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Messages - BoL

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1
Water Cooler / Re: NOAA declares a G5 (extreme) geomagnetic storm
« on: May 13, 2024, 06:42:57 PM »
Missed it on Friday, non-event on Saturday, from SE Scotland. Cracking pictures from locals. Guess I'll need to go to Lapland or wait another 20 years.

Glad that a lot of people managed to see it for the first time though

2
Economics & Investing / Re: Renewables make up the lion’s share of new electric generation
« on: May 08, 2024, 04:24:57 PM »
In the UK we're at the point where renewable energy generation exceeds fossil fuels. The pricing is still a bit mad though.

In Scotland we have 30% of the renewable generation vs about 8% of the population/demand and still pay the highest rates in the UK on the National Grid. Though recent projects actually pay out to local communities in the case they don't like the look of wind farms. £5K per MW of rated power per year. It's a decent incentive.

Locational pricing seems to be the way forward. There's been an effective ban on onshore wind in England for the past 10 years or so.

Luckily there's efforts like Ripple Energy where people in England can offset their carbon emissions to an extent.


3
Traffic / Re: significant increase of Reddit posts in Google search results over the past yr
« on: May 01, 2024, 05:12:46 PM »
Interesting one wrt Yandex's algo leak, they promoted hosts when certain words were in the query iirc, (wiki, reddit) bit of an algo crutch

The overwhelming M.O. would seem to be people looking for other people's opinions, maybe in part trying to ignore the AI/FAQ stuff/guff that normally appears in SERPs.

4
Traffic / Re: The man who killed Google Search?
« on: April 25, 2024, 05:50:54 AM »
>Has search quality just become too hard or does Google simply not care?

I don't follow that close, it probably is harder than before and Google with its share/size is going to have to dredge their results harder. I'd guess it's more the latter, they don't have any real competition to push them to make harder choices. Their revenue per search is so much higher than Bing. Maybe other indexes having access to G's advertisers would help level it all up.

Looks like the revolution of ChatGPT/AI has put Bing into double figures though. https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/

5
Traffic / The man who killed Google Search?
« on: April 24, 2024, 06:44:57 AM »
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Lengthy HN discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

6
Water Cooler / Re: Anyone traveling to see the solar eclipse on April 8th?
« on: April 08, 2024, 01:12:55 PM »
Airbnb bookings:




7
Water Cooler / Re: The US needs 22m acres for the solar energy transition – what that looks like
« on: January 25, 2024, 12:52:37 PM »
>difficult

Not sure and perhaps not viable for all forms of crop, or maybe different setups depending on height requirements. I've read that yields can be increased because the shading is beneficial and can help keep the panels cool with the transpiration from below.

With cattle they help prevent vegetation obscuring the panels while the panels provide shade.

I guess there's unavoidably a trade off somewhere.

It sounds like a quickly evolving field (no pun intended) even though the wiki page mentioned the idea of panels/agriculture in 1981. 

I know at least here in the UK that farmers/landowners can be paid for planting forests (for the same carbon goals), and energy generation can be another form of income for them.

The land use argument is definitely one angle I keep seeing from climate change sceptics as littleman interpreted from the article.

8
Water Cooler / Re: The US needs 22m acres for the solar energy transition – what that looks like
« on: January 24, 2024, 12:07:08 PM »
Agrivoltaics also, another dual use of land that doesn't make the space requirement sound as daunting.

9
Traffic / Re: Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
« on: January 21, 2024, 09:33:57 PM »
>It does seem like a lot of new crawling/indexing search engines are starting up.  It's a mixed bag.  Some have already failed, others don't seem to be bringing anything new to the table but some appear to be trying to be different.  It's a bit like watching a horse race just to see who can make it to the finish line.

And a lot of bending of rules, like Brave (what's their UA? Gbot rules etc). and DDG just an inflection of marketing.

I could see an advantage towards DMOZ style human curated lists but it requires following beyond the usual info discovery of default search and social media.  Alt search engines do seem like an answer as an alternative but there's always the issue how how visible they are.

Personally it seems like the younger generations (at least the objective thinking ones) will wonder what is the point of looking on the web at all because there's so much crap, which would undo all our hard work the past 30 years :-) I guess for me being a teen in the late 90s and involved witnessing SEO over time it's just a necessary cat and mouse game. But it seems far too gone towards Google's version of events.

10
Traffic / Re: Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
« on: January 17, 2024, 05:23:28 PM »
Seen that one on HackerNews, I bet they're missing a bunch of aff sites as they're not rendering the pages.

I'd suggested on the HN thread a solution is a bunch more search engines, at least there's then some variation in results potentially. Looks like edge are somewhat into the idea https://www.techradar.com/computing/microsoft-edges-new-search-feature-has-me-genuinely-considering-moving-over-from-chrome

I've been liking the idea of 'pressure groups' forming their own algos. Something like Google's index since every other is lesser, but the algo is defined by cohorts you vote for. So if I like Th3Core's ethos, it positively influences the algo of stuff Th3Core likes, for me. Add in more groups etc, take your pick. Add a Pagerank type thing to the groups and their followers.

It does seem like there's more complaints about G quality and their index is the best that's going. Maybe the pendulum could swing back to human curated content? Problem then is how those places get found.

Alt search engines invariably have a hard time given bot whitelisting, MITMs like Cloudflare defining acceptable activity and large sites only allowing the likes of G to crawl them at a speed to keep up to date with their content.

11
Marketing / Re: (US) March of the Non-White Babies
« on: November 15, 2023, 05:15:42 PM »
>the "one drop" doctrine

That makes so much sense given the conversations I've had with my NA Native Mrs. The reserves have their own new bunch of rules about blood quantum as per CA/US laws.

Conversations over here about Meghan Markle which I didn't care for much talked about this, to me she was of European descent but my Mrs would call her 'non white' as if in the frame of potential discrimination, which she probably would be given her position. I'd have never put her in that position (as in, I wouldn't see why other people would see it as a thing).


12
Marketing / Re: (US) March of the Non-White Babies
« on: November 13, 2023, 06:00:05 PM »
>Hispanic

Always found that strange (as a Scot) as it does seem to be a North America thing. From my little pov Spanish are European and ergo 'caucasian'.

I'd leap the guess it's more to do with the legacy of the Spanish empire and Protestantism, and all the politics around that, from them til now.

13
Water Cooler / A robots-like initiative to prevent content being taken for AI
« on: November 02, 2023, 12:07:58 PM »
(via a mojeek-initiative)

tldr- Using the robots meta element or HTTP header to say the content should not be used for machine learning, in case some actors make their search UA indistinguishable from their machine learning efforts.

https://noml.info/

Feel free to sign/share. Basic gist is that all the content out there isn't for big tech to summarise and capitalise on.

14
Traffic / Re: Mojeek News
« on: October 19, 2023, 04:42:48 PM »
Cheers for the mention and feedback

Sorting some issues with lo-res images and images that would be better fits.

I've added a few more feeds in entertainment/health. There's a bunch more that can be added shortly.

>Still no nav in the footer. Boo! Hiss!

I'll mention this

>DailyMail

When we add more feeds this'll happen.

>It would be great to be able to select news sources, although I suppose I dont have to click on them

There are some UI params that should appear soon, not quite specific source selection, but being able to weight country of origin and such.

Cheers

15
Water Cooler / Alternate Phone Number for HMRC 'ranked top' on Google
« on: September 02, 2023, 08:18:53 AM »
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-66529264

Quote
After googling HM Revenue & Customs' contact number, BBC journalist Jared Evitts made a phone call which he later found out had cost him £119.
...
After some research, I found the answer. I had unknowingly phoned through a call connection service operated by a company called Bounce Tech Ltd, which has been approached for comment.

This meant I had got through to the organisation I wanted to reach, but was charged for the call at a premium rate.

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