mike

Map, Sun, 29 Jan 2023 13:58:01 +1100

If you need any further evidence of the decline of western civilisation, this is from the front page of the CNN website.

Kylie Jenner strapped a huge lion's head to her body and the internet has thoughts

mike

Map, Thu, 26 Jan 2023 09:18:34 +1100

Federated search part 1 has landed in the streams dev repository. Basically this puts you in control of who can search your content.

Here's what you need to know...

Even if somebody does a site search on your site, they need your permission to search your content or it won't be included in the site search.

The default is connections only. You can change this on your Channel Settings page under 'Security and Privacy'.

You can disable search permission for any individual connection if desired in the Connection Editor under 'Individual Permissions', or assign this to connection classes (using the Roles app).

You also now have a personal search page which only searches your own content.

All searches are available either via the web, or as ActivityPub or Nomad Collections.

Access controls are honoured. So you can even search for DMs in which you participated.

Enjoy. This has been exhaustively tested, but there is a lot of new functionality and permission logic here. If you have any issues or related feature requests, please communicate them via the Streams group or the codeberg repository.

I'll be moving on to part 2, which is the fun part - distributed federated search and personal search agents.

show all 8 comments

mike

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 16:44:41 +1100

You shouldn't see any obvious change from the navbar search. Under the covers though, it's asking everybody on the site if you have permission to search their content. That's what changed.

mike

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 18:41:49 +1100

OK, I apologise for the crude interface, but there's now a 'Remote Search' link in the author dropdown if you've been granted search access. Eventually I'll put a text input there, unless somebody else beats me to it. But this will give you access to personal search pages .

mike

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 20:53:17 +1100

Here's how I wanted to do it. So I did. And you have (nearly) the same list of choices on the Connections page now.

mike

Map, Mon, 23 Jan 2023 18:21:13 +1100

This was a couple of weeks ago - peak blossom for the "pink popcorn tree".

show all 5 comments

Scott M. Stolz

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 05:45:57 +1100

@Micha I've lived in Houston, Texas for so long sometimes I forget that it's snowing elsewhere. We get snow once every 10 years or so and the whole city shuts down over a few millimeters of snow. I was born up north, and grew up with cold snowy weather, so I find it amusing.

Micha

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 05:57:19 +1100

@Scott M. Stolz 4 days ago. ;)

Einer von Vielen

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 09:23:11 +1100

No-blossom-scene here as well - including young woman bathing today. This is a kind of new sport over here.

mike

Map, Sun, 22 Jan 2023 09:31:54 +1100

Here's a development-oriented feature description of the new federated search functionality, if any of you have feedback or comments or questions. Another few weeks of development effort is still required before this feature lands; so if you want to see changes, now would be an excellent time to get involved.

What isn't covered in this document is that the addition of federated search makes ethical distributed search possible. So if you're searching for something that isn't available on your own site, you will eventually be able to "ask my friends" or "ask some large sites" and this will send out a swarm of agents behind the scenes to find results for you and alert you when/if results are found. And the results will only include authors who have chosen to make their content searchable to you (or to the public). This doesn't provide the immediate results of web search, but also doesn't require one company or server to own/store a copy of all the available content in the network in order to provide such a service.

Federated Search

The federated search feature was added to provide individual control over the
ability to search your stream and personal content.

Previously this was a site security setting made by the site admin.

Implementation Details

The first part of this epoch was to enable the fetching of search results as an ActivityStreams 'Collection'. This work was completed some time ago.

The second phase is providing a new permission named 'search_stream'. Only viewers and remote requests possessing both 'view_stream' and 'search_stream' permission can search your channel content going forward.

The underlying search module is also to be changed so that the URL may contain a channel name. In the absence of a channel username in the URL the entire site will be searched, but will only provide results from channels which have permitted search to the current viewer. When a channel username is present, the search is restricted to that channel.

The channel search URL will be provided in the ActivityPub and Nomad actor records in the optional 'endpoints' section. The names used are 'nomad:searchContent' and 'nomad:searchTags'. These endpoints will be essentially a template, containing a bracket pair {} which is then substituted with the desired search text. If evaluated with the nomad: prefix, the URL is guaranteed to provide results for both HTTP and ActivityPub/ActivityStreams/Nomad/Zot6 requests. If used with any other prefix, only remote fetch of the search collection results are assumed to be supported.

If a channel has federated search enabled, a new entry will be provided in the author action drop down attached to every post/comment. This will be named 'Search' (or 'Search Content' and 'Search Tags') and will perform an HTML search of the provided endpoint(s). This entry will only be present if the provided endpoints are associated with the 'nomad:' context namespace.

If a channel has opted out of channel discovery (inclusion in federated directories), no search links will be provided; with the exception of the so-called 'system channel' which represents the site. The system channel will provide these links purely based on the system setting of 'block_public_search'.

Acceptance Criteria and Testing

Validate the existence of the endpoint across all protocols when the discovery criteria have been met.

Validate that a site search does not contain content created by a member which you do not have permission to search.

Validate that a channel search only contains content created by the requested channel and that matching results are found if content exists containing that search text.

Repeat results testing with hashtag search.

Verify the search results contain the same information whether fetched via HTML or via federated protocol and that the returned data objects are valid for the federated protocol used.

mike

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 11:12:22 +1100

Another feature which went into the dev branch this morning is to basically auto-embed attached text files if they are in a format we can handle. Most of the content in the top-level post came from the multicode doc file I created to describe this feature.

Since multicode can contain HTML, markdown, bbcode, and inline SVGs, any of those text formats will also be purified and auto-embedded if you attach them.

As usual, you are advised that Mastodon is primarily a plaintext platform and folks using that software will only ever see the body text with any markup/formatting constructs and inline media removed. This is not a bug. Correction: This is not our bug.

Bill Statler

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 11:57:36 +1100

This looks very interesting. Please tell me if I'm understanding this correctly:

Taking Mastodon as an (oversized) example, if I tried to do a Search Content of a Mastodon site or an individual Mastodon channel, it would fail because Mastodon doesn't allow full-text search of other people's posts. But a Search Tags ought to work (unless the Mastodon admin has disabled that too).

(That ought to satisfy Mastodon users who are in a panic about federated search.)

Only Streams users will have the search_stream permission (for now!). So when searching non-Streams, non-Mastodon sites, Search Content will only work if the server software allows public full-text search.

Is that approximately correct?

mike

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 13:06:11 +1100

This is a stepping stone to something bigger - distributed search. I don't expect to see any interest from outside the nomad world until we can also deliver on that bit. But that's why I labelled this as part of an epoch. If I'm wrong, we can talk.

mike

Map, Sat, 21 Jan 2023 09:38:23 +1100

Did a bit more work on federated search. This has always been controversial in the fediverse, mostly because of previous experiences with bad behaviour on platforms where there are no access controls to speak of.

We're going to change that. We've had federated search for quite some time now, under the site admin's control. The next phase in this epoch is to give that control to you -- where it belongs.

Cheers.

mike

Map, Fri, 20 Jan 2023 12:14:23 +1100

Meanwhile in Australia...

Monster 25cm, 2.7kg poisonous toad like a 'football with legs'

Ranger Kylee Gray says she was so shocked to discover a 2.7 kilogram "Toadzilla" next to a hiking trail in North Queensland she thought it was a practical joke.

show all 8 comments

lotfi

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 23:50:47 +1100

I would like to have one in my little garden, but it might eat the other toads that have been living there peacefully for years.

Papa Dragon

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 02:02:51 +1100

I'd be scared it might eat me someday...

Adam Robertson

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 03:59:12 +1100

That's people for you. Find something unique and proceed straight to killing it. But, of course, if you call it "euthanize", it's alright.

@Tanja The toad is an invasive species, but it is still sad it had be put down. Florida has some similar issues and had to create a hunting season for anaconda and python snakes.

mike

Map, Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:27:54 +1100

People we've lost in 2023

but cap'n, it's only Wednesday....

Giac El Vecio

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 07:14:18 +1100

Waitman Gobble

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 10:14:37 +1100

Do you like that show? I started it but didn't get into it. But i think it's probably good i just need to get back to it. I was watching The Recruit yesterday about a young CIA lawyer which is pretty amusing. The first episode felt like they were "trying to hard" to be "hip hop/urban" but after that they managed to make it modern and cool but not on the nose.

Tim Burton is a producer for the Wednesday thing, but I'm not sure how much creative stuff he does with it? Producers can make things happen or have their name attached because of financing, or sometimes actors work for a producer credit if the like the film but there's no budget for their multi-million dollar take :)

in the 1990's I went to an art gallery in Cincinnati and saw Tim Burton's huge spider art. It was in a huge room with huge spiders and huge spider web. Like the spiders were like the size of a garbage truck or maybe a large car. Also they had Dennis Hopper's photo collection. I just randomly went into the gallery and it was like a ghost town. So to see something like that was pretty cool.

You can buy the photos in a book now but this was ages ago before his book was available.

Dennis Hopper. Photographs 1961–1967

During the 1960s, Dennis Hopper carried a camera everywhere—on film sets, at parties, in diners, bars and galleries, and through political marches. Along t…

Giac El Vecio

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 11:36:41 +1100

I watched it with my daughter, yes I liked it, but also because it's actually a crime story, and not a series about the addams family, you know that I like crime story and whodunit

..but also my daughter liked so...

mike

Map, Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:31:22 +1100

So you're telling me this function has been in PHP for 20 years? Can't wait to find a use for it.
Oh wait - that means I'll have to test it.

PHP manual page for is_infinite function

Bill Statler

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:45:58 +1100

Huh. Apparently it's for testing user input (along with is_finite and is_nan).

https://www.functions-online.com/is_infinite.html

8146949640E+6918468416246824 is infinite (for certain values of infinity).

Scott M. Stolz

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 14:02:46 +1100

I'd attempt to test π but only if I didn't have to type it by hand.

mike

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 14:07:15 +1100

or any value too big to fit into a float on this platform.

They should've just named it too_big_for_platform() . Is_infinite() returning true on a finite number is a bug where I come from.

mike

Map, Fri, 13 Jan 2023 08:36:19 +1100

Even snopes will tell you that this is just clickbait and clicking though to the end doesn't actually answer the question. But in the interests of science, I tried it and I'll save you the trouble. here's what happens:

the wife yells at you for leaving the toilet seat up - again.

Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 08:49:15 +1100

mike

Map, Fri, 13 Jan 2023 07:16:07 +1100

In Canada, the Girl Guides cancels the name 'Brownies' to be more inclusive of people of colour. They are now to be called 'Embers'.

I wonder how this will go down over at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_School

Martin Farrent

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 07:17:54 +1100

@mike But Ember Points sound rather more valuable than Brownie Points.

mike

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 07:35:25 +1100

I just wonder who they consulted.

What does an ember symbolize?
When you see embers, the fire isn't finished yet, but it's almost done. If you're camping and you put out a fire, don't leave it alone until the embers go out, too. People also use embers as a metaphor for other things that are starting to fade, like the last embers of a dying friendship.

Martin Farrent

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 07:40:16 +1100

@mike

You mean they wanna snuff the littluns before they even become real, big girl guides? Surely not! But who knows? I'm told Baden Powell was... complex.

mike

Map, Thu, 12 Jan 2023 19:29:28 +1100

RIP dude. Fuckin' great. Everything. Fuckin' great.
Jeff Beck and Zucchero - Luciano's Friends

Martin Farrent

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 19:39:50 +1100

@mike

Jeff was alone among the guitar heroes of the 1960's in that he never ceased to progress, change and improve.For instance, the span of time between his stint with the Yardbirds and his work with Jan Hammer was incredibly short. But technically and musically, he had put himself on a new tier while his peers were already selling canned versions of their own legends.

Martin Farrent

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:18:05 +1100

@mike I saw this:

"You are the Greatest!! I Love you forever!! RIP"

(John McLaughlin)

Can any guitarist hope for a better obituary?

Martin Farrent

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:43:16 +1100

@mike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viDVXHyIbCo

mike

Map, Tue, 10 Jan 2023 18:27:16 +1100

Them - Gloria (Live in France)

DISCLAIMER: All music, lyrics, videos and photos, remain copyright of their respective owners. No infringement intended. Used for the Artist's promotional pu...

mike

Map, Tue, 10 Jan 2023 17:35:45 +1100

mike

Map, Tue, 10 Jan 2023 08:23:51 +1100

Mad world: Global flashpoints to watch in 2023 in the era of 'polycrisis'

Because they're too polite to call it 'clusterfuck'.

mike

Map, Sun, 08 Jan 2023 21:21:19 +1100

This is fascinating.

There's a woman haunting the internet. She was created by AI. Now she won't leave

New mind-bending technology that creates media from scratch is evolving rapidly, and it’s billed as the next big disruption.

show all 7 comments

Bill Statler

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 08:57:43 +1100

It reminds me of attractors in mathematics. But I don't know either math or AI well enough to dig further.

Sean Tilley

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 18:23:26 +1100

@mike I read about this a while back. It has really good potential for an Internet horror story, but I'm almost convinced that it's a creative hoax.

Nevertheless, it sparks the imagination in a dozen different directions.

mike

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 19:31:01 +1100

@Sean Tilley Yeah I'm reserving judgement. Everything about the story is a bit odd.

mike

Map, Sat, 07 Jan 2023 15:22:27 +1100

Meanwhiile in Australia...

Heart attack treatment using K’gari funnel-web spider venom one step closer to human trial

A drug being developed using venom from the world's deadliest spider to prevent damage caused by a heart attack or stroke will progress to clinical trials.

show all 8 comments

Tanja

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 20:09:07 +1100

@Mike Macgirvin Yeah, that too.

Langensiepen

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 23:02:37 +1100

I almost had an heart attack, just opening that post.

Tanja

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:55:15 +1100

@Klaus Langensiepen (Streams) 😂

mike

Map, Fri, 06 Jan 2023 11:09:57 +1100

The worst is over for the stock market

You can believe what you want. I'd be smashing that 'Sell' button.
I remember seeing this headline before. It was on the tenth of September 2001. We all know what happened the next day.

Bill Statler

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 12:00:15 +1100

There's supposed to be a January stock market rally, according to tradition. Hasn't happened yet.

Scott M. Stolz

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 19:10:20 +1100

There are several influential people in the financial world predicting a recession or even a crash. I think many people are being cautious right now.

mike

Map, Thu, 05 Jan 2023 16:54:07 +1100

Just when it was getting warm enough for the groundwater to subside - I mean below ground level. Then the rain came again. Then lightning and hail. Then more rain. OK. So we aren't completely out of la niña yet. But we had a break from the rain for two or three weeks. I'll take the small victories.

mike

Map, Wed, 04 Jan 2023 18:04:07 +1100

Some garage band in San Francisco. They'll never amount to anything.

The Great! Society - That's How It Is (live) (1965)

A live rendition from 1965 of a superb David Miner song (an "over-the-moon-cow" ?), with Grace Slick taking the lead vocal.

Oliver

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 18:25:03 +1100

with Grace Slick

mike

Map, Wed, 04 Jan 2023 12:27:50 +1100

Spent the morning cleaning out the agricultural sprinklers. I call them "super soakers". Each one shoots a 30-40m circle of water that we pump out of the aquifer. Haven't used them since the bush fires, but we've had a few hot dry days and will probably need them in the coming few weeks.