IT/Tech

Holos Discover -Search the fediverse

An interesting (and slightly controversial due to basically being opt-out by default instead of opt-in, but apparently this is fixed) project is back. Holos Discover is a A #Fediverse search engine that uses standard #ActivityPub federation. It now follows you like any account, respects indexable flags, #nobot, #noindex, locked accounts. Deletions, edits, blocks are processed instantly through ActivityPub.
You have full control. Block it, mention it with “unfollow”, or disable indexing in your settings.

It’s still early days so the index will take some time to build up.

discover.holos.social
General IT/Tech Technology

Does anyone want what big tech is selling?

LLM AI can do some cool things. But is anyone measuring the quality of the output vs the real costs (I mean real total costs, not just your investor and environment subsidised free tier or small subscription) and effort of the input? Is it real inteligence, or just like a plastic doll that says “I love you” when you pull it’s string? Just good enough for small kids to suspend their disbelief for entertainment, companionship, and help in learning social skills.

Watch: AI Overlords Are Engineering a Broke Society ft. Ed Zitron

General IT/Tech Technology

A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator

“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit” – Cory Doctorow. First platforms are good, then they abuse their individual users to make things better for their corporate users, then they abuse the corporate users for profit, then they die. It’s destroying the internet to ensure better short-term shareholder returns.

General

Lemon-Aid

When a seemingly innocent lemonade stand materializes in a suburban front yard, the once tranquil neighborhood descends into chaos as mysterious and unsettling events unfold.

General

Speed Limit Adherence – UK map data

https://speeding.hasp.ac.uk

On this site is shown speeding behaviour data collected from goods vehicles (LGVs and HGVs) in UK cities, across a month in October 2023. This data was collected by Compass IoT, and made available to the Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service for research purposes. All data is non-identifiable and aggregated, and no personal data is collected as part of this project.

The Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service is part of the Smart Data Research UK family of data service

General

The Fascinating Map of Fungi

Fungi are one of the most diverse organisms on Earth and contribute to many aspects of life as we know it. They’re the most populous kingdom on the planet – an estimated 3.8million fungi exist worldwide – and yet, more than 90% of them are currently unknown to science.

A characteristic that places fungi in a different kingdom from plants, bacteria, and some protists is chitin in their cell walls. Fungi, like animals, are heterotrophs, they acquire their food by absorbing dissolved organic molecules, typically by secreting digestive enzymes into their environment. Fungi do not photosynthesize. Growth is their means of mobility, except for spores, which may travel through the air or water. Fungi are the principal decomposers in ecological systems. The video below from “Domain of Science” goes through a lot in short time.

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