m-i-l

Yes, a community effort against the botnets would be great. The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem. It is the "bad bot…

Looks like they were focusing on greenfield rather than brownfield, presumably because the margins are much higher and therefore more appealing to venture capitalists, but getting permission to turn f…

> "Is it actually the case that deaths and injuries in H & N are distinctly worse" Hiroshima and Nagasaki had radiation - many died in the following months from the "atomic bomb …

See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed pape…

I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms... However, from the article: &q…

> "Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet." Amazon wasn't profitable because it reinvest…

I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams fr…

Or smoking a cigar in an oxygen rich spacecraft cabin, as per the opening scene of the original Planet of the Apes (released in Feb 1968, after the Apollo 1 fire in Jan 1967).

Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devi…

I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a b…

> "The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot …

Yes. Just opened some files to check. There was one including a table which I thought at first was a little wonky, but then I realised the column that looked off had currency where I'd right alig…

I used ST Writer which came bundled with my ST. I still have all my ST Writer files (last modified in 1993!), and quite impressively they open just fine in LibreOffice with formatting and everything p…

https://michael-lewis.com/ Also relevant here: https://searchmysite.net/ - a search engine for personal websites.…

I think this is missing the point - it is a bit like saying "you only ever notice bad fraud, if the fraud is well done you never notice it" - the point is what it is, not whether you notice …

Thanks for the great feedback:-) This is what searchmysite.net is attempting to do - help make "surfing the web" a fun leisure activity once more. It is good to see more people seem to get t…

At a big corporate, we had an Apache Solr based search which had some reasonably clever lemmatization and stats analysis and spell check config to suggest alternative searches if not many results were…

That's right. Most search engines are funded by advertising, where there is the clear conflict of interest[0], not to mention incentive for spam etc. Alternative models include a subscription fee…

The LLM was for an experiment in retrieval augmented generation, i.e. "a chat with your website" style interface, using Apache Solr as the vector store. Results (on a small self-hosted LLM t…

Postgres is just used for the site admin, i.e. keeping track of submissions, review status, subscriptions etc. The actual search index is in Apache Solr. In theory you could use Solr to store all the …

A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought wou…

My children were given a soft toy a few years back from a relative who had bought it from a Chinese street market while on holiday in China. When it was switched on it jumped about frantically and san…

Those are the good bots, which say who they are, probably respect robots.txt, and appear on various known bot lists. They are easy to deal with if you really want. But in my experience it is the bad b…

I used to work in an office which briefly had a commercially available 4KW microwave in the coffee area. I used to like it because it was fast. Unfortunately several other people failed to appreciate …

This matches my experience. I ran one of my side-projects on AWS for a couple of years before switching to Hetzner - AWS was around £35 a month while Hetzner was around £7 a month, so Hetzner was arou…

> Who here thinks twitter is a platform for rational discourse? That's the elephant in the room here. The site formerly known as Twitter is optimised to maximise engagement, and conflict typ…