AJ Sadauskas
Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.
Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!
- 67 Posts
- 109 Comments
2·5 months ago@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.
At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.
The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.
For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.
For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.
And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.
(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)
(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)
In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.
@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.
And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)
SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.
@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺
There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.
WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).
Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.
WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)
As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.
2·6 months ago@geillescas @jajabor @asklemmy That, and also making files/emails/calendar events synced across your computer and your phone.
@denshirenji @asklemmy On photos, does NextCloud Photos or Memories play nice with Digikam or any other desktop photo gallery applications? And what about Immich?
@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?
Super fund, short for superannuation fund.
Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.
A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.
More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia
17·6 months ago@lemmyreader Here’s a starting point for a fediverse StackExchange: Make sure it’s interoperable with Lemmy.
Now, you may not get the full feature set on Lemmy, but you should be able to interact with it from Lemmy as if it’s a group on there.
7·6 months ago@AllNewTypeFace Of course there were.
For commuters:
* More densification around existing stations and tram lines instead of suburban sprawl.
* Upgrading buses across Melbourne to a 10-minute minimum frequency and straightening out existing bus routes.
* Rolling out high-capacity signalling and automatic train control across the Melbourne suburban rail network
* Building Metro 2 from Newport to Clifton Hill would double the number of trains that can run on the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines.
* Building the Doncaster Railway.
* Building the Heidelberg to Box Hill section of the SRL first.
* Extending the 48 tram to Doncaster and giving it dedicated lanes for more of its journey.
And then for freight, there’s a bunch of things too:
* Converting more suburban lines to dual gauge.
* Converting more regional Victorian lines to standard gauge
* Electrifying regional rail and freight services
* Building more multimodal facilities near existing rail lines.
@alcoholicorn Yeah, that’s not how it tends to work in Australia.
What happens is a state government puts up a good chunk of time construction costs (as much as half in some cases), plus public land.
In some cases, the freeway already exists, but the state government wants one more lane built, because it thinks that will ease congestion (as happened with sections of the Tullamarine and Monash Freeways in Melbourne).
It gets handed off to Transurban, who builds it under a long-term operating agreement (30 years is common).
In some cases, the agreements have clauses saying railways that compete with the toll road can’t be built.
As the end of the lease approaches, Transurban offers to build one more lane — in exchange for extending the agreement.
@alcoholicorn It is when it has been privatised to a company that pretty much pays no tax (hi Transurban!), for roads that taxpayers helped to pay for, and those toll roads connect car dependent suburbs that have next to no public transport.
@Gurre @fuck_cars The road lobby’s big answer to the mess they’ve created with the Rozelle Interchange is to build a second road tunnel under Sydney Harbour.
Engineers at the inquiry into the Rozelle Interchange fiasco have already testified that will only create traffic jams elsewhere on the road network: https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112383313109173146
Just one more lane, bro!
@LostXOR @yogthos @NoIWontPickAName @technology There’s a few other steps they could potentially take.
The first would be to block any financial institution in the US, or that deals with the US, from sending any payments to or from ByteDance’s accounts.
They could also freeze any assets currently held by US financial institutions.
Second, if they can get Apple, Microsoft, and Google on board to help do their bidding, they could pull the ByteDance app from the Apple and Google Play app stores.
That includes removing it from any apps where it’s already installed. Globally.
They could also request that TikTok is removed from Google and Bing search results.
On top of this, they could do what you suggested, and ask ISPs and mobile carriers to block domains and IP addresses used by ByteDance.
And the US could apply diplomatic pressure on other countries to implement similar financial and ISP-level blocks and bans.
So, potentially, it’s also blocked in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.
@crispyflagstones @yogthos Someone is named @dansup who also created @pixelfed, the app is called Loops, you can follow his progress here: @loops
I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.
It doesn’t use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that’s been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.
It also doesn’t use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.
Because it doesn’t use Linux, Wayland, or X11, you are limited in the desktop environment that you can use. There’s really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.
Instead, there’s a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to ship Unity as it’s default desktop environment with Ubuntu.
And confusingly, they’ve named that window manager Windows as well!
That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.
It also doesn’t ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.
There’s also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.
And sure, if you’re a nerd who’s into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.
But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he’ll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.
I’m sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.
But.
Windows on the desktop just isn’t ready for your average, everyday Linux user.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.
So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).
You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Really good point.
The development time and cost is an overhead. That’s divided between the number of units you produce.
If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.
But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it’s just 10 cents per unit.
Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.
I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.
It really should be the other way around.
@ordellrb @eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.
Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.
In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.
Especially if they’re reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.
Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?
@Hello1000 @ylai Yeah, the Dutch have solved this one already. It’s called a bakfiets: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?si=jc9mn4E_0SYhG78q
As for cycling in the snow, here’s @notjustbikes on why the Finns can happily cycle in the snow but Canadians can’t: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?si=9OWyiLYq3kgEsfAU
@politics There’s more…
“Rebekah Mercer, the 47-year-old daughter of major Republican donor Robert Mercer, is a founding investor of Parler. She increasingly pulls the strings at the company, according to people familiar with the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private business matters. She holds the majority stake in Parler and controlled two of three board seats as of early February — a board to which she recently appointed allies.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/24/parler-relaunch-rebekah-mercer/
"Prominent conservative venture capitalists including Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are investing in free speech-oriented video streaming site Rumble Video, the company said Wednesday.
"The deal, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, marks PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s first investment in a social media company since he bought a large stake of Facebook as an early investor in 2004. It also means that Thiel is supporting a competitor to Facebook while he sits on Facebook’s board.
"That represents a major boost for Rumble, which aims to challenge the dominance of platforms that conservatives claim unfairly restrict free speech, including YouTube and Facebook.
“Rumble’s users include popular right-wing internet personalities like Donald Trump Jr., former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, commentator Dan Bongino and writer Dinesh D’Souza.”
https://nypost.com/2021/05/19/facebook-director-peter-thiel-invests-in-conservative-rival-rumble/
"Last year, Rumble received a major investment from a venture capital firm co-founded by J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio. The firm, Narya Capital, got a seat on Rumble’s board, and its more than seven million shares place it among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to securities filings. Mr. Vance also took a personal Rumble stake worth between $100,000 and $250,000, his financial disclosures show.
"Narya is backed by the prime patron of Mr. Vance’s Senate campaign, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And it was Mr. Thiel who played a leading role in Narya’s Rumble investment last year, becoming what the platform’s chief executive described as its first outside investor.
“The investment fits into an enduring narrative of Mr. Thiel, who has expressed skepticism of democracy and advocated keeping the airwaves open for hard-right voices since his student days at Stanford.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/us/politics/jd-vance-peter-thiel-rumble.html
"Peter Thiel didn’t just wake up one day with a net worth of roughly $4.9 billion.
"His claims to fame largely start as the don of the PayPal Mafia — a nickname embraced by PayPal’s slate of co-founders, which also included Elon Musk. Though the digital banking service raised just $3 million in venture capital on its launch in 1999, PayPal was ultimately sold in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Thiel’s 3.5% stake brought him an estimated $55 million which he used to start his empire.
“Then there was the $500,000 “angel investment” he gave Mark Zuckerberg in 2005. That 10.2% stake in Facebook turned into more than $1 billion in 2012.”
@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.
Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…