kbal
@kbal@fedia.io
- Comment on SearNGX should be a federated search engine 3 months ago:
Okay, sorry! Still a long way to go before the idea becomes sufficiently well-specified to make much sense to me though. Perhaps an examination of yacy could provide you a concrete example of the ways in which such things are complicated. One would need to do much better to end up with a suitable replacement for the ways many of us use searx.
It was wanting to use ActivityPub and the "I fail to see any downside" which led me to read the rest of your post in a way that might've been overly pessimistic about its merits.
- Comment on SearNGX should be a federated search engine 3 months ago:
Ah, I wondered if something like that had been tried before. Looks like it is maybe still running: https://yacy.net/
- Comment on SearNGX should be a federated search engine 3 months ago:
I think you are not a computer programmer. Trying to build an index of the web by querying other search engines is not an efficient or sensible way to do things. Using ActivityPub for it is insane. Sharing query results in the obvious way might help a little during events where everyone searches for the same thing all at once, but in a relatively small pool of relatively sophisticated Internet users I don't think that happens often enough to justify the enormous amount of work and complexity.
On the other hand a distributed web crawler that puts its results in a free and decentralized database (one appropriate to the task; not blockchain) might be interesting. If the load on each node could be made light enough and the software simple enough that millions of people could run it at home, maybe it could be one way to build a new search engine. If that needs doing and someone has several hundred hours of free time to get it started.
- Comment on ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Season 2 Launching On SkyShowtime In Europe In August; Canada Still Waiting 3 months ago:
Well, I guess Canadians who want to watch Prodigy are out of luck. There certainly isn't any other way to see it. It's just impossible.
- Comment on "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again 3 months ago:
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging
It's not that difficult to explain. "When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you've seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N"
But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I've seen? No, thanks.
If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I've blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.
The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We'll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they'll reconsider.
- Comment on "Fry" is an ambiguous word in English 3 months ago:
Never mind the small fry. The word "put" has enough different meanings to fry your CPU.
- Comment on Why is it a common insult for someone to say they slept with your mom? 4 months ago:
Plutarch's biography of Cicero notes that:
Again, in a dispute with Cicero, Metellus Nepos asked repeatedly "Who is your father?"
"In your case," said Cicero, "your mother has made the answer to this question rather difficult." - Comment on A "test" to judge Star Trek shows 4 months ago:
It's just a thought. On further consideration I'd probably broaden it to any non-Starfleet faction. In cases where there is one involved in the plot I like it when they're portrayed in more depth than is usual.
- Comment on A "test" to judge Star Trek shows 4 months ago:
Counter-proposal: Same thing, except instead of crew members it's people from whatever non-Federation civilisation is involved that week.
- Comment on Bill Gates says not to worry about AI's energy draw 4 months ago:
Suddenly I'm worried about AI's energy draw
- Comment on Threads can now show replies from Mastodon and other fediverse apps 4 months ago:
Further searching turns up the information that "federated" Bluesky PDS instances are limited to ten user accounts each, and API usage limits which may constrain things further. So that would explain why there aren't any big ones.
So far as I can tell they do all still "federate" through the central server, not directly with each other. So there being not much point in it may also explain why it hasn't caught on.
Almost as bad as Threads, really.
- Comment on Threads can now show replies from Mastodon and other fediverse apps 4 months ago:
Well, what are some popular servers? Are there several big ones?
- Comment on Threads can now show replies from Mastodon and other fediverse apps 4 months ago:
Is it really? Seems hard to find out. Anyone have a list of Bluesky servers other than the central one with open signups?
- Comment on Welcome to the fediverse: Your guide to Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and more 4 months ago:
tl;dr: Here's everything you need to know about the fediverse, assuming you're never going to use it. Now, back to our regular coverage of all the biggest social companies, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Reddit, as well as funding and acquisitions of new social startups.
- Comment on Lemmy is a failed Reddit alternative 4 months ago:
I'd not yet call it failed, but it's not yet succeeded either. To my mind, one impediment is something that lemmy.world shares with today's reddit: If you look at the front page it's 99% memes and images. That's the first impression people get, and it probably drives away a lot of people who might want anything else. We need those people to make more text-based communities come alive, if it's to evolve into anything like the old reddit.
- Comment on xkcd #2931: Chasing 5 months ago:
"The International Date Line" makes this one worthwhile.
- Comment on An Interview With Jack Dorsey 5 months ago:
Is there a c/lostlemmites somewhere?
- Comment on "Yeah, yeah, I totally know what a lion looks like, just give me the brush" 6 months ago:
I like the way he captured my eyes.
- Comment on Would lemmy benefit of implementing Polls? 6 months ago:
There's a very long history of calling things like lemmy communities "groups". In my case I'm old and the habit comes from Usenet.
- Comment on Would lemmy benefit of implementing Polls? 6 months ago:
Most of the fediverse already has polls, and can post things to lemmy groups. So yeah it would be nice to be able to see them properly.
- Comment on Chuck Todd: The race to build a better internet — before it's too late 6 months ago:
Wow, cool, even NBC is catching on to the Fediverse now?
... nope, it's just another blockchain fueled social media system, the main use of which so far seems to be as a haven for QAnon types (according to Wikipedia,) rapidly burning up venture capital. Good luck to them, I guess.
- Comment on The Force should be plural 6 months ago:
What this galaxy's physicists don't yet understand is that if you want to combine all those other forces into one grand unified theory, what you need to do is get in touch with your feelings and become a space wizard.
- Comment on It's time for a hard fork of Mastodon (DRAFT, REVISION IN PROGRESS) 6 months ago:
I don't think pleroma or misskey were ever mastodon forks. They're just better alternatives that do something approximately similar.
- Comment on Are there any innovative platforms in the Fediverse? 6 months ago:
If you're thinking of it in market terms, then it being a "solved problem" should mean that it's effectively a commodity and nothing radical or game-changing is needed at all to eventually break the monopolies and win all the market share. All that's needed is to offer the same old thing at a slightly lower price, and wait for people to catch on.
But I disagree; there are plenty of unsolved problems.
- Comment on You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet 6 months ago:
Stay strong. A dwarf planet is a perfectly valid kind of planet, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
- Comment on Why did they put eyeliner on evil Kirk 😳 (I'm watching TOS for the first time) 6 months ago:
... because they had to make him distinguishable from normal Kirk but hadn't yet settled on the convention of just giving him a goatee?
- Comment on Caption this. 7 months ago:
Teaching the beavers to use a microwave oven had less benefit to the regional ecology than had been hoped for.
- Comment on Lemmy.ml is acting as a proxy instance for Hexbear and should be defederated by any instances that defederate from Hexbear 7 months ago:
Tankies say all kinds of stupid things, but even if we grant the thus-far unproven assumption that the person being addressed there is among them, when they're telling nazis to fuck off that is not an appropriate moment to try and start a pointless fight by asserting that they're wrong about every single thing.
- Comment on Lemmy.ml is acting as a proxy instance for Hexbear and should be defederated by any instances that defederate from Hexbear 7 months ago:
While I agree that hexbear generally sucks, they and I do at least have an enemy in common. That ban is not so undeserved as I was led to expect.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Of course it is not that it's somehow a "stand in for he or she" inherently in current usage. It's just that it has recently replaced those other pronouns in places where for some time they had held near-universal prevalence among most users of this language.
Just as some people who've never known the old ways think those people who still aren't accustomed to it are putting on an act when they say it's weird and confusing, I suppose it would be easy for those who've lived through the change to mistakenly assume that young people are being disingenuous when they act as if there's been no change for hundreds of years and there's nothing to remark on here. If you're old enough to have seen it happen, the change in usage seems very obvious. If not, perhaps it isn't.