m-i-l

> "Has somebody experience with Apache Lucene / Solr or Elasticsearch?" I've been working on a RAG with Solr, and quickly hit some of the issues you describe when dealing with…

"Query expansion"[0] has been an information retrieval technique for a while, but using LLMs to help with query expansion is fairly new and promising, e.g. "Query Expansion by Prompting…

> ... a project called "Nutch" would allow web users to crawl the web themselves. Perhaps that promise is similar to the promises being made about "AI" today. The project did n…

> "you lend money to someone for example if they need to buy food, and don't have the money, because you don't want them to starve? ... Charging for interests means that you are mak…

Hampstead Heath is actually one of the rare examples of the public successfully fighting private developers to keep land in public ownership[0], culminating in the 1871 Hampstead Heath Act which ensur…

> "Given how much money governments spend on nonsense, why can't we take some money, and build simple, but quality and stable shelter for people?" The "Homes for All" cou…

The article suggests he got sand from the "sandy carpark". While it is true that there are parts of Hampstead Heath with a lot of natural "bagshot sand"[0], it is a bit further awa…

Same here - most of my personal site has been stuck in Google's "Discovered - currently not indexed" limbo for nearly 2 years, despite regularly submitting pages for indexing, and doing…

> "A blacklist would be very easy to implement and much safer from a legal point of view giving peace of mind to the app creators. All the invasive species are catalogued in public reports, t…

> "I am curious how much our body clock synchronizes with real time" Various experiments have been performed with people in caves, where they don't have "time cues" such …

There are often incentives offered to encourage people to move to various underpopulated Scottish islands. The Scottish government even considered a fund offering up to £50K per household[0]. [0] htt…

Didn't have an Atari Jaguar CD myself, but I did have a friend with one, and have fond memories playing with the Virtual Light Machine. Never knew anyone with a Nuon so never got to play with the…

> "our legs, they would be much more efficient if the knees pointed backwards. They are not the most efficient design, but simply good enough." I don't think you can say one leg type…

> "As to the post failure financial effect, that was mainly on a bunch of rich folks." Although trickle-down economics is largely discredited when it comes to wealth, I suspect the same…

> "The moral is that a utopia where tolerance for plurality is permitted is ideologically incapable of defending itself from external threats." See also the Paradox of tolerance[0]: &qu…

With Dropbox (and most other cases) you are paying for something you don't already have, but what is unusual in this case is that you are paying to remove something you do already have. Not exact…

Today I learned that people pay money for an app that stops them from using a (probably expensive) phone. And not just a few people, but enough for the Freedom app to have 2 investment rounds and 11-5…

It could be soil from a battlefield - the Wikipedia article on the subject of the statue says there "are monuments to him around the world ... bringing earth from the battlefields where he had fo…

So should we spend the next 33 years doing the same things, just with more data and more compute power? That would be the logical conclusion of the breathless "I can't believe it is finally …

Nice story, thanks for sharing. My parents used to take me for our "exotic foreign holiday" in Blackpool each year (I was from Scotland). I actually have many happy memories from the time. T…

And according to Wikipedia LK-99 was "discovered" back in 1999, hence the name. It isn't clear if it was also first manufactured back then, but assuming it was, 24 years does seem an aw…

I hope that the tech billionaires are simply blundering towards the destruction of society, rather than intentionally trying to do so with something like Effective Accelerationism. That would certainl…

>"Which would probably reach a wider audience and maybe give the creator a few quid to try other things. ... it's hard to see YouTube as a regression." Doing something purely for f…

In many cultures rain on your wedding day is a good omen, e.g. the Portuguese saying which translates as "wet wedding, blessed wedding", and the Italian saying which translates as "wet …

> "It's even simpler than that ... their goal is to extract profits" According to the article, profit has not been the primary goal for the utilities though, because there is limit…

https://michael-lewis.com/ Infrequent but longer articles on various subjects (topics at https://michael-lewis.com/categories/ ). See also the blog search at ht…

Note that the author is saying that he couldn't find any proof that the story is true (e.g. a primary source or corroborating evidence) from his internet searches (Google, Hacker News etc.) But j…

> "Small data-sets were definitely a limiting factor as well as limited computer power." Not just small data-sets and limited computer power, but also very few libraries to help you out …

I went without a car for decades, even in the first few years of having children, and reckon I saved >GBP200K as a result (plus kept in better shape etc.). But that was with the benefit of: - livin…

Note that Neeva wasn't exactly a small player, managing to burn through $77.5M in VC funding over the space of just 3 years[0]. Note also that, at least at the start of that 3 year period, they s…