maegul (he/they)

well the central site of the web ring could be searched for any particular page that’s part of the ring, and that search could be surfaced on any page that’s part of the ring.

The full set of pages could be decentralised and cached across all members for robustness, and even include each page’s own description and recommendations for every other page if they like.

And then, of course … rings of webrings with as many levels of aggregation as people are interested in maintaining, again with decentralised caches of pages, their links and descriptions (all human curated of course) that can all be searched whenever a member page or aggregating page opts into it.

Tech capabilities have advanced since the 90s enough now that basic text search in a web page over a small data set is not hard or too much to ask.

And nested rings of rings of rings are scalable because at each level the data will just be links (and descriptions or names if available) while it would be on the user to navigate the various layers however they wish until they find something they’re interested in.

Sorry … I don’t know what that is

I mean, the search doesn’t have to be centralised at all … basic search facilities could include the text search in the browser for any page, but made more user friendly and just for the webring you’re navigating or something.

It was never broke, why fix it?

Totally fair! I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about! I’m just riffing on what I suspect would work for me, but also motivated by what I feel is a relatively urgent need to create some robust and diverse human curation of the internet. So in a way I’m not really interested in remaking web rings, but more coming from the perspective of what else can be done with the same general idea along side webrings.

I’m aware of it (and while not being super enthused about it, I can my personal interest growing over time as the internet keeps tracking the way it is).

But how does it help with a page recommendation system? Is there a strong culture of that sort of thing on Gemini?

That seems interesting!

In the end, I’m wondering if all the pieces are here on something like the fediverse but just need to be connected. I haven’t thought about this at all until now (so I’m just riffing here) … but the essence of such a system seems to me:

1. Recommendations are human curated
2. Recommendations come from a single human (or well defined collective)
3. Reccommendations are organised in a navigable structure

Point 3 seems to be the unclear part. A “ring” is obviously a bunch of connections (not unlike a linked list). But other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility.

The idea comes up again and again on the fediverse. It feels ripe for some app/platform to kinda nail it.

I’m not sure this is it or even something that does exactly the old web ring thing. I think a simple enough system for the human curation of web pages in a standardised way that can easily be consumed and aggregated would go a long way though. The fediverse feels like its close to something.

The number of people I’ve come across who also dislike the character limit, the number of platforms that don’t have it, the number of times people write long microblogging threads and the prior and continued existence of the “blogosphere” count against this defeatist pessimism IMO.

The truly dark take here, IMO, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a medium’s configuration to shape not just the content and culture on it (that’s obvious) but the way its users come to think.

Yep this.

It’s gotten to the point where a character limit is itself a seriously toxic part of big-social social media, up there with algorithms and shitty moderation choices. But all of the Twitter people don’t see it.

Sure there are threads through reply chains. No one reads the chain. The first post is all most will see. Context collapse and superficiality is inevitable with this simple constraint. The fediverse should move on. Sadly, mastodon is the only platform still dedicated to it and they’re 80% of the fediverse.

If you like short funny quips and shit posts, that’s fine, there’s no character minimum! With long character limits, short quips still abound. Instead, when necessary, you can opt in to longer form text when necessary.

Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.

A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.

I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.

your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

I mean there’s something to the idea of a screen-less device that doesn’t distract you all of the time.

But then this has a projector and a camera and flashing lights and is basically an interface to the cloud and AI which has its own engagement dynamics, so the whole “be present” thing is likely silicon valley bullshit, as you say.

The bit I can’t get over is that they’ve clearly got funding, hype and connections but are selling a wrapper around another company’s new/untested/probably-just-shit AI service that only came out relatively recently compared to when humane started. So what’s this company actually about? Channeling Apple hype?

Huh … nice. It seems that this and related work are by @phiresky@lemmy.world ?

Too fucking good!

Am I bad for wanting this car?

That’s a shame, it would have been fitting in “modern” Python along with the walrus and static type system.

Python, checking in …

return (a or b)

Parentheses aren’t necessary, I just prefer them for readability.

See python documentation on boolean operators for reference. Short story is a or b is an expression that evaluates to a if a is “truthy” else b. “Falsy” is empty strings/containers, 0 and None.

The cost isn’t the software, it’s the time, energy and risk involved in using it.

The combativeness was deployed to fight off combativeness.