Tag: GitHub

The search engine breadth problem

Yesterday, I spent some time considering what it would take for a brand like Wired magazine to make a curated search engine that provided a limited view of the internet. My current concern is that search engines have taken on an extreme breadth of content by over indexing everything they can possibly map and consider via algorithmic scoring. It would probably be better for some people if a search engine was built out that focused on just depth and stayed locked into a very defined set of known and focused websites for news, technology, and science related coverage. You could probably create a free admission walled garden of curated content that lets people get to most everything that they wanted to locate. You could even split that garden into two sides of content related to learning and buying. Those are the two sides of the coin that I’m curious about in terms of considering if search engines have a breadth problem. 

I might set up and run a rudimentary example of this search engine to see how it would work. It might take me a few days to mock it up and share the code out on GitHub for fun. That might be a good thing to do for fun, but it could quickly be modified into a personalized micro search engine deployment online. You could let people select a few pods of content and seed the search engine of their dreams that could provide a landing splash page to things they probably want to see from that garden and a basic search bar that let them dig in deeper to find things if they wanted to search around. I did a few quick searches for “personalized search engine” and “curated search engine”. None of my searches really populated what I’m talking about. It would be pretty easy for major websites to build this feature into what they offer. Google and some of the other services have methods of introducing a safer search experience, but that is more pruning than curation in terms of how they control the content.

Some random weekly notes

Weekly weblog post for 3/27/2021 to 4/2/202

Keyboard update: The biggest change in transitioning to a 60% size mini keyboard has been getting used to the missing arrow keys. I had no idea just how much using those was part of my typing routine/mechanics. 

A note on routine: Each weekend I get up and drink two shots of espresso before starting to work on Lindahl Letter Substack posts. For better or worse they are sitting in a single Google Docs file. That collection has built out to about 45 pages of writing. I’m cutting and pasting that content each week into the Substack platform publishing post section. My efforts are planned out by content topic to about week 37 and I’m currently refining the week 10 post for publication on Friday, April 2, 2021. That involves a lot of reading and consuming content and just a little bit of writing. At the moment it does not really involve much code production. At some point, I’m going to need to swing from writing and producing words to building out some code based on a few ideas that are hanging out on my whiteboard. 

I’m going to spend some time today looking around at the various “synthetic data” repositories on @github to get a feel for what people are doing in that space. I’ll try to sort them by most recently published/updated to get a feel for the now…

https://github.com/search?q=synthetic+data

1,543 repository results on 3/27/2021

Each week I watch a lot of technology related content and a lot of guitar related content. For the most part I do not share back out my guitar related content to social media. It would be pretty easy to make a guitar related newsletter, but that market is pretty solidly filled at the moment and my attention is focused on the right things. 

I’m wondering if the years of digital files accumulated in my storage and cloud accounts matter. That sentence was longer. It got trimmed down. All these files are just stored and I wonder what is the point of retaining them at this point. Even the idea posting them all online seems problematic and uninspired at this point. 

Every couple of months I try to go in and find and close out any subscriptions that I sign up for without really considering. It is a process that I am committed to achieving, but it requires me to keep checking back and evaluating subscriptions. 
“The best projectors you can buy in 2021, and how to choose” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM-M1PjAD88

Wondering about presenting baseball statistics

Ok. I made a decision earlier today about beginning a journey to present some baseball statistics within Jupyter notebooks on GitHub. Yeah — I know it sounds like a fun and fantastic journey. One of the things I realized yesterday was that notes can remind you of the connectedness of major writing projects. They can be points of reference and thoughts on directions and the overall journey. These details help introduce things at a layer deeper than the obvious. That pretty much means you should start to get ready for 30 days of solid Tensorflow posts on GitHub related to baseball.

  1. Installed Anaconda 2019.07 for Windows
  2. Opened up Anaconda Navigator from Windows menu
  3. Selected jupyter notebook 6.0.0
  4. Things were up and running… this took about 5 minutes