jakeobsen, to random
@jakeobsen@mastodon.social avatar

Hello Fediverse!
I recently set this table up with a 3D printer and I want to expand the other half of the table with an electronics workspace - I'm thinking soldering station, power supply, oscilloscope, tools etc. but I'm not sure what to get.

So this is a callout to all of the makers out there, what tools/brands/devices do you recommend? And why?

(Table sturdiness is being addressed, see thread below)

alexanderhay, to random
@alexanderhay@mastodon.social avatar

[SLOWCLAP]

"'I was misidentified as shoplifter by tech...'

"...[Sara] says after her bag was searched she was... banned from all stores using the .

"I was just crying and crying the entire journey home… 'Oh, will my life be the same? I'm going to be looked at as a shoplifter when I've never stolen'.

" later wrote to Sara and acknowledged it had made an error..."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-69055945

paninid, to random
@paninid@mastodon.world avatar

The miracle of “” is that the words generated actually form sequences which humans process as plausible formulations of sentences in language we know.

danie10, to random
@danie10@mastodon.social avatar

Try these Linux bash aliases for more efficient use of the command line

For those who don’t know, bash aliases allow you to create unique command shortcuts. So, a simple word can be used to run a more complex command which may have a lot of additional parameters, e.g. just type the word ‘update’ to execute an update com ...continues

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/try-these-linux-bash-aliases-for-more-efficient-use-of-the-command-line/

ajsadauskas, to random

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle

ManyRoads, to linux
@ManyRoads@kbin.social avatar

This posting is intended to function not only as a tutorial but, also, as a review and commentary on my ‘long-term’ use of spectrwm as my primary window manager (long-term, meaning at least one month of daily use).

https://eirenicon.org/spectrwm-review-tutorial/

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