Weblog on marginalia.nu

I’ve started going on a long walk each morning immediately as I wake up, and it’s had the unexpected side-effect of fixing my broken circadian rhythm.

This is a bit of an what I’ve been working on style of post.

I recently got a smaller computer screen.

I’m working on Marginalia Search full time.

This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in g…

I use print debugging all the time I know how to use a debugger.

I killed the old memex.marginalia.nu site.

There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe.

I’ve come to think LLMs/GPTs/whatever are a threat to conventional search engines because the modern web is an unbelievably annoying dumpster fire.

I’ve moved Marginalia’s sources to Github.

This is a bit of a follow up to the previous post.

In general I don’t like to fuss over code, but this is exactly what I’ve been doing in preparation of the NLnet funded work.

No time like the project’s two year anniversary to drop this particular bomb… Marginalia’s gotten an NLNet grant.

This is a very brief post announcing a fascinating discovery.

I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but has the Internet gone progressively more crazy the last decade or so?

For clarification, this is discussing no other thing called Memex than memex.marginalia.nu, the website you’re probably visiting right now.

The most common (and most costly) operation of the marginalia search engine’s index is something like given a set of documents containing one keyword, find each documents containing another keyword.

This is a write-up about an experiment from a few months ago, in how to find websites that are similar to each other.

While this post is about programming, it also draws an extended analogy to dungeons and dragons, specifically two of its classes, that correspond to two attitudes toward programming.

I get my best ideas when I’m not working.

One of the more common feature requests I’ve gotten for Marginalia Search is the ability to search by date.

By which I mean there are deeply problematic assumptions in the very notion of scaling: Scaling changes the rules, and scaling problems exist in both directions.

A very brief note to announce reaching a long term goal and major milestone for marginalia search.

In the primordial days of Marginalia Search, it used a dynamic approach to crawling the Internet.

I discovered someone has made a cryptocurrency called “Memex Marginalia Inu”.

Bots are absolutely crippling the Internet ecosystem.

I’d like to discuss a mental somersault that I’ve found has caused me a lot of grief in the past, which is prescriptive descriptions.

Anchor texts are a very useful source of keywords for a search engine, and in an older version of the search engine, it used the text of such hyperlinks as a supplemental source for keywords, but due to a few redesigns, this feature has fallen off.

After a bit of soul searching with regards to the future of the website, I’ve decided to open source the code for marginalia.nu, all of its services, including the search engine, encyclopedia, memex, etc.

There are a lot of ways of building software, there are many languages you could choose to build it with, many libraries to rely on, many frameworks to leverage, many architectural approaches, many platforms to choose, many paradigms of daily operations to

I found myself effectively without a job on short notice.

I’m going to think out loud for a moment about a problem I’m considering.

I’ve been working lately on a bit of an overhaul of how the search engine does indexing.

This is mostly a post to complain about something that chafes.

The search engine index has grown quite considerably the last few weeks.

Note: This is satirical in nature.

Let’s define a simple mathematical function, the function will perform integer factoring.

I’ve caught some bug and don’t have the energy to write more than a brief note.

In a near future, a team of desktop computer designers are looking at the latest telemetry and updating the schematics of the hardware-as-a-service self-assembling nanohardware.

Not what I had intended to do this Saturday, but a hard drive failed on the server this morning, or at least so it seemed.

Black hat SEO is endlessly fascinating phenomenon to study.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how difficult it has become to discover quality content on the Internet, not because it isn’t there, but because the signal to noise ratio is really bad, and most venues of discovery don’t seem to be able to handle it.

It’s been a productive several weeks.

A person might think I’m illusive, writing and working under a pseudonym.

As is often the case these dark winter seasons, I’ve fallen into a bit of a funk.

This entry is about a few problems the search engine has been struggling with lately, and how I’ve been attempting to remedy them.

At a previous job, we had a new and fancy office.

The phenomenon of “normies” is an interesting one.

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.

Search results are only as good as the search engine’s ability to figure out what a page is about.