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Joined 14 days ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2026

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  • Join the club of being owed money. Edward J. Friel Co.: a Philadelphia cabinetmaker never paid more than $83,000 for work completed in 1984 at Trump’s Atlantic City casino. The family business eventually closed. (wtvr) The Paint Spot (Miami): owed about $34,000 for the Doral renovation. A judge ruled for the shop and later ordered Trump’s company to pay about $300,000 in legal fees. Andrew Tesoro: the architect of the Westchester golf clubhouse, offered just $25,000 on a much larger bill. (alternet) Atlantic Plate Glass: lost $450,000 in its final settlement over work on the Taj Mahal. (enewspf) Michael Diehl: a piano dealer who was only partly paid for Taj Mahal pianos.




  • Consider it a tech demo, not a pitch. I’m using it to try things out. . Next I’d like to explore not storing passwords or email addresses at all, and running small local discriminative models to flag spam. This work will help me with other efforts in my life. That’s the extent of it… well other than having convos with people and trying not to panic that teh world is so crazy.

    What I like about the fediverse is that we can talk, and nobody has to adopt anyone else’s interface, view or agenda to do it.










  • Ha, to be clear: the site isn’t built through his lens, it’s just a spot I’m going to hang around in. Probably talking to myself for a while, but the door’s open. If you’ve read or listened to him, come chat! Here I am dropping Hagens name… as an energy-hungry creature, while building algorithms that connect similar stories on this site. My defence…it runs almost entirely on solar.


  • Pretty much, yes. Embedding a post takes about half a second on dboft’s small server, and the lookup afterwards is under a millisecond. At 3–4 thousand new posts and comments a day that’s maybe 40 minutes of work, so the ceiling is exactly what you guessed: how fast new posts can be embedded. More cores or a small GPU would push it way out i would think. Storage grows too, about 14 KB per post with its index, so 35k today is ~500 MB and a million would be ~14 GB. It all lives on disk in Postgres; keeping the index in RAM just makes lookups sub-millisecond instead of a few milliseconds, and Postgres caches the busy parts on its own, so it degrades gently rather than falling over. This was just an idea; I’m just putting it into together to see if it holds up. I like the idea of a shared service… I wonder what the memory constraints would be at scale.


  • Neither, and good eye. dboft ran Photon to start, and when I replaced it with my own front end I carried the favicon over without registering that the hexagon was Photon’s mark. That was a mistake, and it’s been swapped. The Photon-y feel is real: Photon was the client I replaced, so it set the bar for what mine had to do, and the basics look alike because they’re the basics of any Lemmy client: votes, sharing, compact and card views, threaded comments, a tab bar on phones. Beyond that the design is a different one: a three-pane split reader, related posts found by meaning rather than tags, following people, reminders, and every page readable as plain Markdown or JSON(public pages). The code is written from scratch; none of Photon’s is in it. Credit to Photon either way.



  • It’s interesting… The neat part is that “a dog chased a ball” and “puppy playing fetch” end up close together even though they share no words, so related posts turn up without any tagging. It’s the same idea behind a lot of semantic search, and small models like this run fine on an ordinary CPU… so giving it a shot here to see if it adds any value.



  • Thanks. You’re right, and thats on me. Most of what you’re seeing comes from the news feeds I set up to pull in links, and they lean heavily American. I’m also EU myself, so it isn’t what I want the place to be either.

    Another conversation I had here on lemmy made me realize I’ve been running dboft as a link aggregator when I actually enjoy … you know… discussion. So I’m rethinking how the instance is set up, and I want to put the focus on conversation, starting with !superorganism@dboft.com. It’s built around Nate Hagens’s idea of the global economy as an energy-hungry superorganism, and I’d love for threads like that to be what rises to the top rather than headlines.

    If that sounds like your kind of thing, come visit.