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ambitiousslab

@ ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

Posts
14
Comments
60
Joined
2 mo. ago

  • What search engine do you guys use?

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  • I'm quite crazy:

    • Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
      • Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
    • SearxNG via farside.link
      • Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google's ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
      • But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on

    Depending on the thing I'm searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that's as good:

    • Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
    • Some other wikis
    • Lemmy (of course!)
    • Peertube and podcast indexes
    • Websites of grocery shops near me

    Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.

    I'd quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It'd be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I'm doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.

  • I have 100 euros a month to donate to open source projects. Do you think its better to donate more to fewer projects or less to more projects?

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  • Personally, I donate less to more projects. But, if you don't have a strong opinion of what to donate to, you can get the best of both worlds by donating to NLnet.

    They fund open source projects up and down the stack, from open source CPUs all the way up to applications like Lemmy, and everything in between. Some are quite speculative and others are tangible improvements to existing projects.

  • What's the best way to (start) learning a language?

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  • I used Language Transfer and Michel Thomas' courses when starting to learn Italian and found them really helpful in getting a foothold into the language.

    The Michel Thomas course was longer and went in more depth, but I preferred the vibe of language transfer. The Michel Thomas course seemed to be aimed at people looking to cheat on their wife on a business trip, because a lot of the conversation was about inviting women to get a drink :( Despite that, it was still useful.

    Unlike the language apps, these courses did a good job of getting me to think in real-time. Despite only being able to express and understand basic things, they gave me confidence to try and say things. Even without much vocab, I was able to express myself in a simple way: "I like that red thing over there", and I was able to pick up new words with "what does this part mean?" or "can you repeat?" etc. So far, it's the best method I've found to bootstrap enough of the language to start talking and picking up the rest by osmosis.

  • Gorton & Denton Parliamentary by-election: what the constituency polls say

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  • Government abandons plans to delay 30 council elections

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  • He added that the government would provide an extra £63m to the 21 areas affected.

    This issue has trundled on for so long, the concern being cost on local government, and then it turns out it can be sorted out overnight with just £63m.

    If you ran on a pledge to clean up politics, and you're up against Reform saying "they're all the same and all as bad as each other", then it should be obvious that delaying elections because you're scared about the results is not a good look.

  • UK Politics @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Police framed man for murder, new evidence suggests

    www.bbc.co.uk /news/articles/cvg36pknpl5o
  • UK Politics @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Revealed: Tony Blair’s Institute lobbied EU to work with Trump’s Board of Peace in Gaza

    democracyforsale.substack.com /p/revealed-tony-blairs-institute-lobbied-eu-trump-board-peace

  • Test with tags

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  • What's the point of switching to Discord alternatives, if they're going to be subject to the same age verification laws?

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  • Many very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.

    If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn't bother with compliance without losing your contacts.

    Many of the laws don't specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they're over 18.

  • Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

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  • Ooooo, someone's getting worried!

  • Independent News - an idea for aggregating independent journalism

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  • I like the idea and also want to support independent journalism, but in the UK context, I don't think a separate community makes sense. I had a look at !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk and I think most (70%+) of the posts from my unscientific sample would count as independent (in the sense of "free from government and corporate interests, and not controlled by a major media conglomerate").

    I wonder if it would make sense to set up a bot to automatically crosspost articles from allowlisted domains from these general news communities? And if unknown links were found, there could be a mechanism to add them to the allowlist?

    These were the sources I found:

    • The Guardian
    • Al Jazeera
    • Novara Media
    • The Canary
    • Socialist Worker
    • Morning Star
    • Democracy for Sale
    • BBC
    • Politics Joe
    • ITV
    • New York Post
    • Metro
    • The National
    • Associated Press
    • Big Issue
    • London on the Inside

    A lot depends on the definition of independent, and I'm focused on the text rather than perhaps the intent of the definition. If that was stronger, a lot of these could be excluded and a separate community might make more sense.

  • If you want to know what Reform would be like in power, look at how it threatened Bangor University | Gaby Hinsliff

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  • Bangor debating and politics society responded that “in line with our values” it was declining his offer, expressing “zero tolerance for any form of racism, transphobia or homophobia”.

    Reform’s Zia Yusuf thundered on X that Bangor got £30m from taxpayers and he was “sure they won’t mind losing every penny of (their) state funding under a Reform government”. And that’s where it suddenly got serious.

    Anyone who thinks that Reform will not just copy every part of what has happened in the US, has the wool over their eyes.

  • FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?

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  • I agree with you, and I think there's a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

    The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the "education", users will converge on particular instances because that's what's most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

    If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

    I don't know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There's certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

  • FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?

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  • Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

    This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they're used to?

    Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don't care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

    I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

    For the first group, we want software that's easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

    Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I'm not sure.

  • Programming @programming.dev
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    What Functional Programmers Get Wrong About Systems

    www.iankduncan.com /engineering/2026-02-09-what-functional-programmers-get-wrong-about-systems/

  • Revealed: Corporate donations to British politics have tripled

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  • It's scary to see the UK going down the same steps as the US. It's like we're sleepwalking into it, having seen the effects, without really acknowledging what's happening.

  • UK Politics @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Revealed: Corporate donations to British politics have tripled

    democracyforsale.substack.com /p/revealed-corporate-donations-to-british

  • Is this blåhaj?

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  • It looks like The Thing found a Blåhaj to me!

  • Communities Are Not Fungible

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  • I like the emphasis on the networks of relationships and how the real structure is invisible from the outside. When businesses try to recreate it, they just create the artifacts of community but are unable to replicate the relationships. Those are things which can only evolve organically over time and thus create an irregular network shape.

  • Networks @reddthat.com
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Communities Are Not Fungible

    www.joanwestenberg.com /communities-are-not-fungible/

  • Page views for "Zulip" Wikipedia article skyrocket after Discord announces its age verification nonsense

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  • Zulip has a big jump, but worth pointing out that this is part of a wider trend, and other software has seen bigger jumps.

    The export function doesn't include the legend, so the order from top to bottom by the final day of the graph is:

    • Matrix
    • Signal
    • XMPP
    • Zulip
    • Stoat
    • Rocket.Chat
    • Mattermost
    • Discourse

    Thanks for introducing me to this tool. I hadn't come across it before and it's pretty nifty!

  • Lewis Hamilton says new F1 rules 'ridiculously complex' and 'none of the fans are going to understand it' - BBC Sport

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  • While I'd much rather see drivers go flat out all the time, I don't think this will be a problem.

    There were always reasons for drivers not to push as hard as they can - be it the super delicate pirellis, or saving fuel when refueling was a thing. WEC also has long stretches of lift and coast, and it doesn't really impact the racing.

    Ultimately, a casual fan will see that one car is going faster and another is going slower. It doesn't really matter why. As they watch more, they'll organically learn more about the constraints the drivers operate under.

  • Liverpool Street Station Revamp Green Light Is "Sad Day" For London

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  • As far as redevelopments go, it looks ok to me. Liverpool Street is my least favourite of all the big national rail stations to interact with currently - it feels cramped and worn down. It doesn't feel like a heritage site when I interact with it.

  • Removed

    YSK that Dark Chocolate is healthier than White Chocolate and Milk Chocolate

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  • I bought someone I fancied 99% chocolate as a joke. After a year or so, we got together. I opened the cupboard one day and saw it there, unopened. It came upon me to eat it :)

    I love dark chocolate and until that point I thought the darker the better. Since then, I realised that I top out around 85%.

  • Mental Health @lemmy.world
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    How to stop work anxiety impacting the rest of my life?

  • XMPP @slrpnk.net
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Upcoming changes to Let's Encrypt and how they affect operators

    blog.prosody.im /2026-letsencrypt-changes/
  • UK Politics @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    McSweeney’s think tank paid PR firm to investigate journalists

    democracyforsale.substack.com /p/exclusive-morgan-mcsweeneys-labour-together-investigators-journalists
  • United Kingdom @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    'It is jaw-dropping': Ian Hislop on Mandelson and Epstein

  • Does anyone else get phrases stuck in their head the same way songs do?

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  • Ok, I know this is crazy, but I've had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:

    No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.

    When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn't breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.

    My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as "no thanks", and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.

    Although I don't believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It's probably one of the few things I've remembered verbatim for so long, and it's completely useless :D

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Every time

  • Buy it for Life @slrpnk.net
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Durable water bottle

  • OpenStreetMap community @lemmy.ml
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    How to query the map offline, on Linux?

  • Album Art - Share your favourite music album cover @lemmy.world
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Grizzly Bear - Shields (2012)

  • Stallman Was Right @lemmy.ml
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake

    www.theverge.com /news/861668/uk-police-microsoft-copilot-error-mistake