adjustments is difficult, but would be easy to reverse engineer and copy from looking at the data.

Ranking Signals “Curves”

Google engineers plot ranking signal curves.

The curve fitting is happening at every single level of signals.

lf Google is forced to give information on clicks, URLs, and the query, it would be easy for competitors to figure out the high-level buckets that compose the final IR score. High- level buckets are:

• ABC — topicality
  • Topicality is connected to a given query
• Navboost
• Quality
  • Generally static across multiple queries and not connected to a specific query.
  • However, in some cases Quality signal incorporates information from the query in addition to the static signal. For example, a site may have high quality but general information so a query interpreted as seeking very narrow/technical information may be used to direct to a quality site that is more technical.

Q* (page quality (i.e., the notion of trustworthiness)) is incredibly important. lf competitors see the logs, then they have a notion of “authority” for a given site.

Quality score is hugely important even today. Page quality is something people complain about the most.

• HJ started the page quality team ~ 17 years ago.
• That was around the time when the issue with content farms appeared.
  • Content farms paid students 50 cents per article and they wrote 1000s of articles on each topic. Google had a huge problem with that. That’s why Google started the team to figure out the authoritative source.
  • Nowadays, people still complain about the quality and AI makes it worse.

Q* is about … This was and continues to be a lot of work but could be easily reverse engineered because Q is largely static and largely related to the site rather than the query.

Other Signals

• eDeepRank. eDeepRank is an LLM system that uses BERT, transformers. Essentially, eDeepRank tries to take LLM-based signals and decompose them into components to make them more transparent. HJ doesn’t have much knowledge on the details of eDeepRank.
• PageRank. This is a single signal relating to distance from a known good source, and it is used as an input to the Quality score.
• … (popularity) signal that uses Chrome data.

Search Index

• HJ’s definition is that search index is composed of the actual content that is crawled - titles and bodies and nothing else, i.e., the inverted index.
• There are also other separate specialized inverted indexes for other things, such as feeds from Twitter, Macy’s etc. They are stored separately from the index for the organic results. When HJ says index, he means only for the 10 blue links, but as noted below, some signals are stored for convenience within the search index.
• Query-based signals are not stored, but computed at the time of query.
  • Q* - largely static but in certain instances affected by the query and has to be computed online (see above)
• Query-based signals are often stored in separate tables off to the side of the index and looked up separately, but for convenience Google stores some signals in the search index.
  • This way of storing the signals allowed Google to …

User-Side Data

By User Side Data, Google’s search engineers mean user interaction data, not the content/data that was created by users. E.g., links between pages that are created by people are not User Side data.

Search Features

• There are different search features - 10 blue links as well as other verticals (knowledge panels, etc). They all have their own ranking.
• Tangram (fka Tetris). HJ started the project to create Tangram to apply the basic principle of search to all of the features.
• Tangram/Tetris is another algorithm that was difficult to figure out how to do well but would be easy to reverse engineer if Google were required to disclose its click/query data. By observing the log data, it is easy to reverse engineer and to determine when to show the features and when to not.
• Knowledge Graph. Separate team (not H/’s) was involved in its development.
• Knowledge Graph is used beyond being shown on the SERP panel.
  • Example — “porky pig” feature. If people query about the relation of a famous person, Knowledge Graph tells traditional search the name of the relation and the famous person, to improve search results - Barack Obama’s wife’s height query example.
• Self-help suicide box example. Incredibly important to figure it out right, and tons of work went into it, figuring out the curves, threshold, etc. With the log data, this could be easily figured out and reverse engineered, without having to do any of the work that Google did.

Reverse Engineering of Signals

There was a leak of Google documents which named certain components of Google’s ranking system, but the documents don’t go into specifics of the curves and thresholds.

The documents alone do not give you enough details to figure it out, but the data likely does.

Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.

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Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.

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Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.

See terms.