Timothy @arthegall@mastodon.roundpond.net

[me, reading about Samuel Bentham for the first time] "ahhhhh... shit"

https://github.com/lucaong/minisearch hmmmmmm

If the index is tiny, maybe there’s a way to do this that’s embedded in a lambda? Hm

Question:

If I want to index a static amount of text (ie I create the index once and I never need to update it again), and then front elasticsearch or opensearch with a simple search box, and host it all in AWS… what’s the cheapest way to do that?

(I’m assuming “the smallest possible Fargate-backed single-task ECS service” but change my mind here)

Wait wait wait… only three insults per tweet? What’s the allowable ratio on Mastodon then, this is a useful differentiator y’all

First our chatbots were inexplicably, casually racist

Now the searchbots are unpredictably, confidently wrong

You’d think that, at some point, someone smart would notice the pattern. Maybe an LLM could help

I mean, is there a more perfect 15 seconds than “Deviled Egg?”

Truly one of our greatest living American artists

This even extends to his work in commercials (!) https://www.errolmorris.com/commercials/miller.html

He did a whole series of Miller ads whose point seemed to be that a cold beer was an insufficient token to remember a sepia-tinged golden age for which we are filled with nostalgia… but that it’s the best we’ve got

Like, how many Serial-copycats out there are seeking to “uncover” or “reveal” some truth that people (prosecutors, the public) have somehow missed — and then to impose some kind of responsibility on those who would otherwise have avoided it

Whereas so much of Morris seems really dedicated to that absolute *inability* to ever recover anything like “truth,” but how we nonetheless still need to take responsibility

I think— maybe because I’ve been listening to Philip Glass the last few mornings— that I’ve found myself with Errol Morris on my mind a little more than usual

I wonder how many true crime podcasters and filmmakers out there have watched Thin Blue Line, or know how much they owe to it

But also I’ve found myself thinking how so many modern documentary formats (podcasts and movies at the very least) are structured almost antithetically to what I take to be Morris’s stance

It’s one of my favorites, one of those poems with several incredibly memorable phrases and images

“Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish”

“For now the words descended like the calm of mountains”

https://botsin.space/@mobydick/109825649780769379

https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109825323463722969

Narrator: it was actually the perfect start

https://mastodon.social/@arossp/109814038360821892 “I don’t know anybody who voted for Musk”

I wonder how many old war movies or tv shows that depicted Nazis used the language of infection the way zombies seem to have become a shorthand (and pandemic just longhand) for