@amin@alpha.polymaths.social
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amin

@amin@alpha.polymaths.social

Amin is short for Benjamin. I just launched an independent search engine into public beta: https://clew.se

Life is truly a journey. Mine began in Bakersfield, California, but three months later took me to northern Afghanistan ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡ซ. I took the scenic route through India ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ and Malaysia ๐Ÿ‡ฒ๐Ÿ‡พ, and am currently braving a four-year foray through higher education at Texas A&M University, studying Communication and Professional Writing. Along the way I've learned musicmaking, storytelling, the art of performance, and technological mastery.

Wanna see where my journey takes me next?

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

amin, to random
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I've been loving Manu's People and Blogs series, but one thing that has caught my eye is how much some people are paying to run their blogs. Sometimes, it's much more than I can afford and, I suspect, more than many beginning bloggers are willing or able to shell out.

So, for you wonderful, creative beginning bloggers, Iโ€™ve done some research and put together this guide to blogging on a budget.

https://benjaminhollon.com/musings/blogging-on-a-budget/

If you have recommendations I'd love to add them to this post, just let me know.

20/100

amin, to random
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Well I worked out a way to back up my photos from my phone directly to my computer. Of course, in the process I accidentally deleted all the photos on my phone with a ill-advised rm -r, but at least the ones deleted are backed up to my computer? ๐Ÿซ 

amin, to random
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Hey, you. Yeah, you right there.

You should be proud of yourself. If you're not, well at least I promise that I'm proud of you. You are awesome and I'm honored to know you. And if I don't know you yet, I look forward to our impending friendship; say hello!

Fighting words, I know. But I still believe it to be true.

amin, to veloren
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Had fun playing today with @RL_Dane, @jp, @ivan, and @joel today! :D

Ivan, Joel, JP, and me in a hut around a different fire, prepping to go beat up a tarantula.

amin, to random
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@sotolf

https://bin.benjaminhollon.com is now on my new server and will stop going down when I move around. ;)

Should be more performant too.

amin, to random
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Well, I just pulled the trigger on a dedicated server from OVHCloud, I'm looking forward to it. For $28/mo:

  • 8 cores, 16 threads
  • 32 GB RAM
  • 4x 2TB HDD (Software RAID)

I have to say that while dedicated servers can be expensive the price to performance ratio of this is insane.

I'll probably be moving everything I host over to this over the next week or so (including Polymaths, Clew, and my self-hosted stuff). :)

amin, to veloren
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Haven't been on Fedi much in the last day or so; it's @ivan's fault, he got me into . :P

amin, to random
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Just finished an initial version of a metasearch engine to locally search and display answers from dumps of StackExchange sites. Calling it MetaStack.

Demo here: https://stack.clew.se

Code and setup instructions here: https://codeberg.org/Clew/MetaStack

Still could use some work, but for an evening's work I'd say this is pretty good. :)

Boosts are welcome, as always.

amin, to random
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I, uh, may have decided to adapt my Clew :Clew: code to make a minimalist interface to search and display questions and answers from StackExchange dumps locally? Here's what I've got after an evening's work.

The idea is you'd grab dumps of sites you're interested in from this handy site, then drop 'em in the ./dumps/ directory and everything else just works.

Source code forthcoming, once I finish and add CC compliance and if it actually turns out to be something useful. (If it is something you think would be handy, let me know!)

amin, to random
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What's a postgres user to do if they need an int bigger than 9223372036854775807?

Where's the reallybigint datatype?

amin, to random
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If you're upset about the StackOverflow/OpenAI partnership deal, might I suggest looking into Codidact? They're an open source Q&A network founded by alienated StackExchange mods.

https://www.codidact.com/

amin, to random
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Welp, just finished my school year.

amin, to random
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Just released a feature on https://clew.se :Clew: that I've been wanting to make since the beginning: page size indicators! Now 98% of results have an indicator next to them saying the required bandwidth to open the site.

This is accompanied by a sustainability impact rating from A+ to F (based on Sustainable Web Design's digital carbon rating system).

The page size calculation is a bit of an estimate at this point based on some regex and content-length headers, but should be pretty accurate overall. Planning to continue refining this.

Feedback is very welcome!

amin, to random
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Wow, certbot paired with nginx is really impressive.

amin, to random
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My water bottle stickering is finally complete. :Clew:

amin, to random
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This VPS I just obtained reboots in five seconds. What the heck? That's insane.

amin, to debian
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I've renamed the alias I use to count the packages installed on my system:

~] bloat
2042
amin, to random
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Apparently I've been wearing an inside out shirt all morning, to my classes and all.

amin, to random
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I've implemented some basic rate limiting and put Clew back up:

https://clew.se/

Still making it high priority to implement the other measures I'm planning to, and I'm gonna keep looking into this, but this should hold for the time being.

Happy searching!

amin, to random
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Just made an algorithm adjustment to clew that hopefully should improve some results significantly: instead of multiplying everything into one score, I'm now using multiple sort critions; specifically, at the moment, I'm ranking by number of keywords matched, then by the score I was previously using.

This is gonna take more refinement but is the first step in the direction I needed to go next. It should also be the groundwork of being able to tell whether results are actually matching the query or only matching a small subset of it.

amin, to random
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Clew :Clew: will be celebrating JS Naked Day by disabling all JavaScript on ourโ€”oh, wait, there isn't any JavaScript used by the Clew search engine. ๐Ÿ˜‰

https://clew.se

amin, to random
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Polymaths :Polymaths: stickers are in my city; they should arrive for me to pick up later today! :BlobCatDerpy:

amin, to random
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Is it just me or should it be really easy to provide cheap, high-quality static site hosting with unlimited sites on custom domains/subdomains?

I kinda wanna start up a service where people can get that for, like, $12/yr. It wouldn't make me much money, sure, but it would prove a point.

hm. I was saying that as a joke but now I'm seriously considering it. If I were to start up something like that, is there anything here who'd be interested? Would probably need at least a couple dozen people to make it financially stable.

amin, to random
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2,105 searches have been performed on Clew by non-bots in the last 24 hours. :Clew:

Wow. This is the most attention a project launch of mine has ever received. Y'all rock. I hope you like the direction this project goes in.

amin, to random
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Happy Earth Day! ๐ŸŒ

To celebrate, I decided to try and integrate a new feature into Clew :Clew:, my brand-new independent search engine. Using a dataset from the Green Web Foundation, results from sites known to use hosting providers powered by green energy will get a very slight rankings boost and a pretty badge.

Read more here: https://clew.se/green/

I'm aware this isn't a perfect method/dataset by any means, but I think it's a good experiment to try. We'll see how it goes, together, and I'm very open to hearing your thoughts and feedback about this. I may or may not keep this going forward, or may change to a completely different dataset or calculation method. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

(Boosts are, as always, welcome.)

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