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Joined 3 days ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2024

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  • Thanks for putting so much time and thought into the discussion. All the problems you talk about exist for every search engine in actual use today. For example, publishing a site on a brand new domain has the exact problem you’re describing with spinning up a new Forte instance. There can be a 24-hr lag before DNS can reliably find the site. Perfect search is an aspirational goal. The realistic goal is to satisfy most needs. No matter how many words you throw at it, I don’t think federated search is an outlandish idea at all.





  • A few years ago I was in a local place where the food and service were both entertainingly bad. For decades it had been a wonderful little Greek restaurant, until the couple who ran it moved to Greece for a well-deserved retirement and their son took it over. The son remodeled and reopened it as a combination Greek/sushi restaurant and sports bar, hanging five or six large screens from the ceiling. In a place slightly larger than my living room.

    I was eager to try the sushi. “There’s no sushi tonight. Dennis isn’t here.” Oh, alright, when is Dennis here? “We don’t know. Maybe Wednesday. He never says.” Well alrighty then. Dennis is livin’ the dream I guess. So I ordered spanakopita, another favorite. What I received was a brown chunk resembling a giant Totino’s pizza roll, on an otherwise bare plate, where it dryly slid around all by itself. It looked and tasted like a Costco product they took out of a package and over-microwaved. The driest, crispest spanakopita I’ve ever had.

    I took a chance and ordered the baklava. It tasted okay but instead of being flaky it was actually soggy - not as in dripping with butter and honey, I mean watery. The only watery baklava I’ve ever had, and also the only serving of baklava in my life that I did not finish.

    A guy dining at the next table asked the waitress for the check, but said he would like a cup of coffee first. I was directly facing the clock and happened to notice it was exactly 7pm. At 7:10 she returned with their check and said, “We’re out of coffee.” Wat? They’re open for another 3 hours and they’re out of coffee LOL? And it took a full 10 minutes to return with this info. It’s a tiny place, I could see the coffee machine like 12 ft away. And there are like six customers. Seemed like a dismally bad restaurant in a sitcom, reminding me somewhat of the diner in The Dark Backward.

    There were a couple other things but that’s all I can remember. Anyway, this new version of the place didn’t last long and it’s permanently closed now.



  • Generally the first thing I try is to hit ESC to stop a paywall script from running.

    If that doesn’t work I try pressing ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy the whole page as soon as I see something. This works on pages that load and are then hidden by a script, but you have to be quick. Then I open Notepad and paste. If this doesn’t work I’ll either try it once more and see if I can be faster or just say screw it, if they want to hide their content that bad I don’t need it. If it’s important to me google will usually find the same news or info somewhere else.


  • Doesn’t seem to me like you did anything serious enough to be banned from a whole platform, but moderators and administrators are individuals and some of them can’t be objective when something presses their person hot buttons. If a right-wing Christian claimed abortion was Sexual Assault, that obviously would not automatically make abortion an off-limits topic, but I can imagine a moderator thinking differently. I agree with your response that nobody was being forced into anything, but using loaded words like “woke” is a good way to get yourself labeled by someone who thinks in memes.


  • What if search itself were a federated function? Although I’m a software dev I really don’t know much about the mechanics of large-scale search engines such as Google, but I know their server farms somehow share the load of performing searches and maintaining whatever database they maintain to optimize searching. Seems like the fediverse could do search in a similar way. I’m just saying your critique of the idea, although well thought out, seems like a critique of a particular strategy. It’s not obvious to me that the very idea of federated search is outlandish.