Mastodawn

SwiftOnSecurity Nov 14

I like how full text search of every book and human thought ever was a SOLVED PROBLEM in 2001, and now dicks at search engines and my own phone – a piece of silicon faster to respond than God was ever imagined in scripture – prevent it from working, _as a retroactive infantilizing design choice_.

SwiftOnSecurity

My phone has full optical character recognition of 47,000 photos. I can search individual words.

I cannot search three words in quotes.

Computers used to be powerful. That power meant something. It was power for making your life better in sovereignty to your own interests.

And now we have condescending mollycoddled shit.

SwiftOnSecurity Nov 14

Computers were a skill. They were taught in classrooms as a skill. Skills give you power over your tools because you work them as an expert and that is leverage to multiply externally.

And then computers became an A/B tested telemetry-based advertising conduit to brains for SaaS recurring revenue.

This could be said of technologies before. Doesn't make it wrong.

Vincent Sparks Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity but if we didn't keep unsolving problems, how would we keep people paying us for the solutions?

Danny Whitt Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity Settle down, Francis.

Xoa Gray Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity I miss those days. A good chunk of my early life was using my knowledge of computers. I've since gotten completely out of it.

Possumantha Nov 14

@xoagray @SwiftOnSecurity I've found social work much less stressful than computer work.

Xoa Gray Nov 14

@kastope @SwiftOnSecurity I could see it.

𝕕𝔼cⒶ𝕪 Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity still a skill imo. just gotta get in there and use them that way.

not like some node-addicted dweeb is touching the assembly and plc code.

ParzivalWolfram Nov 14

@decay @SwiftOnSecurity isn't that what all the "XYZ low level access but for browsers" is for? Make the entire PC one big bootable node interpreter? They even called it WebAssembly, it's quite clearly interpreted at runtime like actual assembly is on modern CPUs.

@SwiftOnSecurity As soon as usability became a barrier instead of a goal in the name of profit, it got dumbed down.

We kinda missed the most optimal window to replace/reform profit-driven capitalism for something more sustainable and now the senile bull is tearing through the china-shop.

I want out of this hellscape.

Simonoid Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity just like how people can't "google" or "computer". Some people don't even try.
You get out what you put in.
Or maybe I haven't lost faith in human ingenuity just yet ...

@SwiftOnSecurity computers were a mistake.

Tommi Nieminen Nov 14

@kitzy @SwiftOnSecurity Only as far as the whole technological advancement was a mistake.

Enola Knezevic Nov 15

@tomminieminen @kitzy @SwiftOnSecurity Sentient life was a mistake.

@rhelune @tomminieminen @SwiftOnSecurity well hold on now

@SwiftOnSecurity It'll be a pleasantly cool, autumn day in hell when I pay for SaaS. Either there are other options, or it's not something I need to do.

Eric Goodwin Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity five years ago I could search my iPhone for “blacksmith” and get the exact picture I was thinking of. Today that search yields nothing. Sigh.

groff 🇺🇦Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity

I'd blame the corporations but Mastodon's search is terrible.

🦧the grink🌈Nov 14

@geoffl
Its a design choice rather than a technological deficit.
Implementing good search has been tried in the past several times by different people but been rejected by the community on philosophical grounds.
Good search depends on complete indexing, usually by a centralised search node, which goes against Mastodon's philosophy of free federation.
@SwiftOnSecurity

groff 🇺🇦Nov 14

@banshee @SwiftOnSecurity

I have trouble finding people I know are on the same instance using the search. I know there are people here that left twitter but my chance of finding them is basically zero unless someone else mentions them.

If I do find them on another instance there's a 50% chance I can't follow them.

That's why Mastodon feels like a maze of empty corridors where you only find things by luck while you wander round in circles bumping into the same people again and again.

@banshee
Here's a brain dump salad of possibly related and maybe helpful ideas/constraints:

1. Graph databases can be federated
2. Graph databases are performant even when large
3. The problem needs a solution (don't know if graph DBs are it)
4. AI doesn't cut it. They just endlessly repeat what's already there but with added jeopardy of making stuff up.
5. Corporations' imperatives nowhere near match consumer's imperatives (see enshitification)
6. Federation should be front and center for taking back our online experience
7. Advertising should be opt-in
8. User profiling should be illegal and punishable by cake, or death.

@geoffl @SwiftOnSecurity

@banshee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVH0gZO5lq0
@geoffl @SwiftOnSecurity

Eddie Izzard "Cake or Death" Sketch From Dress to Kill

YouTube

@SwiftOnSecurity
Ah, memories of the before times. Yes, phrase/ngram search can lead to making interesting trouble :-).
(Based on a few tests Kagi seems like it might be useable but I haven’t had the use case to push it very hard)

@SwiftOnSecurity And don't even think about boolean logic in your searches:

"cat images and not dogs"?

"router and !tp-link"

How dare you!

cognitively accessible math Nov 14

@markd @SwiftOnSecurity I KNOW< RIGHT!!!!
I was "surfin' sally" in the early 2000's b/c I could GET WHAT YOU WERE LOOKING FOR. I googlewhacked "stratocumulus derailleur" for ONE SEARCH return.
Now the folks selling crap own this stuff.

@markd @SwiftOnSecurity

#duckduckgo has most of this, at least I can still search -term to remove it. I think.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax apparently so but I just tried "Beatles -song" with pretty poor results. Beatles -"The Beatles" was respectable.

How to use advanced syntax on DuckDuckGo Search - DuckDuckGo Help Pages

Learn how to use syntax on DuckDuckGo Private Search to get the search results you want.

@SwiftOnSecurity still is. now stop using a phone that does OCR on your photos.

@iacore @SwiftOnSecurity why? its useful

@cinebox @SwiftOnSecurity you can have a FOSS app that does the search, not the system one. or you can have convenience.

@iacore @SwiftOnSecurity idgaf about the gnu cult bullshit, I just want to be able to search my damn files

Jim Luther Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity I can’t search for messages from a specific email address half the time. ☹️

@SwiftOnSecurity It all went down when the first iPhone came out. No more access to the file system. Users were treated as dummies. That helped to sell the devices to everyone and experts lost their power. The same mindset is now everywhere.

Administrator Nov 14

@SwiftOnSecurity At least once a week this gets me, too:

Why could I search for words in quotes on Google 10 years ago, but today it doesn't work? We've gone backwards.

Hippo 🍉Nov 15

@mdm @SwiftOnSecurity not a Google user but I've noticed similar filters being ignored or not always applying in other search engines too. Especially prepending "-" when I want to exclude something from the results

@mdm @SwiftOnSecurity
25 years ago, you only needed quotes for things that contained spaces. AND was the default search operator.

In fact that was the number one thing that Google did different than AltaVista. Yes, Pagerank helped, but only because Google was ranking relevant results. Ranking irrelevant results is useless.

Vysogota Nov 16

@SwiftOnSecurity the only conclusion you can make from this is that the developers behind the software you're using are incompetent. The assumption that there is so much bloat now that our computers are no longer powerful enough to do n-gram search is just wrong.