Archive for May, 2020

Lekythion search update: additional blogs and other things

Sunday, May 31st, 2020

I’ve added several new blogs to lekythion’s search feature, including:

trinque.org
loper-os.org
thimbron.com
ossasepia.com
fixpoint.welshcomputing.com
billymg.com
ztkfg.com
qntra.net

I intend to add more as I have time. I am also open to suggestions for additional sites and blogs to index.

The crawler still needs some tuning for many of the sites listed above. For example there are still instances where the bot will return multiple identical results for a search term due to different urls displaying the same content.

Also ranking is still very basic and doesn’t incorporate anything like pagerank, although it can search using l-distance.

In addition to adding the encyclopedia (work on which is underway), I’m considering adding Bitcoin transaction search. I wrote my own app for such purposes last year and have found it occasionally useful. I don’t know how much demand there is for publicly tracking transactions, but it wouldn’t be a big deal to set something up and try it out.

In terms of infrastructure, the bot is now running on its own vps. The next step is automatic index updates.

Posted in WoT, irc, search | No Comments »

Rule Britannica

Wednesday, May 27th, 2020

Absolutely Nobody:

Me: Let’s scrape the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica and load it up into an mp-wp instance.

When writing qntra articles I often found myself depending on Pediwiki to find original sources when doing background checks. This was a revolting experience to say the least.

To address this, I am standing up an mp-wp instance containing the the entire 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, which is available in unusable form only from the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. It goes without saying that this will be added to lekythion’s search index.

Obviously it won’t contain bios of more recent public figures, but it is a start, and would perhaps have come in handy when writing the unpersoning piece.

I look forward to being able to reference specific phrases/lines in the best encyclopedia ever.

Posted in alethepedia, news, propaganda | 2 Comments »

Search Prototype

Tuesday, May 26th, 2020

So the search project produced a prototype, which is available in #exusiae.

It works like this:

18:00:07 thimbronion !s Bitcoin
18:00:08 lekythion 10 results
18:00:08 lekythion ³http://trilema.com/2013/bitcoin-prices-bitcoin-inflexibility/
18:00:08 lekythion Bitcoin prices, Bitcoin inflexibility on Trilema - A blog by Mircea Popescu.
18:00:08 lekythion …keeping the Bitcoin). Other than this ~4% of the Bitcoin monetary…
18:00:08 lekythion …Bitcoin. Will people stop throwing dollars at Bitcoin because Bitcoin…
18:00:09 lekythion …Will people start throwing Bitcoin at dollars because Bitcoin prices…
18:00:10 lekythion ²http://trilema.com/2015/introducing-the-bitcoin-isp/
18:00:11 lekythion Introducing the Bitcoin ISP on Trilema - A blog by Mircea Popescu.
18:00:12 lekythion …Bitcoin, The Most Serene Republic Of ~. In any case, Bitcoin ISP will…
18:00:13 lekythion …Bitcoin ISP, your only avenue is to voice your concerns in #bitcoin…
18:00:14 lekythion …Soon to become a Bitcoin registered company, trading as S.BISP…
18:00:15 lekythion All results can be found at ¹http://paste.deedbot.org/?id=ZwnE.

The bot currently only searches an index of trilema.com. The !s command accepts Apache Lucene queries.

I now confront some problems.

  1. Fine tuning was required. I had to tune the indexer to extract certain elements from Trilema to get the quality of the results somewhere near acceptable. This means every site is going to need tuning. For example, the good stuff is all the div.entry class in mp-wp, while trinque.org has it somewhere else.

  2. I don’t yet know how to let others add sites they want to search. This is partially due to the first issue because if I just take lists of sites from people and don’t customize the indexer, the results won’t be great. It’s also due to not knowing the best way to allow users to configure their lists of sites to index. The first thing that popped into my head was to allow users to sign a text file that includes a list of all the sites they want to index and provide that to me. I would then do the configuration on the server manually and associate that index with their nick such that it would be the default index searched whenever they search. Perhaps at some point users could also specify by WoT identity others’ indexes they’d like to search.

One positive result is that after futzing around trying to use Google to find particular Trilema articles, I find using my own index to be much more productive.

Sites and documents I personally want to index:

trilema.com
loper-os.org
the blog of everyone from #ossasepia
thebitcoin.foundation
the naggum archive
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition
bitcointalk.org

Posted in irc, search | 3 Comments »

Exploring WoT Search Project

Sunday, May 24th, 2020

I am in the process of exploring working on a WoT search bot. At the moment I don’t know how exactly to make a “WoT” search bot. I did a little searching of the logs, and this line from trinque aligns most with my own itch. Some possibilities:

  1. Everyone has their own search bot that searches sites they specify (presumably in their WoT).

  2. Anyone can register their list of sites they want indexed/searched1. Registered lists are associated with a nick. The search bot interfaces with deedbot to get WoT for your nick when you register and ranks search results originating from registered sites according to your WoT rankings when available.

  3. ??

I am not sure how to best display search results. I think I will start with maybe displaying the top 5 in chan/dm. I don’t know if I have the stomach for putting up a search webshit.

At the moment I am indexing Trilema. As soon as that finishes (if ever - currently going for about 10 hours) I’ll try to get lekythion (a bot I wrote a while ago for checking prices and logging #exusiae) serving up search results and see how that works out and gauge interest.

  1. It may be that at some point someone develops a WP plugin that the search bot can interface with that would provide “live” results and obviate the need for indexing mp-wp blogs [↩]

Posted in WoT, bitcoin, irc, search | No Comments »

Costa Rica Servers

Tuesday, May 5th, 2020

I have found a hosting service in Costa Rica called Costa Rica Servers that accepts Bitcoin as payment. I can’t find any references to this company in the logs1.

In their favor they accept Bitcoin payment via BTCPay as opposed to Bitpay. A strike against them is that they also accept payment in two shitcoins not worth mentioning.

When I asked them about colocation and payment, I got a reply from Edgar Fernandez who seems unfortunately to be involved with EOS.

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your inquiry. The best way to bring the server is to use a Customs Agent / Courier service and have them handle the local customs. We use Star Box (http://starboxcr.com/)

As for the BTC payments, we accept BTC/LTC/Dash through a BTCPay service we run in our own server where the USD invoice is converted at the time of payment at the rate published by Kraken exchange at the time. We welcome BTC payments and provide discount codes for new clients paying in BTC!

Hope you decide on CRServers.com!

Please let us know if we can help with the introduction to Star Box.

Thanks

Edgar Fernandez
EDENiA
edgar@edenia.com

In terms of their network connectivity, they’ve provided a little bit of info on their datacenter connectivity page. I’m not in a position to compare this to Latechco’s connectivity and would appreciate any pointers as to how to do so.

I am planning a trip to Costa Rica in June to fulfill my visa requirement that I physically be in Costa Rica at least one day per year. I may take this opportunity to colocate a box at Costa Rica Servers, but I haven’t decided yet.

  1. I can only assume CR was specifically excluded in the Pizarro ISP search based on some criteria - but I don’t know what that would be [↩]

Posted in bitcoin | 2 Comments »

Heraclitus

Monday, May 4th, 2020

I looked into Heidegger a bit and though I haven’t read him yet, I read that one of his influences was the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος). The last go I had at the Pre-Socratics I remember their texts as being enigmatic to say the least. Nevertheless I decided to have yet another go at one of them. One of Heraclitus’ fragments that struck me follows:

Τίς γαρ αὐτῶν νόος ἢ φρέν ; [δήμων] ἀοιδοῖοι
ἔπονται καὶ διδασκάλῳ, οὺκ
εἰδότες ὅτι πολλοὶ κακοὶ ὀλίγοι δὲ ἀγαθοι.
αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἓν αντία παντων οἱ ἄριστοι,
κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ κεκόρηνται
ὅκωσπερ κτήνεα.

And the English translation1:

For what thought or wisdom have they?
They follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher,
knowing not that there are many bad and few good.
For even the best of them choose one thing above all others,
immortal glory among mortals,
while most of them are glutted like beasts.

I was struck by how closely this fits with Etica Mircea and how it also fits with avoiding platforms.

  1. I looked at a few translations and this is the best I could find. Translated by John Burnet in “Early Greek Philosopy,” published in 1920. [↩]

Posted in authority, bitcoin | No Comments »