Weblog on marginalia.nu

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…

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…

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.

You are invited to a dinner party.

There has been a bit of discussion over on Gemini recently regarding poorly behaved bots.

A recurring problem when searching for text is identifying which parts of the text are in some sense useful.

Optimization is arguably a lot about intuition.

I’ve been dealing with a botnet for the last few days, that’s been sending junk search queries at an increasingly aggressive rate.

An idea I’ve had for a long time with regards to navigating the web is to find a way to browse it.

Since my search engine has expanded its scope to include blogs as well as primordial text documents, I’ve done some thinking about how to keep up with newer websites that actually grow and see updates.

The last few days I’ve felt like my first attempt at a ranking algorithm for the search engine was pretty good, like it was producing some pretty interesting results.

https://search.marginalia.nu The October Update is live.

If you look back in history to the turn of the 20th century, you will find a lot of people wearing hats.

gemini://friends.riverside.camp/~clarity/journal/branding.gmi gemini://idiomdrottning.org/re-branding Some interesting thoughts going around on the topic of branding in software and websites.

So hacker news apparently discovered my search engine, and really took a liking to the idea.

I’ve spent some time the last week optimizing how the search engine identifies appropriate search results, putting far more consideration into where and how the search terms appear in the page when determining the order they are presented.

I spent some time today weeding out yet more link-farms from my search engine’s index.

There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites.

I’m currently indexing with my search engine.

This an expansion on a comment I left on Lettuce’s gemlog post, “Personal Experiences and Opinions on Version Control Software”.

A question I often see asked is one along the lines of How do I motivate myself do (something) … where something may be eat healthier, go to the gym, work on some project, study hard, &c.

@sdfgeoff asked an interesting question on station just a while ago How much of your lives do you spend living (or watching) someone elses?

So that IPCC report, huh.

The technological choices we make determine the rules we have to abide by.

Dece’s post “last times” made me associate to one of my favorite thoughts from Roman philosopher Seneca, who was counting his days having fallen out of favor with Emperor Nero.

I finally got around to moving @marginalia.nu off gmail.

As I have mentioned earlier, perhaps the biggest enemy of PageRank is the hegemony of PageRank-style algorithms.

Early this winter, when I set up the server that would eventually become marginalia.nu, I did so in order to try out some technology I thought looked cool (proxmox, zfs), and stuff I was exposed to at work and didn’t really see the point of so as to see if

I stumbled upon the Memex, which is a spiritual predecessor to hypertext technology.

Maintaining links is difficult.

Don’t chase small optimizations Said some smart person at some particular time, probably.

I find if I do not regularly plant interesting thoughts in my mind, it will rarely grow them spontaneously.

I’m in the midst of rebuilding the index of my search engine to allow for better search results, and I’ve yet again found need to revisit how I handle link farms.

I’m struck by how easy it is to read things on Gemini.

gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2021/07/07.1 I felt the need to add some thoughts tangentially related to this post by Sean Conner.

Something you probably know, but may not have thought about a lot is that the Internet is large.

For a long while, I have been puzzled by the strangest problem: My attention span is really bad when I use a computer.