At a previous job, we had a new and fancy office. The light switches were state of the art. There was an on button, and a separate off button. When you pressed the on button, the lights would fade on. When you pressed the off button, they would fade off. In the cloud somewhere was two functions that presumably...

The phenomenon of “normies” is an interesting one. The term itself is a bit problematic and not one I’d typically use, but as a phenomenon they are still worth investigating. Their perhaps biggest distinguishing feature is that they don’t get “it”, whatever it is. It’s tempting to think that these are an especially...

I’ve been thinking recently about the emphasis put on “new”, specifically for search engines, but the discussion has some merit even in a wider context. I will start wide and narrow down. It is common to conflate new with good, and most being young sometime between 1950-2000 will indeed have seen marvellous...

Search results are only as good as the search engine’s ability to figure out what a page is about. Sure a keyword may appear in a page, but is it the topic of the page, or just some off-hand mention? I didn’t really know anything about data mining or keyword extraction starting out, so I’ve had to learn on the fly....

This is an reply to a series of posts on anglo-centrism in programming languages that have been floating around in Gemini lately. gemini://nytpu.com/gemlog/2021-10-31.gmi gemini://alsd.eu/en/2021-11-04-thoughts-anglocentrism-cs.gmi Around thirty years ago I was a kid with a computer. I learned to program quite a few...

This is a response to the post “Making Gemini Easy” over on ~tomasino, and the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek haha-but-no-really. gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20211103-making-gemini-easy.gmi I think the idea that we need to shield the users from how technology works is a terrible, terrible mistake. It...

I want you to consider for a moment all the human lifetime wasted in ideological stalemates on the Internet, all that energy, all that anger and frustration. Imagine if you take even a fraction of that time, and put it to creating something constructive instead, learning skills, doing anything meaningful. It boggles...

You are invited to a dinner party. After talking for a while food is served on the table. You pounce. “Haha, suckers!”, you think, and load all the food on your plate and leave nothing but scraps for the hosts. You feel victorious. Serves them right for inviting you into their home. You wolf down the food with...

There has been a bit of discussion over on Gemini recently regarding poorly behaved bots. I feel I need to add some perspective from the other side; as a bot operator (even though I don’t operate Gemini bots). Writing a web spider is pretty easy on paper. You have your standards, and you can test against your own...

A recurring problem when searching for text is identifying which parts of the text are in some sense useful. A first order solution is to just extract every word from the text, and match documents against whether they contain those words. This works really well if you don’t have a lot of documents to search through,...

Optimization is arguably a lot about intuition. You have a hunch, and see if it sticks. Sure you can use profilers and instrumentation, but they are more like hunch generators than anything else. This one wasn’t as intuitive, at least not to me, but it makes sense when you think about it. I have an 8 Gb file of...

I’ve been dealing with a botnet for the last few days, that’s been sending junk search queries at an increasingly aggressive rate. They were reasonably easy to flag and block but just kept increasing the rate until that stopped working. Long story short, my patience ran out and put my website behind cloudflare. I...